This soundtrack CD is part of the Gabriel Knight Mysteries Limited Edition released by Sierra in the USA in 1998. For some reason unknown to me, the Limited Edition released in Europe didn’t contain this CD. Does Sierra think all people outside the USA are unimportant? For their game Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within which takes place in Bavaria, Germany, they obviously didn’t care to get actors who really speak German or at least give them training in speaking it, the German that is spoken in this game is most of the time horrible. An exception is that wonderful Bavarian lady in the König Ludwig Museum. And I also wonder if the actress playing Übergrau’s secretary called Diane Frank in the credits is in fact the German actress Diana Frank? But she has nearly no lines at all, the actors playing Germans in the game often deliver their (mostly grammatically wrong) lines with horrible accents. Anyway, the US version of this edition often pops up at Ebay. It contains Gabriel Knight 1 and 2 and a novel by Jane Jensen based on Gabriel Knight 1. Reading it seems to me to be the same waste of time as reading one of those books made after movie scripts or TV-serials. It’s not very well written and since you’ve played the game you know everything before starting to read. Besides, after seeing the movie Angel Heart I don't think Jensen's plot is that original - she just gave the ideas presented there a twist of her own and delivered what the movie just promised to deliver: a story about Voodoo. The book made after Gabriel Knight 2 is advertised to contain scenes not in the game, but I think I’ve had enough of Jane Jensen’s writing. The packaging of the Gabriel Knight Mysteries Limited Edition also shows that the company who made those great games is dead: it is a joke. For quite a hefty sum you get a huge cardboard box, inside you find a small cardboard box approximately of the size if a CD that contains all CDs cheaply wrapped in paper! This is ridiculous! Of course, for a Limited Edition it would be too expensive to sell the CDs in jewel cases...

Gabriel Knight 3 (1999) also showed clearly for me that Sierra is dead: with a lot of badly rendered actors stomping through synthetic looking real-time rendered backgrounds how did Sierra expect that any kind of atmosphere would develop? Some of Sierra’s games released before Gabriel Knight 3, such as Harvest of Souls had much better pre-rendered graphics, but Sierra thought they would push the genre forward by using a real-time 3D engine and making very limited use of the technology available in 1999, such games as Final Fantasy 8 that where also released in 1999 had better real-time 3D graphics! Besides, the German voice actors really sucked. I just hope Gabriel Knight 4, if it ever gets released, is not as trashy as this. But I guess it will be some kind of 3D shooter. But back to this CD: As all the CDs are just wrapped in paper, there is no cover picture available. The CD mostly contains pieces from the great score for Gabriel Knight 2. The only pieces I miss is the music from Schloss Ritter and the music from the trailer, but otherwise I think everything what you could want is on the disc. It is strange, but the music is for me as depressing as the game was, I don't really know why. The CD seems to have been mastered very sloppily, some tracks suffer heavily from oversampling and there are odd clicks and pops throughout the CD, especially at the end of the tracks. It sounds like a badly mastered CD-R! Track 7 actually belongs in the middle of Track 9. The opera is great and compared to some other actors the singers actually manage to speak German decently but some of them are really lousy. The performance of Hildegunde’s mother for example consists only of a terrible one-liner. Track 22 and 23 are a joke: the main theme and the closing theme from Gabriel Knight 1, which were good sounding wavefiles in the game, are here presented in a lame MT-32 rendition that is not worth listening to. Track 24 shows that the music for Gabriel Knight 3 was not as bad as I thought, but somehow the music in the game mostly fitted the lifeless graphics.