Legacy: Dark Shadows Review

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Legacy: Dark Shadows

Review by TogerMarch 2005

If you’re under 40, skip the next paragraph because it probably won’t make much sense to you …

Okay, let me get this out of my system… when I originally heard about Legacy: Dark Shadows, I immediately thought of the late 60s Gothic soap opera, Dark Shadows. I was all atwitter!  Who doesn’t want a game about vampire Barnabas Collins and poor, clueless Victoria Clark? (Back when Dark Shadows aired, I made sure I was home from school in time to catch each and every episode.) Well, let me be the one to burst your bubble—Legacy: Dark Shadows has nothing whatsoever to do with the soap opera.  Rats.

If it’s not about vampires, then what’s the game about? Private investigator Ren Silver’s journalist friend, Ted, has been kidnapped while researching a story. It’s up to Ren, and you, to discover who’d want to take Ted hostage and why. In playing Legacy, it was obvious the developers had a fondness for science fiction movies. Not only did the game evoke the essence of Blade Runner, but there were also hints of The Fifth Element, Johnny Mnemonic and Alien peppered throughout.

Croatia-based Razbor Studios’ freshman effort opens in 1941 Stalingrad during World War II. After a short, stilted conversation between two Russian soldiers and a bit of player-controlled wandering about the trenches, you’re treated to a head scratch–inducing cutscene, at which point you’re suddenly catapulted almost two hundred years into the future in time to watch Ren arrive on Mars for a much-needed vacation.

Gameplay is mouse-driven, traditional point-and-click with a third-person perspective. Those who suffer from the motion sickness caused by the 360-degree panning of some games can take heart from the fact that Legacy doesn’t have any panning; it does, however, include a slow scroll as Ren walks from one side of the screen to another. Most actions are accomplished with left-clicks of the mouse—directing Ren about the landscape, looking at or picking up various inventory objects, chatting up people that you meet—while a right-click will open Ren’s inventory, where you can view her log or take a closer look at current inventory items. The inventory also includes three permanent objects that are essential to any private investigator: a camera, evidence containers and a handy little device that Ren uses to unlock doors.

Theoretically, a double left-click will cause Ren to run… I say “theoretically” because I could only convince Ren to step up the pace once. All subsequent efforts to hurry her along were met with the same languid footsteps she always took.  (I guess she just wasn’t in the mood.)

Legacy’s puzzles consist mainly of using the correct inventory item at the proper time or helping various characters that you’ll meet in your travels. You’ll only run into two or three stand-alone or logic puzzles in the entire game.

Graphically, Legacy is … charmingly old school. Backgrounds are nicely rendered in 2D; with the entire world displaying a bleak, postapocalyptic feel—flying cars, huge neon signs, dark and gritty landscape, and it always seems to be raining; at least on Earth it’s raining. The rain effects were quite nice, especially with some of the overhead, cinematic shots or when a taxi is hovering for a landing and blowing exhaust, mixed with steam, billows into the air.

I’ll admit the opening sequence wasn’t especially awe-inspiring.  I’ve not seen such pixelated character models since the VGA days.  Once the opening sequence ended, character models improved. Ren does have an odd way of walking—ever notice how Barbie dolls are hinged at the hip to make their legs move?—that’s how Ren walks … it’s very disconcerting at first, but I got used to it. She also does a little two-step dance when you come back from a close-up view of an object.

If you’re expecting state-of-the-art graphics in all of your games, you may be disappointed with Legacy—cutscenes are motion-captured, but they’re also very grainy. Some characters’ lips move during conversations, while others just nod their heads as they talked. Lip-synching to speech isn’t a deal-breaker for me, so I pretty much ignored that whole issue.

I did run into the age-old problem of inventory items blending so well with the static backgrounds that they were practically indistinguishable from everything else. Luckily, most inventory items can be found not too far from where they’re used, so there’s not a huge amount of backtracking needed if you suddenly find yourself without a necessary item.

Legacy’s voice work is … um … oh, let me just say it—bad. Based on the credits, there are only a handful of voice actors, which would mean that they did double duty on the voices … no big deal, happens all the time, right? Um … to differentiate the voices, some of the actors pitched their voices so high they sounded like cartoon characters. Or they changed the voice or accent mid-conversation. Let’s not even discuss the pseudo-Southern accent for one character. And then there’s the issue of being able to tell when they were in a soundproof studio or when they were, perhaps, standing in a stairwell.

