NCIS Ubisoft Style

Some of you may likely think that I've finally lost my mind here. Please bear with me; there's a logical explanation.

As you may recall, my significant other is not much of a gamer. However, I haven't abandoned my efforts to convert her and with Valentine's Day coming up I'm going to attempt to "kill two birds with one stone" as they say. NCIS is one of the few shows we each can actually tolerate watching together, so maybe Ubisoft's version could end up being a game that we could have in common?

I'm thinking that this might actually work out because the gameplay here is actually rather pedestrian by my standards. For one who often needs her reflexes and hand-eye coordination at their peak to avoid being slaughtered by Arch-viles, NCIS could become boring fairly quickly; for my girlfriend who seems unable to use the mouse and keyboard simultaneously, this might actually be a fun game.

From what I've seen thus far, the entire game can be played with just the mouse. Click spots on the floor to move a character around, when the cursor changes to a magnifying glass click to look at a piece of evidence, when a meter changes color click to perform a given action... well, you can see where this is going. Furthermore, the constant on-screen instructions and icon cues like the magnifying glass or a pointing finger could lead even the simplest of children through the game I would think. Sounds like just the thing for my non-gaming GF.

Probably the only major selling point of the game that will save it with NCIS fans will be that the characters are reasonable (though in my opinion imperfect) rendered facsimiles of the actual actors.

But Ubisoft screwed it up, most likely because they're simply too cheap to pay what the stars required to do the job. They actually managed to get David McCallum and Robert Wagner to do the voices for their characters from the show, yet the rest of the characters are voiced by stand-ins that don't even attempt to imitate the voices of the actual actors. This lack of continuity in the voice actors was thus frustrating to me; I would rather have heard all impersonators rather than two of the actual actors mixed in among a cast of stand-ins.

Anyway, that's the plan for Valentine's Day. I'll come back and let you know how it goes and whether or not I was able to get away without actually buying flowers.