Grim Fandango

Your character is called Manuel and he is a travel agent for the dead. (Nothing gruesome) Your boss and rival are corrupt and keep the best clients for themselves. He discovers the truth when he collects a saint from the land of the living, expecting that she will be his ticket out of there. However, her records have been altered and she is forced out into the land of the dead by herself. This corruption has not gone unnoticed and a small rebellion group recruit him to help them in their struggle. You must find her before it is too late!

I had to patch this game because you could not use the text option with the cut scenes!?! You could use the text in the main game but not in the introduction or other cut scenes. Once you have passed the introduction, you choose to play Grim Fandango. Here you can press the F1 key to give you an options menu. From this menu you can choose to turn 'Text only' 'Voice and text' or 'Voice' on or off. You can also alter the speed at which the text appears and disappears on the screen. The text is colour coded according to who is talking. This applies to both the main game and the cut scenes.Another very useful feature is the 'Dialogue Transcript'. Here you can view all the text that you have seen while playing the game. Any text seen here is also colour coded. Once you have selected the options which suit you best, you can then view the introductory cut scene with text. Yeah! If you want to later on in the game you can come back to this option and view any cut scene from the ones that you have reached. Controlling conversation is easy. A menu appears on the bottom left of the screen and from this you can choose what you wish to say. The conversation then carries on with the other person talking and this appears at the top of the screen.

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Your character is not always easy to control since you do not have the option to use a mouse. You can use a joystick or the keyboard. You recognise that your character can interact with things by the tilt of his head. Sometimes this is a very little tilt of the head and may be missed altogether and it can be difficult to judge distances correctly. One small thing that I found annoying was that the text speed could only be altered IF you had selected 'Text Only' in the options menu. I found the graphics in Grim Fandango very good; they are large, well detailed and clear and it is nice to see the characters talking even though you have text only in the game.