About This File
The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes is an adventure game series developed by Mythos Software and published by the American computer game company Electronic Arts for DOS in the 1990s. The series contains The Case of the Serrated Scalpel (1992), and The Case of the Rose Tattoo (1996).
The Case of the Rose Tattoo[edit]
Holmes' brother Mycroft is caught in an explosion when his club, the Diogenes, is blown up. The player, first as Doctor Watson and then as Sherlock Holmes, investigates the explosion and discovers that it was not a gas leak but a bomb which was the cause. This leads them to investigate a case of espionage and the strange death of an unidentified man. In this game, establishing the identity of the victim is as important as finding out who killed him. The intricate plot leads the player to a great number of locations over town and involves several subplots.
The game is longer than its predecessor and features a much higher degree of historical accuracy and detail. The graphics are near-photo quality and the atmospheric sounds more are realistic, while the background music, which communicated the mood of the scenes in the first game, is applied less in the Rose Tattoo. Unlike the previous game, digitized speech is employed throughout the game and adds characterization to the NPCs.
The characters in the game were made by filming real actors in costume, against a bluescreen. While the characters are thus more lifelike, Rose Tattoo did not display large, high-quality faces shown during dialogues in the first game. A similar use of in-game video can also be found in e.g. Jones in the Fast Lane and Under a Killing Moon and in retrospect appears as a transient trend permitted by the available hardware. The CD-ROM greatly increased the data storage space available to a computer game. Most games of this period filled the empty space by enhancing the game with digitized speech and cut-scene videos. Later, advances in CPU and graphic card hardware allowed high-resolution characters to be rendered in 3D.
