Gog.com
Downloaded and played Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky. These two games came free with a gog.com account. Should have never signed up for an account and waste time on more games. Fortunately, I used a strategy guide for the whole thing, meaning it didn’t take as long as it would if I played it without using one. There was a third game, Teen Agent, that was also given free with the gog.com account. I didn’t play that because it had the same ratings as Lure of the Temptress and that game was below average. I wasted the entire night playing these two games. I woke up in the afternoon the next day, and I was so tired that I basically couldn’t work for the next day.
Lure of the Temptress was not very good. It was Revolution Software’s first game, so I’ll cut them some slack. There were many failures. Firstly, the protagonist walked too slow, so it was a chore simply moving around. Also, some of the locations were too similar to each other, leading to confusion as to where you are. In addition, even though the game was mouse-driven, it feels like they basically based the interface on a text-based adventure game. There were dialogue boxes where one has to choose from subjects, verbs, and objects, to form a sentence to tell other people what to do. I would have stopped playing in the middle, but then I got a potion to turn into the eponymous Temptress temporarily, which was pretty cool, so I continued. There was a bug at the end of the game, leading to an impasse until I downloaded a newer version of the ScummVM emulator. The ending was pretty blah, you don’t even fight the Temptress. I thought when she turned into a tiger that you would have to fight her, but the main character just threw the stone to destroy the demon in the temptress and the fight was over.
The second game was better. Beneath a Steel Sky is probably Revolution Software’s most famous game. They took away the subject,verb,object interface and replaced it with a more sensible one, where you choose from different pre-constructed sentences, just like modern games. I liked how good the voice acting in this game was. Overall, this was a much more enjoyable experience than Lure of the Temptress, and I could recommend it to even people who don’t play point-and-click adventure games. I don’t play point-and-click games and even I loved it. The graphic quality is pretty good, too, and there was a real sense of immersion when playing this game.