Jazz and Faust - PC

I'm glad to see others have written bad reviews for this game, as it means I won't have to write as much. The only decent thing about Jazz and Faust is the graphics. Everything else was terrible, especially the dialogue and gameplay. Faust sounds like a sedated cow, and says inane things such as "What a splendid fish!" and "Does nobody sweep the stairs?". The puzzles and problems were either simple enough for a 5 year old, or else made no sense at all. Furthermore, you couldn't solve problems or pick up items until you had spoken to the right person, even if you had figured things out beforehand. I plan on selling this game this week, although I am toying with the idea of setting it on fire. It certainly deserves it. I must concur with other reviewers, any Monkey Island game would be a much much much better investment than Jazz and Faust.

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.

Thank god for 1C... I love adventure games, and to be honest i was geting prety tierd of replaying the longest journey. Jazz & Faust was a breath of fresh air as far as i was concerned... There are a few short comings in Jazz, like the character graphics could have been better, but for [the cost]i think i got my moneys worth. I loved playing the game from two different perspectives and the obvious translation from russian was hilarious!For adventure fans, I recomend this, and I hope we see some more from 1C.

I'm absolutely thrilled by this game. I'm a big fan of quest games since Space Quest 1 and played every adventure since that.Jazz and Faust is just perfect - nice graphics, splendid backgrounds, funny story. And I just loved the way you can play for two characters. It is just like geting 2 games instead of one. And this is just for 30 bucks! Great deal I would say.