Cruise for a Corpse

1001 Video Games

Cruise for a Corpse appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Polygon

Cruise for a Corpse is notable for a technical feature: Most animated objects in the game, from door to persons, are filled vectors rather than bitmaps. This allows for animations which are not only fluent, but consume only a fraction of the disk space that sprites would require. Also, the figures are scalable without loss of detail, although the rather crude vector models used in Cruise for a Corpse are not too spectacular in close-ups.

The Delphine team demonstrated its mastery of the polygon technology impressively -- unfortunately not so much in the game itself than in the ending sequence. It consists of roughly a dozend second-long full-screen animations consisting entirely of vectors. This was an astounding display at the time.

By 1992, Delphine had already successfully used the vector technology in two games (Cruise for a Corpse and Another World). However, it was another game that made it truly popular in that year: Alone in the Dark. Incidentally, this highly successful action-adventure was developed by Infogrames -- another French company.

References

There are a couple of references to Operation: Stealth, one of Delphine's earlier games: At one point you discover the name 'Ostrovitch' (Ostrovitch and Karpov were two Soviet agents from that game). Also, if you examine a waste basket in the toilet, the game will tell you that there is 'no razor' this time (referring to a certain puzzle in that game).

At the epilogue of the game, one character is described 'rich as Donald Trump'. However since the game is set in 1927, it is an historical error: Trump would not be born until 20 years later!

The game includes a few elements which can be understood as references to classical French language comics. For example, the victim's name 'Karaboudjan' is the name of a ship in the Tintin comic-strip album The Crab with the Golden Claws by Hergé. At a point of the game, you discover a tin can of crab meat, as a cover for a smuggling operation, exactly as in the comic book. Finally, a puzzle includes the name "Incal", which is possibly a reference to the title of the comic book by the same name by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius.

Awards

• ST Format
  • January 1993 (issue #42) - #35 in '50 finest Atari ST games of all time' list