Runaway: A Road Adventure

Rating:
Summary: better than most
Review: This is a better than average adventure game. Major points for point and click ability instead of using arrows and other keyboard letters. It has funny ,politically-incorrect characters, great animation and sense of humor. Where else can you sit around in your sweatpants and be entertained for hours for about 20 bucks?

Rating:
Summary: SMART SMART SMART
Review: This is a pretty interesting game. It's funny. It's beautiful. It's cool. And it's a smart one, a must.

The graphics are outstanding, the music pretty nice, and the script very original.

The only thing I didn't like at all was the girl. She was as gorgeous as dumb!

Rating:
Summary: Classic Adventure
Review: This is the best adventure game I have played in years!!! Simply Excellent!

Rating:
Summary: 3rd-Person Adventure of the Classic Kind
Review: _Runaway_ starts with a movie: an attractive young man in a director's chair on a dark stage tells you about the strange turn his life took recently. Brian Basco, you learn, is a brilliant physics student on his way to dream position at UC Berkeley. As he's leaving New York, he remembers he has an errand to run and heads to SoHo. A beautiful woman runs out in front of his car. He takes her to the hospital and tried to continue on his way, but she tells him her life is in danger. Being a kind-hearted soul, he can't just leave her, and soon enough the two of them are on the run.

This is another recent release that I avoided for some time due to various negative reviews. Well, I know everyone can't like everything but seriously! were those reviewers playing the same game? In my experience, _Runaway_ was beautiful, well-plotted, exceptionally acted, humourous and highly entertaining, with an interface that was easy to understand and use. It ran incredibly smoothly--no bugs here!-- and the soundtrack kept me humming long after I was done playing. All in all, a game in the best tradition of 3rd person adventure.

The game was highly linear. In some ways it played more like an interactive movie. There were many cut-scenes, some of them quite long. On the plus side, lots of conversations went along without any participation; it always annoys me when there's a contrived interactive quality to portions of a game that are basically information dumps. Sometimes a character would tell Brian to "Go away and come back in an hour," and instead of wandering around waiting for time to pass, you'd get a little movie where Brian said, "Well, I think an hour has gone by." I like this a lot. On the negative side, you couldn't pick up invetory until you needed it, or at least until you had some clue you needed SOMETHING. So you had to go back to locations quite a bit and keep looking at things to be sure there wasn't anything new. In some games this REALLY bothers me, but in _Runaway_ it didn't so much. I could understand not wanting to carry around fifteen tons of stuff until you had a use for it.

The puzzles were classic inventory/conversation: get information and find what you need to solve a problem. I found that the solutions generally made sense; there were only a few that seemed unthinkably silly or even downright wrong (in terms of real life). There were a lot of multi-part tasks--places where just as you thought you finally had it solved, something else would come up. And there were a couple of pixel hunts. But mostly, the game moved right along.

The characters were wonderful, if somewhat stereotyped. The voice acting was very good; I especially liked the Currandera, Mama Dorita. The main character had a slight tendancy to talk too much, but that was easily overlooked. I thought Brian's development was also well-done. You could see that his experiences were transforming him, but his core personality remained the same.

_Runaway_ took me about 20 hours to complete and I resorted to UHS hints 2 or 3 times (about average for me). I really, really enjoyed it and hope there will be a sequel. If you like the Monkey Island games, you'll like this one.

Rating:
Summary: 3rd-Person Adventure of the Classic Kind
Review: _Runaway_ starts with a movie: an attractive young man in a director's chair on a dark stage tells you about the strange turn his life took recently. Brian Basco, you learn, is a brilliant physics student on his way to dream position at UC Berkeley. As he's leaving New York, he remembers he has an errand to run and heads to SoHo. A beautiful woman runs out in front of his car. He takes her to the hospital and tried to continue on his way, but she tells him her life is in danger. Being a kind-hearted soul, he can't just leave her, and soon enough the two of them are on the run.

This is another recent release that I avoided for some time due to various negative reviews. Well, I know everyone can't like everything but seriously! were those reviewers playing the same game? In my experience, _Runaway_ was beautiful, well-plotted, exceptionally acted, humourous and highly entertaining, with an interface that was easy to understand and use. It ran incredibly smoothly--no bugs here!-- and the soundtrack kept me humming long after I was done playing. All in all, a game in the best tradition of 3rd person adventure.

The game was highly linear. In some ways it played more like an interactive movie. There were many cut-scenes, some of them quite long. On the plus side, lots of conversations went along without any participation; it always annoys me when there's a contrived interactive quality to portions of a game that are basically information dumps. Sometimes a character would tell Brian to "Go away and come back in an hour," and instead of wandering around waiting for time to pass, you'd get a little movie where Brian said, "Well, I think an hour has gone by." I like this a lot. On the negative side, you couldn't pick up invetory until you needed it, or at least until you had some clue you needed SOMETHING. So you had to go back to locations quite a bit and keep looking at things to be sure there wasn't anything new. In some games this REALLY bothers me, but in _Runaway_ it didn't so much. I could understand not wanting to carry around fifteen tons of stuff until you had a use for it.

The puzzles were classic inventory/conversation: get information and find what you need to solve a problem. I found that the solutions generally made sense; there were only a few that seemed unthinkably silly or even downright wrong (in terms of real life). There were a lot of multi-part tasks--places where just as you thought you finally had it solved, something else would come up. And there were a couple of pixel hunts. But mostly, the game moved right along.

The characters were wonderful, if somewhat stereotyped. The voice acting was very good; I especially liked the Currandera, Mama Dorita. The main character had a slight tendancy to talk too much, but that was easily overlooked. I thought Brian's development was also well-done. You could see that his experiences were transforming him, but his core personality remained the same.

_Runaway_ took me about 20 hours to complete and I resorted to UHS hints 2 or 3 times (about average for me). I really, really enjoyed it and hope there will be a sequel. If you like the Monkey Island games, you'll like this one.