sigh...2 more lousy adventure games.
The Moment of Silence
Where to begin with this shitfest? The game is set in about 100 years in the future (I think...they barely talk about the world they inhabit), and you play a generation-Y ad executive who witnesses his neighbor being taken away by the SWAT team. Since the police seem not to know about it, you take it upon yourself to investigate wtf happened.
Fair enough: these games need some extraordinary circumstances. The premise isn't too bad, but everything that comes after is amateurish and illogical.
The game is a point-and-click affair, with a universal "do" command. Navigation is ridiculous. Often when you click on the right side of the guy, he moves left. Like, most of the time. This has to be experienced to believe. If you are facing the computer, and the door outside is behind you, what do you do? Click the bottom of the screen, right? No, click the right side of the screen which will (hopefully) make the guy walk down to another side view, and then another right will get you an arrow to exit the room.
Much of the game consists of conversations with people, and the game uses the normal dialog-tree interface as if the conversation can be done non-linearly. The thing is, though, that if you click option 3, you'll get dialog that depends upon option 1, so if you haven't already picked that one, you don't understand what the fuck he's talking about. Talk about the loss of immersion; your character intuits what a conversation topic would have yielded.
The illogical puzzles are what really miff me. Near the end, one has to 1. stop a nuclear warhead from hitting New York (oh come on, you know in a futuristic adventure game that you have to stop a nuke) by aiming it at the evil base that you're at and then 2. escape from the base before the aforementioned nuke hits you and kills you. So how do you do this? Of course, you find the console, do some mechanical puzzle, and redirect the nuke. Then get in the pod and go, right?
No. You get into the pod first, then insert a cd into the escape pod's handy built-in nuke reprogrammer. You shoot out in a pod and parachute to the ground, apparently outside of the 50 mile blast radius (my ass).
Lots of characters are met in the game, but none is developed. The main character has an argument with what is presumably his best friend, but this is never resolved, never developed further. Why include it at all?
Finally, the game includes lots and lots of my adventure game pet peeve: mundane traveling. Most of the game is spent watching the main character walk from location to location. Getting in the cab. Getting out of the cab. Walking to the door. The worst: every time he goes up the elevator, you watch from the hall as the elevator number go up S L O W L Y from 1 to 23. Every time he goes up. And he does that a lot.
Still Life
More point and click, 3d characters on 2d rendered background. This time the character is a female FBI agent tracking a serial killer, and alternately her grandfather in the 1920s also tracking a serial killer. Still Life is made by Microids Canada, the same company as the awful Syberia games (motto: "1 game for the price of 2!"). The puzzles are dead-easy, and the voice acting is like Stange Brew meets the X-Files (omfg 'abowt').
At least this game is honest about its dialog. When engaged in a conversation, you can click either the right or left mouse button (whichever is lit red). You have to click until the conversation (which is linear) is all the way over. Why not just have it be one click for the whole conversation? Maybe they were worried that people would need pee breaks.
This game also features lots and lots of exciting walking, although it is slightly more fun to watch the female character walk around then the guy from Moment of Silence. oh, and you get to watch her go up the elevator (at length) from inside the elevator. What a plus.
Continuing the fine and greedy tradition of Syberia, this game has no ending. You do not find out who the killer is. Did you hear that? YOU DO NOT FIND OUT WHO DID IT. Instead, the end of the game hints that the website will be charging you to follow the further adventures of the heroine online as she tries to uncover the mystery.