The Last Express (DOS) - Let's Play 1001 Games - Episode 814
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I'm Gaming Jay: Youtube gamer, let's player, fan of retro games, and determined optimist... Join me in this series while I try out EACH of the video games in the book 1001 VIDEO GAMES YOU MUST PLAY BEFORE YOU DIE, before I die. The game review for each game will focus on the question of whether you MUST play this game before you die. But to be honest, the game review parts are just for fun, and are not meant to be definitive, in depth reviews; this series is more about the YouTube gamer journey itself. From Mario games to the Halo series, from arcade games to Commodore 64, PC games to the NES and Sega Genesis, Playstation to the Xbox, let's play those classic retro games that we grew up with, have fond memories of, or heard of but never got a chance to try! And with that said, the game review for today is...
The Last Express
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Express
The Last Express is an adventure video game designed by Jordan Mechner and published by Broderbund in 1997 for PC. Players take on the role of an American who accepts an invite by a friend to join them on the Orient Express, days before the start of World War I, only to become involved in a maelstrom of treachery, lies, political conspiracies, personal interests, romance and murder, upon boarding the train. The game is unique in how it was created, its non-linear story, and in how events in the game are conducted within real-time.
The game was a commercial disappointment following its release, but received highly positive reviews and a positive post-release response. A Sony PlayStation port was in development, but was cancelled before it was finished. The game was later reacquired by Mechner, who worked with DotEmu to make portable versions of the game for iOS and Android, and later released a remade version for Steam, entitled The Last Express – Gold Edition.
Mechner founded Smoking Car Productions to create The Last Express. The company was located in San Francisco from 1993 to 1997 and at its peak had sixty full-time employees.
Mechner derived inspiration for The Last Express from Myst and Infocom's Deadline.[9] He saw The Last Express as an opportunity to create a game with a complexity of story and depth of characters comparable to that seen in a film, something he felt he could not accomplish with his games for the Apple II due to hardware limitations.
The game is notable for its unique art style, with characters illustrated in the "art nouveau" style that was popular in 1914, the year the game's events take place.[5] Since illustrating a game of this magnitude by hand would likely take an exorbitant amount of time, the look was achieved by using rotoscoping, a process that Mechner had used in Prince of Persia.[10] During a 22-day-long live-action video shoot, every action by every character in the game was photographed by actors wearing distinctive makeup and costumes against a bluescreen on 16mm film and digitized. From this, a limited number of frames were selected and put through a patented process developed in house, where the frames first had all their colour removed. Next, a powerful computer program created black-and-white line drawings of the frames; these were coloured by hand.[7][11] The finished product has 40,000 frames.
The game was released 1997, after five years of development, at a final cost of US$5–6 million,[6][13] on a multi-platform 3-CD set that covered Windows, Mac OS, and MS-DOS. The Last Express received highly positive reviews both in print and online, but only remained in stores for a few months.
Broderbund did little to promote the game, apart from a brief mention in a press release[14] and enthusiastic statements by Broderbund executives,[15] in part due to the entire Broderbund marketing team quitting in the weeks before its release.[6] Softbank pulled out of the game market, dissolved its subsidiary GameBank, and cancelled several dozen titles in development, including the nearly finished PlayStation port of The Last Express. In a final blow, Broderbund was acquired by The Learning Company, which was not interested in The Last Express. Within a year of its release, The Last Express was out of print.[16] Withal, Mechner's company Smoking Car Productions quietly folded.