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The Dame Was Loaded
by By Carol Risz — car@texas.net Alamo PC http://www.alamopc.org - March 26, 2001 at 23:09:50:
If you are fond of the old private eye movies of the 1940’s, The Dame Was Loaded [TDWL] may be just the game for you. You can almost hear James Cagney or Humphrey Bogart saying, “Dames are trouble but trouble is your business. For a dame, and maybe a hundred bucks in advance, you’d lose a few teeth and a few friends. For sweet Carol Klein, you might even stand in front of a gun or two. In a sleazy world of corrupt officials, stolen diamonds, lust and murder, you must solve the case and stay alive.” In fact you can hear similar words spoken, but not by Cagney or Bogart.The wording on the case declares TDWL is “the world’s first fully-interactive film noir detective adventure.” The graphics, soundtracks, and sound effects in the game are wonderful. As a matter of fact, watching the detective lean against his yellow convertible in the dark alley to ponder his next move while the smoke curls up from his cigarette is rather characteristic of those old movies...very nostalgic.
The game is a two-CD set that provides over 40 hours of game play. Two of us played the game for about four hours and were unable to locate the clues necessary to move forward to the second CD, so I will say the game presents quite a challenge.
It installed in a trice. It runs under DOS, and the machine we were using was a 486-DX2-80 with 16 meg of ram. The program scooted right along. The minimum system requirements are DOS 5.0 or higher, 486-DX-33, 8 MB of RAM, 6 NB of available hard disk space, 256 color VGA display, CD-ROM drive, sound card, and a mouse.
Playing the game is not quite as intuitive as I might prefer, although it is quite interactive and presents a devil of a challenge. On-line help is minimal. One feature that I did not enjoy was that, if you forget to save where you are in the game, regardless of how long you have been playing it; it is tedious (at best) to get back to a similar point in the game. We had to go through the same scripts, clips, and soundtracks for a quite a long time and didn’t make the same mistake the second time.
TDWL is suggested for age 13 and above. It does contain violence similar to what we saw in those old movies. Suggested retail is $49.95, and it is not currently available in San Antonio but will be sometime in June. [Ed note: http://www.cdaccess.com/html/pc/dameload.htm to buy this game.]
The game is produced by Beam Software, and is distributed by Philips Media, Inc., located in Los Angeles, CA. Philips Media, can be contacted at 1-800-340-7888 or at http://www.philipsmedia.com/media/games
This is a good game for you if you like mystery and good jazz music, and if you have the patience and persistence to try your hand as an ace detective. http://www.alamopc.org
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