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Dream Chronicles
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Graphics & Sound:
Bringing classic PC games to XBox 360 was a touchy subject when Microsoft introduced the console. A certain number of people predicted the console would end up as a clearinghouse for PC games, maybe envisioning the kind of shovelware that has actually become more typical of Nintendo Wii than the other platforms. Sure, there are a slew of PC games released by off-brand publishers and crowding the virtual aisles on Shareware sites worldwide. What Microsoft has actually done is to create a platform with XBLA that is now attracting a wide enough variety of gamers to justify bringing niche titles like Dream Chronicles to the party. What this game lacks in graphical sophistication, it makes up for with style and substance. Each set piece always has a touch of high art, but not to the extent that it feels forced. Musical touches and great sound effects round out the presentation, making you feel like you're really on a journey or part of a story. Where so many games have taken the hidden-object genre and turned it into a meaningless pastiche of pretty pages, Dream Chronicles starts with the premise that narrative is important, and builds a great game experience. What doesn't work as well, especially while playing on a smaller screen, is the framed presentation of Dream Chronicles and the sometimes gritty visuals. The difference between playing one foot away from a computer screen and 10 feet away from a television can be the difference between a good and bad time. Playing the trial will give you a good sense of things, and the payoff for sticking around is having the chance to play an extremely well thought-out game.
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Gameplay:
The continuity between scenes in Dream Chronicles makes it quite different than most of the casual titles you've played recently. Fans of the game will know this, but relatively few casual titles that weren't arcade-based or board games have appeared for XBLA. Getting into the true spirit of Dream Chronicles means reliving the classic adventure games of our youth, games that stressed design, story, and intellectual challenge. Everything here is driving toward a somewhat diluted version of what Myst accomplished, but in a much more portable format. The moody setting, where a mother wakes to find her family pulled into a dream state that she must overcome, takes Dream Chronicles out of the "cute and cuddly" realm. It still feels like a casual game in the sense that it gives you fairly simple challenges, drawing from hidden-object conventions like combining found objects to solve puzzles. Objects are worked creatively into the background, and there's a "game within the game" that has you collecting crystals to complete decorative objects. What's new in the XBLA version is an option for cooperative gameplay, a nice touch considering the move from office to living room that one associates with porting PC games to a console. Otherwise, this is a fairly literal translation of the game that earned huge accolades and spawned many inferior imitators.
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Difficulty:
I'm convinced that any good adventure game has a heightened level of difficulty, for the simple reason that it doesn't lead its players. When you are faced with an open room, what do you do? If you have the proper context and objective in mind, it becomes simple to think about what you need and how to use it when you find it. Dream Chronicles does a nice job of mixing these results-oriented scenarios with others that don't reveal their goals until you gather a few objects. Liberal hints are sprinkled throughout, but less of the "do this" variety and more of the "you can't use that now" type. It's a game that requires some reading, to fully understand the prompts along the way, including hints. Many times, the hints will be passed to you through scripted sequences where you'll pick up on something that leads you to explore an object in the room. Clicking around like crazy - the adventure equivalent of button-mashing - can produce results, but nothing like the experience of thinking your way through the game. Playing deliberately is fine, but it's not typical of younger gamers. Keep this one in mind for the group between pre-teens and the imaginative adult, and you'll be fine.
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Game Mechanics:
The weakest spot here is shoehorning mouse-and-click gameplay into a controller format. Especially with no option to adjust sensitivity, the pointer seems to drag terribly across the screen. A positive expression for this would be to say there's good, fine control available. A slightly less positive expression would be to say that I sometimes felt I could go out for a cup of coffee while waiting for the pointer to reach its destination... Click targets felt a bit loose, but that probably had as much to do with being unsure of the graphics as anything in the mapping. The only other controls in the game are button presses to confirm your choices, and basic menu navigation. If it feels spare, it's because there weren't a lot of extra bells or whistles thrown in on the way to XBLA. It's basically a nostalgia trip for console gamers to appreciate what became kind of a big deal on the PC years ago. If you've enjoyed adventure games and casual titles, but haven't checked out Dream Chronicles, you owe it to yourself to at least grab the demo. There's no doubt that the whole genre took a giant leap forward after this game hit the market.
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-Fridtjof, GameVortex Communications AKA Matt Paddock |
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