There's this feeling I get sometimes - you know what I'm talking about, I'm sure - where I think that if I see one more crappy so-called "interactive movie," I'm going to throw myself under a moving train. This feeling was tickling the back of my brain as I installed In the First Degree. I set my word processor to "flambe" in anticipation, and prepared to roast the game over a bonfire built of old Flash Traffic and Inca 2 packaging.
Imagine my surprise when the game went beyond the merely "not awful" to the downright "darn good." I know my coworkers were amazed at my periodic exclamations about some little doodad or another. Now, when someone uses the phrase "giddy as a schoolboy," I have a frame of reference.
In fact, that's one of the things that makes In the First Degree so good: you just keep tripping over cool little things that the designers didn't HAVE to do, but DID, adding to the fun and enjoyment of the game. They did a really thorough job of scripting the "legal expert" who analyzes your performance for the news report you get to see after each day of the trial (in fact, the news reports are amazingly good, down to the use of REAL, professional anchorpersons), the satiric fake commercials and lead-ins to other news stories you see while "channel-surfing" are the funniest I've seen since "Robocop," the different locations from which you get to observe the news reports (your kitchen, a bar, a health club) are creative and realistically constructed: I could go on and on.
A little background is perhaps in order. As one might guess from the title, In the First Degree is about a murder trial. You're Sterling Granger, D.A., and you've been handed the job of prosecuting a high-profile murder case which has rocked the San Francisco art community to its core. Prominent gallery owner Zachary Barnes is dead, shot by his business partner James Tobin. Tobin's claiming it was self-defense. It's your job to prove Murder One.
The fascinating thing about this game is that it makes no pretense of being a murder mystery. There's no effort made to portray the defendant as anything but a violent, desperate opportunist with lots of reason to have murdered his partner. The trick is getting your witnesses to testify in such a way that the JURY is convinced he's guilty, which isn't easy. I'm not a lawyer - I don't even play one on TV - but this game FEELS convincing to me. Clearly, the designers did their homework.
There are two basic stages of the game. In the first half, you review the evidence gathered by your faithful assistant, which consists of photos, witnesses' statements, and tapes of interviews with witnesses. During this portion of the game, you must pore over this information, as well as interview the witnesses yourself. The interviews with the witnesses are key. Depending on how you handle them pre-trial, they'll react differently to you when you get them on the stand.
The second half of the game, naturally, is the trial. It's here that your groundwork will either pay off or leave you twisting in the wind. If you're not careful, hostile witnesses will withhold information ... overeager friendly witnesses will perjure themselves, get caught, and destroy their own credibility ... clueless witnesses will hem and haw and fudge their way into yielding absolutely no useful information whatsoever. It's fun. Even screwing up can be entertaining, because the results are often (with hindsight) patently obvious. (Step 1: Slap forehead. Step 2: Exclaim "Doh!") The script is easily one of the best I've seen in a game, and actually incorporates real scriptwriting techniques, like a comprehensible plot, believable dialog, and characters who are motivated by personality traits deeper than those which could be attributed to a retarded chimpanzee.
Of course, it's not all wine and roses. Like IE humor, some of the attempts to inject originality into this product fall a little flat. Rather than put you to sleep with a continuous video of the opening arguments, for example, the game spends quite a lot of time cutting around the courtroom, showing bored-looking jurors and onlookers. This is pretty dumb. I also hate the fact that when you are viewing the excerpts of witness interview tapes, selections "fast forward," just like if you had a tape playing in your VCR and hit the fast forward or rewind button. This is cute the first time, but after viewing eight or ten clips each of four different witnesses, it quickly gets tedious.
The great thing, though, is that these are directorial quibbles. The fact that I even have to mention them says that technologically, there's not much to complain about with this product. If a game is boring, or the video bites rocks, nobody's going to care whether the camera angles are stupid. Clearly, then, the game ISN'T boring, and the video definitely doesn't bite rocks.
The only real problem I have with the game is that I HATE the fact that you sometimes lose the opportunity to ask a particular question during pre-trial interviews or cross-examination. (Interactive interviews suck - didn't I hear that somewhere?) I can live with this, however, since playing through the entire game only takes a couple of hours the first time, and even less on subsequent runs through, since, as far as I can tell, the hard evidence (like the videotaped interviews with witnesses) doesn't change, so you don't need to watch them all over again.
And you WILL want to play this game again - it's HARD. The first time I played it, I thought I was doing well, and the defendant got off. The second time, I still didn't hit the mark - I got convictions for Grand Theft and Manslaughter. I could probably get Murder One if I played it through again ... and I'm seriously thinking about it.
In the First Degree isn't an engrossing adventure, or a pulse-pounding first-person shooter, or an involving strategy game - but nor is it merely fluff and eye candy. Rather, it's the most promising effort toward marrying game and live-action video since Johnny Mnemonic: it's brief, but entertaining, and worth replaying (at least a couple of times), thus justifying its price tag somewhat. Before I played this game, the fact that it's the first in a series frightened me. Having played it, I'm looking forward to future titles like this - it's a strong first product, and hopefully, they will get even better. If you've ever had aspirations to lawyerhood, you should definitely give it a second glance. And if you're a game designer thinking about doing a digitized-video game, take a look at In the First Degree for a clue as to how to do it correctly.
