Golden Gate

The Good
I will probably never get to the other side of the country to visit San Francisco. Sure, I've seen parts of it in movies, but I will never get to walk the streets like I did in Golden Gate. The famous Lombard Street, Chinatown, the Wharf, and even Golden Gate Park are some of the places you'll visit.

The game is supposedly based on authentic historical research and San Francisco legends. Playing in 1st-person, you begin by reading a letter dated in 1906 about the descendant of a grain trader and a necklace which will reveal the "truth of the past" including an ancient treasure. So, over a century later, you start out to find what clues remain for the whereabouts of the treasure and the mysterious box holding it.

At least it's not linear and you are able to travel from place to place at will. But, instead of helping, you may find yourself wandering around clueless until you get lucky. Your clues are found by reading other people's diaries, letters or manuscripts, most of which are found by solving puzzles.

Most of the puzzles I considered to be pretty hard. There was one nicely done "magic square" puzzle, musical puzzles, and other inventory-based puzzles. Although I found them to be challenging, some of them seemed added in and put there as roadblocks (or to lengthen game play time).

It's obvious the designers love San Francisco and wanted to show it off. Alot of graphic talent was used in presenting the scenery. There are over 2000 hand painted, 16-bit images, some of which are gorgeous. The scenery looks realistic (albeit a bit out of focus) and you are able to pan around 360 degrees. So you feel as though you are actually somewhere in or around San Francisco. But the scenes are just still photos with "hot spots" for puzzles or the directional cursor. Nothing really moves as it should although the illusion is created with sounds (the crashing of waves, for instance). There are video "cut-scenes" in full motion to move the plot along. The music nicely added to the feel of each scene (when it didn't stutter), and it was nice to be able to listen to the soundtrack within the game.

The Bad
Frankly, the only reason I finished the game was because I had been commissioned to write a hint file for it.

The minimum specifications for this game must be a joke. I played the game on a Pentium 100 and had problems. It was buggy with long scene load times, bad transitions and many crashes resulting in a reboot. The cursor is quirky and unnecessarily complex. Sometimes when you clicked to go one direction you'd end up somewhere else. Using the in-game map wasn't as easy as it could have been either. Playing the game on today's newer and faster computers might make it run better. But who knows?

There is only one non-player character, and he's a sloppy derelict who detracts from the story (if you call it one) rather than adds to it. I would have rather been left totally alone than to meet up with him. His speech and the videos in which he appeared were terrible.

And, the ending was a disappointment, to say the least. As another reviewer put it "you'll wonder why you even bothered playing the game in the first place."

The Bottom Line
Golden Gate does have some beautiful images and I did enjoy walking around San Francisco. But I could have picked up a travel brochure for that. If you're fond of harder puzzles, and don't mind doing quite a bit of on-screen reading, you might want to give this a try. If I were you, though, I'd skip over this title and find something else.