I had a very difficult time writing this review. It wasn't until I figured out why that I was actually able to begin. The problem is, The Dig fills me with conflicting emotions. Don't get me wrong û this is a GOOD thing; it's just not necessarily a good thing for LucasArts, as you shall see.
The Dig is LucasArts' first attempt at a serious story. In movie terms, most of their games have been action adventures or comedies. The Dig would be a drama. This is great. I like to see a game company attempting to reach a larger audience by TELLING BETTER STORIES, as opposed to wowing them with high technology ("Look! There's people walking inside my computer screen!"). Someone was bound to take this step eventually, and I'm glad it was the company whose graphic adventures I've come to know and love.
Unfortunately, as a good drama, I find that The Dig falls short. The story is basically pretty good: You are Commander Boston Low, in charge of a mission to detonate a pair of nuclear charges on the surface of an asteroid which is on a collision course with Earth. This should knock the asteroid off its collision course and safely into orbit. Once this task is completed, however, you return to the surface of the asteroid. While prospecting for rock samples, you discover some odd metallic plates deep inside it. Upon manipulating these plates, the asteroid morphs into a twelve-sided polygonal starship which whisks you and your crew light-years away. There, you discover that the alien creators of the ship have done a Really Dumb Thing, and it becomes your job to undo it, so they can send you home.
Rumor has it The Dig was originally conceived for television (I have to add to that the disclaimer that every time we say something assertive like this, someone at LucasArts tells us we said the wrong thing, so bear in mind I could be making that up). I can believe this, since the game deals with issues of great importance to almost anyone: life, death, the afterlife, resurrection, addiction, friendship, trust, and isolation in much the way an episode of, say, Touched by an Angel would: introduction, conflict, resolution of conflict and teary good-bye, all in 60 minutes less commercials. And, IMHO, the shiny happy ending totally spoils the drama of the story. What are they trying to say about sacrifice? It certainly isn't that in order to gain something, you often have to give up something else, since everybody gets their marbles back at the end.
The dialogue could be better. When I heard that SF author Orson Scott Card would be handling the scripting, I was psyched, as I am very fond of his work. However, although the bulk of the dialogue is good, there are some crucial places it falls flat. In one place that springs to mind, where one of the characters finds out about the death of a close friend, the dialogue comes off way too flip. If you think I'm being too harsh, you need to go back and watch Patrick Stewart in Generations again.
And the voice acting! What a disappointment this is, given the generally good acting in previous LucasArts adventure games. Here you have a script which actually manages to touch on some serious topics, and injects some real humanity into the characters, and what happens? The actors perform in a manner which would suggest they were reciting their grocery lists! Where's the passion? The anger? I've seen more enthusiasm in IE articles, for Pete's sake! This was, at times, so infuriating, I wanted to build a Chron-o-john so I could travel back in time and blow them up in the recording booth. This is made more confusing by the fact that these are professional actors, who've been in real movies and things. Of course, Robert Patrick, who supplies the voice of Boston Low, is best known for a role in which he didn't say much (the T1000 in Terminator 2 [Pop-culture check. Wasn't Arnold's character the T1000, while Patrick's played the T2000? Readers? -ed]). He just stood around a lot, looking grim and determined. Maybe if the animators had drawn Low looking grim and determined, it would have come off a bit better.
One more point, then I'll get away from this whole sound thing: the QUALITY of the recorded audio was poor, much worse than anything I've seen in a commercial product in a while. On a SB16, not the highest-fidelity sound card in the world, there was noticeable noise underneath much of the digitized dialogue. Even IE's audio is better, and we only use 8-bit 11 kHz, for crying out loud!
Okay, I lied: one more last point. The background score is simply excellent. Definitely movie-quality. I'd say the only recent release which comes close is Ascendancy. And it's digital streaming audio, so you need neither a wave-table sound card nor a patch cable to hear it at its best.
Graphically, the game is a disappointment. The VGA talking Lego people have got to go. They were fine for Indiana Jones; all he was trying to do was blow up some Nazis. And they were fine for big cartoon characters, like Sam & Max and Ben Throttle, but when you're trying to convey real, serious emotion, YOU HAVE TO BE ABLE TO SEE THE CHARACTERS' FACES!!!!! 8x8 pixel noseless blobs are not a good means of expression (I hate to say this, but the game probably would have been better û choke! û if it had used digitized video). Perhaps the designers realized this, which is why they used close-up cut scenes, similar to the ones in Full Throttle, for key emotional points in the story. The cut scenes are of good quality, similar to what you might see on a decent animated series for adults (The Maxx? The Tick? Aeon Flux? I can't think of one that uses a comparable style...). However, all this does for me is remind me how bad the gameplay graphics are.
I mean, really. LucasArts has clearly demonstrated, with Rebel Assault, TIE Fighter and Dark Forces, that they're technologically savvy enough to do good action games. By contrast, adventure games aren't that demanding (From an artistic standpoint, they're MUCH more demanding, but that's a discussion for another day...). Sierra hasn't released a VGA adventure game in, I'd say, at least a year, maybe two. Most of the good recent games (Riddle of Master Lu, Beavis and Butthead) have been SVGA, so what's the problem? Maybe the artists are reluctant to retire their hard-won anti-aliasing skills. In any case, the bottom line is: you can't see the faces, and this moves you a level away from the story (I should point out, however, that the backgrounds and the 3D rendered objects û particularly one nasty rendered monster û are excellent).
The rendered animations from Industrial Light and Magic, highly touted as the first time a movie SPFX company has worked on a computer game, do very little for me. They mostly tend to serve to bridge scenes; as such, they're eye candy, and they're not very good at it. They'd probably look really good on film, but as 256-color VGA animation, they're very grainy, not-quite-ready-for-Rebel-Assault. Can it be that the guys at ILM don't have a clue when it comes to compressing true-color, high-res animations down to digitized video that Joe 386-Pack can watch on his home machine? I don't know, and I don't care whose fault it is. All I know is, it introduces yet another completely different graphic style within the game, so it feels like "Okay, here's some gameplay. Oh, and a cut scene. And HERE'S an ILM animation!" rather than an integrated whole. This breaks the fiction, interfering with your ability to suspend disbelief and damaging the effectiveness of the story.
So now you understand my dilemma: I can see what the designers were trying to do, and I have to applaud their efforts, but I can't really say that they accomplished what they planned. The Dig could have been the first game to ever deal with real human issues, and touch people the way a good movie can. I'm disappointed it wasn't, but I'm glad they tried. I hope they learn from this experience and try again (In fact, I'm certain they will).
On the other hand, The Dig works pretty well as "just a game," so if you're able to ignore what they were trying to do and play the darn thing, it can be entertaining. The jarring variety of graphics styles, and the low-res-ness of the gameplay, aren't as important for "just a game." Therefore, I suspect the vast majority of gamers, who aren't as picky as I am, and don't really care if their puzzles come wrapped in a good story, will enjoy The Dig. The puzzles are some of the best of any recent adventure game I've played. One in particular, where you must reassemble the bones of a dead alien creature in proper order, is far and away the coolest I've seen this year. If you're keen on good puzzles, and don't much care about cinematics, or whether a game has an interesting background story, you'll probably enjoy The Dig. If the things that bothered me about it are things that concern you, well, you've been warned.
