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(More customer reviews)Chicago Detective Alan Parker Cameron Returns in _The Pharaoh's Curse_ to help his distant cousin Moira MacFarley out of another scrape. It seems she's gone to Egypt as the artist for an archaeological dig and strange things are happening. When Cameron shows up, she's disappeared. The search to find her and figure out what's going on will lead from Cairo to the Valley of the Kings, with plenty of action along the way.
This second Cameron Files game started out really well. It was immediately apparent that more planning and energy had gone into it than went into _The Secret of Loch Ness_. The graphics were quite good, with just enough detail. There were still a lot of things that you couldn't look at closely, but there was enough that you could look at that it seemed to balance out pretty well. Navigation was more direct and less confusing than in the previous game. You still couldn't go everywhere right off, but at least there were logical reasons for this -- e.g., you had to find out the place existed, or had to find a key. You also weren't stuck in a particular area until you had solved everything there, as happened often in _Loch Ness_, so the game had overall a greater feeling of freedom of movement, which I appreciated. The character animations were pretty darn good and the voice acting was articulate -- a good thing, since there are still no subtitles The music was quite good and not overused; most scenes had minimal sound F/x. The Save Game feature has also improved, although you still have a limited number of slots in which to save (16).
_The Pharaoh's Curse_ is a first person game with numerous third person cut scenes. There is minimal NPC interaction. I actually found this refreshing, as I do not particularly enjoy games where solving the puzzles depends on numerous conversations that go on forever. There were some converstations, but most of the information you needed turned up in the form of documents. The puzzles were largely inventory-based. There was one riddle, but no mechanical puzzles. There were also quite a number of timed activities and this is where the game really fell down for me.
In general, the puzzles were VERY easy. I wish game programmers would take a clue from the designers of Myst and Gabriel Knight and learn to come up with puzzles that are challenging in their own right and not because of some contrived difficulty. TPC fortunately did not rely on the infamous pixel hunting strategy -- hotspots were clearly visible all the time. But it did do things like not allow you to pick up a few inventory items until you knew what they were needed for and provide misleading clues, most often by way of Cameron's comments to himself. These were thankfully fewer than in SoLN, but just as annoying. Several times they seemed planned to lead you into disaster; the rest of the time they were just inane and unnecessary. The one time it would have been helpful for him to make a comment, he didn't.
There were also a couple puzzles that were, well, unnecessary to the game and did not advance play in any way; it didn't matter whether you solved them or not, as they mainly existed to give you information that you didn't need or easily got from some other source. A couple of times I found myself thinking, "What the heck was that about?" after some inventory item that I hadn't used mysteriously disappeared. And when I figured out what it was about, it was like, "well, that didn't make any difference!"
But the worst thing was the abundance of timed puzzles. I can't say it enough, I HATE timed puzzles in adventure games[.] This is not what adventure gamers play for and they are not challenging, just ANNOYING! Two things in particular made the timed puzzles in TPC worse than usual: in many cases they did not give you a reasonable amount of time to do what you needed to do, and the timer did not stop when you opened your inventory, as is usual in this type of game. PLus, often during the timed sequence, for some unknown reason my mouse cursor became spasmodic and difficult to control. A couple of the sequences were straightforward enough -- when the timer started you know what you had to do and could just do it with a click or two. But a couple were truly horrible, with lots of contrived roadblocks. This is another game that lost a star in my rating for an annoying and disappointing endgame, which featured a number of timed sequences one after another that were almost impossible to get through even when you knew what you were supposed to do, simply because you were not given enough time. I don't mind dying once or twice in a game, but dying over and over again when you know the solution really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
The ending was abrupt and disatisfying, leaving a number of loose ends; I would have liked to have seen a little movie with some more resolution.
_The Pharaoh's Curse_ took about 20 hours to complete: a nice length for a game of its kind. I really liked about the first 75% of it; the plot was pretty good, the locations were absorbing, and there was a certain amount of humour, like the Indiana Jones references scattered throughout the beginning. Strange as it may seem, I give this game high marks for making the title character bald. I wish the puzzles could show the same kind of inventiveness as some of the rest of the game.
Definitely worth playing, but prepare to be annoyed at the end.
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Investigate the Mystery of An AncientLegendProduct InformationAncient Evil Awakes... and the Pharaoh no longerslumbers. Investigate the disappearance of the Pharaoh.An ancient ritual revisited awakens a Pharaoh longdead and entombed.You must piece together the clues to discover the real reason why the mummy ismissing. Investigate the kidnapping of one of the members of an archeologicalteam travel the Nile on a steamboat explore the Cairo Museum of Antiquitiesmeet a cast of interesting characters... and solve the mystery behind the emptytomb. Exotic locations danger and intrigue await you in the mysterious sands of Egypt.Product FeaturesExplore the beautifully detailed environments: from a Nile steamboat tothe secret temple of Maat.A complex mystery and a progressive investigation with a touch of thesupernatural all combine for a rich storyline.A gripping graphical adventure certain to capture the imagination.Original score and wonderfully immersive ambient sounds.Hours and hours of exciting and challenging gameplay with engagingpuzzles through the adventWindows RequirementsWindows 95/98/ME/XPPentium 166 MHz (200 recommended)16 MB RAM (32 recommended)4 x CD-ROM Drive3D Accelerator Video Card
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