My gaming tastes vary but mostly I am a PC gamer and most of that is Strategy (Turn-Based and War Games) and Adventure games.

I picked up a number of Adventure games last year in an attempt to catch up on some of the "best" adventure games out there that I had missed over a number of years. I have enjoyed some of my very favorite games in the past year out of this collection of adventure games that I acquired via eBay and various bargain bin dives. The best of the best were "The Longest Journey" and "Grim Fandango".

All of this leads me to the latest of the "classic" adventure games that I am playing which is "Circle of Blood" aka "Broken Sword #1".

My random thoughts on this game follow:

- I really liked the look of the game. The beautiful artwork stands up even for an 11 year old game.

- The game actually had an interesting story with some twists (though most were pretty predictable).

- There were some mechanics of the game that I really didn't like including a couple of actions that you had to perform quickly in order to get out of harms way. This is very unusual for pure adventure games as most just wait until you act and have no time constraints on your activity.

- Another thing that wasn't my favorite was just the concept of "dying" in this game. Again this seems to be pretty atypical (at least for the adventure games that I have normally played). The first time this happened it was totally unexpected and I hadn't saved in a long time. Later in the game I expected this type of thing and I saved often but I really really didn't like re-doing the part of the game that preceded the first instance of this. Don't get me wrong, in other genres I totally expect this type of thing but one of the reasons I enjoy adventure games is that I can go at my pace and I can move through the game without having to redo difficult pieces. As an adventure game is mostly about collecting items and using them in the proper way, the redoing was not difficult but it was very annoying. ('nuff said)

- I thought that the voice acting for this game was very good. I enjoyed the various European accents (though who knows how authentic any of them were). The music in the game was also good and matched the mood of the various scenes.

- Final complaint was that I got tired of the disc swapping. My version of the game was on 2 CDs of which one covered Paris and the other covered other locations. As Paris was a hub that you started in and always came back to, there was lots of "Please insert Disc 1" or "... Disc 2". It would have been nicer if it could have been more linear with just one or 2 swaps through the whole game.

- I enjoyed the game but really didn't think that it was a "classic" for me. I probably won't be picking up the other games in this series. A similar game to me was "Runaway" which I enjoyed a lot more... Overall, I give "Circle of Blood" an 8/10 for the many things that it did get right. In the end my final thoughts on a game are "I glad I am done and can now play something else" or "I am sorry that it is done as I wish it was twice as long". My favorite games are in the second category but Circle of Blood is in the first group.

- Time for a new game...