If you always wanted to be in the shoes of Miss Marple, Inspector Poirot and the like, then Cruise For A Corpse is a great choice since it's one of the best murder-investigation adventure games ever created. The game was released for the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and PC (MS-DOS) computers and received some of the best critics back then. The disk-swapping (5 disks) is rather frustrating though!
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY The story takes place somewhere in 1927 and you play the role of Police Inspector Raoul Dusentier, invited to spend some time aboard a luxurious boat owned by Niklas Karaboudjan, a very rich person. Upon your arrival, Niklas is found dead! A coincidence maybe? Or maybe not! And here's when the action begins since you are called to gather as much evidence as possible and question the other passengers and Niklas' employees, piecing the events together and deciding who could have possibly committed such a terrible crime. People are left for dead one by one while you have to be in the right place at the right time to investigate and question the passengers, before they are vanished for good. By using a simple point-and-click system you can interact with your environment(s), establishing links with the evidence you find in many of the different areas of the boat. Much like in most point-and-click adventures, each object found can be highlighted and will activate a list of possible actions. For example, finding a cupboard you can either search, examine or open its drawers. The boat is quite large so you need to walk a lot by using the map or by guiding Raoul in the direction you wish. There are also several animated story sequences that add to the plot and give clues on what to do next. Different events happen through the game as well. Some cabins may be inaccessible earlier in the game but later can be accessed granting you with interesting clues. There is a list of conversation topics displayed relating to the character that allow you to question the suspects based on information you gathered earlier. According to the answer, new conversation topics may be added to the initial list. An unnecessarily annoying feature here is that actual time progresses through the game, but it seems that it only moves on whenever you pick up another clue. The game can be completed in a variety of ways, so the story is not linear (as in most adventure games of the time, except of the almighty Monkey Island series and a few others).
GRAPHICS / SOUND This game is superb and some of Delphine Software's finest, using their great, cinematic, unique and incredibly powerful adventure interface. It offers detailed, bitmapped backdrops along with vector-style, animated characters (remember Another World and Flashback?). Overall, the game's graphics sport some nice touches of humor with nicely details indoors and outdoors and the characters' animation works well, especially when you get the chance to question them. The DOS version runs only in VGA mode and gives up to 64 colors on screen. Soundwise, the DOS version supports either Ad-Lib or Roland sound hardware and has a nice introductory tune as well as several in-game tunes that accompany some of the screens or actions. On the other hand, the game's sound effects though are quite mediocre.
CPU: Various processors from Intel,AMD, Cyrix, varying from 4.77Mhz (Intel 8088) to 200Mhz (Pentium MMX) and up to 1995 (available on this site) MEMORY: 640Kb to 32MB RAM (typical up to 1996) GRAPHICS: VGA standard palette has 256 colors and supports: 640x480 (16 colors or monochrome), 640x350 in 16 colors (EGA compatability mode), 320x200 (16 or 256 colors). Later models (SVGA) featured 18bit color palette (262,144-color) or 24bit (16Milion colors), various graphics chips supporting hardware acceleration mainly for 3D-based graphics routines. SOUND: 8 to 16 bit sound cards: Ad-Lib featuring Yamaha YMF262 supporting FM synthesis and (OPL3) and 12-bit digital PCM stereo, Sound Blaster and compatibles supporting Dynamic Wavetable Synthesis, 16-bit CD-quality digital audio sampling, internal memory up to 4MB audio channels varying from 8 to 64! etc. Other notable sound hardware is the release of Gravis Ultrasound with outstanding features!