The Pandora Directive and Mass Effect

Hello Danda and JR,

So CCG lasts on my shoulders now? Oh, the pressure!

Well, let me first of all say thanks for the gift certificates for gog.com you gave me. I had never heard of that site before, but it worked very well. I already downloaded The Pandora Directive and I was impressed how well it worked on my super-fast PC, even though it's 13 years old! (I've tried to play old Abandonware before, and sometimes I couldn't even make it work, despite DOSbox). Anyway, I didn't get to install the other game yet, but I will do that soon and report back to you.

So, I played about an hour of The Pandora Directive so far, and of course the visuals are very outdated. Also, the display is rather cluttered (see Mobygames for a screenshot) and I don't think the possibility/necessity to freely move the character around by pressing the spacebar and then moving the mouse makes the game better, even though I'm sure it was impressive back when it was released. However, Tex Murphy is a cool antihero and I find he's likeable enough that I wasn't even bothered by the 10-15 minutes of introduction before the game starts, in which we basically just saw Tex drink and chat. I like that they used real actors for the game (Kevin McCarthy even!), and again I have to wonder why nobody does that anymore, especially considering that it would likely look so much better these days. So the story is interesting and I'm curious to find out what will happen next!

In other news, I got to try out Mass Effect a few days ago and was quite impressed with it - especially with the way they handle dialog in the game.

First of all, the dialog option gives you the basic idea of how you want to react or what you want to say, but when the dialog that is actually spoken, it is very natural. It's well-written dialog, too. Also - and this I find particularly ingenious - you can already choose the next dialog option while the characters are still talking. This way, the dialog flows together more naturally and it makes the game a lot more immersive.

Also in Mass Effect, I like the fact that you can choose to be male or female, which they mostly solved by just giving your character the same last name in both cases, so they can always address him or her as "Shepard". I find that to be a very good solution.

So you see, there are a lot of good games to be played, and sometimes I wish I had the time to be a real core gamer for a while!

Greetings to Spain from rainy Germany,
-- SuperViv