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Superb and stunning

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 30 / 32
Date: March 27, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I bought "Broken Sword" a few days ago and am still stunned by the cinematic quality of the sounds and views. This game is a dramatic departure from all the sprite/action games currently available on the Gameboy Advance: The scenes are lush and beautiful, the audio consists of a classical score and refreshing environment effects like birds twitter. These advances in audio and video help in creating an environment that is so encompassing that you forget your real surroundings and start living in the game - a feat that only happened to me before with "Myst".

For optimum enjoyment, you should progress slowly and talk to everybody as much as possible - this means quite a lot of text to read, but since it's witty and clever, you will get rewarded.

There are a few hitches that stand between this title and perfection. They are all small ones and I recommend this game wholeheartedly, but for completeness here they are:
- The intro sequence consist of only 12 stills. With a few more, the incident during the sequence could have been easier to understand. Since the sequence is described in the manual as well, I recommend reading this passage in the manual first.
- Some scenes are overloaden with details so that you can't make out all parts. Thanks to the vista menu this doesn't have a negative effect on the gameplay, though.
- Even though the musical score is very fitting, cinematic and interactive, in certain scene / situation combinations it starts to repeat after 10 minutes or so. Making it a bit longer would be even cooler, but this is only a minor fleabite.
- The audio seems to be even in stereo and the louder parts sound great with headphones, but if you listen to the more quiet parts in a silent room, some kind of "audio dithering" starts to happen where the music contains a lot of noise before suddenly die off completely. This is likely due to the 8 bit sound chip of the hardware, but recomposing the whole score with this in mind could have overcome the problem.
- Some scenes have JPEG artifacts if you look very closely and know how such artifacts normally look like.
- All sprites have a 1bit transparency map and are antialiased agains a fixed background color resulting in a few jaggies now and then when the scene has varying background colors.
- A new "vista" mode shows all the places in a scene you can interact with by displaying icons over them. When you are moving around, the same icons are displayed to indicate that you can now interact. Both modes look the same way, but since they do not behave the same way, things can get confusing (you can get a description _and_ interact while moving around, but you can only get a description and _not_ interact when using vista mode). But you can get used to it quickly, this is just for completeness.
- You can die. Every time you do you are falling out of the virtual world while you're fiddling around with savegames and are frustrated that you have to replay some scenes. Furthermore, you're always thinking about saving to minimize your frustration. A game where you can't die and the save function is only needed before turning the unit off would be even more encompassing.

Although this list is pretty long, the list of good things is even longer. But you might already know what to expect from other reviews, and I don't want to spoil things so I leave it at it. I think this game is targeted to a more mature audience. If you need lots of action and movement on your screen and frantic hyperactivity in your head, this is nothing for you. But if you're ready to delve into a virtual world, uncover secrets and experience a intruiging story firsthand, then "Broken Sword" might very, very well be the right game for you. :-)

Perfect Classic-style Adventure

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 14 / 15
Date: March 21, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game really has everything for those of us who love old Sierra Quest games and Lucasarts adventures such as Monkey Island or Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis. The game's story in particular will remind some of Indiana Jones. The interface is very well-developed, replacing the point-and-click gameplay with an inovative interface similar to the one found in Grim Fandango or Escape from Monkey Island, but with the addition of a "quick search" button to find the hot-spots on the screen. I found this to be extremely helpful when some of the more exact details are lost on the tiny screen.
I recommend this to anyone who enjoys classic-style adventures. My only complaint would be that it has me hoping in vain for more adventure ports to the GBA from Lucasarts or Sierra, ones that almost certainly will never appear. For now, Broken Sword is definitely my favorite game for the GBA.

Great adventure game. Great GBA game. Good Fun

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 9 / 10
Date: March 24, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Broken Sword is a standard "adventure" game (eg. myst) delivered to the GBA and they've done a fine job of it (with a few small exceptions).

As adventure games go this one is pretty straight forward and doesn't require a mensa membership to make significant progress. The bulk of the tasks in the game are not too hard to figure out, yet there are a few stumpers in there as well.

Gameplay is clear. You can move the main character around the current screen and either interact with other characters, manipulate objects, or go to other screens.

The GBA rendering is nice. There are some dialog scenes which are easy to speed through if you wish although you occasionaly get critical information via dialog. There is one scene in which having the sound turned up might provide some value. Towards the end of the adventure, gameplay is not just puzzles but also reacting quickly to events.

