The Lost Files Of Sherlock Holmes - Electronic Arts RRP œ39.99
            (Interactive story for PC only)

                 Reviewed by Alex McEwan

I sometimes wonder if the software houses have a contest running
to see who can produce the biggest, i.e.  most disk consuming,
game. This monster from Electronic Arts comes with a number of
installation and configuration options, but if you go for the
complete works it takes up a massive 29Mb of hard disk. One of the
main options is to conserve disk space at the expense of speed
reading graphic files, this reduces the amount of space required
to around 15Mb, and on a 33Mhz or above doesn't seem to have too
detrimental an effect on the 'game'.  The publishers call this
work an Interactive Story rather than a game, and I would
certainly go along with that description.

I have heard people say that the graphics perfectly capture the
atmosphere of Victorian London. How do they know? My guess is that
they are basing their assertion on how the cinema has portrayed
the era.  Certainly the ubiquitous deer stalker worn by the hero
owes more to 20th Century Fox than to 19th Century Doyle.
Hollywood also took certain liberties with the geography of
England's capital. You know the type of thing, Holmes would be
seen alighting from a train at a station called LONDON, or looking
out over the Thames from the window of his Baker St. flat, when in
reality the two are a couple of miles apart. Thankfully the game
map is a touch more accurate.

Before talking about the game itself I would like to mention a
couple of slightly technical points.  Firstly, the installation
routine creates a batch file which can be used to start the
programme, this shows the EA logo and the lengthy introductory
sequence, before handing you control.  Although most players will
want to watch the intro first time around, it is unlikely you will
want to see it every time you start the game. Pressing enter as it
is running moves you ahead one scene at a time, but it still takes
a while to run through the preamble. You may prefer to have a look
at the batch file and just use the last line of same as your
command line to start the game.  In my case typing GAME %1 %2 does
the trick and takes me directly to where I want to be to start
afresh or restore a save.  Secondly, I found that the programme
ran perfectly from DOS on my desktop machine, but when I tried to
run it on my portable it would lock up completely as soon as I
touched the keyboard.  As this made saving impossible it was a
real drawback.  I got round it by running it from WINDOWS 3.1
after creating a fairly basic PIF. If you hit a similar problem it
might be worth trying this option, albeit that you leave yourself
exposed to the vagaries of Windows.

The plot as revealed in the introduction, concerns the savage
murder of a young woman in an alley in London's West End.
Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard requests the assistance of
Holmes, but he is already convinced that the killing is the work
of Jack The Ripper, who has been carrying out similar atrocities
in the Whitechapel area.  You, as Holmes, are not so sure and set
about a deeper investigation. Looking at the murder scene the
cinema connection came to mind once again.  The film, Twenty-Three
Paces To Baker Street, used the advertising line, 'Somewhere in
the fog there is a voice, a perfume, a glove, a knife - and a
victim!'.  The only apparent difference in the game scenario is
the glove.

Character control is by the usual method of selecting a verb from
a list displayed at the bottom of the screen and then clicking on
the character or object of your choice.  You can look at your
inventory, talk, or open, examine, move, give, and use objects.
The game control options allow you to save or load, and to do some
configuration. Sound effects and music can be toggled on or off
(if you have a sound card) as can what they call Portraits. These
are 'balloons' which contain an enlarged animated head of a
speaking character. This option is automatically turned off if you
do not have sufficient free memory to utilise it.

One very nice touch is the inclusion of a Journal feature.  Your
trusty sidekick Dr. Watson records everything you and the other
characters do or say in a notebook. You can review this at any
stage, but as it is a complete transcript of the game to that
point it does get a bit lengthy. You can move page to page, skip
in ten-page sections or print the whole lot. Travel is handled
by presenting an overhead map of the city whenever you leave a
location.  The other available locations are highlighted on the
map, and clicking on one shows a 'balloon' containing your Hackney
carriage transporting you across the map's surface.

As a game this offering suffers from the usual problem of
graphical adventures, in that your influence is very limited, and
clicking on everything with every verb will sooner or later give
the required result.  The authors have included a number of scenes
seemingly for the sole purpose of time wasting to make the game
appear to have more substance than it really has.  For instance
the Inspector at the morgue authorises you to enter Scotland Yard.
When you get there the constable on the door won't let you in, so
you have to go back to the morgue, collect the inspector, and
return to the Yard for him to issue the authorisation personally.
Viewed as an 'Interactive Story' it is a reasonable, if very
expensive, way of 'reading' a novelette.