The Graphics Card of Death

Good day. Y'know, I've never reviewed a game before. I'm going to give it a bash.

You may have noticed that the BBC have made a Doctor Who downloadable game available, City of the Daleks. They've advertised it quite heavily after episodes for the past few weeks, and as a Doctor Who fan for many, many years, I thought I'd give it a look.

The first obstacle of the game is to get it downloaded, and you do this by checking to see if you meet the minimum requirements. Getting bored of waiting for that, I decided to download it anyway. What could go wrong?

After a few hours, I got to the title screen.

As you can see, they've been very faithful to the TARDIS design, and just to make sure they've hammered the point home, they've used the image several times over. I'm guessing that in the storyline there's been some sort of temporal crash that has resulted in the Doctor's TARDIS smashing into itself several times over, damaging its Chameleon Circuit. It's this kind of fan-pleasing attention to detail that is sometimes lacking from the parent show. I tried entering DystopianFuchsia as a name, but had to drop a T to get it to fit. Bah.

In order to appease old gamers who experienced long loading times in the 80s, you have to sit through the loading screen featuring the unpopular new Daleks for about quarter of an hour. They've thought of everything; realising that it won't just be new fans downloading this game, but older fans who've not played anything since Way of the Exploding Fist or Sweevo's World, they've kept a loading screen firmly in place for that length of time so as not to scare anyone by new fangled technology. 

Finally, the game itself loads, and there's a cut scene voiced by Matt Smith and Karen Gillan. It's choppy and sporadic, again enforcing my suspicion that there's something afoot in the time vortex. Half-sentences cropping up in seemingly the wrong order; it's a bit like the Red Dwarf episode White Hole. 

They've done something very clever here. By showing the Doctor constantly mid-regeneration, but voiced by the current Doctor, the player can decide which Doctor he's playing, but new fans won't be isolated. The companion is forever blending into the background and its skin changing, obviously a nod to 80s robotic failure companion Kamelion. Again, the TARDIS interior is as jumbled as its exterior. There is definitely something wrong with time. Can the Doctor sort it out? Let's get into the game and find out.

The gameplay is quite interesting, and again is geared at older fans; as you move the mouse to turn the Doctor, it pauses for about 3 minutes, designed no doubt to emulate the pacing of a seven-part Jon Pertwee epic. The backgrounds are, we're repeatedly told in the game, representative of a devastated 1963 London, and to further tie it into 'classic' Who, they do indeed look like mismatched Chromakey effects. Brilliant stuff!

It is a tough game; the Dalek-created desolation has rendered the landscape very difficult to traverse or make out, making it one of the Doctor's biggest challenges yet. As you can see, I didn't last very long. This indicates a longevity that's rare in games nowadays. I just pity the poor saps whose PCs aren't powerful enough to portray this game the way the programmers intended.

Doctor Who: The Adventure Games Episode One: City of the Daleks is available to download for free now on the BBC website, if you own a supercomputer with massive tape-to-tape reels like Bond villains used to have.

Don't forget to keep the votes coming in for Shit Britons. Post a comment on this post or the previous one to nominate. 

Coming up later this week, my adventures in the UK's only Creationist Zoo, more Children's Television: The Re-Imagining requests, and something about Pearl Jam, providing I manage to get there intact. Stay tuned!

Oh yeah, thanks to Michael Legge and James Hingley for plugging Shit Britons (and indeed Dystopian Fuchsia) on Precious Little Podcast #37. At the very least, Keith Lemon/Leigh Francis has been added to the nominations now. Some very interesting votes so far. Vote as many times as you like. Why not, eh?