THE JOURNEYMAN PROJECT FROM PRESTO STUDIOS

Windows conversion by Quadra Interactive

          Computer        Graphics        Memory          Disk Space
Minimum   386/33          640x480         8 MB            15 MB free
                          256 colors                      while running

Control: Mouse / Keyboard
  Sound: Any sound board that does digital sound under Windows 3.1
  Notes: Requires Windows 3.1, CD-ROM drive

Reviewed MPC version on: 486/66-DX2, 16 MB, ATI Graphics Ultra Pro,
                         NEC 3xi CD-ROM, Gravis Ultrasound / Soundblaster
    Reviewer recommends: Ten Foot Pole

In case you hadn't yet heard Sturgeon's Law, it's a simple and useful one: 90% of everything is crap. The fledgling CD-ROM multimedia industry seems to have taken this as a mandate, rather than a warning. If I see another so-called "adventure game" which consists of a flimsy story line, extremely limited choices of action, and lots of sound and graphics, I'll issue a multimedia movie of me screaming. Which brings us to THE JOURNEYMAN PROJECT, and the following postmortem.

I wanted to like this, I really did, for several reasons. Not least of which is the $40 I paid for it. It was one of the first games I bought for my new CD-ROM, it was produced by a local San Diego company with a classic startup story, and I've heard some Mac users say good things about it. The package looks interesting.

The manual looks interesting as well. It's a thing of beauty and a joy to behold, and all that jazz, and includes a nifty "The Making of..." section. There are some very nicely rendered pictures which had me salivating to play the game. The "historical background" is sure to elicit a few snorts of "Right, pull the other one, it's got bells on," but I'd say it's better than most games bother with, and it's certainly no worse than much other science fiction (See Sturgeon's Law).

As a bit of story background, it's the year 2318, and your Eutopia of a society is about to be inducted into the interstellar "Symbiotry of Peaceful Beings." You're a member of the Temporal Protectorate, an elite group of people who have access to the only known working time machine, Pegasus. The machine was built by the government, who, as soon as they got it working, decided in the interests of mankind (remember, this is fiction) not to do anything with it but monitor the time stream and use it to repair "temporal rips" if they occur. You should be able to figure out the rest.

So I pop in the CD-ROM, run the install program, and BOOM! The Quicktime Install doesn't like Win-OS2, and I don't feel like fighting it. Journeyman was created for the Macintosh, and apparently the easiest way to convert it to Windows was to use Quicktime (Apple's motion video system) for Windows. So I boot into DOS and run Windows. Everything installs nicely. Journeyman installs nothing on the hard disk but Quicktime for Windows.

I take a look at the slide show and demo which come with the program. "Aha," I think. They must have run out of space on the CD-ROM. These don't look anything like the Photorealistic graphics promised on the box and shown in the manual. Okay. I run the main program. Up comes a title screen for Quadra, then a rather nifty title animation for Presto. Then I wait. A title animation for The Journeyman Project. Wait some more.

And I wait. And I wait. The drive light's still flickering, so it hasn't frozen. Wait some more. Whoah! Something's happening. No, it's just been so long since anything happened that my screen saver has kicked in. Move the mouse and wait some more... and we're at the main menu. Start a new game.

And wait. And wait. And a rather interesting intro slide show with music, then wait. Then I "wake up" in a room with the radio on in the background, and... the program blows up. Argh! Okay, disable the Ultrasound, use my SoundBlaster. Start over, and realize the damn thing won't let me skip all the introductory stuff. I'm stuck! All in all, it's ten minutes till I'm back to where I was before, and... the program blows up. Okay, disable all sound cards, ten minutes later it gets past that point. As soon as possible I save the game, re-enable the Ultrasound, load the game again (another endless time), and things work from there. By now I've been trained to wait, which is a good thing here.

Those "photorealistic graphics" never materialized. Someone did a fantastic job of modeling the world of The Journeyman Project in 3D, and you can see some of that in the manual, but that's not what made it to the CD-ROM. What we get is very badly dithered graphics. Everything looks like it's made of dots. Which is the case, but a good job of dithering tries to hide this fact. Journeyman requires 256 colors, but I've seen better photorealism in 16 color pics. Look in the manual, then look at the same rendering in the game and it's such a shame. Perhaps there's a palette problem with Quicktime they had to work around. The Quicktime files compress rather well, so I'm a bit puzzled that they weren't stored this way, as the reduced time spent reading the CD-ROM should more than make up for the time spend decompressing the files.

As with the graphics, someone put quite a bit of effort into the sound on this thing. There are some very nice music selections, and the digitized speech / sound bits have had some time spent on them. As with the graphics, though, it's overhyped. The manual recommends a set of headphones, but that's overkill here, since all the sounds are digitized in 8-bit mono at 22 KHz. That's not bad sound, but it's not spectacular, either. The CD audio you might be familiar with is 16-bit stereo at 44 KHz, and you can hear the difference. But still the sound is a winner.

Did I tell you that I waited? That's much of the game. The animations are Quicktime format, combined video and sound. Apparently playing right off the CD-ROM with Quicktime is too slow, so the game copies the whole animation into your memory or hard drive, THEN plays it. So you wait a long time, because the copying is pretty slow. And this happens almost any time you do anything. I've got a 486/66-DX2, triple speed CD-ROM, very fast graphics card, and a lighting fast SCSI-II hard drive. And I still spent most of my time waiting for the game! Since many of your actions are repetitive, this gets old reeeeeeal fast.

As with the graphics and sound, the plot is a bit overhyped. It claims "A branching storyline as sophisticated as any feature film," and we get the standard "non-linear plot" line. Sure enough, it beats out "Rocky V," but it's no Infocom or Legend plot. There are temporal rips appearing, and you, as a Temporal Protectorate agent, need to pinpoint the source of the change, then travel there and fix things. And, of course, there's Something Bigger behind it. Including a psychopathic robot named Poseidon who doesn't want to be your friend. The plot is nonlinear in that you can go exploring, but it's an illusory freedom, in that you pretty much need to do things in the order that the game wants you to do them. Much of the time, exploring too early is just a death sentence. And there's a lot of repetition. Control is very limited.

Now you may get the idea from reading the above that I don't like the game. It actually has a few redeeming features. I copied all the Quicktime movies from the CD to my hard disk and played them all using the Quicktime player, and they're certainly worth looking at. There are some interesting concepts in the game - I thought the time comparison ("before" and "after" the rips) bits were well done. If you have a book with you and read it between animations it doesn't seem so slow.

Still, lack of speed kills, and this suffers in comparison from other CD-ROM adventure games on the market. I'd trade this for the 7th Guest or Myst in a second if I didn't already have them. That I spent this much time on it reveals a disturbing streak of masochism.