Tex Murphy: Mean Streets – A Fair & Balanced Retrospective

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Features by Adventure Game Hotspot staff
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It's too late to change his name to the Tex Murphy Historian, but that isn't stopping the Space Quest Historian from taking the plunge into a retrospective video review series on his second favourite franchise, the one starring everyone's favourite bumbling gumshoe.

Although Tex wasn't always so bumbling! Many people think the Tex Murphy series began with Under a Killing Moon, but while it certainly exploded in popularity with the move to more movie-like FMV, there were actually two games that preceded it that shared both some similarities and many differences with their more popular successors.

First up is the series debut of Mean Streets, and SQH gives us a quick series overview (post-nuclear-war San Francisco, mutants and norms, etc.) before launching into the good, the bad and the ugly players can expect. In this game, a surprisingly hard-boiled and largely competent (but still wonderfully sarcastic) Tex tries to solve "the murder of a scientist while contending with mutants, sleazy corporate douchebags, and the most infuriating flight sim of all time."

Mixing a whopping FOUR distinct types of gameplay – parser-driven interrogations, side-scrolling 2D adventuring with keyboard controls and menu interface, shoot 'em ups, and the ambitious but tedious (but also kinda optional) aforementioned flight sim – the game was far ahead of its time. In many ways it's still far ahead of OUR time, though certainly its technical elements are showing their age, which may prove a problem on faster modern computers.

Mean Streets was a highly flawed but intriguing introduction to the world of Tex Murphy, so join the Space Quest Historian for a fascinating look back to 1989.

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