The Case of the Cautious Condor

Thoughts by Mr Creosote (22 00 2003) – Amiga (CDTV)

It’s been many years since you’ve last heard from your old war buddy Bronson Barnard. You two had been flying together over France in 1917, you even saved his life there once. After the war, your lives drifted apart. He became a successful industrialist, you joined the police first, and became a private detective later.

That is why it comes as a bit of a surprise when you open his letter. He’s inviting you to take part in the maiden launch of his latest invention: the Condor. The Condor is sort of the Titanic of planes: gigantic, fast, ready to cross the Atlantic.

On board, you meet an illustrious, but strangely mixed round of guests: a newspaper reporter, a Spanish Casanova, an Egyptian prince, a Nazi officer, a French wine producer and an American actress among others.

Shortly after takeoff, Barnard has a sudden heart attack. The plane is ordered to turn around. Only now, your old friend reveals the true purpose of this journey: one of the guests is the murderer of his son who worked as a customs officer. He wanted to expose the killer himself to show off to you. Now it is up to you to trace Barnard’s research and complete it. But you only have 30 minutes until the plane lands again and the murderer walks off.

The Case of the Cautious Condor is an ‘interactive comic’. The hand-drawn art is presented in overlapping panels. You won’t get to see any speech bubbles, though, because all the dialogue has been fully recorded and is being played from the CD. CD? This was one of the first games for the CDTV (runs perfectly on any Amiga with a CD or hard drive, though), and one of the very few which actually used the medium.

The gameplay is simple: walk around the plane, overhear conversations between the other guests, search their cabins and eventually accuse someone of being the killer – before time is running out. If the names Deadline, The Witness and Suspect come to your mind, you’re on the right track. CotCC is nothing but a graphical version of these classics. Just like Deadline, you have to be at the right place at the right time. Only then, you’ll observe the important clues and be able to unravel the mystery. That means unlike puzzle-based adventure games, you have to replay it several times to succeed (unless you’re very lucky).

It is certainly worth it, because the detective story with its 30s style is quite interesting. The characters are stereotype cardboard cutouts – just the way it has to be. And even though every game is limited to 30 minutes, the overall time you can spend with it is quite high for an Adventure.

The voices are all well done, but if you’re not a native speaker, you could have some problems understanding the various very strong accents. The graphics are quite good, but unfortunately, they could still be a lot better. The game could use more colours. It doesn’t even use the full 32 colours standard palette! In addition, it restricts itself to NTSC resolution of 320x200. A common PAL of 320x256 would have already helped, and a HAM or Halfbrite-screenmode (for the non-experts: that’s special Amiga screenmodes with higher resolution and more colours at once) would have graced it perfectly!

In spite of these minor glitches with the graphics, Case of the Cautious Condor is a very good detective adventure game, a worthy successor to Infocom’s classics. Being a CDTV game, it’s especially impressive, because for that system, it is almost without any competition! Almost all of the games for it were either straight disk ports (useless) or hideous ‘movies’ close to being non-interactive (a common phenomenon for every of the first CD-based systems). CotCC has stood the test of time, though – an enjoyable masterpiece even today.

Technical stuff: As mentioned before, this game uses NTSC screenmode. To play the game, you have to boot your Amiga in this mode (or set your emulator to it). A PAL screen will only result in a black screen.

Thoughts by Zork (16 00 2007) – PC (DOS)

The Case of the Cautious Condor was one of the first CD-ROM only games and it was released as early as 1989 for the (then) groundbreaking Japanese home computer FM-Towns which came with a CD drive by default – long before this got into mainstream on the PC four years later with killer applications like Rebel Assault.

Of course, there were Laser Disk games before, like the well-known Dragon's Lair which was already released to the arcades in 1983, but TcotCC was probably the very first CD-ROM exclusive title originally developed for a home computer. The only other game which could challenge this title is, according to my research, The Manhole which was released in 1989, too. However, it is likely that The Manhole was already released on floppy disks before.

So, what we have here is a true pioneer game and you shouldn’t expect a masterpiece which uses all the possibilities of the new medium to the fullest extent. Some features were present long before other games incorporated them, though. For example, there isn’t any text in the game, but everything is spoken, making it an interesting aural experience. This, combined with the graphics, would have required a whole bunch of common floppy disks.

Concerning gameplay, one could use the common term ‘interactive comic’. You choose the location you want to visit in which order and decide whether you want to interrogate someone or search the room. The game is built in a way that it’s virtually impossible to solve it first round, because you have to play it several times to see all locations and witness all events to get an overview. Then, you can try to combine all this to get the final solution by being in the right place at the right time. Which might take some effort getting used to these days, because it’s rather a puzzle than an adventure game as it is typical today. It’s still a lot of fun. Some may have recognized the concept known from the game Deadline.

Atmospherically, you could even call TcotCC a secret predecessor of The Last Express. Just like you have the Orient Express there, you’re in a huge flying boat (reminiscient of a Sproose Goose) here. Both games are set in the wake of a world war. While TLE takes place before the first world war, TcotCC is set before the second one, in the year 1937. You play a detective in the middle of an illustrious round of VIP travellers. There are just 30 minutes until the plane will land again, and to find the murderer of the host’s son. That host, an old war buddy, has asked you to solve that case, because he’s unable to do so himself after having a heart attack.

Of course, TcotCC can’t reach the complexity and fun of its successor The Last Express, but both share the same fate: Both were, undeservedly in my view, commercial flops. With TcotCC, it was because of the lack of CD-ROM drives (even in 1992 when this PC version was released), with The Last Express, it was lack of marketing and it was drawn from the market too early (but that is another story).

Compared to the CDTV version, this PC version is more colourful. Depending on the image currently shown, there are usually between 100 and 200 colours used at once.

What’s probably important to note is that you should click on the Intro button on the initial screen, because that intro isn’t the one played automatically on running the game. This can be easily overlooked.

Thanks to Egon68 for providing the game! Review translated by Mr Creosote.