Mobility Site - View Single Post - Further reports on excellent adventure game Broken Sword (with native VGA support!)

Menneisyys · 08-03-06, 06:30 AM

I’ve played Broken Sword, AstraWare’s latest hit, a lot last evening / night. The port is, as far as I can tell, excellent – it greatly utilizes the capabilities of VGA Pocket PC’s, unlike the, in this respect too (it also completely lacks voices), far inferior, 8-9 months ago released Palm OS version. If you have a VGA Pocket PC, make sure you give it a try.

I don’t elaborate much on the game itself because I agree with Eric Pankoke’s excellent review at PocketGamer. Please see his review and further comments. Here, I only add additional information / remarks.

I’ve played the game on several of my WM2003(SE) and WM5 Pocket PC’s (HTC Wizard, WM5-upgraded HP iPAQ hx4700; Dell Axim x51v with ROM version A12; HP iPAQ 2210; Pocket Loox 720) and encountered no compatibility or speed problems – not even on my “slow” HTC Wizard (imate K-Jam, T-Mobile MDA Vario, Qtek 9100, MDA Vario, XDA mini S, SPV M3000, VPA Compact II, Dopod 838). The only small bug (?) I had was that the “this item can be clicked/used” cogs sometimes (particularly after game loading and/or suspending and, then, resuming the Pocket PC while the game was active) disabled and only displayed around the main sprite. Then, a quick cycle of the enabling of these icons helped (by just clicking the “cog” icon in the lower left corner).

My (a veteran adventure player that have played through all the remarkable adventures on the C64, Amiga and PC in the late eighties and early nineties) only grief with the port is as follows:

the voice/music quality could be better. It sounds as if it were sampled at 8 kHz (or 11 kHz at max.) I’m just in the process of ordering the original version of Broken Sword here in Europe (fortunately, it seems it’s still being distributed by Sold Out Software but, unfortunately, Amazon.de doesn’t list it and I’d prefer not ordering from Amazon.com before of the distances, the time it gets here and extra fees involved) so that I can compare the Astraware port to that (and I can try "hacking" the original music/sound files - MUSIC*.BSP, SPEECH*.BSP in AstraWare's port - to see whether the "hacked" version, if it works at all, would result in a sound / voice quality increase). I’ll produce a hack tutorial (if it’s possible at all) if I manage to do it. (Note that the SCUMM cutscene add-on packs files available here are in MPEG-2 and, therefore, totally incompatible with the port. Also, they are cutscenes only and not speech/music files.) Astraware could also consider releasing add-on packs and/or downloadable speech/music packs for Pocket PC users that have sufficiently large free space on their storage cards to accommodate the larger speech/music packs.
as with many Sierra/Lucasarts-type adventures (as opposed to those of Legend Entertainment or Magnetic Scrolls, which don't actively display the main character), this title contains a lot of character animations. They are cool to stare at, but certainly waste a lot of time (for die-hard adventure fans that prefer playing over just enjoying well-drawn animations and/or parallax scroll during walking - it's pretty spectacular, but adventure fans are not really want waste time on them), and can’t be skipped, unlike with most desktop versions (where you can also set, in most cases, the animation speed. It's not possible with the Broken Sword port). It’s only individual sentences in conversations that can be skipped, nothing else, which means animations are really time-consuming. In this respect, non-animated, “traditional” text/ static picture-based (with point-and-click support) adventures fare better because they don’t force the player just to sit and wait until, for example, the character gets from position A to B or a lengthy animation (for example, trying to raise the manhole cover) is played. Astraware should consider adding a, say, configurable “Escape” button to greatly speed up gameplay by just letting the player skip these animations.

Otherwise, it’s by far the best adventure game on the Pocket PC right now. It certainly beats Fade, the, up to now, best “traditional” adventure, in almost every respect (except for the “how much time is wasted on not necessarily wanted character animations” stuff). Note that I prefer text-rich adventures (like Fade) to semi-FPS adventures like those of Tetraedge (Return to Mysterious Island, Egyptian Prophecy, Atlantis Redux) unlike many other Pocket PC players (yes, I’ve always preferred the textual adventures like those of Legend Entertainment); this is why I've always considered Fade the best Pocket PC adventure game. Now, its place is taken by Broken Sword. Particularly if you own a VGA Pocket PC, you will really want to check out this title.

