Ray and Jennifer’s Excellent E3 Adventure
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Ray and Jennifer’s Excellent E3 Adventure
by Ray Ivey & Jennifer Miller
Part One: Longest Journey Ascendant
RAY: What’s wrong, Jen? You look a little green around the gills!
JEN: Sorry. Still trying to regain my equilibrium after the official Dreamfall preview.
RAY: (Handing Jen a Dramamine). I know what you mean. It’s a bit hard not to suffer from vertigo, considering the lofty ambitions of this game, right?
Of course this game is FunCom’s very highly anticipated follow-up to their The Longest Journey. While we did see some more game areas than we have seen before, the impression is still alarmingly that of a game that’s much, much farther away from release than December.
Even more distressing is the fact that we once again did not get a chance to see the mouse control system demonstrated. Every time we have seen this game in action it has been with the Xbox setup, which is all well and good, but we imagine the lion’s share of purchasers of this game will be playing it on the PC. We keep hearing about the natural-feeling and intuitive mouse control system, but we want to see it.
JEN: I’m going with Ray on this one. Where were the mouse controls? Not every adventure gamer is going to want to steal their cousin’s Xbox controller to play this game.
So yes, do to a snafu in setting up the demo PC, we were not given a demonstration of the mouse controls, which when they did work at one point, looked a little cumbersome and reminded me of my early days learning the controls of Uru.
RAY: It was good to see our heroine Zoe running around in environments that were new to us, solving physical puzzles that were quite reminiscent of Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon. It would have been more encouraging if the environments had been more attractive, however.
JEN: Come on, Ray, there is no doubt in my mind that Dreamfall looks great and sounds even better. Ragnar has billed it as not exactly a sequel to his hit The Longest Journey, but as a “spiritual successor.” I became a little worried at that point, but let’s proceed.
RAY: We did pick up a couple of tidbits of new information. Remember Teddy, the talking robotic teddy bear in Spielberg’s A.I.? Well . . . there’s a similar character in Dreamfall, and FunCom has hired Jack Angel, the same actor who voiced Teddy for Spielberg, to do the vocal honors for the character.
JEN: Let’s not go into the story too much (because Funcom will probably hunt me down and kill me!) as not to spoil readers out there, but we will return to familiar places from the original game. We will see April, though we did not see her in our demonstration.
RAY: Yep, we keep hearing about April, but we have yet to see her in the game.
JEN: Puzzles are pretty well integrated, but I thought became a little cheap in places. Such as “I can’t unlock the door until I can see that it’s a door” kind of puzzles.
RAY: I thought one puzzle we saw was pretty solid: remember the one that involved using the environment and inventory to create a torch to facilitate exploration of a dark area?
JEN: Your character has a “focus field” that can pinpoint a number of objects in a room so you can interact with them. This is especially useful considering the game is completely rendered in real-time 3D. This rendering also presents problems. The collision detection needs tweaking. There were times when I would see my character’s hand suddenly disappear into a wall or through solid glass on a window.
And yes kids, there is combat, but easily defeatable combat. There are jumps, but easily accomplished jumps, with targeting and everything. Oooo . . . pretty . . . .
RAY: Finally, it will probably come as good news to our readers that combat using the mouse control system will be simpler and easier than combat using the Xbox controller.
JEN: There are also (gasp) mini games throughout the game. And while this has worked in a series like Nancy Drew, I’m not sure that they work in a game such as Dreamfall. They seemed a little too much like filler and less like purpose.
Oh and shame on you Funcom. Didn’t you learn anything from Syberia? Don’t ever put more than two “doors to nowhere” in a room. It only serves to drive the gamer crazy.
RAY: The bottom line is, we’re a little tired of hearing the rhetoric about how ambitious this game is when we’ve seen so little. Particularly since it’s got a release date that’s just a few months away . . . It’s just difficult not to be a little nervous about this one . . .
