Azrael's Tear (1996), a forgotten adventure game masterpiece 

Didn't have access to the post office?

@@GimmieVidspl0x Yes, the main problem, as a french Quebecois is that I did not write and my very very limited understanding of english...

Thanks! While I was playing this, I kind of remembered how much I really loved adventure games for a time. There's a handful that I have on my list that I plan to do at some point. Of the most well known; I kind of wish all the Tex Murphy games would work on my PC. I never see anyone talking about those.

@@Gilgamechasaur I played the ones on gog, Pandora and overseer I think, they worked well enough. Mean Streets would be interesting to run, no idea how. They have a great atmosphere all in all.

@@Gilgamechasaur I LOVE the first two Tex Murphy games!

I'll check it out. Good luck, buddy.

So true! A national treasure!

There is an option to automatically change the resolution based on the complexity of the scene in order to mantain a constant animation speed.

@@nifftbatuff676I know, but you can still feel it struggling to keep a consistent framerate as the few different detail levels don´t allow for fine changes. It also doesn´t matter if run under DOSBox or a real DOS machine.

From memory of the last time I played it I used Pentium 200mhz speed! Any less and it bogged down, any more and AI enemy were superspeed.

Thanks. Well, not much until recently. I wouldn't want to distract from the subject of the channel, but maybe? Poe and other public domain authors are a good idea, but not any time soon.

Oh yeah, keep this channel's subject what it is now...just make another channel for bedtime stories :) when you can, of course. Keep up the momentum, great content!

That one is interesting. I've added it to my list to check out. Once I can pull myself away from my crippling Darktide and Tekken addictions, I should be doing a lost FMV game next that I think people will find interesting.

Hopefully I cleared most of it up, but most importantly it's got an orrery.

It's not him, but I can't stop hearing him in my head now!

Dunno, the lead kind of went cold. That was all the information I could find online. It's kind of nice that this vid seems to be blessed by the algorithm lately... maybe the right someone will take an interest in it.

Would be cool to contact them

I kind of regret not going into the history of it, since the story of the templars and baphomet and the holy grail was also used in Gabriel Knight Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, but there I think an angle on vampires was actually used. From memory, the charges levelled at the knights templar were the church and the monarchy conspiring to acquire the vast wealth the knights templar gained after the crusades. Not familiar with the anti-semitism of the original grail stories, but there's a lot of stories I guess. Some christian and romance writers give the grail a very mystical dimension, and it becomes very symbolic, as in alchemical language.

@@Gilgamechasaur As you may know Azrael's Tear is very loosely based on the pseudo history 'Holy Blood and Holy Grail'. To be more accurate it uses the work as a starting point. Basically the idea of Holy Blood is that there is a sacred blood line of Jesus via the Merovingian Bloodline. The Priory of Sion is said to include aspects of the famously semetic literary hoax: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but recontextualizes the Elder's plan as the master plan of the Priory. What I liked about Azrael's Tear is how they sidestep all of the antisemitic rubbish by ignoring the bloodline of Jesus and making the grail literal, but at the same time, conceding that the grail probably is not the actual holy grail of the bible: "Brothers, I think if Jesus passed this around at the Last Supper someone might have said something..." It has a secret society composed of Immortal Knights who have started to become something other than human rather than the mortal bloodline of Jesus. This is far more interesting to me than anything in Holy Blood.

PC. Released on DOS only.

No, it's the angel of death. Not really a major figure in Christianity, but features prominently in Islam and sort of becomes a fascination for Christians you could say.

I did a little search, and as far as I can tell, this is the only game these voice actors ever worked on.

@@Gilgamechasaur thank you!

Thanks, buddy, I can appreciate the constructive criticism. In many ways, I'm still growing into my own style or becoming more confident in it. I tried hard to imitate the original voice actors in those passages to separate it from the main body. To the point I suppressed some cringing by following the games pronunciation of "Guy" as opposed to the French pronunciation of "Gee". It's a really unusual thing that a lot of people seem to really like my natural speaking voice, as it's not something I've ever heard in real life. And when I'm editing I hear the things I hate about my voice over and over. Thank you.

They didn't go whole hog and have the knights speak in Latin which would have to be translated by your raptor armour ;)

Since that sounds implausible on the face of it, I just tried to find a source for "only 4 official copies of this were ever sold". I only found one. A blog, which gives it a 9 (presumably out of 10) which states, quote: "Here’s one to file away in the list of great games that nobody noticed: Azrael’s Tear, one of the most fascinating adventure games ever, which sold about four copies on the entire planet and then quietly disappeared" I'd love a proper source for the "only 4 official copies" statement. PS: it might take you a while to find it because you need to search past all the threads of people waxing nostalgic over it.

Oh nice! A well actually to my well actually. But well actually, you are partially right. In that section we're talking about what French knights - who were western Europeans - called them. I looked at the primary sources, and generally Constantinople and Empire of Constantinople or Empire of the Greeks would have been used around this time period, but educated Europeans would have been at least familiar with the term Byzantines and Byzantium as an archaism for the people and its inhabitants, because that's what the capital city of the empire was called. For sources, look to a novel of the emepror Justinian, the emperor who ruled there in the 6th century several centuries after Constantine, and even used the word as an adjective to differentiate between the eastern and western roman citizens, I quote, "where the father is at the same time free and a Roman or Byzantine citizen, he must marry his daughters to decurions of any other city, provided it is a metropolis". If by 19th century aberration you mean not formalised in all caps like "Byzantine Empire" ? Maybe. But I'm pretty sure it started being used pointedly far before then by western europeans to delegitimize it as a successor. German historian Hieronymus Wolf's work on the empire was literally called the Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ and was written in 1557. In short, the French knights if they used the word Byzantium as they did in this game, would have known what it meant and would not have been an anachronism, but an archaism, and when applied to the underground civilisation, a weird word to use to describe them regardless..

Thanks a lot. "Vellum" is the word, a sort of writing paper made from animal skin, similar to "parchment".