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Beautiful, Yet Oddly Tedious

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 37 / 37
Date: May 06, 2003
Author: Amazon User

_The Omega Stone_ follows directly upon the events of its predecessor, _Riddle of the Sphinx_. In the opening movie your "friend," Sir Gil Blythe Geofferys, tells you that the scrolls you found in the last game make clear that a global catastrophe is coming any day now, but that you can prevent it by finding the six "omega discs" scattered in "mystic sites" across the globe. Sir Gil provides you with passes to all the sites (conveniently, all are being excavated by his research foundation) and a driver to get you from place to place. The rest is up to you.

To its credit, there are many things right with TOS. It's a stunning game visually, with beautiful 360-degree graphics. Its video engine runs remarkably smoothly. The background sound f/x are subtle and not too repetitious. The interface is easy to use, with unlimited saves available. You can die, but it usually happens only when you do something incredibly stupid. There are no timed puzzles.

Unfortunately, the good things about TOS are not enough to make up for the fact that gameplay is, well, a bore. With no character interaction to liven things up a game really needs lots of intriguing puzzles. But the puzzles in TOS were too few and far between, and mostly too easy. A large part of the game consists of running back and forth through endless tunnels searching for inventory, some of which is hidden in really unlikely places. Too, only about a sixth of the inventory you acquire is ever used for anything and none of it ever disappears, so every time you access inventory you have to scroll through about forty items to find the one you want. In the end I was all too aware that the miles of corridors and the excess inventory were contrived to extend a game that didn't have much to it. I found this irritating.

This is a four disc game with a full install option. As the full install takes up 2.7 additional gigs of memory and disc swapping doesn't bother me that much, I skipped it. I found the problem isn't disc swapping, it's disc LOADING. Every time you change discs or locations, or load a game in any way, it takes over five minutes. As there are places i the game where you can't go from pne place to another without going through a third, there were times I sat for twenty minutes or more just waiting to be able to play. I have no idea if the full install solves tis problem because when I tried to re-install it crashed my computer every time, and this despite having more than the recommended system.

TOS is pretty glitchy, with numerous hotspots that didn't show up, books that turned into other books halfway through, and important scrolls that were impossible to view, necessitating visits to a cheat site. Using inventory was really slow, making a couple of puzzles extremely tedious. There were items you could zoom in on for no reason, places you could go where nothing happened and places you could see from a distance but never get to. An entire sub-plot never came to anything. All in all, TOS gave an impression of superficial extravagance with little underlying substance.

I took about 35 hours to complete the game, but I really could only call about half of that actual "play." After everything, the endgame was stupid, obvious, and too quick, relying on an interminable monologue to wrap things up where I would have liked a better and more complex puzzle. I think we can look forward to another sequel; I hope OMNI can keep the beauty and take a serious look at the quality of the rest of the game. I might give TOS three and a half stars, but all the five star reviews I've seen must have been looking no further than appearances here.

Not for the impatient

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 14 / 14
Date: October 26, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Intersting game to begin with, nice scenery, simple puzzles, loaded easily onto my PIII pc. How ever moving the character from point to point no matter how close or far is a real challenge. Takes longer to move than to solve the puzzles. Sometimes it swings in one direction briskly, other times it is painfully slow, so slow you think the game locked up. There are cursors in the game not mentioned in the booklet, also there is a patch you have to look for and download to fix some things in the game. Moving to look up or down is tricky, easy to either swing past the object or take forever to get there. Some times trying to look at an object causes the character to move, then you have to go back and try again. The distances you need travel between some points is horrendous, and there is a lot of back and forth travel required. For me the worst part of the game was getting the character to move in the right direction. If you want a simple game, this is it. If you want one that is simple and easy to navigate, forget this one.

