For the MPC CD-ROM
Reviewed by Jeff Maggard
8MB Ram minimum.
386 or better (486 recommended)
Windows 3.1 or later
SVGA (640x480x256)
Double speed CD-ROM recommended
MPC compatible sound card
A few MB of hard disk for Quicktime-for-Windows
Gateway 2000 mini-desktop 486DX33 with local bus SVGA
8MB RAM Toshiba 3401B double-speed CD-ROM drive (MPC-2 compliant)
Sound Blaster 16 ASP/SCSI-2 sound card (11/93 drivers)
Windows 3.1, with 16MB virtual memory
DOS 5.0, minimum config.sys and autoexec.bat (no extra TSR's, etc.)
Microsoft Mouse
10-year old $50 Fisher single-component stereo system for sound
amplification (Hint: get one for $10 at a garage sale, they're better
than the $350 Altec Lansing speakers!!)
Pentium processor
Double speed CD-ROM is a must
5MB of hard disk space for the Quicktime for Windows (QTW) software
10MB more of free disk space for extra Windows virtual memory
Keep your Windows default True-Type fonts handy -- JOURNEYMAN doesn't seem
to like ATM fonts.
If you want a CD-ROM game with a lot of animation, lots of SVGA graphics, and decent sound effects, JOURNEYMAN may be right for you. The Journeyman Project is an excellent game for demonstrating the animation and audio capabilities of CD-ROM, provided yours runs at double-speed. There is a TON of QuickTime animation and digitized video everywhere in this game, and the sound is great. The artwork is superb -- the rendered scenes are mind- bendingly realistic. I easily forgot that I was looking at computer generated images.
Bring your wallet and your Pentium -- it's expensive and it was unacceptably slow on a 486DX33.
While the storyline and concept of JOURNEYMAN are quite clever, the game itself lacks depth, and you will likely find yourself finished after a few gaming hours wondering which part you missed. There are a few bugs and a memory leak caused the game to crash when running on the test system.
The time is the 24th Century, the world is (finally) at peace. You are Agent_5 of the Temporal Protectorate, an agency created to protect the historical integrity of the Human race. Ten years ago today, your home city of Caldoria was visited by an alien space craft, the Cyrollans, a delegation from a galactic commonwealth of peaceful beings. They gave Earth an invitation to join their space faring collective and share the wonders and technologies of the commonwealth's many member species. They also gave Earth the ten year period to think it over.
In the interim, Pegasus, the first time-travel machine, was invented and along with it came the possibility that temporal rips may be created in history by folks with similar devices and malevolent aims. Thus Pegasus was moved to a secret base, the Temporal Protectorate Annex.
Well of course, Dr. Sinclair, the genius scientist who first discovered the time-travel technology, was ostricized by the government and technical community and gone over to the Dark Side of the Force.
Today is the day the alien delegation returns to get Earth's answer to their invitation. Unfortunately, Sinclair seems to have come up with a time travel device of their own, and is convinced that the Aliens are a wolf in sheep's clothing (ala Hitler), and has appointed himself chief xenophobe and plans to prevent the coming of the second Holocaust by altering history to prevent contact by the Cyrollan delegation.
Your job is to use Pegasus to travel back in time to fix the temporal rips, and restore the present day to its rightful condition. To do so will involve ingenuity and quick thinking. While in the past, you are prohibited from interacting with any humans, or doing anything that would permanently divert history from its proper course. You are also encouraged to avoid violence, and seek a peaceful solution to all temporal rips. There are violent and non-violent solutions to each of the three rips as well as the end-game sequence. You will receive a special "Ghandi" bonus if you complete all of your missions peacefully.
The interface is similar to that of Iron Helix or Critical Path (or Mindscape's Shadowgate/Uninvited/Deja Vu), where the player is in the first person perspective using a viewing window, inventory, information windows/screens, and control panels. The viewing window of JOURNEYMAN uses about 40% or 50% of the screen area, with the rest given to the other windows and controls. All game functions are controlled by the mouse, with several functions (like activating 'bio-chips' and controlling movement) also mapped to the keyboard. The user interface is very intuitive, although the pop-up displays (controls, game information, etc.) have some minor bugs.
This game is playable, but slow between game sections, on the test system. Most of the time there was 0.1 to 0.5 second delay between views, and up to a 20 second delay between certain sections of the game where the background music changed. This was very annoying and signifantly detracts from the nice aspects of the game.
Transitions between views are done as abrupt transitions as in Myst, like a slide-show, unlike the smooth scrolling in The 7th Guest. Don't expect the pace of Doom from this game. If solving puzzles is your bag, then you'll probably be disappointed with Journeyman -- stick to Return To Zork or Myst.
