Blue Force

The Good
Not much.It had decent graphics and it was kind of fun to just work on the beat.

The Bad
When I first saw this game,I was excited as it was made by Jim Walls of the Police Quest fame,one of my favorite series of games.So,I quickly installed the game and to my surprise,it was quite bad.The writing was poor,the music was melodramatic and it has some of the worst cliche ridden storylines I've seen in a long time.There's so much else wrong with the game.The date of your parents death is never known as they say many different days.Sometimes you try to do something you know you have to yet you just can't,and sometimes you can miss a large piece of the plot,and when they explain it later,you have no idea what they're talking about.

The Bottom Line
A terrible adventure that features some very poor writing and some very,very,VERY large plotholes.

The Good
In the early 90s, a small game company called Tsunami Media produced a series of games. I didn't hear of them until I purchased a game called Blue Force created by California police officer (retired) Jim Walls of Police Quest fame. Jim left Sierra to work with Tsunami.

The story opens when a killer murders happy couple John and Jackie Ryan. Son Jake finds out about their murder and is forced to live with his grandmother who lives by the ocean. Eleven years later, he decides to become a police officer at the Jackson Beach Police Department, in order to find his parent's killer.

While investigating the murders, you have to deal with several situations, including a woman being held hostage by a crazed gunman which is one of the people you have to arrest, along with a drunk driver, and a person who is convicted of processing illegal firearms.

Your old-time friend, Lyle Jamison, assists you in your investigation to find the killer by helping you collect evidence that will help uncover the killer. When Jake once collects some evidence, he has flashbacks of the night his parents were killed.

The gameplay is similar to every Police Quest game, as you have to make arrests while doing an investigation. You perform your actions through a series of icons. Clicking your right-mouse button brings up a police badge that allows you to select only four actions: walk, talk, look, and touch. Your inventory is displayed at the bottom of the screen and you can click the icon with the left or right arrow key to cycle through your inventory. Above these is a counter that awards your points for picking up objects, making an arrest, etc.

Travelling from place to place is done by using your motorcycle. You do this by simply hopping on the cycle, and pressing the button marked “IGNITION” to turn it on. In a few seconds, you get a birds-eye view of the city. You only need to drag the cursor on several buildings until the game identifies them. Clicking the cursor on the identified building travels you to that location. The cycle also comes equipped with a radio, which makes it possible to receive messages from Dispatch telling you that a situation is in progress, and to respond with the appropriate radio codes, discussed in the game’s manual.

The graphics are beautifully hand-drawn and all of the actors are digitally inserted in the game. And as for the sound and music, they are average. Either of them can be played on an Adlib, Sound Blaster, and Roland. Even if you can also play music through the PC Speaker (which doesn’t produce much sound output), speech cannot be played through it.

The Bad
There is also a CD-ROM version of Blue Force, which I brought ages ago. Along with an interview of Jim Walls and some CD tracks of the game’s music, it is basically the floppy version being placed on the CD.

I can’t think of something to whinge about, except the map. Instead of the birds-eye view, you could get to fiddle with the bike’s controls, stopping at each red traffic light and making the right turns in order to get to your location faster. This is seen in PQ1, PQ1VGA, and PQ3. This feature is missed in Blue Force.

Finally, as Tsunami made the effort to add speech in the installation program when you select a soundcard, what was wrong with adding some speech in the game, particularly in the CD-ROM version?

The Bottom Line
If you like all the Police Quest series, or if you want to practice the techniques used in the game before deciding to become a police officer, Blue Force would be the game for you. ****

The Good
When I went out to buy a game, I chose this one for two reasons. One, because the graphics looked fairly outstanding for its time. Secondly, it was designed by Jim Wells, one of my (then) industry favorites, who had brought us the first three incarnations of the Police Quest series. I'll talk about reason one now, and reason two a dialog box later.

The graphics for this game are great. Albeit, any screenshots that showed live digital actors did it for me way back in the mid-90's. The backgrounds are drawn nicely, and the actors integrated into these backgrounds to nice effect. My biggest complaint with the graphics were that everyone had a vertically squashed head during closeups, but that can be forgiven.

The gameplay is typical adventure fare (pre-Myst). If you've ever played a Sierra adventure game immediately after they got rid of the text parser, you know what I'm talking about. The mouse does everything via icons and hotspots on the screen. It doesn't really do anything new.

The storyline is fairly pleasing. It is not up to par with the Police Quest games, and it actually forgoes a lot of the police investigation elements that made the series so intriguing. While nothing special and with predictable plot twists, it serves the game.

The Bad
My biggest complaint was that it was very short. That, and the puzzles were very easy (although the two kind of go hand-in-hand). I was able to finish this game in about six or seven hours. And after paying $60 for it, I was not a happy person.

I was dissapointed at the overall quality of the game.  It just didn't have that Jimmy feeling that was in his other three games.  As I mentioned before, alot of the police procedures and conflicts that occured in the PQ games are absent.  In its place is something that I would almost call 'action sequences'.  While they are not actual action moments in gameplay (as is common today), the scenarios and situations are action packed.  Hostages, terrorists, gunfights and the like.  This may not be a neccesarily bad thing, it does create the tension, but when you go from one dangerous situation to another, it gets tired.<br><br>**The Bottom Line**<br>This could be a good game.  It's from a man with a good track record, and it had appears to have had the production values concerning the aesthetic quality.  But it's incredible simplicity and short length do not make it worth the money.