Is this thing on?
User Rating: 4.8 | The Crystal Key PC
Well, since the game was originally written for Mac and i have OS Classic which runs OS 9 on my Mac, I figured I'd load it on there and probably have a better gaming experience. Big mistake, as it STILL couldn't recognize the discs to actually run the game, even though it was supposedly succesfully installed. I thought maybe i was doing something wrong, so I contacted the tech support who told me that no way, no how would it run on a computer in OS 9 if OS X was on the computer. Well, since I didn't feel like completely dismantling my operating system for a game, I decided to load it onto my PC. Eureka! It loaded! It started! It played! And then I tried to save my game. After 2 hours of game play. And needless to say, no saving occurred. Errors abounding, I pulled out large chunks of my hair and gave up for the day. But I do not give up easily, oh no! I am an intrepid warrior, so i looked online for similar problems and saw that I should try switching my compatability mode on my OS. Oh thank goodness. So I started TOTALLY over and was back in business. Well, good things first. Despite the age of the game, the graphics really are quite beautiful, when you can see them. (More on that later) The music is appropriate and nonintrusive and puts you in the right mood. It's a plotline that gives adequate impetus to your journey. The puzzles, while too easy by a mile, are logically placed within the game and not of the Gabriel Knight cuckoo clock variety. Now the bad. The screen is so dark that 50% of the time I thought my monitor had gone out. Even set to it's brightest setting and turning off every light in the room didn't help. Despite the ease of the gameplay, I found myself consulting a walkthrough just to see where items were that I was looking for, because even when going back to look for things that i knew the exact location of I had a hard time actually SEEING them. At many times, the screen was literally totally black. The theoretically cool option of hitting S during your game to automatically save only seems to work on the first disc. Even using a walkthrough, it took me FOREVER to locate a spaceship that i knew existed, simply because it was so dark that i had been walking past it repeatedly for what seemed like an hour. Some tasks had to be done over and over and over before the game seemed to register what was happening and said to itself "oh, yeah, I'm supposed to make so-and-so happen now!" Despite my overzealous need to complete every game I start, I have never been this eager for a game to be over. In theory, I enjoyed parts of the gameplay, but the frustrations far outweighed the enjoyment. While i'm not shedding tears over having played it, I'm relieved to be done.
Oh, and the ending? It's like expecting KaboomTown and getting a sparkler. A dud sparkler that doesn't even light for that matter. Just a note saying "oh by the way, in case you wondering, you finished the game. Go you." Gee, thanks.
