
Transferring that success to a video game however has historically been a difficult challenge as many developers end up relying on the license to sell the game instead of the gameplay. Solving murders using various high tech and low tech methods, many watch faithfully each week as evidence is extracted from the most unlikely sources. The whole thing's about as free-roaming as a man in a straightjacket locked in a padded cell, and about as fast moving as a glacier.ĬSI has made quite a name for itself as a solid TV series taking crime scene investigators through different murder mysteries. Locations are bland and static -click on something to look at it, click on someone to talk to them. It's like a survival horror game stripped of everything bar the cut-scenes and puzzles. Interrogations are simply a matter of exhausting the supplied question options, and every shred of evidence has to be correctly inspected using the appropriate piece of equipment to find the next clue. Full marks for doing something different, but it doesn't hang together as an enthralling game experience. The 'evidence trinity' of suspect, victim and location is complete, you swoop in for the arrest. With your evidence safely zip-locked it's off to the morgue or labs for analysis, and once you've got what you need and Looking for fingerprints? Spray some Ninhydrin around the place.

Notice a suspicious looking substance on the corpse's trousers? Take a swab. There's no action, and instead you visit locations to talk to suspects and gather evidence.

Which initially leads to some interesting gaming.


But when you're emulating TV's favourite forensic whodunit, what other choice have you got?ĬSI: Miami is a show where a bunch of struggling actors solve crimes across South Florida with a mixture of old-fashioned detective work and newfangled forensics. Sifting through a pile of puke with a pair of tweezers and then analysing the hair found therein by means of microscopy is not, under normal circumstances, the stuff of an enthralling game.
