What made Tex Murphy games great

Many things, but I'll start with this.

I have played newer CGI games and some of them are quite good. For example, Atlantis: Evolution had a feature character named Curtis who came up with several funny one liners. It made the game more interesting than most modern adventure games. However, the last 3 Tex games went a step further; they did it with class, pizzaz AND FMV. Having said that, I think that was the greatest attraction of these games. Throw in a great story line, good supporting actors/characters and some good old fashioned fist fights and voila! great adventure games.

I think the key to understanding how revolutionary the Tex games are, you need to understand the history of the series and how it has evolved throughout the years. This is something I will not go into at the moment.

Above all, what makes the TM series so good is the fact that's it's purely original and something of which never appeared before in a video game at this kind of professional level.

Add to that absolutely exemplary writing by Aaron Conners, and every great adventure game is driven by a great story. However, the key to TM's success is behind its implementation of the story. Rarely will you see such great plots made into computer games so professionally, with such intricacy, detail and above all - style. Everybody who's ever had the pleasure to experience the Tex series will tell how stylish and polished the games feel (especially PD and Overseer).

Think about this scenario: A futuristic film-noir in a dystopian city where mutants are opressed for lack of gene purity and one man rises to the challenge time and again, in order to save the world. However, that man is not a hero, not even close. He is the anti-hero and he doesn't mind. He has a knack for trouble (or more to the point, trouble follows him). Just a down-on-his-luck detective whose needs are simple and earthy, his ambitions are of ground-level and a man who is just trying to make an honest living off P.I. work. Throw in assassins, thieves, liars, mutants, norms, a few beautiful dames, some nosy buddies, and a whole slew of questionable characters and what you've got is a great thriller. What sets Tex apart from other games is its presentation of the story, which in a large series scale like that it is relatively unmatched with the possible exception of the Gabriel Knight series (which is brilliant in its own right).

There is a whole slew of things that make the Tex games great and those are too numerous to mention. But the bottom line is this, the Tex games are well-made detective thrillers that are rarely matched in the quality of their writing and professional presentation.

What did I like about the Tex Murphy games that keeps me posting on this web site years after the last?

1. The characters. Crazy Gary the maniac vegetarian. Louie the kind mutant. Nilo the pervert landlord. The list goes on.

2. The story. A well written detective story, I was always interested putting together the clues to see the mystery to the end.

3. The acting. Imagine that. A video game...with good acting. And this is back in the 1990's! There are still plenty of games that can barely churn out good voice acting, let alone try to do both at the same time.

What might be missing from this list? I'm sure somebody might say gameplay, but I've never cared for adventure games. Of all the adventure games I've played all the way through are:

Full Throttle
Day of the Tentacle
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Pandora Directive
Overseer

Two of them Tex games and the other three Lucasarts classics. I've tried others, but just didn't care.

Also, just to mention, I never liked Overseer. It was a chore to get to work, a chore to play (disc swapping especially), and as a game it felt like good material rushed out the door. Not to mention you can't trust anything that gives so many lines to Clint Howard...

Lol, ahhh poor clint howard...

But yah I agree, I really enjoyed the characters, especially CJ's character (of course). The story of a hard-luck, hard-boiled PI who's still hanging on to his ideals. He could have very easily have been a completely one-sided character like in the stereotypical detective stories you might hear. Gotta love the anti-hero!

The gameplay for me wasnt exactly the best part either--I never even care much about the puzzles and whatnot, I just wanted to know what happened next.

Though I'm still playing Overseer (just bought it) I think I'm liking it better than Pandora Directive. Sure, it was nice to have the options, but Overseer is just more straightforward; the whole morality pathing wasnt really working for me in the game. The Broken Boulevard path was just too unlike Tex. Mission Street I thought was the most like Tex, although the other path kinda worked too.

Lol, though maybe I'm just hoping for a Tex Murphy movie/tv series. The radio theater was really great too, they should really continue that stuff! It's too bad we gotta wait so long for some closure on Tex's story though.


**As for disc swapping, I never really had to deal with it. Just burn your CDs into ISO or BIN format, and run them all at once using a virtual drive like Alcohol 120% or Daemon Tools. And Voila! No swapping at all!**

I think something I like in video games, movies, and books, in when a new fantasy world is created, and it is believable and consistent. I don't know, I guess it's not such a big thing, but inthings like Star Wars, the world that's created, all of the technology and stuff is justified. I dunno, I guess it just helps the game along, so the Tex Murphy universe was pretty cool and consistent. Just a small thing I liked...


But if I had to give the one all around answer, it is obviously the charisma of Tex Murphy as a character. Favourite character ever...

One of the things we're forgetting here is that, at the time the games came out, other adventure games were pre-rendered, point-to-point presentations like the Myst series. There might have been some other games that allowed panning at the time, I'm not sure. But the capability of full 3D free roaming brought a level of emersion that no other adventure game could match.

It is the character.

I first met Tex Murphy when I picked up "Under The Killing Moon" in 1998 while living and working in Germany. I found the game by accident and decided to take a fling at it. Normally I did not and still do not play computer games.

Tex Murphy games are simply outstanding in that the character has depth and detail. Even today Tex Murphy as a character is not dated, the producers succeeded in making Tex timeless.

Compare Tex to Bogart's portrayal of Chandler. Bogart did a great job of bring Chandler to life but only in the context of the period.

Chris Jones bring Tex to life. For me it is the character that keeps me playing the games, even though playing the game require loads of efforts to make the games run on non DOS computers.