I first played this game when I was in my early teens and have only just been able to find a copy of it to try and complete it. As has no doubt been mentioned in other reviews or walkthroughs there appear to be some "bugs" with the program. The screwdriver outside Hector's cabin for example. This made it impossible for me to complete the game when I had it the first time. But what remains is that it is a nifty little third person adventure game, a genre which is quickly being overtaken by the before mentioned Grand Theft Auto genres.
Games like Cruise For A Corpse and The Secret Of Monkey Island set the standards for this type of genre, even though they were still simple (a lot more simpler than the 12 disk changes of Monkey Island 2!!!) and it is a shame there aren't more "simple but effective" adventure games being made.
So about the game itself. Cruise For A Corpse is basically a "whodunnit" murder mystery, that could have been lifted straight from the pages of any Agatha Christie novel or Murder She Wrote show. The Idea is to roam around the ship looking for clues, talking to people and getting a good knowledge of everybody on board in the attempt to find the killer. It is all pretty straight forward,
however with the clock ticking on every time you find new clues, it sometimes gets frustrated when you have tried everything you can think of and found out all the information you can and the clock still doesn’t tick over. Also, finding the clues is a little difficult, because if the clock hasn’t ticked at a certain time and you’re not in a certain place, there are clues that just don’t appear, or clues that appear in places that you have already checked three or four times.
Actually, reading my review of this, it doesn't seem that much of a decent game, but that’s where it's weird, because it's a mixture of all these frustrations and glitches and things that wind you up that makes Cruise For A Corpse such a good game. The graphics were decent for their time, so no complaints there, it's just a shame games like this can't be updated for the PC. I dunno, maybe it just reminds me of first getting into computer games, but I like it and I’m still determined to complete the damn thing!
