Gray Matter

Before I gets balls deep into this one, I want to give a brief opinion on point and click adventure games as I seem to be playing a lot of them at the moment (if you count the CSI games). They are obviously very tricky in their own right as many of the classic games, such as The Secret of Monkey Island, have really convoluted ways of getting from start to finish. I can see the unique challenge in this, however I think that point and click adventure games should have a strong storyline as their main selling point.

I don’t think I’m clever by any stretch which is why I had to use a guide for Monkey Island and I’m not ashamed of that at all. I wondered around the dock for about three hours before giving in and being forced to look up the solution. This brings me to my next point for these games – the music has to be good because if you are stupid (like me) and playing properly (not like me) then you are going to be listening to a lot of background music –more on this later.

Anyway, on the matter at hand. Gray Matter, that is!

Gray Matter is a classic style point and click adventure game designed for easy use on a PC. The story follows Sam Everett, an American orphan trying to make her way to London to become a full on magician and member of an exclusive club. Her bike breaks down in Oxford and she wakes up in a strange house with her rabbit Houdini. Seriously.

She later entwines herself with reclusive neurobiologist David Styles with hilarious consequen... I can’t even lie about that, there is nothing hilarious about the game. Like I’ve said above, the main selling point of a point and click adventure game is the story so I won’t go into detail. But I will say this – it’s horribly depressing.

Along those lines, the music is also dreary and depressing. I was playing at around ten o’clock at night, not to subject any other members of my household to having to watch me play it, and I fell asleep twice. The storyline – coupled with the music – is enough to drive anyone to the verge of suicide. If you are going to play this, make sure you put aside an hour of gentle comedy to cheer yourself up after you’re done with a session.

As intricately put together as Gray Matter is, it was mildly disappointing when I discovered that the characters have generic responses similar to the witnesses from CSI: Hard Evidence. You play as David and Sam and at one point, as David, I had just witnessed a traumatic incident. But when I returned to my house afterwards, the housekeeper asked David how he was which he responded to with a quite cheery, ‘Fine thanks!’

He does have a moment of pure quality towards the end of the game. He makes a phone call to get some information and gets given loads of confidential information... so fully lays into the person on the other end of the phone and reduces them to tears!

In other positives, the Oxford depictions are really close to those of real life. They do look a bit dated though and the whole game feels very Americanised. The English speaking characters are clearly Americans and the lack of any kind of vehicles and cobbled paths seems to indicate that America thinks England is stuck in the nineteen-fifties.

In terms of the gameplay, point and click adventure games are best played with a mouse but in a world where we have an analogue stick... sorry, make that two analogue sticks, I don’t understand why I have to hold down the right trigger to be able to click on stuff. Basically, the point and click interface registers a -9 out of 150 in terms of user friendliness and this is the main reason that playing the game was a fucking ball ache.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 41 Achievements

As far as the achievements go, most of them are simply story driven with a few missable ones sprinkled in. It gets it completely right it terms of secret achievements though – all the missable ones are non-secret.

I do have one massive issue with one particular achievement called Fast Play. You get this achievement for completing the game in less than five hours. Now, a game of this type is not designed to be played in less than 5 hours. I’m pretty sure that it can only be done by skipping all the dialogue and by knowing exactly what to do before you do it. This makes playing the game properly completely redundant.

I used to be the kind of person who would aim to get all the achievements in a single playthrough and this can be done with a guide but what’s the point? I took the extra hit and played the game properly once before getting Fast Play but I don’t think a game’s objectives should make the game redundant.

Downloadable Content – N/A

To sum up, it’s not the most straight forward 1,000 points I’ve ever earned and the puzzles are a massive let down in terms of what they offer. It’s a gettable 1,000 points, but not necessarily the most enjoyable. Unless you’re a masochist of course.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Hard Evidence

Being a stickler for playing a series of games in order, I’m shocked at my own lack of research. Hard Evidence is the first in the series and that is evident (ha-ha) straight from the off.

Released in 2007, the controls show a real return to the dark ages. It took a little while to sink in, such was my shock but, you have to use the D-Pad to go through the menus which I found really alien after years of using an analogue stick.

Other than that, the controls are essentially the same as Fatal Conspiracy, although the forensic science bits are a lot simpler which is to be expected from an earlier release. In order to finish the game, you have to complete five cases. Unlike Fatal Conspiracy, these cases are not linked with an overarching story and they don’t really increase in complexity.

