Jack Keane
| Jack Keane | |||
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| Studio | Deck13 | ||
| Publisher |
10tacle Studios Focus Home Interactive Play Ten Interactive Strategy First   |
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| Senior Developer | Jan Klose | ||
| composer | Oliver Szczypula Jan Hofmann |
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| Erstveröffent- lichung |
 August 1, 2007 October 18, 2007 March 14, 2008 April 14, 2008  |
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| platform | Linux , macOS , Windows | ||
| Game engine | PINA | ||
| genre | Adventure | ||
| Game mode | Single player | ||
| control | mouse | ||
| medium | DVD-ROM , download | ||
| language | German, English, Spanish | ||
| Age rating |
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Jack Keane is a computer game by the German development team Deck13 . The humorous adventure was released in August 2007.
action
The prologue shows the vengeful Doctor T. talking to his housekeeper Mrs. Thatcherby on an island in the middle of the ocean. He ponders his diabolical plan to overthrow the British Empire before she gives him information about an application he has received, that of an American woman, as the Doctor's new henchman.
London, late 19th century: The action begins with a handcuffed Jack on the top of Big Ben Tower, who is threatened by two thugs because Jack had borrowed a large sum of money from their boss ( Mr. Lee ). He manages to narrowly escape them and meet at the harbor with his sailors Eric and Lawrence on the Charming Princess , Jack's dilapidated ship. Shortly before fleeing London, Jack receives an offer from Government Commissioner Joseph Little to take a British agent to a mysterious island called Tooth Island for an enormous reward, the name of which Jack is immediately familiar. In Cape Town he meets the agent who pretends to be Mr. Montgomery, as well as the mysterious American Amanda, who for some reason also has Tooth Island as a travel destination and is taken by Jack. After he drops a large package from Montgomery at the post office for shipment, Jack, Amanda, Montgomery, Eric and Lawrence go to the island with the Charming Princess. Due to (according to Jack) incorrect navigation of Montgomery, the ship crashes on the cliffs of the island, and Amanda flees together with Jack's sailors in his dinghy. He now has to climb the cliffs alone with Montgomery, the latter collapsing the temple on the island while trying to reach the goal with a grappling hook and blocking everything. On the now arduous ascent, the two young islander Shari comes to their aid, who tells that she should actually be married in the temple and that her fiancé lost her memory due to a falling stone. After Jack and Montgomery arrive at the tip of the island, the agent is suddenly dragged into the jungle by a monster. In the further course of the story you see the two thugs again and again in short sequences, which first appear at the port of London, then in Cape Town and on the shore of the island, and are always only at short intervals on Jack's heels.
Jack crosses the forest and finds himself in a small village, where he searches Montgomery's room in the hotel and finds the package he had sent from Cape Town, in which Montgomery announces that Jack's reward has invested in real estate in the village, which is why he stays longer the island must remain. After he was allowed into the village by British guards, he met many of the villagers. These include the well-known bride Shari, her scary father Mr. Gopesh, his mother Louise, the groom's uncomfortable mother named Rupia, a little old man with whom Jack constantly argues, and the grouchy butcher of the village who keeps a secret seems to have. After Jack sells his dilapidated investment for a minimal fraction of his reward, he learns about the airport of the resident doctor, with whom he wants to leave the island as soon as possible. To do this, he needs the help of the elephant taxi driver Pandu, with whom he sets off into the jungle. When their way there is blocked, Jack goes alone in the direction of the airfield. At the airport counter, Mrs. Thatcherby refuses Jack entry and holds him off for a long time. Doctor T, who has hired Amanda as a henchman in the meantime, is suspicious of the name Keane, and assigns her to find out more about Jack's goals on the island. In his hotel room she finds Montomery's letter (which she believes is Jack's property), instructing him to stop Doctor T., and leaves a slip of paper with the date '6. November 1871 '', when Jack must have been very young, lying in his room. As soon as Jack reads this, he immediately begins to investigate this date and finds out that the '' botany station 1 '' burned down that day. In the woods on the way back to the village, he meets Murphy, a tour guide whose customers always die. He seems to know Jack and is not surprised when he tries to go to botany station 1. There Jack finds an old house and a laboratory with a safe. Surprisingly, Jack can open it with the key on his pocket knife, which he has had since childhood and has always wondered about this component. Inside he finds a letter from his parents, which explains his origin:
The Keanes lived and worked on Tooth Island with Doctor T. until 1871, and they bred an elixir for him that made his tea plants grow faster. However, there was also the side effect that the plants went wild and destroyed other plants. To be careful of the doctor's opaque plans, they hid the plant seeds called '' Emerald 13 '' in the safe, which could only be opened with the Keane family key (which is on Jack's knife) before they were killed by him. The letter also states that a certain Dr. Umbati in Calcutta knows what to do with the elixir if something should happen to the Keanes.
