Best-selling vintage PC games of the week: Mystery-solving detectives

The vintage games chart from specialist web retailer Good Old Games this week emphasizes the glut of high quality detective and puzzle-solving adventure games on PC ahead of Sony's February 2010 release of the intriguing PlayStation 3 murder mystery, Heavy Rain. All the games clock in at less than $10, most of them under $6.

The Tex Murphy series of detective games started off as the 1989 game Mean Streets, which was available for a number of popular home computers, but the sequels tended to be focused on the PC user. Though Tex is a down-on-his-luck private investigator - a humorous caricature of Hollywood film noir and detective fiction stereotypes - the games' setting is in fact a dystopian, post-fallout San Francisco.

Their standout quality at the time came from the integration of high-quality video and sound while remaining playable and engaging. Here they experience renewed interest thanks to a free giveaway of Mean Streets and its immediate sequel Martian Memorandum as the Tex Murphy 1+2 double pack during the week before Christmas 2009.

Elsewhere in the charts, more mystery solving abounds. The Myst series is invigorated by RealMyst, a 3D remake of the 2D point-and-click intuitive adventure which was the best-selling PC game for almost a decade following its 1993 release. A graphically improved 2D Myst: Masterpiece Edition appears at chart position ten, and the game's sequel Riven pops up at number eight.

Myst: Masterpiece Edition and Riven both feature in a limited time cut price offer running over the weekend until midnight Eastern Time on Monday (04:59 GMT, Tuesday 26).

Top 10 best selling vintage games as of 7:00 AM GMT, Friday January 22
1) Tex Murphy: Overseer
2) Tex Murphy: The Pandora Directive
3) Tex Murphy: Under a Killing Moon
4) Real Myst
5) Constructor
6) Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition
7) Tex Murphy 1+2
8) Riven: The Sequel to Myst
9) Freespace 2
10) Myst: Masterpiece Edition

Source: http://www.goodoldgames.com