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eCS
Software |
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Game Review |
Hopkins
FBI for OS/2 Warp 4.0 |
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Year:
1998 Homepage
Link: Click
Here Manual Download:
Hopkins FBI for OS/2 Warp
4 Walk-Through: Click here! |
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A criminal organization, headed by the infamous terrorist Bernie Berckson, gained possession of two nuclear missiles, threatening the US government. They stated that if their demands were not met, they would launch them against civilian targets. As the US government stubbornly refused to negotiate, the two missiles were launched on California causing untold casualties. Two years later the leader of the criminal organization, Bernie Berckson, was captured by Special Agent Hopkins. Sentenced to death, Bernie Berckson was electrocuted twice. But, remaining inexplicably alive, he finally managed to escape.
Bernie Berckson is leading a new criminal organization. As Special Agent HOPKINS you are in charge to find and arrest him as anyone belonging to its gang. Hopkins FBI is a 1998 point-and-click adventure game from MP Entertainment, most famous for very large (at the time) amounts of gore. PolyEx Software, Inc. first released it for OS/2 Warp. The OS/2 beta release was in French. The small OS/2 market share necessitated cross platform development. (2) Installation: I was a little surprised to discover that the game has no installation routine. Instead, you install the game by opening the drive object for your CD-ROM and dragging the Hopkins folder to your hard drive or Desktop, although I wouldn't recommend the latter. Now, that is certainly very simple but it means that you will have create a program object yourself unless you want to start the game by double-clicking on the HOPKINS.EXE file. To run the game you need the CD in your CD Drive, it checks for sound files from what I can tell. You also cannot play right from the CD as it wants to write to the file. I'm not big into games that make you load a CD each time you want to play. Pretty annoying. Hopkins requires Warp 4 with functioning DIVE and DART systems for the video and sound. (3) Startup: Click on the HOPKINS icon and you will get the screen below (after an Introduction). Once the home screen comes up you have five choices, Play Game, Load Game, Options, Introduction, and Quit.
Not many options here and they are all pretty obvious. I want to go over the Options here though for a sec.
Again, not much here, I do want to note that no matter what I did, I was not able to increase the Frames per second. I'm not sure that was the max I could reach but that seems very low for max. Not many options which seems par for the course of games of this date. Anyways enough of that, lets play! (4) The Game: Before we start, I want to say I wanted to like this game...I mean I really wanted to like it. I am a HUGE fan of games like Sam & Max Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle, and especially Full Throttle. So when I first heard of this game I actually bought it (I have the CD of Hopkins FBI!).
I won't BS you though, I won't, this game is hard to chew on, there are some bugs such as when I ran into links in conversations that were, not broken, but would lead you to an illogical next choice. Not because I decided to pick something odd, no, it was just plan wrong! I got the keys from the apartment to use on my car, and then when I got to the car they would not show up so I had to start over, Hugh! Then I found out it was not a bug, but just very, very bad placement of the inventory. There are no instructions that come with the game so I actually had to get on the Internet to find out how to get there. I never had Hopkins Crash on me, thankfully, but once you play, I think you will understand some of the oddities that while maybe some of the “things” that happen in the game are not “bugs”, they sure seem like it. Its like the saying goes, if it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck, then it I'm guessing it's a duck! Anyways, once you hit on the “Play Game” button you find yourself in your apartment.
The game is easy to control with your standard single player adventure game 'point-and-click' interface. Use / Take / Go - these are the commands, easy but not new (Right Clicking). Left clicking takes you to different locations on the screen. Clicking the mouse and inventory, that's it... the same as Lesiure Suit Larry's series. The game is difficult; in an old school kind of way, if you mess up on something, there is no real way to fix it and your going to reload a past game. As stated above, the inventory screen only shows up if you move your mouse to the top right of the game window. This is also where you also save the game.
Talking is done similar to Monkey Island where you have a list of 3 to 5 responses to continue a conversation and what you choose will have some effect on the outcome. Voice acting is bad, almost to the point that its “so bad it's good”. I know they used to have programers do voice acting back in the day but this is so bad, it's like they purposely tried to make it campy and made it something worse, much worse.
The majority of puzzles consists of finding and using objects in the correct place or in leading conversations, to receive information. Conversations partly open new locations. One must also often serve machines as for example a film projector. There are no timed puzzles. Once you have to leave an area fast, in order not to be caught, but you are even told about that in advance. Puzzles, to a large extent, are imaginative. An example is one must start e.g. a fire in one room, in order to divert a guard in another room. And often there was this “aha” experience, if a solution appears somewhat far-fetched, but one thinks on the other hand nevertheless that it could function and then it really works. Occasionally some puzzles were quite difficult to comprehend, since there are very many locations and with that a lot of possibilities at the beginning already. So examining everything in every detail is very important. Besides, I didn't find one or another quite well hidden item and didn't find some solutions also. Thus I cribbed a few times from the walk through (which, I personally hate to do). There is a dedication to comic book-like art, each scene is a hand drawn, air-brushed comic page. The vibrancy of the colors in Hopkins is nice. This is not a complaint. The cut-scenes in the game are also very comic-book in style, and it should be said that they are chock-full of very gratuitous violence. This didn’t bother me but I know it’s a concern for some players. For example, one of first crime Hopkins come across is a female helicopter pilot dead at the scene.
Actually when it comes to cut-scenes, the are two types, the first is with the comic book style, the other is with CGI, both are nice in there own way, but only the CGI cut-scenes run at the correct speed. The comic book cut-scenes, on my machine run way too fast and I could not find any settings to slow it down. The story of Hopkins is convoluted, creepy and outrageous, just like the graphics, the story is comic-book pulp. It’s dark, melodramatic and sensationalist. Again, from my point of view, these are NOT complaints! Even for a dark comic book, however, there are plot points in Hopkins that seriously push the envelope. The puzzles in the game are pretty much of the inventory-fest variety. They are pretty logical for the most part, but there are a few head-scratchers as well, and many of them are VERY morbid.
About a third of the way through the game, the story takes a bizarre turn. I didn’t know if someone had slipped me mickey or what, as I stared stupidly at my computer screen. Even as I played through the sequence in question, I wasn’t sure if this was really part of a story that had just gotten a lot weirder, or if it was the longest and most complex Easter Egg of all time. By the time I got to the end of the game I realized it was the former. (5) Final Thoughts: I know it sounds like I did not like Hopkins FBI but I did, it just took sometime to grow on me. There were times I wanted to delete the game off my hard drive, but ultimately I kept playing because it was enjoyable. Hopkins FBI is not terribly long, but it’s full of fun locations – the various urban locations early in the game, including a bank, a museum, an indoor swimming pool, and a movie theater; you also get to sneak around in the woods, a tropical island, and a Big Fat Secret Underwater Fortress. Whenever the game felt a little too strange or preposterous, the graphics, with their high-gloss patina and vibrant palette (with a particularly pleasing emphasis on greens) would win me over again. The game has basic soundtrack that’s very appealing, under eCS, I never had an issue with the sound (such as skipping). There are options that allow you to adjust the volume levels between speech and music. Hopkins FBI for OS/2 is a generally a good game, obviously one of the best commercial games for OS/2 at the time. If you have not played it yet then do yourself a favor and download the full version at the top of the page and make sure you have the walk-though close at hand. (6) Updates after the review: None as of yet. |