On the other hand, Ren’s voice work was nicely done. It was suitably world-weary, yet she was still able to make little jokes about some of the things that she saw—click on a giant sewer rat and Ren asks, “Are you nuts? Do you want that beast to eat me? I think I’ll stay here.” Clicking on a stick of dynamite in her inventory will cause Ren to say, “C’mon, use it. You know you want to.” Plus her accent was charming, particularly when she turned the letter V into a W, thus pronouncing the Russian national drink as “wodka.”

I truly enjoyed the background music. It was low-key and unobtrusive enough that when I was sitting there trying to figure out what I needed to do next, it didn’t clash with what my brain was trying to do. I actually found myself humming along with Beethoven’s Fifth while checking out the Ares Hotel lobby or just enjoying the serene, 2001: A Space Odyssey–like music used for the asteroid sequence.

Ambient sounds were the usual: Ren’s footsteps as she traveled though the various landscapes, doors and drawers opening or closing, fans whirring, rain on the pavement and, in one location, a bird call.

And now we come to the technical portion of our program … Legacy has several bug issues. None of them are game-killers, but they’re annoying nonetheless. The biggest is that there are a couple of instances where the cursor doesn’t respond to indicate an active hotspot (the cursor should glow green if moved over an active object or person.). Try finding a specific rock in a pile of similar-looking rocks when the cursor doesn’t let you know you can interact with it.

A rather scary bug was when trying to name a save game; no text was displayed onscreen, which made me doubt the game had actually been saved. (It was.) While aboard the space transport, Ren disappeared completely from the game for three screens and didn’t reappear until I’d completed a puzzle. (Exiting the game completely and then reloading from a previous save seemed to solve the “no text on save game” issue, but it did nothing for Ren’s sudden disappearance.) And then there’s the crash to the desktop that occurs every time you exit the game.

I’ve read various accounts of other players experiencing a crash to the desktop every few minutes or the game not playing, at all, once the install completed. Aside from an extremely sluggish install and a couple of random crashes to the desktop, I considered myself fortunate after reading about others’ travails. I played the game on a P4 3 GHz with 1 GB RAM, a 128 MB video card, DX9b and XP-SP2.

There is a patch for Legacy, but I could never figure out which issues it corrected, so I left my game in its virgin state. (Based on threads in Legacy’s forum, the patch does not seem to correct the “crash to the desktop on exit” bug.)

In all honesty, Legacy’s story is somewhat typical for science fiction—a megalomaniac intent on achieving world domination through any means possible. The slight twist is that the domination doesn’t stop at just one world or one time period.  While I’m a huge fan of sci-fi, I really would have liked a much deeper and clearer story than the one presented. Although the story, and opening sequence, made a lot more sense once I’d played through the entire game, I felt that too much of the game’s exposition took place within Ren’s log rather than within the context of the conversations with the various NPCs or the papers and notes scattered throughout the various locations. Based on some conversation choices, there were times I felt that Ren was privy to far more information than I. Perhaps the game would have flowed better, along with increasing the immersion factor, if Ren had done a voice-over narrative similar to the Tex Murphy games.

Legacy: Dark Shadows isn’t a bad game, and there definitely appeared to be a better game lurking somewhere just on the outer boundaries. A lot of the issues—older graphics engine, bad voice acting and clichéd story—are simply the trappings of a shoestring budget. While some games, like The Fifth Disciple, seem able to overcome those shortcomings and become a really entertaining game; Legacy wasn’t quite able to pull that off due to its myriad technical issues. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Razbor Studios Publisher: Tri Synergy Release Date: November 2004

Available for: Windows

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System Requirements

Windows 98 SE or later DirectX 8.1 PIII 800 MHz or AMD Duron 900 MHz (P4 1200 MHz recommended) 256 MB RAM (512 MB recommended) 12x CD-ROM drive (32x recommended) Mouse and keyboard 3D card with 32 MB RAM (1024×768, 16-bit) (64 MB RAM, 32-bit recommended) Windows compatible sound device 700 MB free hard drive space (1.5 GB recommended)

Where to Find It

Links provided for informational purposes only.  FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies).

      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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