0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Aztec The Curse in the Heart of the City of Gold

    

Aztec The Curse in the Heart of the City of Gold otherwise known as just The Sacred Amulet or just Aztec is a 1^st person Point n Click adventure puzzle game developed by Wanadoo a part of the France Telecom Group and published by Cryo Interactive.

The game released exclusively in Europe with releases first for windows in April of 2000 the for the Playstation on October 20^th in France and 9 days later in the UK. The game would also release in Spain, Italy, Germany and The Netherlands, releasing on the 27^th of October in the majority of countries.

Notable people who worked on this game, programmer Grégory Joseph worked as a UI programmer on both Far Cry 4 and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, he still works for Ubisoft as of December 2017.

Like several of Cryo Interactive titles it mixes entertainment with education the game has an encyclopedia for you to learn about the Aztec culture, language, history and everyday life. For example Temazcalli or a steam bath the game gives you at least two paragraphs of information on this and goes into high detail about it as well.

Simply by clicking on an interactive object in the game world will bring up the corresponding encyclopedia entry along with a larger image of the item you are looking at. Moving on to the actual game it is a 3D adventure in a first person perspective.

The player is able to move the camera 360 degrees to look around the game world, however movement is done in jumps from point to point, areas that you can move to are indicated by a pointing hand once clicked on the player character almost instantly is transported to the new location.

 

Interacting with objects is done in the same way as movement with the player manoeuvring their cursor over various objects in the game world until passing one that can be interacted with, when this happens a question mark will appear as the cursor, interacting with NPC’s is done in the same way but a talking mouth icon appears instead.

A young Aztec named Snakeling is out hunting one day when he comes a warrior attacking a nobleman, the nobleman is mortally wounded by the warrior, once the warrior has left Snakeling approaches the barely alive nobleman who gives the young boy a necklace and whispers the name Tlatli.

The young boy knows the name Tlatli is a poet that lives at a market place near his village, when heading to see Tlatli the young boy is approached by the same warrior who killed the Noble and accuses the young Snakeling of the heinous crime.

Snakeling has no choice but to flee back to his village, upon returning to his village he discovers his parents have been taken and imprisoned and the poet Tlatli that you have been seeking has been murdered. Your village has also been struck down by a mystery illness. 

Snakeling has no choice but to delve into the political quagmire of Aztec politics and unravel the mystery of a mysterious illness, a strange necklace and political corruption and jealousy.

Reviews for this game are limited in number but there are at least some to work with, overall though this game did not fair well with them, with review scores ranging from an average as you can get 50 down to a very poor 20, as usual though we will start with the best which comes from French publication Jeuxvideo.com.

The review compared the game to the PC version which he called beautiful, the Playstation version though has some very big defect according to the reviewer. They were not without praise though the encyclopaedia  element that is common in Cryo games and will please History fans.

However the issues they had far outweighed the usefulness of the encyclopedia with visuals that are far inferior to the PC version and controls that never become instinctive. The review can only recommend the game to fans of Aztec history who are likely to spend more time in the encyclopedia than with the game.

German publication Mega Fun were the next highest scoring review with a 44 while scoring the game low they also praised the in depth information on the Aztec people and culture they did however criticise the games graphics calling them rather simple.

Fellow German publication Video Games scored the game at a lowly 35 while they also praised the encyclopedia, they however found the rest of the game to have a drawn out 15 hour storyline with annoying loading times

The final review comes from French publication Gamekult who scored the game at a lowly 20 calling the game  ultra linear and boring as well as being painful to play on a pad, they were also critical of the clear downgrade in visual quality. They concluded with the following, If you like exciting adventure games, go your way. If you are fond of pre-Columbian history ... buy a book.

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit four online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com, eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to, I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, Ebay has now been dropped unless the game is unavailable at other retailers.

So lets get down to business with Gamedude who unsurprisingly don’t stock this European only release, the same goes for eStarland.com and more surprisingly Retrogames.co.uk. So we head over to Amazon.com in the hope of finding at least a few copies of the game.

We do find some copies of the game but for the PC version of the game, so we head over to the co.uk version of the site in hopes of some better luck. Which we do but we only find 3 copies of the game currently on the market, all 3 are in good or better condition.

Starting with the good condition copies, the first one is the only copy that does not say how complete it is, this copy is priced at £10.02 once shipping has been added in this is about $13.40. The second copy in good condition does come complete and is priced at £12.99 and comes with free shipping for Prime users and those spending over £20.

The final copy currently on offer is a very good condition copy which comes complete with the manual and original case, this copy is priced at £17.93 once the shipping costs have been added in, this price converts to $23.98 in the US and €20.24 in the Euro zone countries, please be aware if you are buying this game outside of Europe you will need a PAL console to play the game.

Written by

P J Gibbon