“SOCKO!”

Well here it is people, the review to Déjà Vu. Now I apologize for being absent for so long, but I recently moved to back to Germany, so the last 3 weeks I had a lot of packing and such to do and hardly had any time to take a game break. Now without further ado I give you….Déjà Vu!

What to say about this game, well it’s a point and click game, much like Maniac Mansion (fun fact, Maniac Mansion was inspired by this very game here). It was Developed by ICOM Simulations and Published by Kemco or at least the NES version was. This game has been ported to a lot of Computers and even the Game Boy Color, though I never seen that version before. The North American NES version was released back in 1990. Now I personally never heard much of this game as a kid, I’ve seen it in stores but it never actually gripped me, but now 20 years later I notice it should have.

The game is set in 1941 Chicago, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. You play a retired boxer who has become a private eye who is suffering from a bad case of amnesia.  Awakening from a bathroom stall in Joe’s Bar you start looking for clues on your identity which leads to discovering a dead body. Turns out, someone is trying to frame our good old P.I. with murder!!!! As you move around in the game you trigger memories of your identity and surroundings.

Now in all honesty I can’t say much about the game itself because every little thing can be a spoiler. So I’ll sum some stuff up, starting with the graphics. For a PAC game on the NES the graphics are outstanding, well except for some creepy looking woman you see on the street who’s eyebrows look like to strips of black tape and are the same exact size as her eyes, thus making her look like some She-Demon-Lady-Creature! But you can easily make out everything in the game without having to try and imagine the impossible, well okay the wall safe on the second floor office is hard to make sense of, at first I thought it was a bird cage, without the cage, don’t ask me why.

Look at her and fear her eyebrows....OF DOOM!

Now moving on to the music. The music in this game is what you’d expect to hear in a Detective Game, smooth and simple, and it won’t really get on your nerves quick because you tend to jump from room to room a lot, most of them having their own sound, then again at times I found myself paying so much attention to the game I didn’t even notice the music.

But here it comes, something that truly bothers me in this game. The controls, my gosh can they be a pain in the backside at times! You use this hand as a courser which is fine with me but the problem here really is, is how it jumps onto the buttons. Having played Nightshade just recently, it really had me a little confused and made me have to try hard to get used to it.

Also when you want to move somewhere on your map it can become a pain too. Let’s say you want to go top right this means on your map, which is represented by a square box, that all you’d have to do is slightly hit down so you’d be right on top of it, well that’s a no go, cause each time you come close to the map it blasts you right in the middle. Now you might say that this isn’t anything to have a fit about but let me tell you, until you played it, you have no idea how annoying that truly is.

That small square with all the dots, THAT is your map!

But I fought through it just to be able to check out a toilet, look at a picture of a 400 pound woman and punch a lady in the face. SOCKO!…..that’s the sound effect it makes when you punch someone. How do I know this? Because Tyler knows this? Wait……wrong genre. Anyway, each time you hit something that is supposed to be hit the screen shows this really cheesy picture and it says SOCKO in the middle…..yes I was shocked as you can imagine. I mean, look at it. SOCKO? Really Kemco?

OH NO! I just got Socko'ed in the face!!!

Why not the typical BAM? Or POW? Or even a SPLASH? No no no, they thought “SOCKO” would do the job just right, well I disagree because the fact that I could punch a woman in the game and was made to believe the sound effect of bone hitting bone being SOCKO…..I was more than confused. OH! And No, I’m not a Woman hater, but she wanted to blow me up and or shoot me. So she had it coming right?

Remember how I said you are being framed for murder? Well the police are looking for you, and once they catch you its GAME OVER….well….that’s only if you walk into the front door of the police headquarters. The police do not look for you at all, telling us that 1940 Chicago was a very unsafe place because the police didn’t even bother to look for any criminals, they thought they just had to wait at the front door of the Police Headquarters and the crook would bring himself in…..wow, video game tax money hard at work there.

Another thing is the items in the game can be very confusing, there are items like the medicine which each time you pick one up its renamed to “Medi.1 /2 /3 or 4″ and so on. This makes you examine the Meds very often. Also the fact that you have to pick up bullets one bullet at a time in the Gun shop is very annoying and time consuming. Yeah there are only 12 but still man, I want to pick one and get the rest not do it one at a time.

Also let me tell you, this is not a sit though game, there is no chance you can beat this game in a few hours, without knowing what to do. It will keep you on your toes, at times you really have to sit down and think on what to do next while at other times your best option is to just punch things, and I’m not joking.

While I’m still playing this game I noticed that I became very hateful with the whole courser control, going back to Nightshade it was simple. You could hit select to easily get into the menu and select what you need, but you could walk with the D-Pad, while in Déjà Vu to walk around you had to “Hit the move button, select the door thus walking thought it” or “Hit open door, then hit move and then the door to get through” this is way to tedious I tell you, it gets very very old quick.

But to leave with a positive note I have to say this game is really strangely appealing. Enjoying PAC games myself I found this one very enjoyable, kind of like Nightshade but not as corny. It’s definitely worth anyone’s time and it should be checked out.
Again I apologize for the long wait, but I will make it up by later on today posting a review of another game and also some new stuff I have been working on for you all to enjoy.

This is Chaotic, signing out!