Plus anime and video games are about all I can speak about with some extent of knowledge.
Just like the last few times I've posted, I've just finished playing another of the ten games, and so naturally I'm going to do a review of one I finished weeks earlier, because accurate recollection just leads to deeper reasoning and we don't want that.
Wait what?
Alright we'll do the most recent game:
Calling Indigo Prophecy (or Fahrenheit depending on where you live) a game is quite a stretch as even the developers refer to it as an interacting movie. If you were to give it a genre, I suppose adventure game would be the most apt (you know, the genre that died out years and years ago).The plot kicks off with Lucas Kane murdering some random in a restaurant bathroom while in a trance of sorts. The early game consists of you playing as Lucas as he tries to cover his tracks and work out what happened, and also as two detectives who are trying to track Lucas down. As the game progresses things get out of hand with Mayan Oracles, unexplained AIs, and an Illuminati-like conspiracy (who stylistically remind me of SEELE). I'll expand on this in a minute but first I'll address the simpler stuff.
Actual gameplay comes in a few varieties. There's moments of direct character control where you can interact with your surrounds to some extent, kind of like a sandbox game except the only things you can do is advance the plot. These parts of IP unfortunately become less and less frequent which is a shame because they are the most interesting when done well. Take the very start for example: you have to clear up the murder scene and then escape without being noticed. I hid the body and cleaned Lucas' bloody hands but it didn't occur to me to clean up the blood stain on the floor. Whoops.
While the freedom this mode offers is a refreshing change, how you perform actions is less so. Rather than just presssing some sort of context sensitive 'use' button, you must hold down the mouse button and move the cursor in the indicated direction/pattern; this is to create a greater sense of immersion or some bullshit. On a side note, one would expect this game to be on the Wii since the control style's would fit perfectly but apparently IP is on everything but the Wii.
The main two other types of gameplay are the "physical challenges". The first is essential Simon Says, where directional inputs appear on screen and you have to mimic them fairly quickly. These tend to be more tedious than difficult. The second type is just straight out button bashing, where you hammer left and right to slowly increase a meter and then keep it maxed till the action ends. This is to make you the player empathise with the challenges your character is going through but all it did for me was make me want to play something else. Yay immersion.
The graphics have the horrible burden of needing to be realistic but don't have a massive budget to full back on. They are functional (you know what you are looking at) and adaptive (the characters can perform some more depending gestures and actions) as one expects from the Source engine (complete assumption, citation needed), but that's about it.
I'm running rather long so for the sake of brevity I'll just mention so of the more major irksome elements of IP.
As well as a name change, some versions of IP are censored (guess what Australia got). The only things removed was some nudity and a couple sex scenes, one of which was interactive. The developers state that these removals don't impact the story and that is what really annoys me. I can live without seeing Carla's nipples how can they say that those scenes added nothing but leave parts like the basketball game and the boxing in? In a story-driven game character interaction and relationships are kind of important, and if sex can't contribute to this what can? The aforementioned basketball and boxing parts barely contribute at all however, as the former is a trivial plot point for a secondary character, and the latter contains some generic banter between two characters but has no relevance to the plot what so ever.
We the player have to control multiple characters in IP: Lucas, Carla and Tyler. The second two people are detectives after the first. This means that you are essentially playing against yourself and since the game won't progress until you do whatever is required you can't sabotage the investigation or just hand Lucas in.
I should point out that I rarely like how magic works in fiction and so when it is an integral part of the plot I get irritated. I know that all sounded a bit nerd-ragey and tangential but it is relevant to IP in that the game falls into three 'guidelines' magic often follows:
1 - Magic can only be beaten by magic. This divides everyone and everything in the world into relevant and irrelevant. In the last chapter of IP, Lucas and Carla go to confront the villains, but since Carla is just a lowly mortal human, she does not contribute to the ordeal.
2 - Magic contains a handful of arbitrary rules for certain circumstances. So you need to see visions of a prophesied child? Then sacrifice people, by proxy, with three cuts to the heart. You need Matrixesque abilities? No ritual required.
3 - Magic can do virtually anything (when it isn't being constrained by arbitrary rules). As I just hinted, Lucas effectively becomes Neo when he develops super-speed, super-strength, flight, telekinesis and probably other stuff I'm forgetting. None of these seem to have any requirements for use apart from magical talent.
And now the plot. Or rather not. while writing this I've kept rearranging things to try and make some sort of ordered logical review but like IP that sort of coherence isn't going to be present. There isn't one giant plot hole or anything like that to identify, but patches of moon logic that sprout up every now and then, and nothing short of riffing on a LP will do it (in)justice.
Or playing it yourself.
But don't do that.
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