Mean Streets

Review by MMyers

"A clever, darkly comic detective mystery masquerading as a Blade Runner wannabe."

Philip K. Dick may have been a paranoid wackjob who once admitted that he thought he was so different from everyone else, like some aberration of nature, that the universe was out to get him. He was also a celebrated author with a cult following. To this day there are those that consider him one of the greatest authors ever. The rest of us know him as the guy who wrote the stories that led to the movies: Blade Runner, Total Recall and last year's Minority Report.

In any case he has been influential and his influence is felt in this game. In fact I picked up this game some years ago out of curiosity for its cover art with portraits of a guy, with an 80's hairdo, wearing a trenchcoat and holding a rather large gun and a rather attractive blonde woman among a depiction of a flying car over a futuristic city straight out of Harrison Ford's 1982 movie Blade Runner.

Mean Streets was the first in a series of adventures for lead character Tex Murphy by Access Software Inc. Something worth note about this series is that each game seemed to contain some technical achievement within. This particular one had digitized sound which included some limited speech without any hardware required. You can imagine how different it was to hear near sound card quality audio from only a PC speaker in a game that ran on only 512 K and a 286 CPU. Tex Murphy would go on to appear in other games including ''Under A Killing Moon'' which starred Brian Keith, James Earl Jones and Margot Kidder among others.

In Mean Streets, as detective Murphy, we meet Sylvia Linsky, a comely, curvaceous young blonde female who wants Tex to look into her father's mysterious death. It seems her father Carl, who the police claim had committed suicide, was a brilliant neuropsychologist who was working on some secret project. Her father would never tell her anything about it or even who hired him. While his suicide seems apparent; he was seen jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge into the bay, Sylvia is sure there's more to it. Apparently he'd always been afraid of the water since nearly drowning as a child.

So, off you go to explore parts of California in 2033, in your flying car no less, to find answers. Along the way you'll see more than a passing resemblance to some of Philip K. Dick's strange paranoia of the future. Yet you'll also see a nod to detective film noir, like those with Humphrey Bogart, plus some sexual innuendo thrown in for good measure (nothing like a good blow up sex doll joke).

It seems in 2033 there are mutants living among us. They're more like the disfigured ones seen in the movie Total Recall rather than those in X-men. But, as in X-men, there are those who don't accept them which include a quasi-fascist organization named Law and Order. There is also J. Saint Gideon, former head of British Intelligence and founder of Gideon Enterprises, the largest surveillance company in the world. What do these groups and something called MTC or Management Through Control have to do with Linsky's and others' deaths? Perhaps the infamous Detroit hit man that just arrived had something to do with it. Or maybe the good doctor's fiancee Delores Lightbody, an extremely full-figured female, had a hand in the doctor's demise. How all this and more (including the game of chess) fits into the mystery is what you have to figure out.

Your mode of travel is a flying car which you'll only see from the outside as the game starts. Imagine the flying Delorean from the Back To The Future movies. For the rest of the game you'll see it from the driver's seat and it is strictly the only way to get around. Apparently you don't walk in 2033. And sorry, no flying car chases. You can virtually fly anywhere but you won't be able to leave the car unless you've landed on a specific pad. Each person you talk to and each place you can search has an NC or navigation code that you enter into your onboard computer. Then you can either take the controls or have the autopilot fly you there. You can also use the bounty hunter coordinates in the manual which are sets of X and Y coordinates that mark a special pad where you can pick up money and ammo for your gun by getting rid of certain people.

This bounty hunting is handled the same as when you enter a guarded area. As soon as you exit your car you'll see yourself coming from the left, gun in hand, as other guys enter from the right. The only thing that changes in these encounters are the backgrounds which range from the inside of an office to the outside of a warehouse complete with a littering of hollow drums. You have a certain amount of bullets and a certain amount of damage you can take as seen by a bar that runs along the bottom of the screen. You can only duck, shoot and move forward as can your adversaries. When they die each curiously breaks into pieces so there's no blood or gore. The encounter ends when you reach the other side. If you die in any part of the game you hear a person cry out and get sent back to the game's first screen where you're asked if you want to start over or open a saved game. Games are both saved and opened in the car's cockpit.

When you go to question a suspect you usually see only the outside of their location which can range from Coit Tower to a beautiful, lush estate to the squalid so-called Freak Town where the mutants live. Underneath you'll read Tex's observations and thoughts and then see a small digitized picture of the person in the middle of the screen. While the effect was nice for its time, their herky-jerky movements and the fact that you can only see part of them in a little picture window will remind you more of a video phone. You're given the option of questioning, sometimes bribing or threatening depending on the person. Some of the names of these characters such as Lola Lovetoy will have you grinning. Some of the encounters turn nasty and end with you getting beat up, maced or the ever popular kicked in the groin.

You'll also find locations to search like: Linsky's warehouse, a beachhouse, Law and Order's headquarters to a lab with a caged ape, cages of dead rats, a large computer and a security system. In fact, most of these places have some system that locks the door once you enter as you'll see a clock counting down, in a top corner, till your demise unless you get what you need and find a way to escape in time.

As you search you'll walk to a corner of the room and a bunch of words will show up representing what you can search, with action words like: move, open, pull, push etc. This makes it so much easier than trying to type out just the right phrase.

As far as the graphics are concerned: with its electronic map, detailed flight instrumentation, including flight stick and throttle lever and onboard fax and vid phone, your car looks amazing inside. The video phone is in fact where you have most of the digitized speech in the game as you hear your secretary Vanessa and your informant Lee Chin, speaking fairly clearly, from a very authentic-looking device. On the other hand, while most everything, including bridges and buildings as you fly by them look good, I wonder why you only see daytime? Even when the location you see as you're talking to someone is bathed in darkness; the second before and after you're in your car and flying in broad daylight! The inside of places you search are generally nicely rendered and usually fully interactive.

The music you hear is okay with its percussion beat but I think a nice bluesy saxophone would have set the mood for a detective mystery noir better. The sound effects including gunfire, the usual grunts and groans, explosions and the like are generally top-notch. And while most of the speech is confined to the vid phone there's a funny, sexy little interplay between you and a foxy femme fatale in the back of your car at the end that you'll love. If you live that long.

If you like complex detective mysteries or Sci Fi (sorry, no space battles) or, even better, both then this game would be right up your alley. It's an old one but demands classic status.