Again, I’d like to point out (like in my first report on the final version) that, right now, you can purchase the game right from AstraWare for $19.99 only, as opposed to other sources.

If only Astraware added an “Escape” button or some similar functionality to speed up gameplay and there were a way to enhance the voice/music quality…

Practical tips

Note that the game stores its savegames, by default, in the main memory, in \My Documents\My Saved Games. While saved games don’t take up much disk space, you may still want to relocate them to a storage card to, for example, minimize writing operations on the main storage (to, say, avoid filesys.exe compactions on non-native WM5 Pocket PC’s – hear me, Dell Axim x50(v) or HP iPAQ hx users that upgraded to WM5?) To do this, just relocate the directory to a card and accordingly modify HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Apps\ Astraware Broken Sword\ SaveDir in the Registry.

During the testing (which also included mass-deployment of the game on my (several) test Pocket PC’s – yes, I always test the Pocket PC titles I review on ALL my test Pocket PC’s and this includes mass-deployment), I’ve also noticed that, to avoid lengthy and space-consuming (re)installation procedures, you can directly keep/copy the main game files (under WM5, they’re in \Program Files\Astraware\Broken Sword 1\ on the storage card) in/to the same directory. Then, you only need to make sure you copy all the

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Apps\Astraware Broken Sword Cutscenes]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Apps\Astraware Broken Sword Speech]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Apps\Astraware Broken Sword Music]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Apps\Astraware Broken Sword Data]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Apps\Astraware Broken Sword]

registry keys (with a simple registry export/import) to the new device (by necessarily modifying – by a mass search / replace operation - the paths if the storage card is named differently in the other device) and also the save directory (if you don’t relocate it) at \My Documents\My Saved Games.

