Csi Las Vegas Online Game
Fans of the leading CBS crime drama join virtual versions of Gil Grissom, Catherine Willows, and the rest of the Las Vegas Crime Scene Investigation team, to apply cutting-edge forensic methods and good, old-fashioned police work toward the solution of a deviously puzzling murder case. As in earlier CSI adventures, an accessible point-and-click interface allows players to speak with other characters and examine noteworthy objects, but unlike previous games in the series, 3 Dimensions of Murder runs on a real-time 3D game engine that allows for more complete, enveloping interaction in each crime scene. CSI: 3 Dimensions of Murder was developed by the veteran computer adventure crafters at Telltale Games.
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Add to Wishlist. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is a fast-paced drama about a team of forensic investigators in Las Vegas who are on the case 24/7, scouring the scene, collecting the irrefutable evidence, and finding the missing. A new threat has enshrouded the neon streets of Sin City, and it’s going to take some familiar faces to stare it down. William Petersen and Jorja Fox return to the roles they made famous — and to the crime drama that made CBS history — in CSI: Vegas. Join Gil Grissom, Catherine Willows and the rest of the CSI Las Vegas cast to break down the evidence and bring suspects to justice in five all-new, bizarre crimes. Inspired by the hit TV show, CSI: Miami gives players the opportunity to experience forensic investigation first hand.
Not many television shows can claim to have affected the criminal justice system, but prosecutors these days are finding it more difficult to get convictions from juries in cases where little physical evidence exists, with defense attorneys playing up a lack of DNA evidence for their clients. All because of a series of television shows called CSI (it's called the 'CSI effect,' in fact). Unsurprisingly, videogames based on the show continue to appear, and the latest, CSI: 3 Dimensions of Murder ('CSI 3D'), puts you in the role of a new criminalist in Las Vegas to solve five new cases with the original crew.
One of the big selling points with CSI 3D is the move to a 3D environment, but it's a bit misleading to call it that. You won't be running around freely like you've come to expect with 3D games, but rather you're limited to pivoting in place at key hotspots and rotating objects. The environmental graphics are decent, but the character graphics look about four years old. People stand stiffly and they have 'plastic' hair; it's even more noticeable in the recreations of the cast members.
The voice acting is as uneven as the graphics. The non-CSI characters are fine and sound like they were recorded in a proper studio. The voiceovers for the main cast, however, are the audio equivalent of a train wreck. Eric Szmanda sounds like the only one who really gave it his best effort; Gary Dourdan and George Eads are so bad, you can't help but wonder if they had just been told they were fired from the next season; and the voices for Catherine Willows and Sara Sidle (not performed by Marg Helgenberger and Jorja Fox) are like nails on a chalkboard. Even the best efforts aren't enough to salvage what sound like recordings done in a noisy garage while standing ten feet from the microphone. We've heard amateur machinima that sounds better.
Since the CSI series is the sort of concept just ready-made for adventure games, good gameplay could've salvaged this title. The mini-mystery format -- searching for and then analyzing clues, questioning suspects -- is all stuff you'd already expect in any point-and-click adventure game. In fact, CSI 3D does this well. Each of the five mysteries begins with Gil giving you a quick rundown of what your crime scene looks like. You'll visit the crime scene and question any suspects or witnesses and collect evidence. Then it's back to the lab. As you uncover more clues, new locations might become available, along with new witnesses to question.
The real downside to this is that you can't fail. You'll always uncover the real criminal, and you never have to worry about contaminating evidence using incorrect procedures. The game leads you along on rails and is more like a TV show than it should be. It would've been nice to actually be penalized for using the wrong tools and let you run the risk of actually screwing up the case. As it is, it's so easy, the game even narrows down the tools you need when you find a new clue, has your CSI overseer (one of the main characters of the show) tell you where a clue should be analyzed if you pick the wrong machine, and provides a hint feature that will give you a breakdown of what you need to proceed. While these hints are nice to keep you from being stuck for too long, it also gives you so many answers that it makes the game little more than a clickable version of the show.
We experienced a few minor bugs during our testing, such as dialogue overlapping or repeating, and a flub where a Glock 22 was referred to as a twenty-two caliber pistol, made all the more amusing by a character going to great length to mention the ultra-realism of the weapons in their game (which became doubly amusing in a video flashback showing the gun with an external hammer).
If there's a single word to describe CSI: 3 Dimensions of Murder, it would be 'uneven.' It's a faithful recreation of the TV show, but that isn't really a positive endorsement. TV shows are passive entertainment; computer games are not. Unless you just love everything CSI-related, give this one a pass.
People who downloaded CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - 3 Dimensions of Murder have also downloaded:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Dark Motives, CSI: Miami, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Fatal Conspiracy , CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Deadly Intent, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Hard Evidence, CSI: NY - The Game, Law & Order: Criminal Intent
It was bound to happen sooner or later. CSI's fascinating emphasis on forensic science combined with the intrigue of police drama made it an obvious choice for a game, one that could dust off the adventure genre's cobwebs and give audiences an excuse to use their gray matter as they lift fingerprints, swab sticky substances, and hold magnifying glasses to find trace evidence. The game would ideally be like a Sherlock Holmes mystery but with hipper technology to play around with. In the world of CSI, a strand of hair or dandruff flake could be enough to put a suspect behind bars. What better way to promote the top-rated drama than to have players actually do the detective work?
