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jp's James Patterson Women's Murder Club: Games of Passion (DS)
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| [October 5, 2020 12:21:56 PM]
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Finished it! And, I enjoyed it - the gameplay was relaxing and chill despite the terrible hit detection for finding objects.
Once I finished it I looked into a cool little side-activity. The back of the box calls it "Create your own mystery", which I was very intrigued by. It's not quite what I had imagined, but a fun diversion nonetheless. It's basically a mad-libs style mystery. So, there's a pre-written mystery you can experience but before you do that the game asks you to take pictures of specific things like "man" or "container" or "item of clothing" - these are then integrated (as in, shown on a scree) as a detective tells you about the mystery. So, the "suspect" might be the "man" you took a picture of who was covering his face with the "item of clothing" and so on. I think it was like 10 pictures or so, and they're used a few times. Fun little activity - and I like how it used the DS cameras - not that many games allowed for/made use of that potential, so kudos!
In all, a positive and surprising activity - reinforces my notion that we can learn from all kinds of games even when we're not the target audience.
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| [October 4, 2020 04:01:46 PM]
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This game is the complete opposite of "Mystery P.I.: Portrait of a Thief". Both are hidden object games (with some mini-games thrown in) and are about investigating a mystery/crime.
However, in this game - the things you need to find actually HAVE to do with the case. Mostly you're finding objects in crime scenes. In a clever twist - sometimes at the beginning you have to "clear the crime scene of clutter" which is when you're tasked with finding a number of random objects that have no bearing on anything. However, you then have to find clues or objects related to the deceased and so on. It's not been a challenge so far - which is fine, but I'm really enjoying this one a lot more than the aforementioned.
Notable things so far (I've cleared 5 chapters)
(a) You must hold your DS sideways like a book almost the entire time. There are other games that do this - but might this be one of the few where you do it all the time? (I'm blanking on the name of a non-US DS game I bought in Europe that you also held sideways most(?) of the time...
(b) The object detection is awful. REALLY bad. I sometimes need to tap like crazy around an object I know is correct for it to register. It seems such an obvious thing to look at that I wonder what happened...
(c) I'm unfamiliar with Patterson's mystery novels or the series on which this game is based - but I gather that it's a bunch of women (only two of which work for the police) who are friends and like to discuss cases and help each other out? (one is a reporter - and she helped out in chapter 5). This set up gives a nice dynamic to the ends of chapters. Here you're all sitting around a table and the other characters (you play as the detective) ask questions and such. For answers you produce evidence from a list of options.
(d) AFAIK, there is no fail state. If you produce the wrong evidence you can keep on trying until you get it right. You do have 3 clues you can use per chapter that point out where an object is hidden in a scene. I've had to use them mostly to confirm stuff I know was correct but wasn't getting "selected" by the terrible hit detection. I don't know what happens if you run out of clues - is it game over or are you just stuck?
(e) There's a clock in the corner - which was confusing to me because it shows "real world time" rather than game time. It just seems like an odd design decision given that each chapter (usually?) takes place over the course of a day.
(f) There's been a LOT of murders. 4 if I've kept track correctly. All on different days and (now we know) all connected to the case!
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jp's James Patterson Women's Murder Club: Games of Passion (DS)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Saturday 3 October, 2020
GameLog closed on: Monday 5 October, 2020 |
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This is the only GameLog for James Patterson Women's Murder Club: Games of Passion. |
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