The characterisation throughout the game leaves a lot to be desired. You can tell which characters are guilty by talking to them when you don’t have any questions left to ask – they each have one blanket response so if someone is cooperating at the beginning of the case, you know they are going to become hostile because their ‘one-liner’ will be overly aggressive and out of character.

It is also very linear. You can’t progress cases if there is one piece of evidence left outstanding, meaning there is only one way to solve a case. It’s nowhere near as bad as NCIS’s approach of A=B but B≠A, but several times I had missed one tiny thing and couldn’t progress the story. One of the cases, I was required to go and talk to the doctor for a second time in order to progress and the only reason being that it triggers a cut scene, but I didn’t get any prior clues to this and it was just random luck that I happened to look in the one place where there was guaranteed to be no additional evidence! What was he going to do? Perform another autopsy?

Also there were two unexplained game crashes where the game seemed to get confused about whether the menu was open or not and, like all games, when it doubt, completely freeze. This wasn’t too bad because the auto-saves are generally quite good meaning that I didn’t lose loads of progress.

There is a side part to collect bugs in the various crime scenes which does really make a lot of sense from a reality perspective. When you get to the end of a case, you get evaluated on your performance and part of that evaluation is a thank you for collecting bugs for your boss’s collection. This is a great way to suck up but I have to ask the question – how many different bugs can you possibly find (inside luxury hotel suites and casino floors, may I add) that are uncommon?

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 5 Achievements

There is nothing major to add here. 5 cases; 5 achievements. You don’t have to do very well at the cases, just getting to the end is enough.

Downloadable Content – Not Applicable

It’s a relaxed kind of game where the only element of frustration is the controls. Although I pointed out the errors with the characterisation, is it a nice relaxing 1,000 points but won’t give you much of a sense of achievement, which kinds of defeats the point of achievements.

NCIS

Another game included in the Gamescore push, NCIS offers a similar style of gameplay to CSI, albeit more dumbed down. The story follows the characters from the series in what I can only describe as a light-hearted fight against terrorism in the United States.

Like, CSI you have to play through various investigations which are inherently linked to a plot to detonate a nuclear bomb and kills lots of evil Americans. The characters are the best bit in the game for me but only for the first two episodes. After that, the self congratulatory one liners, of which each character has only one, really begin to destroy any kind of likability they have built up to this point.

The gameplay elements are about as close as ‘click here to solve’ as possible and I thought CSI was quite basic. There are two elements to investigating a crime scene. You have to take pictures of everything. In NCIS, taking a photograph can delve through a wall to obtain bullets, collect forensic evidence from bodies and take moulds of anything that could assist in the investigation. In CSI, you had different tools for all of these things. If real forensic scientists could get their hands on an NCIS camera, it would make their work much for efficient.

In addition to the crime scene investigations, there are also interrogations which are simply laughable. In order to extract more information from witnesses, you have to press A to ask them a further question. The further question is normally, ‘Are you sure about that?’ which then causes the witness to completely change their previous statement under next to no pressure whatsoever.

The worst aspect of the gameplay is the deduction board. After analysing all the evidence, you have to make it work so that the evidence points to a suspect. So instead of working it out from the evidence, the game makes you go through the deduction board to piece it together in exactly the way the game wants you. It takes it way too far as well. You have to combine the evidence by selecting two bits at a time, however if you select the two in the wrong order it won’t let you compare them and asks you to try again. Comparing ‘B’ to ‘A’ is the same as comparing ‘A’ to ‘B’ no matter how you look at it, so fuck off you fucking game.

When you successfully manage to combine the two items in the right order, you then have to pick from four statements picking the correct link. Some of these statements mean exactly the same thing just worded differently, so being punished for picking the wrong one was a amazingly patronising from a game as complex as a ball and cup.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 26 Achievements

There’s not really a lot to say here. There are 26 achievements and I think they are all impossible to miss on one play through of the game. There is no additional challenge and due to the nature of the gameplay, it becomes very irritating having to listen to the characters’ dialogue very quickly.

That said I reckon the whole thing can be wrapped up and tossed aside within three hours so for quick achievement hits, it’s second on the list behind Avatar: TLA: TBE.

Downloadable Content – N/A

So it’s a quick game and easy achievement points for this one but it’s not going to be the cause of a game revolution and is the weakest game in a sparsely populated genre. The characters could have saved it but their underdeveloped personalities and dialogue destroyed what could have been the game’s saving grace.