These games could be great...
..if they had a bit more money and time spent on them
The CSI games have always been a bit of a dirty gaming secret for me. I have played all the telltale ones and enjoyed them, but at the same time painfully aware they are lacking in several areas.
I love the concept and I think with a few changes they could be fantastic.
1. Full 3d movement. Let me walk around the crime scene looking for the evidence rather than just wafting the mouse cursor about looking for hotspots. Let me walk around the CSI builidng to, into Brass' office and down to the lab, etc.
2. Give me full access to the detection tools. In the crime scenes let me choose any tool and try it. I want to know what each tool does and work out myself what one to use. Maybe i could have a whole briefcase full of tools and take out the one i want. At the lab let me put the evidence in the machines, etc.
3. Don't use the same structure for every case. 3 suspects, one body etc. The last case in FC was different and much more exciting for it.
4. More links between cases and an greater overall story arch with twists and turns.
5. Improve the graphics. Come on guys, its 2011.
The CSI games have always been a bit of a dirty gaming secret for me. I have played all the telltale ones and enjoyed them, but at the same time painfully aware they are lacking in several areas.
I love the concept and I think with a few changes they could be fantastic.
1. Full 3d movement. Let me walk around the crime scene looking for the evidence rather than just wafting the mouse cursor about looking for hotspots. Let me walk around the CSI builidng to, into Brass' office and down to the lab, etc.
2. Give me full access to the detection tools. In the crime scenes let me choose any tool and try it. I want to know what each tool does and work out myself what one to use. Maybe i could have a whole briefcase full of tools and take out the one i want. At the lab let me put the evidence in the machines, etc.
3. Don't use the same structure for every case. 3 suspects, one body etc. The last case in FC was different and much more exciting for it.
4. More links between cases and an greater overall story arch with twists and turns.
5. Improve the graphics. Come on guys, its 2011.
Sign in to comment in this discussion.
Comments
I agree, while I love the games they do leave something to be desired. I watched the interviews for FC and they stated they wanted us to feel involved in the process, but they make it to "auto mode" for that. For example, when searching the bedroom in case 3(I think it's 3) and you find the underwear, we should be able to use, say, the UV Light(which wasn't in this game, but goes to my point), lifting tape and Luminol all over the bed in order to find something. It goes for anything that needs to be fingerprinted as well, don't just make automatic, let us dust the whole thing until we find it. There were a few other instances where I felt hindered because it make complete sense to me that I should have been able to do something the game wasn't letting me do.
I would love to see a game where we have complete control of what to process and how to process it, if they truly want us to feel immersed in the story and process that's the only way. I felt kinda let down after playing through FC after watching the "making of" videos but overall it was still a great game. The one thing I loved was the overall story and how the cases were all connected.
Come on guys, with the tools available for making games this isn't too much to expect. I'd bet that if one CSI game was developed with a big enough budget to take it to the next level, i.e. make it much longer and let us have almost complete control while still pointing us in a general direction, the game would appeal not only to CSI fans but to a much larger audience. There is so much untapped potential here that it's a shame to not take it there.
**Ending Spoilers**
Also, after 4 cases of fairly good length and a good amount of evidence was anyone else let down and how short it was and that there wasn't even an attempt to locate Salazar? Or to find out if anyone in Law Enforcement was involved in her escape? Seems to me that there should have at least been an investigation into the ambush.
The PlayStation 2 version of 3 Dimensions of Murder actually had full three dimensional movement because of the restrictions by Sony at the time. It actually made the game a whole lot more confusing, since you had to actually move the camera towards the items in order to interact with them. This really is counter-intuitive in a point and click adventure game, since you really don't need to look up and down, just side to side since there are no objects to interact with that are out of view of a regular fixed camera.
They could give you more freedom of movement for side to side movements though, I agree. It would be much more interesting to interact with a crime scene by actually feeling like you're moving through the crime scene instead of being guided by a camera through it (the movement in the CSI games actually reminds me of the Monk franchise, where he's sometimes guided through a crime scene by a camera phone when his phobias get to intense). It might be interesting to get a third person game (like Telltale's other games, like The Walking Dead for example) for CSI. It could let you actually play as one of the characters for a change instead of the unshown CSI.