There are several long animated sequences in JOURNEYMAN, most notably the Retinal Scan sequence and the Mars Trench sequence. These are top notch! There is also a 'time travel' sequence, which is interesting at first, but after the 5th or 6th time through the same 3 minute long sequence, it gets a bit old. I found myself getting up to replenish the milk and cookies in those spots.
Death scenes are by 2D black-n-white 'artwork' and pop up spontaneously at the first instant of your boo-boo. Seems like it was an afterthought to the game, but it does increase the game's target audience somewhat.
The music is well integrated into the game, and supplemented the 'mood' of the experience. The sound effects were well done and realistic. Most of the voices were well done (that used in the QTW animation sequences), but the background voice used in the demo and in the Mars Shuttle Launch scene was done with a $2 microphone and the boy next door -- very poorly 'acted' and not 'mixed' into the soundtrack at all -- all in all, very cheeze-ball. Seems like they either ran out of money, ran out of time, or both... and just tossed in the filler to keep you from wondering what the frizzle-fratz was going on. Fortunately, the it's only used in the one scene and in the demo. As I said, the rest of the audio is great.
There are three 'rips' that you must solve, one time with your wits, another time with arcade-game skills, and the third with grade school competence in world geography. There is a fourth brief trip to 2,000,000 B. C. to retrieve the sacred historical records at the start of the game. Unfortunately, it doesn't take too much effort to solve each rip. The game box claims that there are multiple ways to solve the story, that it's not just another linear plot game -- but trust me, it's just another linear plot game: the ending is the same no matter how you play it. You can't do some rips before others at all, and to solve all of them peacefully, you must complete a particular rip first.
The story is good, the graphics are excellent, the sound effects are excellent, the music is good. But the puzzles are easy, the game ends too quickly, and the coding is awful.
Installation went smoothly and successfully on the first try. I have read accounts that others have not been as lucky. To install, run the install. exe in the jman direcotry on the cd-rom. It seemed to be a pretty good installer, and will ask before modifying your autoexec.bat/config.sys, and windows.ini with the appropriate QTW drivers/environment variables. It gives you the choice to do or not to do several things, so if you're paranoid, you can do it manually (which they tell you how to do). You will need to reboot your PC after the installation in order to initialize the QTW DOS environment variables and Windows drivers. Unfortunately, the installer has no UN-install function, so you have to remove all the windows.ini garbage.
Once done, you'll get an icon group in your Windows Program Manager window containing three JOURNEYMAN icons: one of a slide show, showing scenes from the game as well as some shots of the game development, one of a demo of the game showing one brief encounter with a robot on Mars, and one of the JourneyMan game itself. Upon clicking any of the demo/game icons, Windows will briefly do odd things like change the color pallette and draw 'invisible' icons in the lower left corner. As far as I can tell, this is 'normal' for the game and harmless to the system. Well... at least it didn't crash the test system or nuke anything. The game has 'copy protection' in the form of three 7-digit codes that will be required to access the computer systems in the Temporal Protectorate Annex.
After a 3-5 minute long boot-up sequence, which you can't skip (first major complaint), you'll get to the main menu. There are several buttons to choose from: Start new game, Start but skip intro but show background, Start but skip intro and background, Load previous game, Roll credits, and Quit to Windows.
My second complaint is that the mouse pointer only turns to an hourglass during some operations (not all of them), so it's possible to buffer up a few mouse clicks while the game spontaneously loads data off the CD and/or HD. I noticed this most while the game was changing background music, and found that the best way to avoid overbuffering your mouse clicks was to wait until the music started up again. A minor bug, but a pain nonetheless.
Third complaint. Either JOURNEYMAN or Quicktime for Windows has a memory leak. After about 30 minutes of play with 8MB ram and 6MB of virtual memory, disk access would rise significantly, gameplay would quickly grind to a screeching halt, and I got warned by Windows that I had a low memory problem. Several seconds after I saved my position, the game crashed when it ran out of memory. The only workaround I found was to up the virtual memory in windows to 16MB. This extended the inevitable crash to longer than I cared to play in one sitting (about 2 hours), but didn't really fix the leak.
I did enjoy playing JOURNEYMAN, but I felt a little cheated after spending over $60 on a game that only took me 6 hours to finish (with over 30 minutes of that time spent waiting for the game to switch scenes or reloading after a crash).
With some better coding, Quadra Interactive and Presto could have entered the PC CD-ROM domain with a stellar product with a neat game concept, excellent graphics and animation, and great sound. Unfortunately, the marvelous efforts that went into the visuals and audio of the game have been wated on a product that just isn't playable on most of today's multimedia gaming systems.
This review is Copyright (C) 1993 by Jeff Maggard for Game Bytes Magazine. All rights reserved.