 By Brad Cook “In the criminal justice system,” the opening to the popular TV show Law & Order explains, “there are two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.” |
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 Have You Reached a Verdict? The moment when you learn if all your hard work paid off. |
A Rich Experience
Like the TV series, Dead on the Money opens with a murder. A woman lies dead in Central Park and you and your partner, Lennie Briscoe, arrive on the scene to gather clues and interview witnesses and suspects. The facts you learn there lead you to more Manhattan locations as you interview more people and try to figure out who likely committed the crime. When you think your evidence is compelling enough to make a murder charge stick, you send in the police to make an arrest and move over to the district attorney’s office, where you work with assistant DA Serena Southerlyn to prosecute the case and return a guilty verdict.
Listen to This Guy. Veteran detectives like Lennie Briscoe offer a lot of sage advice. Take it.
“We think it will take the average player about 35 hours to identify [the perpetrator of the crime] and successfully prosecute the case,” explains Ariella Lehrer, CEO of Legacy Games, which developed Dead on the Money. “There are many possible ways to lose: not arresting a person in time, getting your case thrown out in court, receiving a not guilty verdict, and so forth.”
The game features 25 voice-over actors, including Jerry Orbach, Elisabeth Röhm, and S. Epatha Merkerson, who reprise their TV roles of Briscoe, Southerlyn, and police lieutenant Anita Van Buren, respectively. You interact with more than 50 characters and explore 40 locations for clues (complete with the distinctive place, date, and time stamps and “tum-tum” sound effects used in the show). The scenes you watch as the story unfolds are drawn from the 400 possible ones in the game; the ones you see depend on the actions you take.
Where Were You That Night? Make sure you ask the right questions or you may miss some important facts.
“Leave no stone unturned,” advises Sean Langley, manager of Macintosh software development for Transgaming Technologies, which ported the game to the Mac. “In search scenes, grab whatever you think is remotely related to the crime and send it away for analysis.
“And when you do interviews,” he adds, “it’s really important to focus. In some cases you actually get docked points for asking bad questions. Think ‘Is this question really relevant?’ and ‘Will this person realistically know the answer?’”
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Whodunit?
“‘Ripped from the headlines’ is how the creators of the TV show like to think about their storylines,” says Lehrer, “and that is also true of our game.” In this case, the game nods in the direction of recent business section headlines with the story of Jenny Russ, an investment banker under investigation by the feds over a shady IPO and a victim of murder.
Drag-and-Drop Simplicity. The game’s “file” interface efficiently organizes your collected data.
Like any good “whodunit?”, Dead on the Money requires you to asses the evidence at hand, gather more facts and clues, and try to figure out how poor Russ ended up the way she did. You quickly learn that more than one person had a motive to commit the murder: she recently sued her own daughter, and she had just broken up with her boyfriend, who invested in some of her business deals. The killer could easily be one, both, or none of them. Remember: the show often employs red herrings to come up with a surprise ending.
Dick Wolf, the creator of Law & Order, insisted that Legacy hire writers with experience working on the show, a smart choice according to Lehrer. “That way, we could ensure that the writers would understand the characters, who speak in a tone that is consistent with the TV version,” she says.
You Are Here. Scour the length and width of Manhattan for important clues and key facts.
“As a result, when we worked with the three cast members during the voice-over sessions, they all remarked how similar the script was to what they were used to on the set.”
The main difference, of course, is that now you’re the star of the drama.
If you liked this game, check out:
Feeble Files|
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