Martian Memorandum

aka: Tex Murphy: Martian Memorandum
Moby ID: 222
DOS Specs
Buy on Windows
$5.99 new on Steam

Description official descriptions

Martian Memorandum is the sequel to Mean Streets. Six years have found the private investigator Tex Murphy broke, down on his luck, and seriously in need of a new case. He gets a call from Marshall Alexander, a business tycoon who owns most of the industry on Mars. It seems his daughter Alexis has run away from home, and taken "something else" with her. Marshall won't say what that something else is, but he is willing to pay handsomely to get it (and his daughter) back.

Unlike its predecessor, the game contains only adventure gameplay, removing flight simulation and action sequences. Basic gameplay mechanics are very similar to those of the first game, placing interrogation and choices above object-based puzzles. Verb commands are used to interact with the environment, while interrogating suspects usually involves selecting conversation options. Making a wrong choice may sometimes prematurely end the game or render it unwinnable.

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Credits (DOS version)

10 People

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 66% (based on 11 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 47 ratings with 5 reviews)

So this is what Mars looks like

The Good
Six years ago, PI Tex Murphy investigated the death of scientist Carl Linsky, who was suspected of jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. He also foiled a corporation's plan to use a supercomputer to control the minds of the scientists which is basically the reason why Linsky committed suicide. Now Tex is back on his second case in the year 2039. Marshall Alexander, head of the TerraForm Corporation, whose purpose is to make life inhabitable on Mars, asks him to recover his daughter, Alexis, and in the process, get back an item that was stolen from him.

Martian Memorandum is an adventure game like its predecessor. You walk around a location, doing stuff and getting up to no good. You have a ComLink that allows you to call up Stacy, your new secretary, who will provide you with information, as well as addresses of characters that you are supposed to talk to, and this makes up the majority of the game. By talking to them, their face appears in a box, and I knew straight away that MM is a multimedia product. Each character's face looks so real, and when they speak, the lip-syncing is spot on. You ask about other characters, but rather than typing their name in, you are given a list of characters that you can ask about. This way, you don't have to remember full names in case remembering stuff like that is hard for you.

MM is the first Tex Murphy game to feature different conversation paths. Before you can ask characters about others, you have to carry out a conversation with them, choosing two or three responses. What the character says will depend on your responses. If you are rude, expect them to be rude back and, more often than not, tell you to get out of their site. If you are nice to them, you will be their friend. Having to choose responses not only effect the conversation, but it also makes the game replayable.

The graphics that mostly serve as the backgrounds look amazing. An example of this is where you get to see Alexander at TerraForm. You can see metropolitan San Francisco after dark, with the Golden Gate Bridge to the right and some land to the north, which is surrounded by lights. Lightning strikes one of the buildings occasionally to add to the atmosphere. More great examples of artwork are accompanied by some text which describes the location that you are about to explore. I was amazed when Tex's investigation finally leads him to Mars.

The music in the game is catchy and it sometimes reflect the environment/situation that you are in. Some of the music has beats that make you want to tap your feet to. The sound effects are similar to Mean Streets, except that the game supports sound cards that were commonplace in 1991 such as the MT-32, Adlib, and Sound Blaster. You will mostly hear Tex walking around the place, and opening and closing doors. At one location that Tex travels to, there is a cat somewhere, and the sound it makes seem out of place, like a “meow” sound backwards. Although it is unusual for a cat to sound like that, I find it funny.

The puzzles in this game are not hard, and can take 5-10 minutes to complete. One involves you finding some way to open the safe in a strict time before you are killed. Another one is navigating Tex through the ducts using some blueprints you pick up earlier as a guide. I found the puzzles quite easy if I save mid-way, restoring if I die.

The Bad
As with all adventure games, you have to travel between locations. In MM, there is no map. The locations that you can travel to are listed in a dialog box. Since this is a Tex Murphy game, you expect a detailed map to appear. I believe that you access a detailed map in future Tex games.

The Bottom Line
Martian Memorandum is the second Tex Murphy game where you have to rescue an item that was stolen from the head of TerraForm Corporation. Mostly throughout the game, you have to deal with characters who have their own personality, and who are classed as either mutants or norms. There are times when you need to search locations for clues that let you progress through the game. The game uses motion video to make the characters life like. The different conversation paths make the game replayable.

The game has a nice storyline, excellent graphics, and very good sound. The game supports sound cards that were commonplace at the time MM was made. The puzzles are easy to get through in less time. The game uses no copy protection which means two things: 1) the game is easy to pirate, and 2) you don't have to look for the manual you lost ages ago.

