The Journeyman Project: Turbo!

Moby ID: 804
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The Journeyman Project: Turbo! is a remake of The Journeyman Project. The year is 2318. The place: the sky-born city of Caldoria. After a century of bitter struggle, humanity has finally learned to live in peace. In 2117 the Unified World was established. And humanity knew no more war.

But all that was achieved was threatened with the invention of time travel. Its potential to destroy humanity's hard won prosperity realized, the only time travel machine ever built, the Pegasus, was moved to a secret location. The Temporal Security Annex (TSA) was formed to protect history from sabotage. The project's code name: Journeyman.

Today is 11.6.2318. Exactly ten years ago, an alien delegation calling themselves the Cyrrollans approached earth as messengers from the Symbiotry of Peaceful Beings. They gave humanity ten years to decide if the want to join the Symbiotry or not. Now the moment has come, and humanity awaits the arrival of the alien delegation.

You are Agent 5 of the Temporal Protectorate. When you report to the TSA, you find that someone is changing history, influencing events and happenings, changing how things happened - and not for the better. It is your job to find out who is messing with history, stop him, and restore history. For this you will have to travel time, using the Pegasus, as far as 2 million BC. You will travel to Mars in 2185 to stop attack on an alien vessel, visit the World Science Center in 2310 to stop an assassination, and go back to 2112 to destroy a nuclear missile. You will collect items, solve puzzles, and pit your wits against a giant robot.

The game itself is an adventure game, played in 1st person perspective - explore the environment, collect and use items, solve puzzles and small games, and it even has a maze in it. It has a few twists though: according to TSA's rules, you are not allowed to interact with people from a different time, so you must gather information in a different way. You can also stay only a limited time in every time zone, since you protective suit has only limited energy. You can also die at this game, if you are not fast thinking and fast moving.

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Critics

Average score: 68% (based on 6 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 24 ratings with 4 reviews)

A true science fiction experience, complete with an original story, great sound and imaginative visuals.

The Good
The optimistic future described in the game is very believable, and I found myself hoping it is possible to achieve. This stands in contrast to most other science fiction games, which usually describe the future as a modern, violent Dark Age. In The Journeyman Project humanity prospers, and has long ago put aggression and violence behind them. And in the game, you will generally avoid violence, and in fact, all your actions are directed to prevent violence. This, if nothing else, makes this game very special. But that is not everything. The graphics of this game, although not always technically spectacular, are one of the most imaginative I have seen. Every time zone looks unique, and although its the right look, it is never exactly what you expect. The game also features beautiful music from many styles, ranging from rock to new age. Each zone has its own distinctive theme, or style, enhancing the atmosphere of the game. The game has a strong background in the manual, which allows for a very complex story, with some interesting twists. The game is not entirely linear, allowing you some freedom in your choice of where to go next. Also, sometimes there's more than one way to solve a problem. In at least one place, choosing a more violent approach will result in the loss of helpful information!

The Bad

  • The designers of the game wanted to make something fresh. Unfortunately the interface of the game suffered from this. It takes a lot of time getting used to it, and even then - it is simply not intuitive.

  • The time limit are a hassle. I simply do not like time limits in adventure games, since it keeps you from exploring around. Luckily, the limit is not very strict and you usually have some time for exploring. Also, in the original game (not the turbo version), the loading of a time zone was so slow that the time limit expired before all the time zone data was loaded!
  • The loneliness. In the entire game, the only "people" you meet or see are three robots, and even then you can't talk to them or in any way interact with them. This is excused as one of TSA's rules, which forbids you to interact with people from other times since you might change history. Logical, but I still don't like it.


**The Bottom Line**
A good time travel adventure, with very good music, original graphics you don't wont to miss and a story so good it should be on a cinema near you.

Windows 3.x · by Mickey Gabel (332) · 2000

About so-so

The Good
The puzzles actually had a consequence if you didn't do them right, and some of the hallways really gave even the most experienced maze runner, a run for their money. Some of the puzzles were fun, especially the one in 2185.

The Bad
Some parts in the game--like the codes, for instance--are tough, because if you lose the manual, and you don't have a very good memory (no offense, of course!) you're stuck right when you get to the TSA's front door. Also, the many ways of perishing can get quite irritating sometimes. That and sometimes running into robots does get sort of monotonous after a while...

The Bottom Line
A recommendation, but only for the PC gamers who love adventure games, solving puzzles, and giant seven-foot-tall robots.

Windows 3.x · by John Kinney (4) · 2005

Decent multimedia experiment

The Good
A combination of interactive-movie and adventure game, JProject is an interesting sci-fi thriller where (in a similar manner to the film TimeCop), you are a special time-travelling agent that is sent to the past to make things right and prevent major space/time fuckups.

