Mini-review of Mummy, Tomb of the Pharaoh

Introduction:

	I played this game immediately after finishing Myst III, so
	some of my comments here could be due to "proximity effect".

	Mummy, Tomb of the Pharaoh is a game that feels profoundly
	unfinished in almost all respects.  It has a pretty good set
	of actors, with some horrible ones thrown in.  It has some
	fairly decent graphics, with many areas duplicated.  It has
	some fairly good puzzles, with a zinger of a dead end at one
	point.  It's extremely short.  And so on, and so on.
	Basically, this game feels like one that was rushed to market
	about six months before it was finished; what you get isn't
	horrible, but it wasn't good enough or long enough.  You will
	see what I mean when I go over the details.

Graphics (quality, animations, cut scenes):

	The graphics engine was based on Quicktime (the 16 bit
	version).  Compared to something really new (like Myst III),
	the graphics were fairly bland, but the main missing
	ingredient was any sense of artistry.  The buildings are
	mostly empty, the mine shafts are all duplicates of each
	other, and the textures are painted on with a very broad
	brush.  It feels like the budget was expended on the live
	actor filming, so the graphics had to be done with minimal
	expense.

	Movement was node-based, and cut scenes involving movement
	from one node to another didn't show any information, they
	were just video wipes of hatched lines.  You didn't get a
	nice movie of a door opening -- all you got was a picture of
	a closed door followed by a picture of an open door.  I don't
	know why they bothered making the transition speed
	configurable, since there wasn't anything to see.  It's feels
	like they ran out of budget to do the transition movies, but
	they left the speed control in anyway.

	The FMV sequences involving live actors were done quite well,
	with no massive edge effects or lighting errors to draw
	attention to themselves.  However, once sequence involving a
	ghost got downright silly at times.  It's one thing to have a
	translucent ghost fade in and out while talking to you, but
	when they rise up out of the floor or from the walls, it's
	pretty silly.

Sound (music, voices, special effects)

	The music was forgettable for the most part, but it didn't
	irritate me, so that's a plus.

	The sound effects were quite well done, complete with
	footsteps, creaky doors, grating stones, etc.

	The voice acting was mostly well done, except for a mummy
	whose "aargh" was ridiculously bad.  Just to be nice, I'll
	forgive it and call it an intentional bit of game humour.

	The sound had one serious problem -- a complete insability to
	play multiple sounds at once.  A speech would be completely
	interrupted when a background sound effect played, and then
	continued afterwards.  Even worse, you usually had to wait
	for the CD drive to spin up while listening to silence, so
	the interruptions were very noticeable, and very irritating.
	

Story (plot, theme, depth):

	The basic story is not that bad a premise for an adventure
	game.  You play the character of a mining company
	troubleshooter sent out to Egypt when it appears that a box
	has been discovered, complete with an attached curse.  The
	problem is that as soon as you get off the plane, the plot
	becomes too obvious almost immediately.  Things get
	interesting again at the very end of the game, but it's too
	late to do much with the story at that point, so the ending
	comes across as being rather abrupt.

Characters (depth, development, interaction):

	Malcolm McDowell plays the mine supervisor, and he does a
	great job of being an extremely irritating, hateful sort of
	person.  However, it did get a bit irritating to have him
	continually walk on screen, spout out some diatribe at me,
	and then walk away.

	Most of the other actors all did a good job of their parts,
	but I certainly wouldn't call this game the apotheosis of
	full motion video games.

Puzzles (difficulty, uniqueness, suitability, ugliness, linearity):

	The puzzles were fairly pedestrian throughout; explore
	everywhere and pick up everything, and when you need to do
	something, apply the correct inventory item to the task.
	There was no combining of inventory items, at least not
	directly inside your inventory.

	Some of the puzzles were not always obvious.  As an example,
	at one point I picked something up and was killed for my
	troubles.  It turned out that if I picked up all of the
	objects, I wouldn't get killed.  This is not what I call an
	obvious way to lead me to the solution.

	Most of the puzzles at the end of the game were timed in
	nature.  You were confronted by a situation, and were given
	enough time to select one inventory item and use it.  Even
	worse, there wasn't any auto-restart when you were killed,
	you had to load a saved game every time.  It was neither
	challenging, nor very interesting.