DOS · by Katakis | カタキス (43092) · 2007

Digitized mutants get too much stage time

The Good
Martian Memorandum is the second Tex Murphy game and the sequel to Mean Streets, a technologically impressive - though not always fulfilling gameplay-wise - adventure set in a colorful future combining post-apocalyptic traits with a bit of film noir.

Mean Streets boasted 256-color graphics and an ingenious usage of the PC beeper (they managed to reproduce speech using nothing but those beeps). Like that game, the Martian Memorandum is, above all, a technological showcase, though on a smaller scale. Following the footsteps of Countdown, the game proudly presents video snippets of live action and rudimentary (but still very impressive) voiceovers. The graphics - digitized for most locations, hand-painted for the exotics of Mars - are strong as well, bringing many of those interesting areas to life with their detail.

Dialogues are a simplified version of the complex conversations in Countdown: most of the time, each response you choose leads to more branches, of which only one would normally achieve the desired effect, allowing you to continue the game. It is nice to have this kind of tension, though it is really overused here. Those dialogues were clearly supposed to be the highlight of the game; but there are also the usual adventuring screens where you have to find the right items needed for progression. These are somewhat more varied than in Mean Streets, with some proper inventory puzzles and more adventure-oriented setpieces (avoiding lasers, crawling through vents, etc.) replacing the first game's repetitive flying and goon-shooting sequences.

The Bad
Much like its "older brother" Countdown, the second installment in the Tex Murphy series seems to focus on audiovisual effects more than on actual gameplay. The biggest problem of the game is its schematic, formulaic progression. It is as if the developers decided that a few gameplay gimmicks were enough to build an adventure game upon, without paying attention to pacing and general flow.

Martian Memorandum is built like a detective investigation, but one following either of the two very simplified procedures: search a room, find the right item; or, discover the correct way through a conversation to open another location either of the first or the second kind. The entire game is, essentially, composed out of those segments - which make perfect sense within the frames of a detective mystery, but feel disjointed and unrewarding in an adventure game.

Areas often confine you to one screen only; there is no sense of movement in the game, because most of the time you'll "jump" to new locations instead of actually moving there. Many locations consist of just one character portrait and dialogue lines, almost like in Japanese adventures. The path through the game is linear and you often feel your investigation is on rails. These repetitive activities quickly get old, and the more you play the less you care which of the myriads of mutants you've been talking to is the real culprit. Puzzles are mostly forgettable, and the clunky interface combined with a few serious pixel-hunting issues doesn't help at all.

Just like Countdown, the game also struggles to find the right tone. The story involves a series of murders and a global conspiracy, yet the game stubbornly insists on a campy B-movie style with particularly cheesy mutants and rather lame attempts at humor. The detective line itself starts well, but becomes disappointingly predictable as the game goes on. There is something dry in the way the plot is being served to you, and the protagonist seems to be curiously detached from what is happening around him.

The Bottom Line
Martian Memorandum is a solid and technologically impressive title - but as an adventure game, it is somewhat lackluster. It also doesn't really improve upon Countdown in any significant way.

DOS · by Unicorn Lynx (181780) · 2014

Tex is back!

The Good
Other than the Police Quest games, there weren't many "gritty" games widely available. This was one of them. Murder, sex, mutations...it was all there. Want to get the help of a secretary? You don't give her candy, you take her out on a date and then take her to bed. Ever see Guybrush do that? Like Mean Streets, the sound and graphics were advanced for their time, but of course they don't look so great now. The locales were also very well done, and if you went to a junkyard, it looked like, well, a junkyard. The ending is good for a laugh, too.

The Bad
Whenever someone talks about "dead-end syndrome" I immediately think of this game. Forgot to do something you had no idea you were supposed to do? Well, that will come back to haunt you...at the very end. This, coupled with the built-in hint system, made it too tempting to cheat.

The Bottom Line
A solid adventure/mystery game. Not the best ever, but a worthy addition to the Tex saga. If you find it, grab it.

DOS · by Toka (13) · 2001

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

Trivia

Tex Murphy

As in all other Tex Murphy games, principal designer Chris Jones plays the titular character. However, this is the last title in which he remains silent.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Eurythmic.

Windows, Macintosh, Linux added by lights out party.

Additional contributors: Jeanne, Travis Fahs, Patrick Bregger, firefang9212.

Game added August 16, 1999. Last modified August 14, 2023.