I'm playing through sherlock with my wife now and agree with almost everything you said, I will note that if you are trying to get the right answers without looking them up, you will probably want your own pad of paper to write down clues. The game does a good job of writing down important details for you to comb through later, but if you are solving the cases over the course of days, it's easy to forget lines of dialog that can make or break the case that holmes doesn't mark as a interesting note.
I won't spoil anything, but in the third case, not only are you solving for who the murderer is but also the weapon, and one throwaway line during an interrogation actually makes the weapon clear, but the game doesn't really call that line an important clue.
But it's a really enjoyable game and I agree more people should play it.
Hey.. not only am I also playing through Sherlock Holmes crime and punnishment on my switch, but I am going to blame you and this blog for me wanting to revisit both heretic and hexen64. They might not be nearly dubious enough to make this list, but I have to blame someone for my ebay habits.
Back in my achievement hunting days, perfect dark zero nearly broke me. The game on perfect agent or whatever the hardest difficulty just felt really cheap to me, and I remember a temple escape level (like the third one) that was a nightmare to beat.
Of course some of this awfulness might have been avoided, had I played co-op with a good buddy.
@tartyron: Thanks for the comment. Yeah, the cover did not do this game any justice. Not only does it put Cheech's name right on the cover, it uses the word "blazing" in the title, and has a picture of a dragon smoking something next to his name. I thought for sure, that even if this game was going to be an adventure game, that the humor would be pot themed, or that Cheech would play a stoned character, but nope... Just a game with a pretty bad marketing team.
@sethmode:Thanks for the comment.. Yeah, you aren't alone. I too think I am fairly plugged into the adventure game scene (especially the 90s and 00s), but the first time I heard of this game was within the past 4 months when I stumbled upon the ebay listing. I think the look is.. fine.. The backgrounds look nice, but since the game is "cartoony" it sometimes clashes with the sprites and items which are trying to be a little Kings Quest 7 esque. If I had to compare it one to one with another adventure game, I would say that it is probably on par with Space Quest 4. I actually never looked to see if it had a PC release, so you might be stuck either getting it for the PS1 or Saturn if you want to play it.. or you know... getting it some other way (too much winking).
@topcyclist: First of all thanks for reading and the comment, it means a lot. To answer your questions, I do not write for any websites professionally, and while I would love to magically work for one, I'm not really doing any of the legwork to make that happen (advertising, soliciting for work, pestering industry insiders). I write these blogs mainly for myself, because I enjoy the act of writing out my thoughts on a video game. A lifetime ago (3-4 years) I started a youtube channel under the same name, and this blog was going to be a companion piece to that. I would record playing through a game in starts and stops, and then write a succinct review of the game and rank it on some nonsense list, but I got burnt out on running a Youtube channel. Despite not ever thinking I was going to "make it big" it was kinda demoralizing knowing that at best I would get 5-10 views per video, no one would leave a comment, and I couldn't really tell if people liked what I was doing, or what I could do to improve. Eventually I gave up the Youtube channel because of the feelings you allude to in your post.
This blog would have died with it, but I still liked the act of playing video games, I still liked ranking them on a nonsense list, and I still enjoyed writing, so I told myself I would continue, on one condition, and that I was doing it for myself and not for any other agenda. I didn't then, and still don't now, think that Jeff G will stumble upon my writing and offer me a gig, and I'm not out here promoting a twitch channel that I hope blows up and allows me to quit my day job. I simply write to express myself, and if other people read it, or comment, then it is a bonus, but even if I wrote 10-15 of these blogs in a row and got zero comments, I would probably still do it. (I am sure the forum users would be annoyed seeing my stuff come up all the time, but they probably are now anyway).
For your last point, in terms of the actual writing, I actually don't do a whole lot of editing to my posts before I publish them. I usually write the whole blog over the course of an hour in a semi stream-of-consciousness writing, and then I go over it one time before publishing to clean up any huge issues I find. Nearly all of my blogs have errors in them, some might even make people think that English is my 2nd language or that I'm just a kid, but I try not to let it bother me much. Since these aren't professional pieces, I'm less worried about the mistakes I make, as long as people can understand what I am trying to say.
I know it can be dispiriting when you write a blog, review, etc. and it doesn't get any clicks or comments, but that doesn't mean your take isn't valid, or your opinion is lessened because of it. If you are doing a blog or review thing for fun, its important to realize that you started it to have fun.. Don't ever try to compare your review of Halo to Jeff's or Jan's etc. Not only is it their job, but the patrons of this website are here for those people they are going to get more traffic.
While I definitely see some of the asides perhaps targeted at my comment last time about playing without a walkthrough, I rescind that comment for this game. I have never played it, but I lived it through your writing. This sounds absolutely awful. I never evolved into the most or most clone style of adventure games. The closest I came was "7th guest," I will gladly take a 3 room, no death, try-everything on everything else puzzle, over a die with one wrong click puzzle.
It does seem extra insane to not allow manual saves, at least then you could baby crawl and save after each step, so you could feel a little better about brute forcing a puzzle, but just to have checkpoints makes this extra rough.
Great write-up.. I have had this game sitting on a shelf for awhile and I always think about starting it.. this might be the push I need to finally do it.
@bigsocrates: good read as always.. I saw this played a little bit by Dan Ryckert, and I didn't really come away enamored.. granted my hands weren't on the sticks, but it did look like switching forms was fun but the enemies just seemed like generic hordes.
It was maybe a small slice, but I don't think what I saw from his playthrough or your writeup sold me on the game.
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