On the first Doctor Who adventure game

The newest Doctor Who episode wasn’t a TV episode; rather, it was an adventure game. So to speak. In it, the Doctor takes Amy to meet the Beatles, but finds the London of 1963 to have been destroyed by his archenemies, the Daleks, and the entire human race but one survivor to have been exterminated. But how could they have altered the timeline in such a massive way, you ask? Ah, but therein lies the rub, and I won’t spoil that little nugget for you! Suffice it to say, it’s a worthy problem for the good Doctor to have to unravel.

I have to say, though, the “adventure” game isn’t really worthy of the hype that it’s gotten, especially considering the designers made Broken Sword. 80% of the game was made up of sneaking, there was precious little in the way of puzzle solving (and what WAS there was mostly silly mouse games), and the voice acting… wow. While they used the real cast, they were very obviously unused to the idea of acting for a video game instead of live action. I will grant you that it was made for kids and non-gamers to be able to enjoy, but I was really hoping for actual puzzles. You know, instead of a “don’t touch the sides” maze and what amounts to a game of Dalek Dalek Revolution.

The fact that it lasted roughly as long as an episode even with all the retries after being hit with stray Dalek blasts repeatedly during the climax, it’s canonical, and it involves the Daleks, made it interesting enough to not feel like my efforts were a total waste. Knowing that they intend to charge non-UK-residents for it in July, however, does feel like a bit of a ripoff… depending on how much they expect people to pay, I guess.

For those that are wondering, no, I don’t live in the UK. I downloaded it from a third-party site that had the installer available even to those on the wrong side of the pond, and it wasn’t terribly difficult to figure out how to circumvent BBC’s region locking on the installer. It merely tries to get to a region-checking script on the BBC homepage that uses Geo IP’s to do its checking. I can think of a few ways around that off the top of my head, but no, I won’t share how to do it. Either figure it out yourself (trust me, it would be a more rewarding puzzle than actually playing through the game!), or wait to see how much it costs when it comes out.

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On the first Doctor Who adventure game
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