No Load

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 14 / 15
Date: June 26, 2003
Author: Amazon User

The puzzles in this game are sophamoric busy work, no cleverness at all. Graphics are nice but after running back and forth countless times they become boring. Worst of all is the time you waste loading each disk, five minutes at a time, sometimes four times in a row. There is way too much inventory [at one point I counted 41 items and I had a long way to go]. The designers seem to have a fasination with skulls,23 in inventory for 2 seperate puzzles with lots more laying around. Some of the clues are so illegible you have no choice but to go to hint lines for help. I liked the first Riddle of the Sphinx but this one is a big waste of money.

Boring

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 11 / 14
Date: April 11, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I just finished playing the Omega Stone and feel I have just wasted a good bit of my time. Though I agree with the other reviewer that the graphics are very good, the puzzles are rather easy to solve and I didn't feel any real purpose while playing the game. I would say that if you are looking for an entertaining adventure game, try Syberia, which though relatively easy, is much more entertaining.

Tiresome

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: August 17, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Isn't it weird how you feel tired when your game character has to travel and walk all over the place? That is how I felt in this game. A lot of walking through dark places, picking up inventory items and then travelling to a new place. I loaded the whole game so didn't have to swap discs but still had about a 1 1/2 load time for games on a PIII866. The worse part was my hard drive crashed and I had to start all over again. Made myself finish but really wanted to abandon it. Most annoying moment - the chemical mixture. I was bored, kept getting distracted and would lose count on the measurements. Wouldn't recommend as story line is not that interesting.

So Far So Good...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 12
Date: April 03, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I received my copy today 4/2/03 and is running fine under Windows XP. The graphics are much superior than its predecessor "Riddle of the Sphinx." Still, besides the great gameplay, I have to poke a little at the graphics. On a scale of 0-9, I have Exile at 9 and Riddle of the Sphinx at 6 and now, The Omega Stone is at 8.75. The game lacks animated water and the text in journals and books are difficult to read. Some areas would be so much better with more graphics rendering!

Besides these minor graphics mediocrity, the environment is chilling...the Mayan underground caves gives me the chills. I am in a cave and the skull puzzle is ahead of me. The background sounds of ghostly ooohhhs sends chills down my spine.

The video interface is great! Acting and voice acting believable.

If you enjoyed Riddle of the Sphinx, you must pick up your copy of The Omega Stone! The puzzles are great and until another release to the sequel of Myst, this is what we adventure/puzzle solving gamers are craving for. Four stars out of five. Minus a star for not having immensely spectacular eye-candy graphics.

A very realistic, educational, and fun game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: January 05, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I bought the first game in this series of two, "Riddle of the Sphinx" (Which I enjoyed very much by the way) and then I bought this game, "The Omega Stone". I liked this game very much because it is very realistic and it looks more like your really there than a 3D game. I also liked it becasue i'm very interested in ancient civilizations. You are able to visit 6 locations in this game; Chichen Itza (a Maya city), Giza Plateau (in Egypt), Stonehenge, Easter Island, the underwater ruins of Atlantis, and the Bermuda Triange. It takes place in the future, (2012 I think) and ends with you just saving a meteor from destroying the planet. The concept is that all these civilizations knew that this was coming and left behind clues and tools to help stop it.

I thoroughly enjoyed this game and would recommend it to anyone who likes suspenseful adventure games, puzzles, and/or ancient civilizations. If you do make the choice to buy it, have fun and good luck! :)

nice game dood

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: June 12, 2006
Author: Amazon User

this is a good game with awesome graphics and sound. i had fun playing it, i hope whoever is reading this will 2. :-)

Sequel to an Egyptian Riddle, Megalithic? No Kidding

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 28, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Long and ardous, intrigueing history, of a continuation that was quite difficult to play. Only because the riddles included a bit of logical insight in each undertaking; try The Omega Stone on for size. The graphics and insight are greatly improved. If you do get lost on where to go though, don't forget that Dreamcatcher Games has strategy books for these riddle games that confuse the unwary of a riddle's complexity. Music though sounded better, and tricks more dire.

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