Spooky times for Not-Mulder and Not-Scully as we get lost in warehouses and take pictures of Triscuits!
Let’s Play: The X-Files Game
Spooky times for Not-Mulder and Not-Scully as we get lost in warehouses and take pictures of Triscuits!
9 Comments Comments RSS
This is bound to be a sexual thriller on the level of John Hurt’s Penis Farm. I mean, Tender Loving Care.
I’ve just watched the first part so far, but I absolutely lost it at everything after the “DO THAT” save. I love that they filmed a game over scene specifically for when the player just gets bored and shoots someone.
X-Flies fans, Spoiler Alert: This game is actually not terrible. You might actually want to play it before watching this LP. Unfortunately, it’s not cheap on either PC or PSX.
Seconded. It’s fun once you get the hang of the interface, and especially if you have time to explore everything the game has to offer. I was trying to figure out why they were having so much more trouble with it than I did on my first playthrough, but then I remembered I had the hint system enabled.
But yeah, you can search the database for all the characters in the game to get a little backstory, read that From Outer Space book (which only consists of the ending monologue at the end of “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” (i.e. the episode)), flip through Willmore’s diary and notes on his PDA, etc. There’s a lot of content to find that fleshes out the story if you’re interested in that kind of thing. As a die-hard X-Files and adventure game fan, I ate it up. I know the game is not intuitive and actually BRUTALLY hard at some points, but if you take it slow and listen to what the characters have to say, it can be a really satisfying and intriguing experience. It’s also fun on multiple playthroughs because of how differently Astadourian reacts to you. Highly recommended. 🙂
Except for the guy who plays Willmore. He is so wooden and bland, I just… ugh. I always thought he looked a lot like Matthew Perry and Astadourian like Jennifer Aniston, so I like to pretend Boring Chandler and Blonde Rachel are just from a parallel dimension solving a high-profile case. 😛
Forgot to add:
The easter eggs. They’re EVERYWHERE. It’s great! They wrote this before Season 4 started but filmed it maybe a half a year later. It’s supposed to fall sometime in between the second-to-last and last episodes of the third season. It’s hard to tell because of Scully’s season 4 hairstyle, though. So it was written for season 3, filmed for season 4, and came out around the time the movie (which, for the uninitiated, followed season 5).
Also, around that time, games were using FMV and all, but the makers of the X-Files PC game wanted it to be playable ten years from then and have it not look horribly dated, so they did their best to optimize color schemes and video compression. I think it holds up pretty well for a game released in 1998, when full motion video was still pretty constrained to a really limited color palette.
It seems to suffer from what other “detective style” games suffer from (I haven’t played it, so I can’t say for sure) – you can tell what’s significant because they’re what you can click on. Real detectives don’t have that luxury and have to make assessments on what is likely to be significant… it doesn’t seem to provide enough red herrings (possibly for memory capacity reasons) to throw in bits of evidence that are pure loose ends (eg. a cigarette butt found in your room wasn’t Cancer Man snooping on you, but the maid taking a fag break while cleaning). Also, the “live action” bits are INCREDIBLY stilted, like at the end where you’re being held at gunpoint but the game literally WAITS for you to do something.
Yay! I love Obscurus Lupa LPs. I like that this game takes place in Washington state. We don’t get enough credit.
Hey, I like how the game says that the Seattle Police be unavailable so often.
It’s funny how the culprit’s hobbies were in that database.
SO MANY UNANSWERED THOUGHTS!
Yes! I finally finished this. I swear I’ve been working on watching this since the day it came out. LOL
YAY, I made it to the end! LOL, took me a while. I watched it in little spurts. XD
To answer your question about the PSX version, it’s quite a bit of a pain in some ways and a bit more boring in others. For instance, the cursor is WAY too sensitive, so you bip your little hand all over the place trying to get places. You also don’t get much control over your computer, so when you go to search for something, I think all you have to do is click on the Search bar and it inputs it for you. (It’s been a while, sorry if that’s not actually the case. I just remember it doing it automatically instead of making you type anything in.) I didn’t play it through to the end, but besides that, it played through about the same. The video quality might’ve been crappier, but it’s hard to tell by watching Let’s Plays on YouTube.
I almost fell out of my chair laughing when you shot Mulder and cracked up. You were so legitimately and disturbingly amused! That was awesome. I guess I haven’t had a chance to see anyone really react to the game since I played it myself in ~2000 when I finally got a good enough computer to get past the warehouse.
I found myself gesturing at the screen when you walked past Cook’s room all those times without going inside. I was afraid you were going to miss the cutscene like you did in the hauling yard, haha. If you turn to face Astadourian when you’re locked in, she finds a bomb, and you can try and clip the wires (and ‘splode) or pointlessly smack the windows (and waste time.) It took me a while before I figured out that you had to smack the grate.
You can piss Astadourian off so bad through the game that she actually ragequits and you lose. Not sharing that you’re trying to find FBI agents irks her, then you can keep hiding it on the Tarakan. She’ll insist she’ll get the log book translated, and you can pull rank on her. She is nooooot happy about that one. She actually goes to the coroner’s office without you and makes a remark about you being a liar when you show up after you say you won’t. She sees you ask the coroner about Mulder and Scully and essentially is like, “oh hell naw, wtf? Okay, tell me what’s going on or I’ll have you arrested for fucking up a police investigation.” If you tell her to fuck off, she’s like, “k, later, bitch” and you’re out of a job. It was hard for me to get that ending because you wind up saying some REALLY awful stuff, but it was still funny at the end. (Yeah… I’m a goodie-two-shoes Lawful Good when it comes to adventure games.)
You can email all sorts of shit to Cook, Shanks, Skinner, your parents, your buddy writing a book, etc. You never clicked the pencil button on your PDA, which acts as a sort of hint guide and reminder of the things you’ve done so far. You can mail those notes to the people I just mentioned which are responded with some odd to hilarious reactions. If you send your own IND info to Shanks, he says that if you have enough time to goof off, you must be done with the case and to send over your final report asap. If you send your notes about Cook’s suspicious activity to Cook before he comes to your apartment to explain, his response is essentially “that’s odd. We gotta talk, but I gotta zip off for a while. Later!” If you send random stuff to your parents, you get a lot of “Son, why did you send this? I’m so confused! Aunt Blank sends her love.” I don’t know why, but you sending some random bullshit to your parents and confusing them tickles my funnybone. XD
I could comment on this Let’s Play forever because it’s two of my favorite reviewers playing one of my favorite obscure games, but I think I’ve babbled on long enough at this point. Thanks for sharing, you guys. Even if you didn’t enjoy playing it, I really enjoyed watching it. ^_^
Oh god this game! 😱  I can’t believe I watched all of this. Though at least I got to see how it ends.
When I played this when I was young, I kept getting stuck at the part with quizzing the homeless guy at the train tracks…. I didn’t have a cheating guide and oh god, the hours and days I spent in that warehouse staring at that shitty little quicktime window. I also shot all of the characters, multiple times.
Any chance for more Manic Episodes X-Files content? 😀