Six more things I remember about Runaway which turned me off:
1. At the very beginning of the game, Brian/the player has no idea if he should believe Gina. Well, if that is so, why does he bother stealing medical supplies from a hospital storeroom which he gets to by climbing out the window and scaling the outside wall rather than using the freakin doors?? Sheesh. That doesn’t seem quite normal to me. “I am not sure I believe this person; I think she is delusional. But, what the hell, I’ll climb out the window. Who cares if I fall to my death? When I find a storeroom, hey, morals be damned, I’m stealing from this hospital!” Later on, when it seems she is telling the truth, rather than maybe calling the cops, Brian/player decides it would be better to set off the hospital fire alarm. Uh… doesn’t that seem completely lacking in common sense to anyone? How many patients just died from that act?
2. In the museum you/Brian discover that the janitor is stealing lab equipment to sell. There is no option in the game to report this illegal activity. I guess the main character really has no morals or something… and later defaces priceless artifacts.
3. I love how in Chicago, the car the main characters use is instantly recognized by an acquaintance of the bad guys in New York where the story began. Get this: the acquaintance is a midget. Why? Who knows? The midget must have crazy memory, visualization skills, and eyesight, though, to be able to recognize from a description a totally nondescript brown sedan. Or maybe there’s only one brown sedan in all of New York and Chicago?
4. Funny how over the top a video montage of Gina plays through Brian’s head after he thinks she just fell to her death is, especially given that he spent absolutely no effort to actually see if she died. “Oh she just fell through a hole. Guess she’s dead. Oh god, no! How can life be so cruel??”
5. At one point, you/Brian discover that some local ants in a desert in Arizona love peanut butter. How do you make peanut butter? Why, by mixing peanuts with butter, of course! Wow, do they really think that’s what peanut butter is? To top it all off, the mixture has to be cooked?? And to do that, you have to put the bowl of mixture in the sunlight coming in through a window of a shack. Uh… why couldn’t you just put the bowl on the ground outside?
6. I found it annoying in general that you have to search things like bags over and over again at different parts of the story since you only realize the importance of things in the bag later on. The reason why it is annoying is that the game doesn’t tell the player what is in the bag, only that “there’s nothing I can use in there” so that there is no idea in the player that the bag might have something useful later.
After finishing Broken Sword 4, I’m extremely disappointed. I did not play the third game, so am not sure if something happened, but why are George and Nico so cold to each other? When they first meet up in this fourth game, how is it that George doesn’t recognize her at first? And there is no explanation of why Nico even shows up. Some of the puzzles were very difficult and I had to look at hint boards to solve them. I still don’t know the underlying logic behind those solutions, though. Also, the end of the game was… well.. rather abrupt. In fact, in the whole history of me as a gamer, I might have to say it was the worst ending ever.