I Love Sherlock on Sega CD, But Sherlock on Sega CD Hates Me

Above: Lead image of Sherlock, played by Peter Farley, from the 2015 release of 'Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: The Case of the Mystified Murderess', available on Steam.​ 

One of my favorite parts of Waypoint's 72-hour non-stop launch stream was when Her Story​ creator Sam Barlow joined us to play Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, in the Munchies kitchen. Most of what Waypoint covers falls firmly into the video game category; but we've regularly found a place for board and card games, for paper and pencils. Playing Consulting Detective was a way to show newcomers to this site that we're not a strictly digital operation. Also: that we don't mind streaming in PJs.

You can watch us at it in the YouTube embed below. We attempted the game's seventh case, "The Banker's Quietus", and—spoiler—did not come close to solving it inside of our allotted stream slot. Nevertheless, having never played the game previously, but having heard plenty about its greatness, I came away smitten. I've since blabbered on to my wife about it, and intend to pick the game up soon.

Above: Waypoint plays 'Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective'. Watch more of our #Waypoint72 videos on VICE, here​. 

But a few nights ago, a little light sparked into life in this mostly vacant head of mine: You already own this game. After a fashion, at least.

Back in the 1990s, I was one of not all that many people who figured that a Sega CD (though it was known as the Mega-CD over here) was a good investment. So I picked one up and slowly accumulated a modest heap of games—Sonic CD, of course, and also the likes of Thunderhawk, Ground Zero Texas, Soulstar and the deliciously hammy Tomcat Alley. (To this day I'm bummed that I never bought Snatcher​ when I had the chance, only borrowing Hideo Kojima's now-extortionately-priced graphic adventure in order to complete it just the once.)

Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, an FMV-aided affair released for the Sega CD in 1992, went largely ignored in the pile of software. I'm pretty sure it came with the system—I bought mine second hand, with combined birthday and saved pocket money—and it wasn't until a few years later when I properly attempted to crack its three cases, each a grainy video interpretation of one found within the not-actually-a-board-game version. I know this as, on opening the game's box today, sheets of lined A4 spill out, full of scribbles.

Here's the documentation of the teenage me attempting to solve two of the cases—and, from what I can tell, I was successful in both endeavors. Alas, the more you do when investigating these mysteries, the higher your score come the winning verdict—and the higher the score, the worse your performance. The trick is to play through each assignment with the fewest encounters with potential suspects, established confidants and street-savvy sorts with their ears to the cobbles. At the end of each case, your score is compared to the one Holmes apparently would have registered.

By the look of my notes, I attempted to refine my runs: I got both "The Mummy's Curse" and "The Mystified Murderess" down to double digits, close to Holmes' twenty-something results. But it seems I never tried "The Tin Soldier", based on the fact that there are no references to it amongst the pages. So I say to my wife at dinner: You're helping me catch a murderer this evening.

Albeit very, very poorly.

With our kids in bed, we turn on the old Mega-CD, pulled down from the loft and dusted off as best as it can be with a sweater sleeve. The objective of "The Tin Soldier" is simple: Work out who murdered General Farnsworth Armstead, a veteran of Waterloo and one of the final remaining members of a post-Napoleonic War tontine​ scheme—the last person alive gets all the money, over a million pounds (worth rather more in Victorian London than it is today). His body was discovered at home by his valet: Armstead had received a guest bearing an aged letter, but the two quickly quarreled, leading to a duel with swords, and the victim was killed by a puncture wound to the chest.

And here's your spoiler warning, should you wish to play "The Tin Soldier" yourself at some point (in either board game or FMV form). From here, some details of the case are revealed, and my own shoddy detective skills are laid bare.

We're told that there are five other surviving members of the tontine, so it makes sense to speak to them all. However, the disc drive won't read two of the requested destinations, responding instead with monochromatic static and a sound I can only assume is the death's-door spirit of the Mega-CD itself screaming for release, to be finally put out of its misery. I keep it turned on and retreat from the noise, back to the main menu from which all persons of note can be visited, key names and locations added to a notebook, library files read and directories searched. Hopefully these corrupted contacts didn't have anything of importance to reveal.

Already, I'm aware that we're seeing a lot of people in a short space of time: the valet alone reels off a sizeable list of possible inquiry lines, and so we set about following them. The visitor had a French accent, so we begin to investigate anyone in London who's from across the English Channel. There's a play in town, starring a French actor as Napoleon, but somehow we don't note it down—a crucial error given how Armstead, prior to collapsing, manages to turn a small figure of the former emperor around in a display cabinet, a fact that we neglect to pay much mind to until the final moments of our investigation.

Nevertheless, we're getting somewhere—my wife, struggling to stay awake (when you have kids, you'll understand), is writing down everything we hear that we think is going to be useful later, and before long we've uncovered another murder. That, and the fact that someone, a Russian, is roaming around strangling people to death, possibly in pursuit of a famous diamond that the late General Armstead was something of an expert on. This causes us to stray from the best-scoring path of fewest consultations even further, chasing after gem collectors and poking around in all the wrong avenues.

An hour's passed. My wife's asleep, leaving me with both pad and pen in hand. I'm clicking through the London directory in search of anything with the faintest whiff of a possible lead. Everything we wrote down from the valet has been followed up and resulted in dead ends. An early suspect gives a rock-solid alibi. I've been to carpet stores, to publishers, to the coroners—I feel as if I'm going around in circles of crude FMV, each hunch hitting a brick wall made of stuttering pixels and cheesy dialog.

But then something hits me: How the hell did we not remember the turned-around figure? There's a play on at the Princess Theatre, depicting five stages of Napoleon's life, all performed by the same actor: one Phillipe Arneau. We knew about this play this ages ago, having been informed of it during a visit to the French Embassy, but for whatever reason it never clicked beside the emerging diamond distraction, which represented too intriguing a lead to ignore. Blame tiredness, perhaps; or more likely, our pitiful sleuthing. The general's visitor was old, his valet said—but could he have simply been in a convincing disguise?

By now my score's definitely hit the hundreds, and some. It's gotten late, I'm exhausted, so what the hell: Let's go and see where this Arneau is staying, at the Grand Hotel. In his room there's a cane—unusual for a young man, but it fits with what the valet saw. Only, inside the cane is a blade, perfect for a little swordplay. And on a table in his room is the very same letter that Armstead was shown, leading to his fatal final stand. I nudge my wife awake: nailed it, I tell her. She mutters something about that being delightful and makes her way upstairs.

Above: Footage (unrelated to "The Tin Soldier") from the Mega-CD version of 'Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective'

That's that wrapped, then: Arneau, it transpires, was the significantly younger brother of a woman Armstead had met during his time in France, who he called "my little flower." The guilty party blamed the British general for both her death and the much more recent one of his institutionalized mother, an event that seemed to set him on a collision course with murder. The verdict's delivered by a static judge, FMV sequences the preserve of the investigation itself. Let's see what the score is.

Six hundred and sixty-one?

Watson despairs at how awful I've been. Holmes' score is just 26. This game hates me. And yet, I still love it. The Mega-CD adaptation mightn't look the part in 2016—arguably it never did in the early 1990s either—but as the way it plays isn't dependent on the visual quality of the video clips, more so on the words that are spoken in them, it's an old FMV title that's actually aged just fine.

That said, I think I'll save my next investigation for the tabletop original. There's just something about having one's own imagination fill in the gaps and bring the characters to life that's more appealing than having bad actors judge my performance from the mists of video gaming history. It was pretty far from "elementary", actually, Holmes. So zip it.

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