The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I played the first episode of CSI: Deadly Intent.

I’m still not 100% sure why I did? I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a single episode of CSI, no matter what the variation, and really nothing about the game made it seem like it was even vaguely going to be good. Sure, Telltale made it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has appeal outside of those who like the show. But I have Gamefly, so sometimes I put stupid things on my Gamefly list, and then they show up when I’ve forgotten about them, and I go “Oh.”

Let me just say that even as a fan of adventure games, this game is not very good. The controls on the 360 version, especially, are just completely fucking awful. Your left thumbstick is just emulating a mouse. For some things, you can choose options with the d-pad, making it less of a pain, but not everything. It is un-good. Maybe it’s slightly better on PC because you can actually control it.
Second, let me just say that I don’t know how much a CSI fan is going to get out of this game. I mean, maybe I’m wrong about what a CSI fan likes, but I’d think a lot of why you’d like the show is an attachment to the characters, right? All the characters are there, but you interact with them very, very little. They don’t really have any sort of dialog or banter between them that you would assume would be a major portion of the show. They just pop in, or serve as menu options for different things. For example, some guy named Captain Brass is your menu for getting warrants, basically. Again, I haven’t seen CSI. Maybe I’m wrong, and the whole show is all business all the time and everyone works in silence. But I really doubt it, and that would suck for fans of the show, wouldn’t it? Also, the few times the characters do talk, they often crack kind of weak jokes. There was a “ha ha, look, that stripper fingerprint belongs to a transsexual” stupid joke for example. I dunno.

The story of the episode and the mystery seemed fine, however. You had multiple dudes who all could have been the murderer, and you kept finding evidence that would point more to one, then the other, and so on. That seems like what a crime show would do, and that’s kind of neat. Not, you know, hard to do, but not bad.

The actual finding evidence, though, is kind of annoying. Most of it involves playing silly minigames on computers at the lab, which is fine, but also not necessarily entertaining, especially when the game won’t let you complete the minigame yet due to the story, when you know that’s the ultimate solution. For example, the murder weapon in this episode had been broken into many pieces, and you were collecting them over the episode and putting them back together. One fragment had half of a fingerprint on it, so the idea is that you’re going to get the whole fingerprint eventually. But here’s the thing: you match partial fingerprints like 5 times during the course of the investigation. Why the hell wouldn’t you take a partial fingerprint and see if that was enough, at least for now? You’ve got this magic crime computer: use it! I got so frustrated at being unable to match that partial fingerprint, but of course if I could have done that, it would have ruined the suspense on who was the actual killer, so oh no, can’t do that. They even could have explained it better, “That looks like a fingerprint, but it’s too smudged on this piece to get a good match… maybe the rest of the print on another piece will be clearer,” or some shit like that, and I would have been happy. But they didn’t. It’s a shame.

Anyway, I beat Episode 1, and got like a million achievement points, and I could have gotten a lot more if I kept playing, but I don’t care about achievements that much? In any case, I can’t say this game is any good. I guess I hoped that Telltale’s “sellout get that cash money” game would not be quite this slap-dash, but eh, that was probably too much to ask for.