Unlike TimeCop however, the game puts an emphasis on puzzle-solving, exploration and peaceful adventuring instead of martial arts extravaganzas, gratuitous violence, nudity and drool... Mia Sara (though I can't help but think what a great game Journeyman would have been with all THAT!!). You have a series of small action sequences thrown in to spice up the gameflow, but they are just that and the main gameplay concept is that of a simple first person slide-show adventure game that combines inventory puzzles as well as myst-like color sequencing stuff and other mindteasers in a sci-fi storyline. Fear not my brain-challenged friends, as the difficulty is very simple and you'll have no problem solving each and every one of the challenges in the game, providing ample time to just enjoy the story and explore the limited but beautifully rendered gameworld which offers a small modicum of non-linearity in the form of different solutions for each mission as well as a scoring system based on the items you got, how you solved the missions, etc. etc.

Speaking of the storyline, the game places you in an interesting variation of the "happy-happy-joy-joy" utopic Star Trek future, where everyone is just dandy and society has finally embraced peace, love and all that crap. The first contact with an alien entity is about to become a reality, but some forces do not want to see that happen so they'll trigger some historic events in order screw our further dealings with E.T. The plot does have it's holes but it's essentially an entertaining sci-fi adventure which is told via the game with the aid of full multimedia whiz-bang.

That's right folks, Journeyman Project contains plenty of eye candy in the form of fully rendered items, backgrounds, creatures, etc. especially designed to make you forget about the plot holes and concentrate on the beautiful scenery. Sound effects are extremely well implemented, and the music is of superb quality, only adding to the already proffesional feel of the game. Small fmv clips and animations handle all transitions when exploring the locations in the game, and everywhere you click you trigger some small 3DStudio-powered gimmick. The game does look and sound VERY good, and it even holds up to todays standards in terms of graphical quality. If only for the looks, JP stands the test of time.

The Bad
Well, to the untrained eye Journeyman will look like one of those "multimedia experiences" that started popping up when the cd-roms appeared, with lots of multimedia and very little "experience" to it, and while JP distances itself from that definition by providing an actual game in it, it still falls under the category. The whole game just reeks of that whole multimedia fad, sprinkled as it is with millions of mini-action/puzzle sequences just to prove how "interactive" the whole thing is. Plus, the whole game treats itself as if it was the second coming in terms of technology implementation and development, pretty much like every other cd-based game at it's time (this one, however, going the extra mile by providing an appropiately cheesy making-of video and behind-the-scenes documentation).

To be fair let me stress that JP is not just a collection of pre-rendered slides and fmvs with the word "interactive" slapped over them, but the game does take it's roots from there, and while it is an entertaining and fairly decent game, it's still far from perfect. The interaction with the world is far from exciting since the whole game universe seems to be composed of you, the bad guy, a computer chick and 3 (count them) robots. The puzzles are of the "use key on door" kind, with little to no difficulty to them so, to put it simply: it's a simple, lightweight adventure game.

The Bottom Line
The Journeyman Project is and delivers much more than other cd-based multimedia bonanzas of it's kind. It's beautifully presented and has tremedous attention to detail, and to be fair it provides a very decent gameplay experience on top of all it's pre-rendered magic. But unfortunately the gameplay design never raises above decent, and while it's not going to hurt you to try this game, it's not going to rock your socks either.... Just plain vanilla.

Windows 3.x · by Zovni (10504) · 2003

[ View all 4 player reviews ]

Trivia

Development

The development team collaborated with several organizations such as Apple Computers and Macromedia to implement their technology into the game, but most notably they received support from the (small at the time) PIXAR Animation Studios, which you'll surely recognize as one of the leading computer animation houses in the world, developers of the first full-length computer animated film in history: Toy Story, as well as other films and the Photorealistic Renderman software used in motion picture CGI and the famed R.E.Y.E.S. rendering alghoritm among other milestones.

Extras

The game comes with trailers for The Journeyman Project and The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time. It also comes with The Journey: Making of The Journeyman Project - a documentry covering all steps in making the game, from initial concept to marketing.

References

The computer at NORAD in the game is named Deep Thought, the same as a supercomputer in Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books.

Remake

The original version used Apple's Quicktime technology, and was supposed to be playable on PC and Macintosh. It was slow on PC's, so the company created this version, using Video for Windows technology, which was three times faster! A further enhanced re-release was The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime.

Information also contributed by Timo Takalo and Zovni

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Related Games

The Journeyman Project
Released 1993 on Windows 3.x, Macintosh
The Journeyman Project Trilogy
Released 1999 on Windows
The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime
Released 1997 on Macintosh, Windows, 2014 on Linux
The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time
Released 1995 on Windows 3.x, 1995 on Macintosh, 2010 on Windows
The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time
Released 1998 on Windows, Macintosh
Turbo
Released 1981 on Arcade, ColecoVision, Intellivision
Turbo
Released 1988 on Amiga
Turbo
Released 1987 on DOS

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Mickey Gabel.

Macintosh added by Zeppin.

Additional contributors: Jeanne, tahtalf, Patrick Bregger.

Game added January 28, 2000. Last modified January 29, 2024.