CSI offers a series of five cases, each led by one of the five cast members of the Las Vegas Crime Lab. As an intern, players are silent observers of the crime scene and work by themselves to collect the necessary evidence that leads to a suspect's arrest, satisfying the three conditions of means, motive, and method. The game is played from a first-person viewpoint with an icon-based interface along the bottom of the screen that lets players access one of 14 tools, jump to the LVPD office, crime lab, or autopsy room, or view collected evidence and case files. Crime scenes are the primary focus of a player's attention, with more destinations opening up as the evidence warrants.
Unfortunately, the developers must have overlooked the majority of adventure games in the decade prior to CSI's release, because there is nothing remotely interesting or new about the gameplay. To be blunt, the game looks and feels painfully out of date. Each crime scene looks awful, not because it's a site of a gruesome murder, but because it's blurry and pixilated, making the goal of trying to click on items in plain view difficult. It's hard to determine if there's something of interest on the walls or along the floor when everything looks like a blotch or a blemish, so players end up waving their mouse up and down the nondescript areas until the pointer turns green, which signifies a 'hotspot' and thus an important piece of evidence.
The biggest problem with the graphics is the developer's obvious inexperience in creating a full 360-degree panoramic view, which involves players moving the mouse to the far edges of the screen to spin the room as if it were a seamless whole. Unfortunately, players can only look at specific areas in a room, so if they manage to notice an aquarium or dresser, they can't investigate them further -- for potential clues or just for fun. With only five cases and maybe ten locations in the entire game, everything in the environment should have been clickable, with players making decisions on what is valuable evidence and what isn't. Yet everything in this game is important, reducing the game and the process of forensics to a basic exercise in pointing-and-clicking.
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Clicking on a hotspot, assuming players find one amidst the visual murkiness, takes them to a close-up view of the area. The graphics are much better in these views, since they are generally composed of high-resolution still photos. Most environments are dark, however, so players should be prepared to adjust their monitors so they don't miss evidence. Once they are in the zoomed-in view, players can use the tools for detection (magnifying glass, ultraviolet light, etc.) and then collection (cotton swabs, tweezers, and so forth). After evidence is collected, it goes into a player's inventory to be processed at the crime lab.
Selecting the crime lab takes players to a single screen, where Greg Sanders always leans back in his chair in a slow animation sequence and says one or two things while the supervising CSI member stands in the corner. The same boring routines occur in both the autopsy room and Jim Brass' office; the view always remains the same and players are extremely limited in their actions. In the lab, players just click and drag most evidence to Greg and he will say what it is. Other times, players are allowed to do some basic comparisons using the microscope and computer. The microscope is used maybe once or twice the entire game to compare hair samples. Players place them on the platter and their partner automatically says if it's a match or not, so there's not even the satisfaction of making a determination on your own.
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The computer is useful for comparisons and searches on tire tread patterns, names, and fingerprints, which again, is a simple matter of dragging the evidence to the screen and pressing the search or compare button. As in the hair samples, players aren't allowed to analyze the material on their own, just to sit back and listen to the results. Unfortunately, that's essentially the entire game. The ratio of listening to characters talk to actually doing something is completely out of whack, and players shouldn't expect to do much of anything except for clicking on evidence and choosing from a list of questions to ask during interviews (there's no reward or penalty for asking or not asking the 'right' ones because the questions are, in effect, all important).
There is so much that could have been done with the game: puzzles where players have to assemble shattered glass fragments to determine the point of impact; helping to reconstruct facial features on unidentified skulls using clay; identifying fingerprint matches using the actual point system used by scientists; examining DNA strands, etc. Instead players are given a game that not only looks dated, but also suffers from the same pixel-hunting exercises that doomed early-computer adventure games. The game does not do justice to the television show and simplifies forensic science to embarrassing levels (players can swab a hotel room television but not the faucet to a blood-soaked sink, and the TV only reveals one fingerprint). As an adventure, CSI should be considered DOA -- its gameplay, clueless.
Graphics: The graphics are simply outdated, with few frames of animation, grainy video clips, and blurry panoramic views that make finding evidence difficult.
Sound: Excellent voice acting from the original cast of the show, though there's little music. Ambient sound plays in the background of the crime scenes.
Enjoyment: Those new to adventure games may get a kick out it, but don't expect to do much other than pointing and clicking.
Replay Value: Adventure games as a rule don't lend themselves well to repeated plays, and this one is no different. Players can try to collect more evidence to improve their rating, but doing so only unlocks character sketches.
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People who downloaded CSI: Crime Scene Investigation have also downloaded:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Dark Motives, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - 3 Dimensions of Murder, CSI: Miami, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Fatal Conspiracy , CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Deadly Intent, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Hard Evidence, CSI: NY - The Game, Law & Order: Criminal Intent