?
The FM Towns, released in 1989, was quite a remarkable platform. It was probably the first home computer system that came with a CD-ROM drive by default, and it had screen resolution up to 640×480 with 256 colors. For comparison: The first PC and Mac games designed for similar specs were The 7th Guest and Myst in 1993.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of games available for the FM Towns were ports from the NEC PC-98 and didn't make use of its asvanced features. The few games that did, ironically, usually were not from Japan. One was Wizardry V, which on this platform featured 192×224 pixel enemies in 100+ colors. But the first (and possibly only) game developed especially for the FM Towns, and designed to showcase its possibilities, was The Case of the Cautious Condor, and it was developed by a US company, Tiger Media.
Gameplay
As a game, The Case of the Cautious Condor is quite unique. Set on a plane above the Pacific Ocean in the 1930s, you have only half an hour to find the murderer among the passengers in a classic Agathe Christie-style setup. Everything is in real time. There is no saving and reloading, unnecessary since the game lasts only half an hour anyhow. You are just supposed to play it over and over again till you finally solve it.
Tiger Media
The company that developed and published The Case of the Cautious
Condor was founded in 1986 by Laura Buddine, who had before designed
the set-top box ThomCat
for the French company Thomson, which
would have been something like the CD-i, if I understand it correctly.
Tiger Media was not a game company, its goal was to develop interactive
CD-ROMs.
Paul Norman
The Case of the Cautious Condor has no credits, but there is some
circumstantial evidence that it was the brainchild of Paul Norman. In
Murder Makes Strange Deadfellows, which was sort of a follow-up with
a similar premise, he is credited as
Written, Produced and Music by
.
Ports
In 1991, The Case of the Cautious Condor was released for the Amiga CD-TV. This port was incredibly bad. It ran in low resolution, the original graphics were just crudely resized and did not even use the 32-color palette fully. All the more astonishing since Laura Buddine was personally involved in the CD-TV.
The PC port, released 1992, was far better. It used Mode X when it was not yet very popular and made fairly good use of the 256 colors. It seems however that neither port was all too successful.
