Successful games like Zelda, Ultima, Baldur's Gate and others dazzle us with an atmospheric fantasy world, challenge by fighting against hostile forces and offer a lot of experience for further survival. The top-down perspective – i.e. moving on a kind of world map – is a striking common feature of the aforementioned classics. The player has a top-down view of the environment and his avatar, but without taking over the avatar's field of vision and thus his role – as is usual in 3D shooters. In this kind of flight over the actual scene, the player is a bit further away from the action and gets a more abstract picture of the game's progress. The mentioned game titles nevertheless manage to captivate the player without much effort and integrate him into the story. This is achieved by the perfection of the well-known technical elements like graphics, music, game mechanics and also the psychological incentives, which reward a fight with progress in the story and increase the experience points.
Last year, LucasArts closed its doors. Instead of spreading even more malice than already out there about them not having produced good games for many years anyway, we would like to go back to the beginning of this development studio under the name of 'Lucasfilm Games'. One of their first two games called itself Rescue on Fractalus.
The first thing you may notice about this title and what probably made you wonder about the other games from this studio, too, is that there seems to be no connection with the 'Lucas' name brand. Everybody would have expected something along the lines of one of the most famous science fiction films of all times, wouldn't you think?
A murder mystery works very well in confined space, because it tickles the audience in a very special way – it appears 'solvable' as all the information seems to be at hand. Agatha Christie knew it when she wrote the quintessential Murder on the Orient Express and similar setups have appeared many times in the genre since then. One issue with the classic train setup is the 'confined space' aspect: A train can usually stop at any time, at the next station or outsiders can enter it. That is why Orient Express has it stuck in a snow storm in the middle of nowhere. No special events are necessary for aircrafts flying over one of the oceans in order for them to be inaccessible, making them probably even better suited for this setup. The Zinderneuf is a Zeppelin – extremely convenient due to its long travel time over the Atlantic! The airship is almost halfway on the way from London to New York when a murder occurs. The player, a detective, has got 15 suspects and 12 hours remaining until arrival.