Some dislikes:
- The game is good in that you are stuck in an area until to you solve that local puzzle. There is a bug in the game in which you can go to Spain before Syria which will cause you to get stuck in a scene without enough artifacts to get yourself out.
- You can keep multiple games running but you have to go through some gyrations to copy games between the 3 memory areas.

This is a good game to play and will definitely keep you entertained. It is easy enough to keep you engaged but hard enough to make you work for it.

Great adventure game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 11 / 14
Date: April 04, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I really wish there were more games of this style for GBA (let alone any other video game platform). If you like the wander and solve type of games like all of the classics from Sierra (King's Quest, Space Quest, Quest For Glory, etc.) you will probably enjoy this one. The graphics are pretty good and all hand-drawn. Since alot of the colors are dark, a good white light is definetly needed (Worm Light), but that's a given for playing GBA at all I guess. The only problem is that there are a few glitches that I've come across, forcing me to start all over again. I don't know if its my GameBoy or my particular cartridge, but it was kind of frustrating.

Marvolous, Magnificent, Superb!- and thats just for starters

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: August 12, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This is one of the best games I've ever played, surely the best GBA game ever. You are "George Stobbard", an American vacationing in Paris when you wittnes a bomb go off in a cafe. The plot really picks up when you discover that ring of assasins are tied into this, and a whole bunch of other neat stuff like scrolls and ancient goblets come into the picture. It's like Indiana Jones meets Dick Tracy.

The background is gorgeous, all hand drawn, the commentary is funny and witty, (press "B" on objects, some comments can be really hilarious like on the seats in the church in Paris) The plot can be surprisingly tense, and suspenseful, esspecially when you discover you can die, so save often.

If you liked this game, I'd definately suggest the book "Saving the Queen" by William F. Buckley, its just as good, but our hero is with the CIA and deals with some good old fashioned "Cold War" stuff, instead of Knights of the round table. Even if you don't read much or dissagree with WFB's politics, PLEASE READ!!! You don't know what your missing.

You should DEFINANTLY buy this

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: July 26, 2002
Author: Amazon User

this game is my favorite one out of all the ones I own (15) it has a great sense of mystery adventure and a bit of humor.worth the price buy this item!!!

Excellent Adventure game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 8
Date: March 22, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game is very excellent.I say this because the graphics come out very good and you in Paris on a mission.You have to visit places and talk to people.Some people will give you true information,and some will give false leading you to traps and trouble.One other good reason is that the game is probaly be the most popular game for the GBA.This is also the way most GBA games should be made instead of very short levels that will get you trapped.The two problems with this game is that some places are too colorful and if you dont go to Syria and go to spain you will find yourself stuck,so you might want to go to Syria before you go to Spain.This game is very cool so you might want to get this game!!

i hate to rain on every1's parade but....

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 10
Date: December 23, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I didn't like this game as much as I thought I would. It was intresting enough but i beat it quickly with only a few problems(the thugs outside the hotel...and the hotel itself). Anyway it wasn't the worst i've played (if you've ever played mr.nuts you know what i mean). The graphics were great! I wasn't expecting that much on the graphic side. Anyways if you like games where you're fighting constantly then you won't like this game. Its nicely put together yet it wasn't as much fun as i thought. It requires a lot of thought; more than i wanted to put into it.

overall:
Graphics: 10/10
Gameplay: 7/10(no bugs:-) w/ little problems)
Fun:4/10
Storyline:9/10

in my opinion it was fair.

This game sucks!!!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 25
Date: February 14, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game is way to hard!You dont get to fight at all.But there is this one part were this man will give you one of those things when you ask someone to shake your hand and they get shocked by the hand buzzer thats in your hand.Nobody shakes your hand when you ask them to on the game!!!It only works once on this man named Khan yhat wants to shake your hand before shooting you with his gun(He doesnt know you have a hand buzzer).Doent by this game!!!It really sucks!!!...

Fun but challenging...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 29, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Out of all of the handheld gaming systems, I didn't expect the Game Boy Advance to have a PC adventure game ported to it, much less this one.

The recreation of the experience is somewhat faithful: the controls on the GBA only provide limited input but the developers managed to fit in a number of puzzles and the graphics are incredible, even on the small screen of the GBA.

Colors are vibrant and the game runs smoothly throughout. There are a couple of times I caught myself staring blankly at puzzles (yeah, you'll be scratching your head on a few). But if you're an adventure game fan (e.g. Lucasarts' Monkey Island or Grim Fandango, or Sierra-type games), consider looking into this one. The Nintendo DS is backwards compatible with GBA games, so you should still be able to play this on the next Nintendo handheld system.

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