With the new knowledge and some items from his parents in his luggage, Jack now learns from Murphy that he was a kind of babysitter for the young Jack and that he accompanied him until his parents' death as he grew up. In the hangar near the laboratory, Jack tries to gain entry to one of the Doctor's airships unnoticed and to travel to Calcutta. In the process, however, he is discovered and after a mess he is briefly locked in the elevator under the hangar. During this time window Amanda reaches him, who can arrest him. Jack wakes up tied up in a lighthouse, where the Doctor and Amanda leave him to die after a short time, since the lighthouse would be destroyed by a built-in bomb at the first light. He escapes and at the foot of the tower meets the weird old guy he met in the village and with whom he doesn't have a good relationship. He advises Jack to finally jump over his shadow and grow up. To this end, he should begin his training in the nearby temple of Mr. Daniels . The monks there put him some tests, including proving himself in the holy tiger's cave . There he meets the long-lost Montgomery, who was able to kill the tiger in a duel and has stayed in its cave ever since. After he has completed all the minor tasks, he is sent to the high priest of the temple. He turns out to be the little owl who encouraged Jack to train. His final test is to make the wedding a success, which is prevented by the groom's amnesia. For this he gets access to the upper part of the village, in which he meets said Vincent, as well as meets Montgomery and his former sailors who want to start a campaign against the Doctor, but Jack refuses to do so. With the help of a love poem, which he received from the butcher who secretly wrote poetry, and a love potion from the village pharmacy, he succeeds in bringing the two lovers back together and passing his final test. In return, the high priest hands him a potion to remind himself of significant experiences from the past. He drinks it at his family's house and remembers the day he was a child when the doctor's men came to kidnap the boy after his parents had died. While fleeing from these men, he jumped from an enormous height into the sea, which is where his years of fear of heights originate.
Meanwhile, Amanda is torn between her loyalty to the Doctor and the trust she has in Jack. However, at the last meeting he said that the doctor was the bad guy and that she was on the wrong side, so she now starts her own research. These lead to a corpse in the closet of her room, which probably committed suicide, to strange statements by the doctor up to the discovery of a pre-formulated dismissal for her, whereby she now stands against the doctor and looks for Jack. She finds him mentally broken in front of the botany station, where the two have a long conversation, kiss and end up in Amanda's bed (in the doctor's villa) together. The next morning she has breakfast with the Doctor so as not to blow her cover while Jack sneaks through the house and cuts the phone connections in the house.
The Doctor is planning to send his army of genetically bred artificial monkeys across the tea plantations of the British Empire so that they can shed his giant herbivorous plants and destroy the British tea harvest. Since Jack has now cut the radio connection to the doctor's secret base, the doctor has to set off in the airship to manually press the trigger. Jack and Amanda follow him on a plane that crash-lands near the base. There Jack meets the wedding community again, ensures the final success of the wedding, then speaks briefly with Montgomery and notices that the two London thugs are hot on his heels. Together with Amanda, he chases after the doctor, who goes into the air on one of his airships to the monkeys in order to better transmit the signal to them for departure. The two thugs are put to flight when chunks fall from the doctor's ship and rain down on them. In the meantime, Jack finally overcomes his fear of heights in the air before he cuts a rope with his knife in the finale, causing the Doctor to be blown uncontrollably into the air, while Jack and Amanda land safely in the water with the ship.
