Interactive movies… you might say that if you have played one of them, you have played them all. From the humble beginnings with pixelated miniature slide shows up to the fullscreen full motion video titles, all of them have one thing in common: A shallow plot combined with bad acting, interspersed by obscure and out of nowhere puzzles. The game we are going to discuss today, Black Dahlia, tried its best to leave this reputation behind by turning things up to eleven, with really high production values and an even somewhat creative story.
Admittedly, the master detective has always been a great attraction to me and the reviews of this game have sounded extremely positive throughout. The previous part was quite recommendable and I already reviewed it. In the end, curiosity triumphed over my commitments and I spent the good 10 hours of playing time in order not to miss the latest developments in crime fighting of the master detective. For connoisseurs of the series, it should be mentioned that even more recent developments have already been realized in a successor to this 6-year-old title. My judgement will not be objective, like someone who didn't grow up with the books of Arthur Canon Doyle, and perhaps thinks more of Pikachu in terms of a Master Detective.
A lot of things went wrong in the development and publication history of Starlord. For instance, it was subject to a fairly huge marketing campaign, with full-page adverts in the style of comic book pages. Just that this marketing campaign ran all through 1993, even though the actual game was delayed by approximately half a year, so it had run out when the actual release occured. The even bigger question, however, would have been why such an inaccessible game was considered worthy of such a large marketing budget anyway, of course…
