Black Box

The Low-End Mac Portable Gaming Page

X-FILES: THE GAME

Excellent adventure/interactive film. If you are an X-phile, this is a must-have. If you are not, it is still a recommended choice. No knowledge of tv series is required. In this game, you don't play neither Mulder nor Scully. You are a FBI agent assigned to the case of disappearance of Mulder and Scully, and your character never heard of the "X-files" - thus the scenario allows a logical introduction into the story for a complete beginner. Like the series, it's more a mystery thriller than a sci-fi (contrary to stereotypical views). The game has intriguing suspense, lots of puzzles to solve, and provides entertainment for few weeks. Game comes as hybrid Mac/PC CD-ROM set. Harddrive installation is Windows-style unconvenient. It is needlessly long (how can you rationally explain how copying 250 mbytes of data from a 12x CD-ROM can take a bloody half an hour!). It creates a folder "FOX INTERACTIVE" and then puts an actual game folder in it. What a moronic idea of having software sorted by vendor, not by category! Thanks God it's Mac, not Win, and you can delete the 'FOX INTERACTIVE' folder and move the game somewhere else.

OVERALL RATING: A must-have for the TV-series fans. Recommended for everyone else. Unless you really HATE paranoid science-fiction, you'll love this game.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: PowerMac 603e 120 MHz (166 MHz recommended) MacOS 7.1 (7.5 recommended); 250 Mb free hard drive space; 12 Mb free RAM with Virtual Memory enabled or 18 Mb free RAM with Virtual Memory disabled (32 Mb system RAM recommended); 4X CD-ROM (8X recommended); Graphics card supporting Thousands of Colours at 640 x 480 resolution (Millions of Colours recommended)

CD-ROM: It is possible - and manual even helps doing it - to install all the 6 CDs on your harddrive. If you don't have enough space, just install only the first two. The game is well written and it uses only one CD at one time. So when you'll pass the first, play the second - and then delete the first and install the third. Easy, isn't it? This way a harddrive installation would consume some reasonable 1.5 gigabyte. If you don't have that much, you will have to carry all the CDs. Don't complain, I carried them in my handluggage at the Venice Film Festival last year.

SCREEN: 640*480 fixed. A good brightness/contrast calibration option.

SLEEP: Not compatible.

KEYBOARD/TRACKPAD: Works fine. The game is controlled mostly by mouse (trackpad).

BUGS: None detected during the actual playing, but if you'll (a) play a bit, (b) quit, and change something in control panels, (c) launch the game again, it might freeze during initial warm-up.

MORE INFO/PURCHASE OPTIONS: Any suggestions?



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