Hitchcock: The Final Cut

Rating:
Summary: Pleasant diversion for the fan
Review: A pleasant enough little bit of fluff designed for the hardcore Hitchcock fan. Plot is fairly threadbare, but that's because they insisted on weaving in a series of mainly unrelated clips from the original movies. With Universal's connections, they managed to get themselves some first-rate acting and even fairly decent writing. Graphics are great, but interface is quite clumsy, and puzzles, while difficult but not too, are often very bizarre in solution. But it's a pleasant enough way to spend a weekend.

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Rating:
Summary: Hardly to be considered a classic. Ever.
Review: Rule of thumb: Before you buy a game, make sure the French didn't have a hand in its making. Do some research, if you can; it's usually the same trap. Interesting concept, nice graphics, infernal gameplay.

The Final Cut has been inspired by the films of Alfred Hitchcock, which means you should be familiar with his films in order to be able to solve some of the puzzles. You are a grumpy detective who was hired by a mysterious mute lady to investigate the strange goings-on on a remote film studio.

The figures are rendered in realtime, the surroundings are pre-rendered still images. At the highest quality setting, the detective moves with a frame rate of 5 to 10 fps (estimate, Radeon 64 VIVO graphics card). At the lowest, he looks worse than Lara Croft in her first adventure.

The game controls are an insult. To move the detective around, you use the keyboard -- a clumsy affair since he seldomly moves exactly where you want him. To investigate something more thorougly, you use the mouse.

The game play is uninspired: Arrange a few words, use object x with y, solve simple numerical puzzles (make sure you write some details down even though there is an automatic journaling feature). The trickiest part are the arcade sequences -- downright unfair, given the clumsiness of the controls. During an arcade sequence, the save feature is blocked, therefore you can be stuck in such a scene for hours.

After about three hours of very frustrating gameplay, the game went back on the shelf, from where it's unlikely to return. I couldn't tell you a single reason why I should want to finish it, even though I'm a certified Hitchcock fan.

Rating:
Summary: Weak + Lame = waste of $
Review: This game was so bad I wanted to write review. poor design, numerous buggie areas, nothing to keep your interest. I'd like to send them a bill...
Similar design concept to Blade runner but much more poorly done. FC crashed in the middle of the game and I never tried to finish it.

Rating:
Summary: The Final Cut
Review: This is a very interesting game. The upside is that you have a palm pilot that you can review at anytime and you can jump to locations once you have visited them. The downside is that it uses keyboard controls to move the character. It is very difficult to locate hotspots because the character must be in a certain position, facing a certain way to trigger the symbol which means you can "see" something. You have to go over a room several times in all possible directions to see if you have missed anything.

Rating:
Summary: Beware - UBI Softs packaging & web site lie about mim req's
Review: UBI Soft's packaging in the stores AND web site state minimum hard drive free space is 300mb. My install failed because it said it needed 744mb free space. Not a good sign as to the competance of the programming for the game. Good luck.