Have you ever wondered what gaming would be like if your favorite Sierra On-Line text-based adventures were voice activated instead of keystroke activated? Well apparently someone in Japan just couldn’t get enough of Al Lowe’s
Softporn and decided to take it to the next logical step by adding full 3D visuals and a voice communicated interface. However, like those games of yesteryear
LifeLine comes with its own share of problems and the end result is a pretty tedious adventure that probably won’t cater to everyone out there.
You begin in the year 2029 on a floating hotel that’s in orbit around the Earth. A party is well underway when suddenly a group of rogue aliens attacks and the station is thrown into a state of disarray. Chaos ensues and you’re separated from your girlfriend and locked into a security room. It just so happens that one of the station’s waitresses managed to survive the attack and she calls to you on her headset. It turns out that she survived the attack and is now looking for a reporter. Since you’re looking for your girlfriend, the two of you decide that there’s a mutual interest to help her and guide her through the remains of the hotel. Through the use of the various monitors in the security room you are able to guide her through the adventure.
The main selling point of
LifeLine is that you don’t actually control the protagonist but rather you guide it with your voice. By utilizing an array of context sensitive commands you’ll guide her through the game and the adventure. While the game may look like a next generation game, it operates very similarly to the very first adventure games that appeared on the Apple IIc’s and IBM compatibles. You don’t really talk and develop a rapport with the character, instead you simply tell them what to do and they’re off. So let’s say you want to tell the person to walk down the hall and to go into the security room, you don’t actually tell them "walk down the hall and open the door." Instead you tell them "go to security room" and then she automatically wanders there on her own. It’s a very interesting game and if not for some major design flaws it would actually be one of the most amazing pieces of technology that the gaming world has ever seen.
As amazing as the voice recognition is it still leads to plenty of frustration. One of the largest problems with those earlier adventure games came with textual recognition. Although a normal person might understand that "look at the bottle" and "examine the bottle" might mean the same thing, those games were very text sensitive when it came to its operation.
LifeLine operates in exactly the same way. Yes you might see a bottle on a table but in order to interact with it you’ll need to specifically say "examine green bottle" as opposed to "look at bottle". Early on there’s a scenario where you’ll see a shiny object in a vending machine. Instead of being able to say "examine vending machine" to figure out what it is you’ll have to say "examine dispenser." I don’t know about you but I don’t really think of the slots on the vending machines as dispensers so you’ll really need to know technical terms to succeed.
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