Tex Murphy: Overseer

This game is a remake of the first Tex Murphy game -- Mean Streets and also the fifth episode of the series. Naturally history doesn't repeat itself this quickly, so this time things aren't actually happening to Tex, he's just telling the story to his girlfriend, Chelsee. The story's basically the same, so this walkthrough is useful for both games.

Story

Chelsee and Tex are going out on a date. They have a lot to discuss and on the top of the list is Tex's first wife--Sylvia. Chelsee insists that she wants to know the whole truth; she wants to understand why Sylvia still stands between them. Murphy isn't too happy about this, but he finally gives in and starts telling his life story from the moment where he 'left' the Colonel and his business.

His first client was Sylvia whose father had recently committed suicide. Since Sylvia didn't believe that her father killed himself, she hired Tex to prove that her father was murdered (tough luck, insurance companies don't pay for suicide). Murphy, since he just started his own business didn't have any money or other clients, so he put his instincts aside (which, by the way, were all telling him to let this case go) and took the case. That was when the troubles started.

Opinion

I've read a couple of reviews about this game and they said that it was kind of a disappointment compared to Under A Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive, but I think this game was in no way disappointing (aside from a few odd crashes). The engine has changed a bit, but it's just as good as it was before. Movement and interaction is really easy and the pop-up panels allow us to see the whole screen while making it easy to save our game, check out the inventory, etc. The sounds are great, as is the music. The biggest change I've noticed concerns the graphics. They are incredible. I mean UKM looked great, but this lookes awesome. Beautiful 3D environments with absolute freedom to walk around, look around and do almost anything we want. Of course, as always, you have to pay the price somewhere. On a P200MMX system the game didn't exactly run smoothly (to say the least). There were some rooms, where the framerate got down to about 2-5 frames per sec. I'm more used to classic type adventure games (I like playing on still backgrounds) so this didn't bother me too much, but it was definitely frustrating when I was just trying to walk around and explore the place. I think this whole 3D mania is getting a little bit out of hand.

I don't want to give away too much of the ending, but I will tell you this much. At the end of the date Tex has a little problem with his car (namely it gets stolen), so he and Chelsee have to call a cab. As it turns out, that wasn't such a good idea. I won't tell you what happens next, but we will definitely see Tex again.