The press release Empire Interactive sent around yesterday — announcing their new DS game, Unsolved Crimes — raised a couple of questions. First, who in the hell are Empire Interactive? Second, would it have narration by Robert Stack? The answers came swiftly. Empire Interactive made the Jackass videogame. Ugh. I also realized these are unsolved crimes and not mysteries. Also, Robert Stack is dead.
Humor and pedigree aside, Unsolved Crimes has an ace up its sleeve with an eminently cool setting: New York in the 1970s. The dank, crime-ridden NYC of thirty years ago is prime real estate for a game with both action and point-and-click adventure play. More importantly, 1970s New York is just downright uncommon for a videogame setting.
Excepting classic PC gaming’s diverse palette, videogame designers typically stick to the staples of swords-and-sorcery fantasy, science fiction, and real-or-specualtive militarism for its narrative and aesthetic trappings (when they don’t, they lean towards cartoonish abstraction.) But Unsolved Crimes is one more recently announced title that’s plumbing 20th Century America for new ideas.
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