So, this week I played a new release for the Wii, Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templar, Directors Cut. I know what you’re thinking, “Wait, how can you have a directors cut for a game? Do games even get a director?”

Well, yes, but not the way a movie does. They function more like executive producers. So, no, not really.

But, apparently Broken Sword did. Not that it helped.

Broken Sword is a point and click adventure game. If you remember my review for
Strong Bads Cool Game for Attractive People, and I am sure that you do, you will remember my opinion of point and click adventure games. No? I will sum it up here.

They suck.

Broken Sword really lives up to that.

Now, I know what you’re about to say, “Abraxas, how can a game released in 2009 for a genre that peaked in 1986 suck? Surely they’ve have taken the time to find all the best elements of the best of those games and combine them into one super point and click game?”

Well, you might be right, except for two things.

1.This is a point and click game. They inherently suck.
2.It’s not actually a new game.

No, Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templar, Directors cut really came out in 1996 under the title Circle of Blood, and has just been repackaged as new to try and squeeze a few more dollars from a tired game in a dead genre. Well, they did add about an hour or two worth of new game play to the front end of game. So, there’s that. A whole extra hour or so.

Yeah, that’s worth $50.

Now, the main character of Broken Sword is George Stobbart, an oafish American Tourist caught up in a globe-spanning conspiracy that has a lot of lame crap, some murder, and some more lame crap that stretches believability in the form of obscure and pointless puzzles you endlessly click random inventory objects in some vain hope you’ll get through this quickly.

But you don’t get to start of playing him. Nope. Haha, fooled you! You’re going to start off playing a young French journalist who has been invited to interview a famous french sort-of-aristocrat. I say sort of because I am reasonably certain most of the French nobility lost their heads or moved away.

Reasonably certain.

Anyway.

You start play as Nico. A young woman with the power to drive Mime’s insane. No, seriously. She walks by a mime, plays his little invisible door game, and then brushes past him with hardly a “I said good day, sir!” Now, this shock alone might well unhinge any other man, but this Nico woman compounds this inhumane treatment by ringing a doorbell!

As you can clearly see, this would drive any man insane, and this poor bastard of a Mime just flat out loses it. He scales the building to the second floor, cuts a whole in the french doors (that’s how you know they’re in France) and murders a man. With a real gun.

Now, this has lead me to understand two things:

1.French women cannot be trusted with doorbells.

2.Mimes are one doorbell ring away from becoming mass-murdering psychopaths (later on the Mime blows up a cafe with an exploding accordion).

No, I am not making that up.

And that’s what I hate about these point-click games- it’s the bizarre internal logic that just stretches any sense of believability with whacked out stories and all the damn puzzles.

The puzzles so twisted and obtuse it makes Byzantine look like the Shaker period by comparison. These things are crazy. I’m talking crazy like pick up the blue paint from two boards ago, combine it with the paper from three boards ago (all of which you have kept with you the whole damn time for no freaking reason) and rub it on the wall to reveal the secret message- no rational person thinks like this!

It’s like having to watch National Treasure I and II for 10 hours straight! But instead of Nick Cage and a hot blond tromping around actual history in live action with competent cgi, Broken Sword is animated with all the subtly and complexity of a Scooby-doo cartoon- you know the ones I am talking about, the episodes in the later seasons where you can tell what part of the character is going to move next because it changes color.

It’s enough to make me want to take a tack hammer to my head. Really, it does. But despite all of that, there is something that just drives me up the freaking wall with point-click games even more.

It’s the lame game mechanic that you must take the key for a door out of your inventory and try it. WHY should I need to do that? Why doesn’t the game assume a rational action for me, and apply the damn key?!? I just found this key, with the character said, “hey, this is a key to that door over there!” Why not have it opened for me automatically rather than have to click through the damn inventory screen to get to that damn key!

WHY?!? We have been creating video games for over 30 years now, this should be possible!

And that additional content you’re thinking about? Maybe that was updated? Yeah. About that.

The game was put out in 1996, and looks like it was animated by a talented group who’d been let go from the Thundercats and hadn’t worked a day since the show had been canceled a decade ago. The additional content does a good job of continuing to look exactly like that. So, kudos to the production team for making the new stuff look as crappy as the old stuff.

Good jorb!

Well, they did add some new dialog. But the new recording process is a lot better than the original tapes, so it’s sort of embarrassingly clear when the new stuff has been sandwiched into the old stuff. Oh, and they add a comic-book style pop up with the head of any speaking character who has lines at that time.

Which would be kind of cool, except their mouths don’t move. They just blink at you from their little prison boxes begging to be given the final release by the Murder Mime. Oh, and one of the selling points of the new content is the portrait work for each character was done by Dave Gibbons, the artist/collaborator for the Watchmen graphic novel. Except it ruins that whole idea by translating it into Windows Paint 95.

I think there is a car thing later on, but I stopped way before that showed up.

When it’s all said and done I just have one thing to say to the people who thought it would be a great idea to repackage this game for the Wii (and the Palm cell phone OS, interestingly enough):

FUCK YOU!

As always you can hit me up at abraxas@cybermonkeydeathsquad.com