08-03-06, 06:30 AM	#1 (permalink)
Menneisyys Contributing Reviewer Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 4,577 Thanked 1 Time in 1 Post	Further reports on excellent adventure game Broken Sword (with native VGA support!) I’ve played Broken Sword, AstraWare’s latest hit, a lot last evening / night. The port is, as far as I can tell, excellent – it greatly utilizes the capabilities of VGA Pocket PC’s, unlike the, in this respect too (it also completely lacks voices), far inferior, 8-9 months ago released Palm OS version. If you have a VGA Pocket PC, make sure you give it a try. I don’t elaborate much on the game itself because I agree with Eric Pankoke’s excellent review at PocketGamer. Please see his review and further comments. Here, I only add additional information / remarks. I’ve played the game on several of my WM2003(SE) and WM5 Pocket PC’s (HTC Wizard, WM5-upgraded HP iPAQ hx4700; Dell Axim x51v with ROM version A12; HP iPAQ 2210; Pocket Loox 720) and encountered no compatibility or speed problems – not even on my “slow” HTC Wizard (imate K-Jam, T-Mobile MDA Vario, Qtek 9100, MDA Vario, XDA mini S, SPV M3000, VPA Compact II, Dopod 838). The only small bug (?) I had was that the “this item can be clicked/used” cogs sometimes (particularly after game loading and/or suspending and, then, resuming the Pocket PC while the game was active) disabled and only displayed around the main sprite. Then, a quick cycle of the enabling of these icons helped (by just clicking the “cog” icon in the lower left corner). My (a veteran adventure player that have played through all the remarkable adventures on the C64, Amiga and PC in the late eighties and early nineties) only grief with the port is as follows: the voice/music quality could be better. It sounds as if it were sampled at 8 kHz (or 11 kHz at max.) I’m just in the process of ordering the original version of Broken Sword here in Europe (fortunately, it seems it’s still being distributed by Sold Out Software but, unfortunately, Amazon.de doesn’t list it and I’d prefer not ordering from Amazon.com before of the distances, the time it gets here and extra fees involved) so that I can compare the Astraware port to that (and I can try "hacking" the original music/sound files - MUSIC.BSP, SPEECH.BSP in AstraWare's port - to see whether the "hacked" version, if it works at all, would result in a sound / voice quality increase). I’ll produce a hack tutorial (if it’s possible at all) if I manage to do it. (Note that the SCUMM cutscene add-on packs files available here are in MPEG-2 and, therefore, totally incompatible with the port. Also, they are cutscenes only and not speech/music files.) Astraware could also consider releasing add-on packs and/or downloadable speech/music packs for Pocket PC users that have sufficiently large free space on their storage cards to accommodate the larger speech/music packs. as with many Sierra/Lucasarts-type adventures (as opposed to those of Legend Entertainment or Magnetic Scrolls, which don't actively display the main character), this title contains a lot of character animations. They are cool to stare at, but certainly waste a lot of time (for die-hard adventure fans that prefer playing over just enjoying well-drawn animations and/or parallax scroll during walking - it's pretty spectacular, but adventure fans are not really want waste time on them), and can’t be skipped, unlike with most desktop versions (where you can also set, in most cases, the animation speed. It's not possible with the Broken Sword port). It’s only individual sentences in conversations that can be skipped, nothing else, which means animations are really time-consuming. In this respect, non-animated, “traditional” text/ static picture-based (with point-and-click support) adventures fare better because they don’t force the player just to sit and wait until, for example, the character gets from position A to B or a lengthy animation (for example, trying to raise the manhole cover) is played. Astraware should consider adding a, say, configurable “Escape” button to greatly speed up gameplay by just letting the player skip these animations. Otherwise, it’s by far the best adventure game on the Pocket PC right now. It certainly beats Fade, the, up to now, best “traditional” adventure, in almost every respect (except for the “how much time is wasted on not necessarily wanted character animations” stuff). Note that I prefer text-rich adventures (like Fade) to semi-FPS adventures like those of Tetraedge (Return to Mysterious Island, Egyptian Prophecy, Atlantis Redux) unlike many other Pocket PC players (yes, I’ve always preferred the textual adventures like those of Legend Entertainment); this is why I've always considered Fade the best Pocket PC adventure game. Now, its place is taken by Broken Sword. Particularly if you own a VGA Pocket PC, you will really want to check out this title. Again, I’d like to point out (like in my first report on the final version) that, right now, you can purchase the game right from AstraWare for $19.99 only, as opposed to other sources. If only Astraware added an “Escape” button or some similar functionality to speed up gameplay and there were a way to enhance the voice/music quality… Practical tips Note that the game stores its savegames, by default, in the main memory, in \My Documents\My Saved Games. While saved games don’t take up much disk space, you may still want to relocate them to a storage card to, for example, minimize writing operations on the main storage (to, say, avoid filesys.exe compactions on non-native WM5 Pocket PC’s – hear me, Dell Axim x50(v) or HP iPAQ hx users that upgraded to WM5?) To do this, just relocate the directory to a card and accordingly modify HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Apps\ Astraware Broken Sword\ SaveDir in the Registry. During the testing (which also included mass-deployment of the game on my (several) test Pocket PC’s – yes, I always test the Pocket PC titles I review on ALL my test Pocket PC’s and this includes mass-deployment), I’ve also noticed that, to avoid lengthy and space-consuming (re)installation procedures, you can directly keep/copy the main game files (under WM5, they’re in \Program Files\Astraware\Broken Sword 1\ on the storage card) in/to the same directory. Then, you only need to make sure you copy all the [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Apps\Astraware Broken Sword Cutscenes] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Apps\Astraware Broken Sword Speech] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Apps\Astraware Broken Sword Music] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Apps\Astraware Broken Sword Data] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Apps\Astraware Broken Sword] registry keys (with a simple registry export/import) to the new device (by necessarily modifying – by a mass search / replace operation - the paths if the storage card is named differently in the other device) and also the save directory (if you don’t relocate it) at \My Documents\My Saved Games. __________________ MS MVP- Mobile Devices.