November 26th, 2007, 02:03 PM
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| CSI games v Law & Order series
If anyone here has played any of the Law & Order games, I'd like to know whether you thought they were better, worse or just 'different' to the CSI games. I have played the first 2 Law & Order titles - 'Dead on the Money' and 'Double or Nothing' and would weigh up the pros and cons like this.. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- PROS Because each game revolves around a single case there are many more locations and characters to interact with than CSI Jerry Orbach! (god bless him) Its a pity that you can't work with Lenny Briscoe AND Ed Green as a team like in the TV series, but they gave Orbach enough 'Lenny' lines to keep you happy. Your choice of questions when interviewing a witness or suspect really makes a difference, if you mess up, the interviewee will just clam up before they tell you what you need to know. One great thing is that when you do get told something significant, Briscoe turns to you and raises his eyebrows just to let you know this is something to follow up on. (Ok, maybe not 'great', but a nice touch anyway). The Courtroom scenes are actually quite exciting, because you don't know what the defence attorney is going to say or who his witnesses are and you have to be very quick to get in an objection before the next question. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- CONS At least 90 percent of the evidence you can gather is worthless, but you can't be sure exactly which 10 percent you need either, and there is a TON of stuff you can put in your case file. To give you an idea, in the second game you have 84 free slots to put pieces of evidence into your case file and unless you use a walkthrough, at some point you are going to have to decide which things to keep and what to throw away - which leads to.. If you throw away one tiny piece of what the game considers to be 'critical' evidence, you may be able to get a suspect arrested but you will never get a guilty verdict from the Jury...This is the single most infuriating thing about these games, you can spend hours building up what you consider to be a cast-iron case but then find that you don't have the one item you need to trigger a guilty verdict and have to go back to earlier saved games and start again from the place where you last had that item. You don't 'work' with the evidence at all,you pick it up and send it to other people to tell you whether or not it's valuable, after playing CSI I found this to be very shallow, but you have to remember this isn't a forensic crime show so maybe I' m being a bit harsh here. Unless you have some idea of courtroom procedure the defence attorney will run rings around you in the cross examinations, you can't just object to every question because this pees off the Judge and has a negative effect on the jury as well. I had to play this part of the first game with a walkthrough, and eventually you can see the logic of when to object and which are the right questions to pose to the defence witnesses, I still had a tough time in the second game trying to get through this part without a walkthrough, even though I now had some idea of what I was supposed to do. N.B I haven't mentioned the fact that the first game is supposed to have a time limit for you to find out whodunnit before going to court (which led to howls of protests in the reviews) because there is a an official patch you can download that gives you basically unlimited time. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I have to say that despite having only one case to work on I actually found the Law and Order games enjoyable, in a different way to CSI. Apparently 'Justice is Served', the 3rd in the series is the best of the lot so I wiil see if Santa can get me that this year   |
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