Spoiler alert

    OK, another gratuitous review, or at least kvetching about, an old computer game. This one is less than 10 years old, though, so slightly more likely to get played than the other one. Or maybe not-- it required a massive patch and also an updated driver (a small one, and for its copy protection, but still).
    It's a little love from Germany called Secret Files: Tunguska. This being me we're talking about, no one will be surprised that it's another point-and-click adventure. By and large, it's pretty fun, although a good many of the puzzles are just ridiculous. Fortunately, I at least found them to be the funny kind of ridiculous, although they may not have been meant to be. And the voice actors were probably not native English speakers, since they kept stressing the wrong words in sentences. But I tended to get a kick out of that, too.
    My objection is at once trivial and gigantic. It's trivial because, well, it is; it's gigantic because bad writing makes me crazy. Our bad guy is a cell phone baron, well on his way to setting up a world monopoly. Named Massimo something, he's introduced when our heroine Nina (who makes Lara Croft look homely) sees a poster for his company and mentions that she gets their mailers all the time. In our climactic moment, Nina hurls her cell phone at the bad guy, more or less, and then all hell breaks loose, there's a big boffola ending (not being sarcastic this time) and the good guys win, thank goodness.
    However, why not have her see the poster, say, "Hey, that's my cell phone company; they're pretty much taking over the world!" which also works as foreshadowing, and at the big climax, she can say, "Hey Massimo! I'm returning my phone!" I mean, have these people even seen action movies? (Maybe not; they're German.) Well I thought it would be a big improvement. Or at least some emotional resolution. Then again, these are people who had the heroine stealing from an unconscious torture victim and had another character fantasize about having sex with her frozen corpse. So maybe they've been watching a whole different type of movie.