Bill Harper on the Net

It’s taken the best part of a month, and I hit one major stumbling block along the way, but I’ve finally finished Runaway 2 — the Dream of the Turtle.

Normally after spending days on end with a game like this, I feel a little flat. It’s like being wrapped up in a really good book, and then hitting the last page — you can’t quite believe it’s all over. (Unless it’s crap, in which case you can’t believe you wasted so much money on it.)

But not this time.

Why? Because the game ended with some of my absolute “pet hates” in storytelling, which include:

• the “dream sequence”
• the words “To be continued”
• Tom Cruise smiling.

Okay, so the game didn’t have Tom Cruise in it. But it have the other two things. The entire last act was the figment of someone’s imagination after being knocked on the head. (I like to think the guy who came up with the idea suffered a similar blow). And the game ends pretty much the same way it started — the girl is still missing, and the bad guys are still around. But we do manage to pick up a secret weapon: a turtle. Yeah, they’ll be quaking in their boots now. James Bond will probably have one as part of his arsenel in the next movie.

What’s really annoying is I have no idea when the next game will be out, or if there will even be a next game. It’s not as though they’ll be making millions of dollars from it. EB Games slapped a “25% off” sticker on it before they even put it on the shelves. (And I got it for half price — go figure.)

The only other game I’ve played that left me hanging like this was Dreamfall. But it had a much better storyline, and the author has promised that if he can’t make the video game he’ll finish the story some other way — book, comic, whatever.

Of course, he may have also been knocked on the head.

Well, there’s part of my life I’ll never get back.

I’ve been playing Runaway 2 pretty much all day (my reward for getting another column done), and after a few hours I was stuck. Of course, that’s nothing to complain about. You want to be stuck sometimes. It means whoever wrote the game has created a really tricky puzzle, and while it’s frustrating at the time, it feels great when you finally solve it (and stop cursing the author’s name under your breath).

So, having gone through all the ‘logical’ options (logical in terms of the game at least), I tried solving it the hard way — using every object with every other object (and every character) in the game. Still no luck, and so I searched for a walkthrough so I could move on.

And what was the solution I couldn’t figure out? Well, I won’t reveal the exact answer (I wouldn’t deprive anyone else of the chance to beat their head against the desk), but I ended up having to use a particular object not with a character or another object, but with an exit. Not only that, it was an exit I (or rather the character) couldn’t get to during the game.

I’ve been stumped by obscure puzzles before (if you’ve played The Longest Journey, remember the key in the subway?), but at least they made sense after the event. This one was completely out of left field.

(My only consolation is the guy who wrote the walkthrough didn’t think it made sense, either.)

Just before vowing to stop buying computer games until I finish the ones I’ve got, I picked up a copy of Runaway 2 - the Dream of the Turtle.

Like its predecessor Runaway (surprise, surprise), it’s a point-and-click adventure game. I much prefer these to the MMORPGs everyone else is playing because:

• I can play it at whatever pace I want
• I don’t end up getting whipped by some 13-year-old kid
• I don’t have to remember what MMORPG stands for.

It’s a pretty wacky storyline, and nowhere near the calibre of Grim Fandango or The Longest Journey. But I’m enjoying the ride, and so far I’ve made it to chapter four (of goodness knows how many chapters) without any hints whatsoever.

Still, considering I’ve made it through only one adventure game on my own (The Curse of Monkey Island), it probably won’t be long before I turn to the universal hints system (otherwise known as Google).