This month's issue of OPM has a demo of Lifeline. I've been tracking that game for a while now, because I adore the concept. Rio - your regular ol' hot video game heroine - is stranded inside an wrecked space station. You're also stuck there, but locked in the security command center, with camera-eye views of everywhere she happens to be. So the game revolves around you actually telling her (via the PS2 headset) where to go and what to do. You're supposed to work together - you instructing, she following - to get her out alive. And I assume there's some kind of Resident Evil / Disaster Report plot conspiracy behind it all; there always is.
"Run." "Shoot!" "Go to the table." "Look under the sink." Almost like an old King's Quest game, just with your voice instead of typing.
With a game that runs on voice recognition, it's pretty obvious where it will live or die: how well it reads your voice. And guess what, it's spotty! At least, the demo was... and every review so far has been rather cruel about it.
When it works, it's amazing. It can feel like a real conversation with a real person. "Drink the wine." And she says "No, I don't feel like drinking anything right now. Let's check out something else."
Other times she's just not paying attention. "Read the report." "OK. I'll go to the hallway." It looks like you could spend hours just fighting the voice-recog system. What's worse, she necessarily has to play extremely stupid for the game to include you... why should I have to tell another human being to "Dodge!" the incoming attack of a nasty space slug? And if you tell her to "Walk," she walks in endless circles until you tell her what to do next.
That really breaks the illusion, and that's what is going to kill this game. I'd prefer one of two solutions: either I do less (instruct less) so she looks less stupid, or I get some kind of kickass remote control robot so I can handle the fighting myself.
Once I told her to look at something, and she ate a healing capsule instead. Gah!
