Four Fat Chicks -- Ring Review

Ring

Review by Jen

Even though I am not much of a fan of classical music in general and opera in particular, the idea of an adventure game based on an opera was intriguing to me. I thought there would be a strong plot and great music, but I was only half right.

The game is set a long time into the future and uses the main characters from Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungen, who are Alberich, Loge, Siegmund, and Brunhilde, all of whom are controlled by Wotan, god of gods. You play as Ish, a human who is sent by "Mother" to complete a quest as each of the four characters and return to tell her what you've learned. Each quest ends with you learning some great moral lesson. I have never listened to the Ring opera, although much of the music in the game is very familiar, and I started this game pretty unfamiliar with the story—I found myself not understanding what was going on most of the time. I suspect that if you are an opera fan and already know the story, you could follow along quite easily, but the writers did not do such a good job translating it into lay terms for the common adventure game player, i.e., me. It's not necessarily because there wasn't a story or it wasn't good (it does make for a classic opera, after all), but I just didn't get it from the game. Also, I didn't think the transfer of the plot from the time of the ancient gods to a sci-fi scenario deep in the future was a very good idea.

The graphics are spotty. Some are very beautiful and well-executed, but in some cases, comic book-style drawings (unmoving) were just superimposed on the backgrounds, creating what was to me a total clash of styles. Also, the characters all looked like they were made of rubber. Picture a latex Halloween mask, like a Richard Nixon whole-head one, and then picture a finger poking the bridge of the nose. The middle of the face collapses and the upper lip rises. This is how the characters' faces looked when they spoke. There is not really a whole lot of movement in the game, either—a large part of the game (at least half) consists of speech over still backgrounds. There were a couple of instances that were just lovely, though—I really liked Wotan's gown o'starry night, and I also liked the way flames were executed in a couple of spots. Overall, though, there was nothing special here. If I were a man, I might think otherwise because no pixels were spared on the women's bosoms.

You have the option of playing the four characters in sequence or switching from one to another in the middle of the game. I played them all in sequence; their stories are sequential, and I have a feeling if you were not thoroughly familiar with the story already from listening to the opera, you would be totally lost, even more than I already was, by playing them all simultaneously. I generally like the ability to play as multiple characters, but it just flopped in this case. The puzzles are either very simple or totally incomprehensible. There was a slider puzzle (how unoriginal), and I just hate slider puzzles. There was also a puzzle where I had to play back a Wagner piece that was playing in the background, and oh, man, I am totally clueless when it comes to this kind of puzzles—I get it sounding right to me, but it is still wrong. At least there were no mazes. There were also a lot of puzzles in the LucasArts style that involve picking up inventory in one place and using it in another. I had to resort to hints numerous times in this game on the more unfathomable puzzles, and even after I learned what to do, I still didn't understand why in a couple of instances. The puzzles all lack originality or are too obscure, and as a result there were not very many fun ones.

The music is outstanding—that's probably why it's classic. It is all taken from the actual Ring opera, and yes, it includes the Ride of the Valkyries when you play as Brunhilde. The voice acting, like the graphics, is really spotty. Some of the actors are outstanding; others obviously are just reading a script; and some even occasionally mispronounce words. There is a mix of accents between English and American. Methinks this game was originally created in German and the English and French were added as an afterthought to broaden the market for the game. Sound effects are neither intrusive nor inappropriate. The game is about the music and the music is great, but the quality of the sound overall, outside of the music, is just very inconsistent.

I fancy myself a pretty intelligent person, but this game left me befuddled and bewildered. Toward the end, I was just anxious to be done—it became extremely tiresome. I would recommend this game only to the Wagner aficionado and maybe not even that—I believe games based on books or music or whatever should always stand alone so that someone unfamiliar with the basis can still enjoy them, and Ring does not achieve that.