Meanwhile, Joseph Little appears in the village, who praises Montgomery for his heroic deeds with which he allegedly saved the Empire. All of the main characters in the story are present, with the exception of Jack & Amanda, who drift arm in arm out onto the sea on their raft.
Game principle and technology
Jack Keane is controlled completely with the mouse and completely dispenses with dexterity and puzzles under time pressure. Instead, action scenes are shown in self-running cutscenes. The dialogues run either automatically or in a multiple-choice process. By interacting with people or objects, some of which can also be added to the inventory for later use, the player drives the action forward. In the course of the game, in addition to Jack Keane, his opponent Amanda can be controlled, whereby the change takes place automatically and a complete chapter is always played with one character. The largely linear adventure also offers various possible solutions to puzzles and - for the first time in a Deck13 game - the opportunity to discover bonus items that unlock various extras.
The game was created with the help of the in-house engine PINA. Both the normal game plot and the cutscenes are shown in real-time 3D. Thereby fall v. a. the frequent camera pans that give Jack Keane an optical depth that is normally rather rare in adventures.
Production notes
The game offers a full voice output, whereby well-known speakers have been hired for the main characters.
- David Nathan (German speaker e.g. for Johnny Depp ) as Jack
- Bianca Krahl (e.g. Charlize Theron ) as Amanda
- Udo Schenk (e.g. Gary Oldman ) as Doctor T.
- Thomas Danneberg (e.g. John Cleese ) as a secret agent Montgomery
- Boris Tessmann (e.g. Patrick Dempsey ) as sailor Eric
Before the start of sales, data carriers with a “Special Edition” of the demo version, which had more content than the free download version, were raffled off in the McDonald’s “Now is your vacation” competition . Even before the game was released, a sequel was announced in the official forum. The sequel "Jack Keane and the Eye of Destiny" was released in November 2012.
reception
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From 25 aggregated ratings, Jack Keane achieved a score of 69 on Metacritic . The game immediately reached high positions in the German Media Control (5th place) and Saturn sales charts (1st place). The German trade press rated the game consistently positive.
GameStar magazine presented the “Gold Award” and described Jack Keane as the best “Adventure in recent years”. In addition, “successful puzzles, great characters, an exciting story and lots of humor” were praised. The game magazine PC Action awarded "Gold" as a rating and described the game as "currently the best adventure". PC PowerPlay also gave the game an award for outstanding games.
At the German Developer Award 2007 Jack Keane was recognized as the best German adventure game and as the game with the best story / game world.
Web links
- Jack Keane at MobyGames (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ JackKeane.com: Jack Keane '2': Community-Casting ( Memento from August 19, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Adventurecorner.de: Jack Keane. Retrieved March 30, 2016 .
- ↑ Adventure-Treff.de: Jack Keane. Retrieved March 30, 2016 .
- ↑ PCGames.de: Jack Keane in the test: A really great adventure. Retrieved March 30, 2016 .
- ↑ a b Metacritic.com: Jack Keane. Retrieved July 6, 2017 .
- ↑ DGap.de: 10Tacle Studios AG: New game 'Jack Keane' occupies top position in the German sales charts. Retrieved July 22, 2020 .
- ↑ http://www.pcgames.de/?article_id=608860 - PC games via the Saturn charts (accessed on August 12, 2007)
- ↑ http://www.pcgamesdatabase.de/gameinfo.php?game_id=2117&cat=zit&PHPSESSID=d2 - press review about the game ratings on pcgamesdatabase.de (accessed on August 12, 2007)