Oh MAN! I FINALLY BEAT THIS GAME! I originally bought this game as part of the Journeyman Project Trilogy pack somewhere around 12 years ago. I was breezing right through it until I had to enter the temple in Shangri-La. That's when EVERYTHING went bad. I do mean everything. The game crashed, freezing my computer utterly and forcing me to do a manual reset to get it to turn off. Oh, and this happened EVERY TIME I got to that part of the level.
It turned out that there was some sort of manufacturing issue with the last disc in the game (where the data for Shangri-La was located). This was apparently pretty widespread, but the internet was pretty much just a rumor around my town at the time, so I don't remember how I even found out about that. I did get a phone number to call the help line for the production company, and guess what? They charged me $10 for a replacement disc! $10! For something that THEY screwed up in the first place! Icing on the cake? It never even showed up. After waiting about a month and calling again, I was assured that my disc was on its way. Over a decade later, I think even the most optimistic person would be force to admit it's never showing up.
Well, that sucked, but it wasn't the end of the world. After all, I could buy another copy, right? Oops, no. It was pretty much impossible to find, at least in my area. And as I mentioned, no internet means no Amazon. So that was that.
Until I got to college and one of my roommates actually HAD a copy of the game! Finally my chance to finish it! Oh, wait, no. Because of the difference in technology between when the game came out (Windows 95) and that time (Windows XP), there were so many issues with the game that it was practically unplayable. The audio was full of pops, which rendered the dialogue impossible to understand, and the frame rate would dip into the single digits every 30 seconds or so. Well, so much for that.
I had pretty much given up on ever seeing the ending to this game (go screw yourself, Youtube! I'm not interested!), so when I saw it for sale on GOG.com last week, I was pumped! And then the setup.exe file got corrupted in the download. Well, crap. So, with an out-of-town trip on the immediate horizon, I curtailed my Journeyman 3 plans and headed to my alma mater for a pretty awesome weekend with a pretty hot girl.
After an essentially sleepless weekend, I returned on Sunday with no desire but to do the absolute least amount of work possible, so I tried to redownload Journeyman 3. Well, this time it worked. Being too tired to actually play it on Sunday, I started it up yesterday after work, and I was amazed by how much of the game I remembered right away. After playing for about two hours, I had completed nearly half of the game without even breaking a sweat.
Listening to Arthur the Artificial Intelligence's witty comments and awful jokes made me feel like a kid again. Rarely have I had such a perfect moment of nostalgia.It was like meeting old friends that I hadn't seen in a very long time, and finding out that our friendship still worked just as well after the long absence.
Is the game perfect? Well, no. There are definitely a lot of issues. Navigation is quirky at best, and even with all of the tweaks that GOG put into it to make it work on today's operating systems, I still recognized a fair amount of the bugs that were present in the initial release. It is better than pretty much any other FMV game that I have ever played, though.
My biggest problem with Journeyman 3 is that it's the end of the franchise. There was a planned fourth game, but it got shelved when the developer came up with an idea that the publisher thought would make more money, and the subsequent closing of Presto Studios made it incredibly unlikely that Journeyman 4 will ever see the light of day.
Well, it was fun going back and seeing how the story ended, finally. It's the end of my adventures with Arthur and TSA Agent Gage Blackwood, but their memory will live on in my heart, and make me cry every time I see an adventure game like Nibiru: Age of Secrets (video review coming soon!).
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