Top of Adventure Mountain

Finally making waves here in North America comes the European adventure game by Funcom that is generally being hailed as the best one in ages, The Longest Journey. No offense to their decent-looking contender of the holiday season, but if I had to choose between this and Escape from Monkey Island I wouldn’t have a bad case of what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’ at the store. It would be an easy call (and I did play both demos). PC.ign gives their blessings to this game in their new laudatory review. A dollop:

The pre-rendered backgrounds are full of incredible details, and mix animation with still CG work to make the backgrounds a lot more interactive than your average adventure title. Grass will flow in the wind, waves with animate, rise and fall when you’re on a ship, environments will shift shapes… it’s all as consistently impressive as the storyline. As for the CG, there’s lots of it, and for the most part, it blends in well with the key events in the game. Funcom has opted to include a lot of short segments instead of a few gigantic key sequences, something that really helps to keep things moving, and keep you interacting with the game as much as possible. As for music, it’s a pretty lush affair with a fully orchestrated score that covers everything from major cutscenes to incidental moments in the game.

On a tangent:
List of games to be converted to modern-day graphics (even 3D) while still being the same game: Ultima VI, VII & VII.5, Monkey Island I & II (2D still best I think)… Anyone remember when they first released the screenshots for Ultima Ascension back in ’95 & ’96? A page called Sith’s Ultima IX site… Remember the isometric view of those shots? Incredible… I wish I still had them and I’d post them to our site. Something like that for the updated Ultima’s would be wonderful. It’s funny that as the game progressed he (Sith) eventually couldn’t support the direction they were taking….