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What is it about the hour-long crime procedural that makes viewers all over America - and
the world, for that matter - tune in time and again? Just look at how many different
flavors of Law and Order we’ve been subjected to over the last couple decades. We’re up
to how many different CSI variations now? And that’s to say nothing of Cold Case,
The Mentalist, The Closer, Hawaii Five-O... the kind of shows that pull in ridiculous
ratings in prime-time, and are truly evergreen in syndication. I’m at a loss to explain
it. But from the moment the opening credits hit, bam. You’re in. Buckle up, grab a caffeinated
drink, and... wait. This is a video game?
I was wondering why everyone looked a little... uh... uncanny-valley-ish. Indeed, this is
Ubisoft’s new NCIS game for all the major consoles, because when you’ve got a license
to adapt the hottest hour of naval crime busting on television, you want to make sure to hit
all the platforms. The game plays out as a series of four episodes, starring... well,
digital representations and soundalikes of the cast. There’s a reason those credits
didn’t give the actors’ names. Anyway. These stories put you in control of the various
members of the team, as you collect evidence, interview witnesses, perform autopsies, conduct
various forensic tests, and... I suppose you could call this hacking.
Alright. So the gameplay itself boils down to some distressingly easy motions, simple
matching games, and wandering all over crime scenes looking for that last bullet hole you
missed before. The most intense the game gets are the deduction board segments, where you
combine the discrete pieces of evidence in order to come to an understanding of the murders,
and interrogation sequences, which combine quicktime witness-pressing with Phoenix Wright-style
contradiction by making you call out the suspects lies. That’s pretty much it.
Graphically, the game is about as middle-of-the-road as it gets. On the one hand, everyone’s
recognizable... on the other, man do their lips and teeth look weird. That’s where
I usually get hung up. Lips and teeth. And you wonder why I prefer anime? The stories
you play through were actually written with input from the series’ main writing stable,
so they’ve got the twists, turns, and interconnections you’d come to expect from an hour of quality
television. The vocal work, however... alright, here’s my main beef. The soundalikes do
a passable job, and if you’re not familiar with the show itself, you’d pay it no mind.
But the trained ear can tell that Gibbs sounds nothing like Gibbs, it takes Ziva an episode
and a half to tell the difference between Brooklyn Jewish and Israeli Jewish, and Ducky...
is actually voiced by David McCallum, star of stage and screen, - and along with Robert
Wagner as DiNozzo Sr, the only voices from the actual TV show to grace the video game
with their presence - turning in what might be the best line reading in video games in
the past 20 years. Everything he says sounds natural, in-character, and... well, frankly,
sets the bar too high for the rest of the cast to reach. It’s unfortunate that the
whole performance is marred most grievously by the excellence of one particular member.
The whole experience is going to run you maybe six hours, not much longer than if you sat
down and watched four episodes of the show itself. But that’d mean you miss out on
the game’s dirty little secret: the fact that one play-through, from start to finish,
yields all 1000 achievement points. That’s right, this may be the easiest thousand points
in existence. I expect the PS3 trophies work much the same way, while the Wii gamers out
there... well, too bad so sad. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go curl up on the
couch and watch 18 back-to-back episodes of CSI, on any of the fifteen channels that offer
such a line-up.