Well,
it’s about time! Nancy Drew has been sleuthing all about the place
for about eight years now, but as far as I know this is the first
appearance by the “granddaddies” of teen detectives, Frank
and Joe Hardy on your hard drive. Eons ago when your grandparents
weren’t even born yet, there were such things as book factories, where
ghostwriters cranked out book-length stories for the entertainment
of America’s youth. It was, frankly, the equivalent of today’s video
game companies. The Hardy Boys series was a phenomenon. If you were
a good little lad you maybe got the next installment for your birthday.
The original series ran to fifty-eight volumes. Now, I’m not going
to delve into the anything-but-sordid publishing history of the Hardy
Boys here. If you’re interested, there’s a fairly good Wikipedia
page covering their exploits on the printed page and in other media
over the years. However, one glance at the enormity of this enterprise
and it does seem quite a mystery why it took so long for someone to
turn them into an adventure game series. Frank and Joe did appear
in a few Nancy Drew games, on some occasions literally phoning in
their contribution, but that doesn’t count as having your own series,
at least not in my book.

So was it worth the wait?
Well, that would spoil the suspense if I were to give it away here
in the second paragraph.

Nutshell-wise, Frank and
Joe are, respectively, the 18- and 17-year-old offspring of an ex-NYPD
detective who’s turned private eye. The Hardys would more than give
the Cleavers a run for their money in purebred American squeaky-cleanness.
Frank and Joe (in the novels) are such goody-goodies that it makes
your teeth ache. The prose in the books, too, is a strange mixture
of Dick and Jane primer and Norman Vincent Peale pep talk. Yet, when
I was a youth, I couldn’t get enough of these episodes, because, as
turgid as the prose got, they were usually pretty good mysteries.
Simple, yes, but engaging. It’s no surprise, then, that this first
(I presume it’s the first) video game installment, though subtitled
The Hidden Theft is really the plot of
the very first Hardy Boys novel, “The Tower Treasure.”

Don’t
expect me to give away the plot of The Hidden Theft
here, either, not least because the plot is one of the best things
in this game. Suffice it to say that Frank and Joe nose their way
into a theft at an out of town mansion. Someone’s broken into the
impregnable safe and run off with an armload of valuable bearer bonds.
And as with any good mystery, the investigation of this first crime
uncovers subsequent sinister doings.

There are actually two
issues to address here. One, how does the game stand up as a game,
and, two, how good a job did the publishers do in transferring this
beloved series onto a CD? I’ll start with the latter. It has always
seemed to me that the main appeal of the Hardy Boys is to make you,
the reader, or in this case, the game player, feel what it would be
like to be a real-life private eye when you were in high school. As
far-fetched as the notion of teenagers going after real criminals
is, that’s the hook. Otherwise, why not just read mainstream mysteries.
What would it be like if you and your high school pals jumped on your
motorbikes (okay, you and your upper-middle-class high school pals)
and zoomed all over town investigating clues and interviewing suspects?
Then dashing back to the school chemistry lab to run a few forensic
tests. Unbelievable? Sure. Great fun? Unquestionably.

The game publishers have
stacked their deck a bit, of course. They’ve hired a couple of real-life
teen idols to not only do the voice-overs but to model for their respective
digital characters. Pop star Jesse
McCartney has been tapped to play Frank and Cody
Linley, of Hanna
Montana fame, to play younger brother Joe. In the books and here,
Frank, though only a year senior, is the more mature of the two. Joe
is scruffier and more outspoken. Frank acts and talks like he’s already
running for public office, while Joe is still enjoying his youth.
This makes for a good dynamic, in the books and again in this game.
The two professional actors do a good job of playing off each other
as well as the other characters.

Video
game publishers have long since learned the lesson that it’s worth
forking over the cash for real acting talent. Somewhere back in the
Nineties, when Sierra came out with its first adventure game with
a voice track, for King’s Quest V, they
decided just to have people from the office voice the game’s characters.
The result was a legendary fiasco.

Now, in my personal opinion,
if the game developers had indeed “faithfully” transferred
Frank and Joe from the books, I think the result would have been questionable.
The books are best read before, say, the age of twelve. The game publishers
know, however, that players of all ages are going to want to give
this game a go. So they have not only wisely updated Frank and Joe
to the present day (their motorbikes look like they came out of a
Japanese anime cartoon), but have rendered them considerably more
“natural” than their literary counterparts. How much of
this is due to the acting and how much to the writing and production,
it’d be difficult to say. But Frank and Joe and even their buddies
and quasi-girlfriends (no serious commitments here) come across as
believable teens. I still have my doubts about running blood tests
at the high school chem lab, but then I wasn’t all that good in Chemistry
back in tenth grade to begin with.

In short, I give the game
publishers high marks for transferring the Hardy brothers to CD, preserving
what’s good about the brothers and smoothing over what’s not-so-good.

