Friday, May 9, 2008

X-Files Computer Game Review

The X-Files game is cheese-tastic. It's designed for Windows 95, really. I tried it on Windows XP and the audio vanished after the first disk. The gameplay is rather lame, too. The actor dialogue is uninspired and flat. "Here's my files." "Okay." Actual video is wasted on cheese like Walter Skinner sayimg, "I don't know," and "I don't want that."
Admittedly, there are funny moments, like if you clown around with the night vision goggles he asks, "What are you doing?" But really it's a poor reflection of the show.
I bet they thought they were being clever with the concept of creating a no-name agent to follow Mulder and Scully around, but Agent Willmore has the emotional range of a baked potato. The Hollywood actors mesh poorly with the obscure ones.
There are also times in which the game doesn't operate properly. Near the beginning, when you go to the dockside warehouse, there is a way you can get the game permanently stuck. What you do is take the bullet, blood, lead and cigarette to the crime lab before going to skinner with them or visiting the field office. Once this is done, you will be stuck forever with field work business that can never be finished. In fact, if you don't hang around at the boring warehouse until the black car appears, it won't appear, and you'll never get to disk 3. Skinner will just continue complaining that you have work to finish in the field.
Additionally, near the end of the game, when you visit Scully in the hospital, my particular game crashed whenever I tried turning left or right when I was done talking to her.
Another problem came at the end of the game, when you were in the Alaskan military base. Cook, your coworker, is lurking in one of the rooms. If he attacks you, you're dead. If you shoot him, everything seems fine until you get to the final climax, then I discovered that there was nothing I could do to avoid getting stabbed by Scully. I would have been satisfied with that ending if it had been an actual ending, but it was the same generic ending you always got when you died.
The password on Willmore's computer is Shiloh, but nothing in the game indicated that it was the same thing as the battle of Fredricksburg. If you don't study history, you don't know it's Shiloh. His notebooks all say Fredricksburg, and that's what I typed. Even getting that far was impossible. You'd think that, being that the computer is the first thing you find in the game, that it would be easier to log into.
You could left click through some of the cinematics, but not others. Exiting the Keystone Cops movie was next to impossible. The Cancer Man sequences were painfully long, especially when I had seen them before. I wanted to left click through them, but couldn't.
The Keystone Cops thing was the most irritating thing in the game. Nothing you could do could pull you out of it. I got so sick of seeing it everywhere. The game was locked into it for minutes at a time.
But on the good side there were some challenging gunfights and fairly good action sequences. There were some amusing scenes and at times I felt like a cop. The final battle got my pulse going. Overall, fair, but not great. Poor debugging and interface issues make a lot to be desired.
Also, no matter what you do, skinner never seems to be finished at the hotel.

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