Catching up with an old friend

On the weekend I spent some time with an old friend. You know how it is when you meet up with people you've not seen for years and the passage of time is very apparent, well that'a the way this was. They'd made some changes to their appearance added some new twists to their look, but their sound samples still suffered from low bit rate compression artefacts.

I was of course talking about was the classic adventure game Broken Sword from revolution software reborn again on the Wii as "Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars - Director's Cut".

The original Broken Sword was a wonderful 2d point and click adventure game and it spawned a number of sequels and re-releases with the directors cut the most recent. Broken Sword did templar conspiracy's before it became popular and wove a story of murder mystery and intrigue with style and wonderful voice acting. It was built on the lucasarts SCUMM system which has meant it has been playable by the wonderful SCUMMVM for years but this new version has some additional content and updated puzzles making use of the wii's controls system.

I've loved the broken sword games since the first one came out in the late 90's and have played all the sequels including the more recent slightly disappointing 3d ones and replayed the first two using SCUMMVM a frew times but the thought of having a polished reissue with some new content on a platform that I've always thought was ideal for point and click adventure games.

Most of the new content is in a preceding section not seen in the original describing how one of the main characters Nico get's involved in the neo-templar conspiracy. It is all new story graphics and voice work recorded including some art work by Dave Gibbons the guy who drew Watchmen.

It's nice to have new stuff and this part makes the most use of the new Wii controls. The rest of the game is more or less the same original code with a few tweaks. This is where the game shows it's age. The art work is still good but it tends to look a little fuzzy in parts most of the time in game you don't notice it too much the original detailed backgrounds are detailed enough that it works. The 3d cut scenes really could have done with some work. Where it really shows it's age is the quality of the audio, the sound on the original sections of the game is dull and fairly low quality which can be jarring compared to the new recorded sections.

Still it is a classic adventure game and it was fun to play through it again and enjoy those quirky characters again. The new stuff is good but it would have been nice to see some more updates in there.

Maybe revolution now they have some experience of the Wii platform will do an all new Broken Sword game on this platform, I know pure adventure games are a tough sell these days.

If you've never played the original this is a good version to play, if you've played it in the past then there is less to recommend it as it doesn't add a lot. As always you can always dig up the original and run it on SCUMMVM it will run on almost anything.