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I wanted to hate this game for no other reason than grammar.
I’m sorry, are you saying the audience is its own favorite host or are you just using
a contraction when you should be using a possessive adjective? Common mistake, you know...in **** third
grade.
So obviously, I’m not a fan of stupidity. And nothing signifies stupidity like mixing
up you’re and your. But I am a fan of good video games, and despite its awful grammar
and occasional typos, James Noir’s Hollywood Crimes is kind of a good game.
Released last month for the Nintendo 3DS, James Noir’s Hollywood Crimes is a puzzle
game with a strong whodunit flavor. Think of something like Professor Layton, only weirder...much,
much weirder.
Hollywood Crimes is set in the early 1960s, and the game really nails the feel of its
period. It’s this serious *** mystery with an obvious noir influence, but it has
the style of a You Bet Your Life or What’s My Line. That 1960s game show campiness totally
comes through here, and the way Hollywood Crimes mixes it into a crime
drama is really unique.
In fact, it’s almost kind of unsettling at times. The game has this strange vibe,
and a large part of that comes from its animations. Hollywood Crimes uses full-motion video for
its characters, but the interesting thing is that it actually just loops the same video
over and over no matter what the characters are saying. So there’s a jerkiness to everything—a
sort of disconnected motion—that creates a really creepy vibe.
But in terms of the actual game, Hollywood Crimes tells a very saxophone-laden mystery
of *** and deception. You’re on a popular 1960s game show, and the former champions
of that show are being killed one by one. Whoever is doing it is leaving puzzles at
the crime scenes, and of course, puzzles play a large role in Hollywood Crimes.
The game’s puzzles will seem familiar to anyone who has explored the genre on
their Nintendo DS. In fact, for all its presentational originality, Hollywood Crimes is somewhat
typical in terms of its puzzle design. Find the hidden message, finish a sequence of numbers—the
puzzles are good, but again, they just don’t have the originality the game displays in
other areas.
Obviously, this isn’t quite the must-have third-party 3DS game you might be waiting
for. The puzzles are a little underwhelming at times and even a bit repetitive, and the
game only lasts five hours at most—Hollywood Crimes isn’t perfect. But it is interesting,
even fun while it lasts. It’s one of the first third-party games for the 3DS to surprise
me in a good way. For that alone, James Noir’s Hollywood Crimes is a case worth taking.