Cheap Jazz and Faust (Software) (Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows 2000) Price

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Customer Reviews of Jazz and Faust

Now don't get me wrong this game is no where near the classic adventures that most avid gamers hold close to their heart but that's not what we are comparing this to,we're just asking whether this is worth the money. Good graphics, fun, and easy-going gameplay for just $10.00? Of course it's worth it.

Just look at what everyone's shoving this game to the side for. Dialouge???? They just need a reason to shove this perfectly good game into the garbage so they can feel like they agree with the all-mighty reviewers. If you are a person reasonably into adventure games and need a game to play, I must say this game is well worth your money.

Not So Bad as All That
I have two pieces of advice for anyone considering playing _Jazz and Faust_: first, do NOT pay full price for it. Second: Relax! It's just a game. It's not the best game I've ever played but it's certainly not the worst either, and I don't think it deserves the vilification that's been heaped on it.

What we have here is essentially a fairy tale: Faust, an upstanding sea captain, becomes obsessed with a mysterious woman who has asked for passage on his ship and follows her across several seas to rescue her from certain difficulties. Jazz, a smuggler, is on the track of an ancient treasure that has been the cause of a double murder. During the game their paths cross several times in different situations. Eventually the two stories come together in a fairly typical way.

Remember how I said this is a fairy tale? It's important that you not forget this if you are going to get through this game, because it is chock full of fairy tale logic, fairy tale morality and fairy tale discontinuity. In a fairy tale it's perfectly all right for, say, the hero to give someone drugs in order to obtain help or for the heroine to have committed certain acts of violence and still be treated as a shrinking violet. Okay, maybe you didn't read those fairy tales, but I did. So JaF didn't perturb me the way it did some people.

You play JaF first as one title character, then as the other: a nice device. The stories are similar but POV (as well as some implied magic) changes certain things. It doesn't matter which character you play first. However, it was clear to me that more time was spent on the Jazz story than on the Faust story: It was less discontinuous and more detailed and the character of Jazz was much more interesting. So the Faust story make somewhat more sense if you've played Jazz first. On the other hand, Faust is pretty dull, so you might want to get him over with and save JAzz for last.

The puzzles are all inventory- and conversation-oriented: finding what works where and talking to people to open up new locations. I did not find them particularly illogical, but then, I was remembering the fairy tale thing. Often -- but not always -- you could not pick up an item until you knew what it was for or even see it until someone had mentioned it. This was somewhat annoying when it caused a lot of otherwise unnecessary back-and-forthing. It also made the game very linear, more like an interactive story than an adventure, really. There was thankfully not a lot of pixel hunting, but you did have to keep going back to every location in a segment to make sure no new inventory had appeared.

As far as graphics go, the backgrounds to JaF were stunning and the high point of the game, although there were a couple of locations where nothing at all happened and I wondered why they had been included at all. The character animations were not very good, unfortunately, reminding me of very early attempts at 3-D. The movement and transitions were exceedingly slow, even when you made your character run. This increased the annoyance factor of having to go everywhere umpteen times to pick up inventory; if the game had moved faster and more smoothly I think there would have been fewer complaints. Interaction between characters was also slow. Sometimes you didn't know right away, when you tried to interact, whether nothing could happen here or whether it was just taking a long time. So a large amount of patience is essential to gameplay. I found it helpful to play with a friend, so we could chat and make comments while waiting for the game to proceed, like watching an Ed Wood movie.

Speaking of movies, the movies in JaF were very choppy. I heard a rumour that the game developers for some unknown reason used an incredibly obscure video engine. So don't feel bad; almost no one can watch the movies. You won't be missing anything if you just press the escape key when they start, though.

The sound was also choppy at times and the voice acting was uneven at best. Some of the minor characters were pretty good, although it was a little too obvious that the same people were providing the voices over and over again ("Hey, didn't I meet you in Er-Elp? Except you were shorter and had a wooden leg...") The main characters' voices were unfortunately pretty bad, especially Faust, who spoke everything from threats to declarations of undying love in a monotone.

One thing I thought was interesting about the game's technical aspect was that it comes on one CD in a compressed file which is unzipped to your hard drive during installation. It takes up nearly a gig of disc space, but on the other hand there is no annoying disc swapping. You don't even have to have the disc in your CD drive to run the game. Of course, then there's no excuse for the game running so slowly...

A shortish game, JaF took me 15-20 hours. The ending was slightly odd, but it did give a nice little wrap up which implied a sequel -- or would in a game that had been received better; I don't know about this one.

All in all, I found _Jazz and Faust_ to be neither as good as initial reports made it nor as bad as later ones did. But it's not for people who are short on patience or have a low tolerance for frustration.

a lamentable purchase
If you're in a store and thinking of buying this game, just say to yourself, "No. That would just be stupid."