Hypocrite.
n : a person who professes beliefs and opinions that he does not hold [syn: dissembler, phony, phoney, pretender]
I cannot decide on the best way to describe The Daedalus Encounter. It's like a movie. A 'B' movie but it is reasonably enjoyable to watch 'B' Movie. It stars Tia Carrera of Waynes World and True Lies fame and Christian Bocher of some, err... fame.
The film is set in space. The back ground to the story is something like this: an intergalactic war has very recently ended. Ari and Zack (Carrera and Bocher) have been demobbed and have decided to start up a space salvage operation.
While on route to a retrieval site the salvage ship crashes into an organic alien craft.
The team disembark and start on a quest to find a way to save their damaged ship and/or get home by investigating the mysterious alien craft.
For a film, the acting is occasionally stilted. Carrera and Bocher sometimes seem a little uneasy acting in what must have been a blank room. All the graphics and scenery would have been added later as they are all computer generated. But, as professional (ish) actors they just about hold it together and occasionally some chemistry between the two actors is apparent.
The script is a little stilted to. When it works, it works well. Here is one of the high-lights:
[An Alien corpse is revealed when someone switches on the floodlight]
Zack: Whoa! God, those things are ugly.
Ari: Why Zack, I always thought you found them quite... attractive.
Zack: Hey, I was drunk that night, okay? And you swore to me it was female.
On the other hand when it doesn't work, it does get a little painful to watch.
The other problem is that sometimes it is required for Zach and Ari to interact with the screen, something I guess that is unnatural for a movie actor and because of this, things do feel a little awkward sometimes.
But I'm forgetting, this isn't a movie. It is a video game. So, assumedly, there must be some game-play.
This is where the character you play comes into things. Your avatar is, as Christian Bochers characters puts it, a brain in a box and you make up the 3rd crew member of the ship. From the storyline given you lost your body in an battle. Scientists managed to save your brain and were working on fixing your body. Well, they were fixing your body until an impatient Zach and Ari turned up and stole your boxed brain.
Game-play takes the form of puzzles and little interactive sequences. Progress for all characters in the game is halted until your characters, Cassey, solves a particular puzzle which usually involves solving a mathematical sequence problem or colour location puzzle. This type of thing is really the bread and butter for these types of game.
At other times it is necessary for your character to navigate a maze, save another character from a big fall, shoot some aliens and various other minor missions.
These objectives are reasonably well scripted into the plot. So the events don't look at all out of place.
All the puzzles are reasonably enjoyable and the balance of difficulty is achieved well. They do sometimes totter on the brink of annoying but then you solve it and then you feel better about it.
So, it is a movie you interact with. An Interactive Movie. Oh god no. How did this slip through the net? Worse yet, I enjoyed it!
It is an enormously well polished title. The graphics are spectacular and the whole thing is very smooth. The human actor to computer generated scenery is well integrated too. There is no hovering above the floor or any sense of unreality about the alien location.
Daedalus Encounter is spread across 4CD's, which makes it something of an Interactive Movie epic. That's one more CD than Psychic Detective and two more than Creature Shock.
To sum it up; Daedalus Encouter is 7th Guest or 11th Hour set in space with Tia Carrera.
And if liking it makes me a hypocrite (see my other reviews for my unilateral condemnation of Interactive Movies) then I guess so be it.
I have two copies, so it's not rare at all. (In this house!)
3DO Kid.
