''Cruise for a Corpse'' (orig. ''Croisière pour un cadavre'') is an

adventure game An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story, driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based m ...

from

Delphine Software International Delphine Software International was a French video game developer. They were famous for publishing ''Another World (video game), Another World'' and creating the Cinematic platformer#Cinematic platform game, cinematic platform game ''Flashback ...

, made for the

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore International, Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-b ...

Atari ST Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the company's Atari 8-bit computers, 8-bit computers. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985, and was widely available i ...

, and

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

Plot

The game is designed as a murder investigation. The player assumed the role of Raoul Dusentier, a French police inspector invited to spend some time on Niklos Karaboudjan's boat. Quickly after arriving, Karaboudjan is murdered, and the investigation begins. The game uses many references to French and Belgian pop culture. Karaboudjan is the name of ''

The Adventures of Tintin ''The Adventures of Tintin'' ( ) is a series of 24 comic albums created by Belgians, Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, who wrote under the pen name Hergé. The series was one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century. By 2007, a c ...

'' character

Captain Haddock Captain Archibald Haddock (French: ''Capitaine Archibald Haddock'') is a character in the comic book series ''The Adventures of Tintin''. He is Tintin (character), Tintin's best friend, a seafaring captain in the Merchant Navy or Merchant Mar ...

's cargo ship in the

comic a medium used to express ideas with images, often combined with text or other visual information. It typically the form of a sequence of panels of images. Textual devices such as speech balloons, captions, and onomatopoeia can indicat ...

The Crab with the Golden Claws ''The Crab with the Golden Claws'' () is the ninth volume of ''The Adventures of Tintin'', the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The story was serialised weekly in , the children's supplement to , Belgium's leading francophone newspa ...

''. Just like in ''The Crab with the Golden Claws'', crab cans are used to hide objects (in the comic they contain

opium Opium (also known as poppy tears, or Lachryma papaveris) is the dried latex obtained from the seed Capsule (fruit), capsules of the opium poppy ''Papaver somniferum''. Approximately 12 percent of opium is made up of the analgesic alkaloid mor ...

, whereas in the game they contain

hand grenades A grenade is a small explosive weapon typically thrown by hand (also called hand grenade), but can also refer to a shell (explosive projectile) shot from the muzzle of a rifle (as a rifle grenade) or a grenade launcher. A modern hand grenade g ...

Reception

Computer Gaming World ''Computer Gaming World'' (CGW) was an American Video game journalism, computer game magazine that was published between 1981 and 2006. One of the few magazines of the era to survive the video game crash of 1983, it was sold to Ziff Davis in 199 ...

'' called ''Cruise for a Corpse'' "an admirable recipe for a classic adventure of murder most foul". The magazine liked the rotoscoped animation, but criticized the EGA graphics and "atrocious"

code wheel {{Refimprove, date=September 2008 A code wheel is a type of copy protection used on older computer games, often those published in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It evolved from the original "manual protection" system in which the program would r ...

-based copy protection, and concluded that while "Dedicated whodunit aficionados" would enjoy the game, "the general adventure gaming audience" would find it "tedious".

References

External links

* * * * {{Internet Archive game, msdos_Cruise_for_a_Corpse_1991, Cruise for a Corpse 1991 video games Adventure games Amiga games Atari ST games Delphine Software International games Detective video games DOS games Erbe Software games Mystery adventure games Point-and-click adventure games ScummVM-supported games Single-player video games U.S. Gold games Video games about police officers Video games developed in France Video games scored by Jean Baudlot Video games set in France Video games set in the 1920s