Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy

The Good
Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy is a third-person futuristic/sci-fi adventure game developed by Trecision and published by Team 17. Anyone who still owns an Amiga will know the British company released high-profile titles such as Alien Breed, Project-X, Assassin, and SuperFrog, among others. So it’s not surprising that this title has also made its way onto the machine.

Trecision has been taking cues from Beneath a Steel Sky as well; the game is set in Union City, and the main character – Joshua Reeve – has the same personality as Robert Foster. The city in question has been plagued by a series of terrorist attacks by a group calling themselves Genesis. You have been hired by your old friend, Hugh Martens, to investigate the disappearance of Simon Ruby, a colleague who was in the middle of the investigation when he vanished.

Anyone who has played Beneath a Steel Sky should feel right at home with the interface. You have a single mouse cursor that can be moved around the screen at will. Text appears if a person or object can be interacted with. Clicking the left mouse button examines an object on screen, while clicking the right one allows Reeve to manipulate that object. Moving the cursor down near the bottom of the screen brings up a BASS-style inventory. Clicking on items causing it to rotate, allowing you to use it on screen or with another inventory item.

Moving the cursor over the edge of the screen allows you to walk between locations. If it is a new location, the words “Go to...” will appear, otherwise the location’s name is spelled out. You can click the left mouse button while the text appears to see Reeve walk toward that location, or even better, click the right button to teleport Reeve over there. It will just be like Phantasmagoria 2, where the main character had the ability to teleport around the room.

Although most of the puzzles in the game are inventory-based, some require you to jot down some notes. An example is a puzzle in the zoo. You have to match up the symbols according to a book you find in the zoo library in order to open a passage within the Sphinx’s base. There is a bit of pixel hunting as well. To complete the aforementioned Sphinx puzzle, you have to click in the middle of the puzzle, in an exact spot.

Reeve has to explore over 80 locations to get what needs to be done. Trecision has also used idea from “Blade Runner” for some of these locations. There are flying cars, automation robots, mechanical exhibits at the zoo, and even virtual assistants that are right up there with the Replicants. These hand-drawn backgrounds look good, and the soundtrack to the game is fantastic, with most of the music blending in with the situation. My favorite piece was when Reeve is exploring Union Square.

Most of the dialogue in the game is mostly restricted to Reeve telling you what he is doing. Subtitles are presented in the AmigaOS 2.x font and are turned on by default. From time to time, there is a long cut-scene with lots of dialogue, to give the player some more background information, and these cut-scenes can pause to present the player with a list of choices they can click on. I found it a bit hard to follow the plotlines, but games like this are just like the Matrix movies: play it enough times and eventually you’ll understand everything.

Up to twelve save games can be stored, and these are presented as thumbnails with descriptions below them. You can also load a game right from the autorun menu instead of starting up the game first. Nightlong spans three compact discs, and you are required to swap between them at some point in the game. To make up for this, the installation completes in no time.

The Bad
There isn’t anything bad about this game.

The Bottom Line
Nightlong is an futuristic sci-fi adventure game released around the same time that AAA companies were killing the genre. It is an excellent title that pays homage to "Blade Runner" and Beneath a Steel Sky. The graphics and sound is excellent, and the game has a reasonable dose of puzzles, most of them inventory-based. Even though the plot can be confusing, don't let that stop you from enjoying it.

The Good
The game has some great animations, and the puzzles are very logical and clearly thought out. Few scenes had any hard to find rooms, and the layout of the game was very user friendly, much like any other point-and-click game. The animations are very similar to Blade Runner, and can be very funny at times. The installation file is very small.

The Bad
Although it's describe as a Blade Runner style game, it's not as entertaining or as fun. It also has crashed on me a bit, and i couldn't complete the whole game because a glitch occurs at the Sphynx section of the game, you can download a patch for this, but it still didn't want to work. Sometimes the speech stuffed up a bit because it's being ran more from the CD drive than the computer, and i don't have a slow computer or drive, but i do have Windows XP. If your computer is based on Windows NT or XP i would check out the download first to see if the game works.

The Bottom Line
A great game for ages 15+, the puzzles can be a little obscure at times but end up to be quite logical. Based in a futuristic world with many locations and puzzling technology. Contains a light sense of humour and some fun interactive games, the game is very much like Blade Runner.

The Good
Set in a Blade Runner like future, where animals in zoos are only robotic recreations, you play an investigator helping out an old friend. From breaking into apartments and terrorist compounds to swinging across a subway line, this game has a true action feel absent in most adventure games. The locations you enter are well designed and the characters are great. Good voice acting. Hopefully more of these will come out.

The Bad
My number one pet peeve in games is when designers throw in parts that just add length to game play. In some games that would be complicated jumping puzzles or endless mazes. In Nightlong, they have an algebra problem. There might be some way to circumvent this, but after hours of thrilling gameplay, I had to sit down and solve for x and y. Arrggghhh.

The Bottom Line
This game was actually very cool. It does have that Blade Runner cyberpunk noirish feel, but the story is great and most of the puzzles are logical. Great graphics and characters too.