Personal Favourite!
An admitted Egyptology buff ever since kindergarten, the idea of a romp through the mysterious world of pyramids, tombs, gods and monsters was like manna from heaven. Unfortunately, once I paid the price and brought my prize home, I was greeted by a nice-looking basket of frustration.
First, the story. Sphinx is the story of two heroes: the eponymous Sphinx – a leonine demigod-in-training, and the equally eponymous Cursed Mummy. On a mission given to him by his mentor, the wizard Imhotep, Sphinx and his rival Horus set out to recover the mystical Sword of Osiris. The intrigue mushrooms from there as Sphinx stumbles across a dark ceremony that crosses his path with that of the boy-king Tutankhamen, who would later become a mummy. A cursed mummy. The story is told more or less in snatches, almost as a reward of relevance for slogging through the preceding level. Of course, this is as game one plays more for the visuals than for the storyline.
Sphinx features colourful, vibrant textures, smooth animation, and wonderfully expressive character models. Since the game takes place in an Egyptian setting, expect to see a great deal of sun-bleached sandstone, as well as tombs, and a little bit of alabaster. Though the story doesn’t lend itself to having a variety of locales, most of the levels look almost exactly the same. I did notice a bit of texture-fade as I fiddled with the camera – a minor flaw that seems almost inexcusably amateurish. The water also looks very flat and is definitely not up to the calibre shown by, say, Mario Sunshine or Waverace. As for the characters, they are all fairly well animated – especially our heroes. Sphinx moves like a lion – he springs and leaps as he sidles and climbs, and he seems very light on his feet. The mummy, on the other hand, moves very fluidly (go figure – a dried-out corpse moving fluidly but, as they say, those are the breaks), with the loose limbs of a young Steve Martin. In all, the graphics are fairly uninspired, which is indicative of its port status.