	There are several mazes (of a sort), but at least you got
	complete maps of the underground mine.  For the remainder, I
	went to a hint site and printed out their maps.  The mazes
	were pointless (like all mazes), and the mine itself
	consisted of six levels, of which four levels are completely
	unused in the game.  The problem, of course, is that you have
	to explore those levels just to determine that they are of no
	use to you.

	There was one huge dead end in this game (which I ran into).
	I ended up in a series of rooms, with the way back
	permanently blocked, and the way forward would kill me.  It
	turned out that I was missing a crucial piece of inventory
	which woud allow me to move forward, so I had to restore and
	replay a large chunk of the game.

	I'll put this comment under puzzles -- this game was one of
	the shortest ones I have ever played.  My wife and I spent
	two short evenings playing it from start to finish.  And that
	included exploring every shaft on every floor of the mine.

Controls (user interface, save/restore, sound/video adjustments):

	The game cursor was a hadn which pointed in directions you
	could move, and changed to an moving "grabbing" hand when you
	moved it over a hot spot which could be manipulated or picked
	up.

	The node movements weren't symmetric; a step forward,
	followed by a step backwards didn't always bring you back to
	where you started.  In some places, this became quite
	confusing.

	A hot spot didn't always cause the cursor to change.  Many
	times, it would only indicate it as a hot spot if you were
	holding exactly the correct inventory item in your hand.

	The inventory management system was very poorly designed.
	There was a large unused section at the bottom of the screen,
	with the inventory backpack on the right hand side.  Instead
	of displaying inventory along the great big space across the
	bottom of the screen, you only got a single item displayed at
	a time, and had to use scroll arrows to go through the
	inventory a single item at a time.

	When opening things with locks, the game would automatically
	bring up a key to apply to the lock.  the problem was that it
	wasn't consistent.  Some locks you had to cycle through
	inventory and bring up your key ring yourself.  The lack of
	consistency got quite frustrating.

	Saving a game was easy, but when reloading a saved game, you
	only got an alphbetical list.  This made it difficult when
	you wanted to load on based on time ordering.  I prefer
	ordering by date for saved games in almost every case.

	For some reason, you could bring up inventory just by moving
	the cursor to the bottom right of the screen, but you had
	to hit the spacebar for saving or loading a game.

Bugs or problems:

	The game would crash on startup, until I found a support FAQ
	that indicated that it was a Quicktime problem, and how to
	fix it by changing a setting in the qtw.ini file
	(optimize=BMP).  I really hate quicktime (still).

	The game didn't remember my settings for transition speed.

	I had to remember to change the resolution to 640x480 before
	starting the game (it didn't do that for me).

	Sound track glitches as mentioned above.

	At least one major dead end in the game play.

	Inconsistent and non-symmetric node movements.

	Inconsistent user controls (spacebar vs cursor)

Install/Uninstall:

	The game itself was a fairly minimal install (no registry keys).
	Quicktime was its usual horrendously intrusive install.

	The game had no uninstall facility at all.
	Quicktime had one, but it didn't remove much of anything.

Pros:

	Cheap
	Not bad graphics (1996 vintage)
	Reasonable entertainment for several evenings

Cons:

	At least one major dead end
	Long pauses on CD loading pictures/sound
	No real cut scenes when you move -- just wipes
	Sound effects interrupted voices
	Timed sequences (with no save allowed)
	Inconsistent inventory usage (keys for locks)
	Inconsistent node movements
	Bad inventory design
	Space bar needed to bring up save menu, just cursor for inventory
	Had to remember to change resolution before starting game
	No uninstall -- had to do it by hand
	The usual half-hearted uninstall effort by quicktime
	Quicktime 16-bit version crashed until optimize=BMP setting discovered
	Extremely short game

Conclusion:

	As I said in the introduction, this game appears to be
	unfinished.  If I had been told nothing about it, I would
	have assumed that I had been given a beta-test version of the
	game.  There were just too many rough edges and gaps in
	almost every aspect of the game.

	So, what should I conclude about Mummy, Tomb of the Pharaoh?
	I will give it a minimal recommendation, provided that you
	can get it cheap.  I bought my copy at Electronics Boutique
	for $20 Canadian, and that included a free copy of
	Frankenstein by the the same company (Interplay).  At $10 a
	game, it's not a bad deal, and the game *is* playable in
	spite of all the deficiencies.  I just hope Frankenstein
	turns out to be a more finished product than Mummy.


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