Feel free to share anything about The 7th Guest (1993) here!

Nice Review! It captures the spirit of the advent of Multimedia games really well. Alltough I never played the 7th Guest, I remember the advertisments and the review/previews in the magazines quite well. They made it sound like the best game ever (like ultrarealistic, superhard puzzles, intense atmosphere etc.). Back then I even was a little bit curious but though I had access to one of the first CD-Rom drives, I wasn't all that much into puzzle games. I think there even was a sequel (something like the 13th hour). By the way: Nice touch with the receipt.

Cheesy actors and interlaced videos aside: What I really hated about those Multimedia games was their massive CD-access times. While single and double speed drives where relatively safe, those 52x speed thingies burnt out faster than a light bulb. No wonder considering they where acclerating all the time, accessing lots of small packets scattered accross the whole disc.

The 11th Hour – the box is sitting on my shelf as well


I hope that's irony… What counts in this scenario is access time, not access speed.

Exactly that's the problem: You would need high access times, but what you got with those hyperactive Supperspeed Drives was high access speed. They spinned like crazy with a tedious humming sound until they went into some kind of stand-by mode from which they had to start spinning again, which a) took some time (sometimes even longer than it would take a simple double-speed drive) and b) wasn't all that good if done time after time because of bad timing of the accesses (and those early FMV games always seemed to have very bad timing ).