Which
brings us to the game play itself. How does the Hardy Boys detecting
experience translate into an adventure game? Not surprisingly, the
answer to that question is: quite well. This isn’t too much of a shock,
I suppose. We have years now of very good Nancy Drew games to compare
to, so we know the mystery in the malt shop scenario can be a good
one. Also, mystery stories in general tend to lend themselves to the
adventure game format. Both deal with uncovering clues and solving
puzzles. The Hardy Boys have one advantage over Nancy, too. There’s
two of them. And in this game you can play as Frank alone, as Joe
alone, or as the two of them together. This naturally leads to additional
game play and puzzle-solving possibilities. But though the game goes
to great lengths at the beginning to set up this good dynamic, it
is largely abandoned for most of the rest of the game. That’s a bit
of a shame. Perhaps in future episodes the game designers will avail
themselves more of this feature.

The
Hidden Theft is rendered entirely in 3D, as far as I
can tell, so it eats up a fair amount of your processor capacity.
It’s not “true” 3D, I suppose. There isn’t complete freedom
of movement, with spinning around and zooming in. It’s 3D characters
on 3D backgrounds but confined to more traditional “rooms,”
or screens. You can walk around inside each room, but must click on
“happy feet” hot spots to move to other areas. In general,
the game plays like a fairly traditional adventure game. There’s an
inventory where items can sometimes be combined. There’s a lot of
talking to other characters, fittingly for a mystery story. (I don’t
know why game publishers always seem to claim there are multiple conversation
paths, when you know you’re going to exhaust every single leaf of
every conversation tree before you move on.) The game also throws
in a fair number of fixed screen puzzles or “mini-games.”
I happen to like these, but pure adventure game traditionalists be
forewarned. You are going to have to solve a few honest-to-God puzzles
before you can press on with events. A couple of these were moderately
challenging, but most were of the fiddle-around-and-eventually-you’ll-get-it
variety.

The most important thing,
it seems to me, in a game like this is to make the player feel like
he or she is indeed tracking and solving the clues of a mystery. This
is what the best mystery-adventures do, like the Sherlock Holmes series.
Frank and Joe Hardy may not be as clever as Sherlock, but the game
does do a good job of making you believe that you’re uncovering matters
as they do. You’re surprised when they’re surprised. You’re suspicious
when they’re suspicious. The plot in this game, naturally enough,
is broken up into chapters and that too adds to the feeling that you’re
in Bayport with the real Hardy Boys. Each new chapter is also a dramatic
shift in the plot. I’m not entirely sure if all the elements quite
hang together, logically, but it did keep me guessing.

The
game also does a good job of not butting in too much. As I have ranted
elsewhere, it drives me nuts when a game spends half its time trying
to “help” me. The Hidden Theft
does have an admirably subtle help feature in the form of a cell phone
log. If you’re stuck you can refer to your “notes,” which
list the immediate task or two ahead of you, with a good nudge as
to where or what to look out for. This “QuestLog” is different
from the “Journal,” also on your cell phone. The Journal
is something you occasionally need to consult for important information
and for the text of longer documents. There are also phone numbers
on the cell phone you can dial for “help.” Or, at least,
moral support.

Even Nancy Drew, returning
the favor, appears as one of the boys’ cell phone buddies.

As for the more technical
stuff, I have only my usual complaint about not having quite as many
options as I’d like. Admittedly, now that I have a wide screen monitor
I really like the option of playing in a window. The version of The
Hidden Theft I was playing was pre-release and there
were a few crashes here and there, but the game mostly ran quite smoothly
and I’m assuming that these bumps will be flattened out before the
game is finalized.

The soundtrack in being
unobtrusive also gets my approval; this applies both to the music
and the special effects. The acting talent surrounding our two heroes
was generally professional. The writing, again thanks I imagine to
the source material, was also a step or two above the usual. There
was the by now usual number of typos and other grammatical errors,
but these should also be corrected for the official release.

Though
not long, I thought the game was of a satisfying length. The same
is true of the difficulty. Not hard, but no walk in the park either.
I don’t really expect a game that is largely going to be, like the
Nancy Drew games, marketed to those as young as ten to be a brain-bruiser.
Overall, I’d award the game a B plus, but add a half grade to that
if you’re already a Hardy Boys fan. I know what a peculiar thrill
it was for me the first time I was able to “play” Sherlock
Holmes in an adventure game, and I suspect a lot of Hardy Boy aficionados
are going to get that same treat playing this game.

The Hardy Boys:
The Hidden Theft may not be a quantum leap forward in
the annals of adventure gaming, but it shouldn’t be. It seems to me
the goal the publishers had here was to reliably usher into the video
game medium a century’s-old, beloved classic, playable by fans of
all ages. In this I’d say they were successful, and I certainly hope
that this is only the first of a series. Probably not as long as the
original fifty-eight, but we’ll see.

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows® 2000/XP
• CPU: 1.4 GHz Pentium®
  3 Processor
• RAM: 256 MB
• Disk Space: 1.5 GB
• CD/DVD-ROM: 16x
• Video Card: 64 MB DirectX®
  9 Compatible Video Card
• Sound: 16-bit DirectX®
  Compatible
• Input: Mouse, Keyboard
  and Speakers