Law & Order: Dead on the Money

For my money, the original Law and Order is the pinnacle police procedural. Yeah, NYPD Blue and Hill Street Blues had good drama, yeah Homicide had good cases, yeah, even Dragnet already had the formula pretty locked down in the ’50s – but Law and Order‘s blend of police investigation and courtroom tension, along with the “ripped from the headlines” stories, made it a consistently great hour of television. We could argue whether any of the spinoffs that weren’t Criminal Intent could stand up to the original, but that’s a whole other topic.

The show’s success and popularity eventually drew Legacy Interactive (of Emergency Room fame, among many similar titles) to release a PC adventure game around the show’s 12th season. Three Law and Order alumni show up to provide faces and voices for the game – S. Epatha Merkerson as Lt. Van Buren, Elizabeth Röhm as Asst. District Attorney Serena Southerlyn, and the legend himself, Jerry Orbach as Det. Lenny Briscoe, in his second-greatest role.

Anyone else from the show simply isn’t mentioned and is even edited out of the CG-ified intro. Admittedly, it’s a little disappointing that this is all the cast you get, but I think it does qualify as the minimum. I’m annoyed, but I can barely believe that this case doesn’t warrant the attention of Sam Waterston’s Jack McCoy, whereas I’m petty enough that I probably wouldn’t play at all if Briscoe wasn’t included. New characters are invented to fill out supporting roles, such as a Medical Examiner, Crime Lab technician, and the heads of both Records and Surveillance. The newcomers do a fine job and I have no real complaints about any performances.

The game consists of a single case – the murder of a respected Wall Street fund manager and its possible implications in a wider investigation of her former firm. You will play both parts of the story. First, you’re Lenny Briscoe’s partner as you both have seven days to track down leads and build a solid case for the D.A. Then, you (well, another you… a lawyer you) bring the case to trial, determining which evidence to introduce, what questions to ask, and when to object to the defense’s questioning. In terms of an episode of Law and Order, it covers all the expected bases in an interactive format. It’s worth noting, however, that you can’t skip any part of the tale – if you’re only interested in playing the trial part, you can’t skip past the detective half.

When starting each section, you’re given the option to select two out of four “traits,” which are basically helpful perks. Both detective and lawyer get the same traits with slightly different rewording – one gives you fewer multiple choice questions when talking to suspects, one changes the cursor to a magnifying glass when over something you can interact with, and one gives you hints from your boss if you missed a clue or critical step. There are a few pixel hunts, so the magnifying glass is a good bet. Boss hints also aren’t terribly hand-holdy and save wasted time.

The final trait absolutely demolishes the game’s time limit. Every interaction you perform or location you travel to deducts some time from the clock. If following a walkthrough exactly, you’ll have about two days left. If stumbling through on your own, you might get down to the wire. However, the “Efficiency” trait runs the clock about 8x slower. You’ll do two days worth of work in half a day and can essentially ignore the time limit completely. This is the only trait I wouldn’t recommend if you’re familiar with adventure games. The time limit does set up some good dramatic tension. But, if you hate the threat of a “game over” hanging above you, you know where to go.

You’ll begin the investigation at the Central Park crime scene with Briscoe. As your partner, he will offer you no hints, help, or suggestions – he will simply offer the sarcastic, world-weary commentary we love him for (after finding the deceased’s “I Love New York” hat, he quips “Too bad New York didn’t love her.”) You’re responsible for finding all pieces of evidence and making all decisions. Locations are 360-degree panning screens with a handful of preset spots to stand in. Items can be clicked on to look at closer, but you don’t actually examine them here. Your only option is to drop the item into your case file.

The case file holds icons of people, evidence, or reports. You can double-click any of them to get a broader description. Occasionally, you’ll come across something like a locked door that needs you to select the key to use on it, but mostly, items in the case file exist to be sent to different departments. There are four tabs on the upper right for Lab, Research, Surveillance, and Psych Evaluation. Dragging an icon to the tab puts in a request for that specific department to investigate that piece of evidence. You’ll then need to wait a differing amount of time for the results to come back.

Other than time, there’s no limit to how many items you can have a department look at. The crime scene is absolutely littered with trash and red herrings, but you’ll get no penalty for wasting the Lab’s time in testing them all. You can run surveillance and psych evals for every person you meet, with no consequences or complaints about use of department resources. The only downside is that seven day time limit, and the possibility that you might so thoroughly clog up the works with useless tests that they might not get to key evidence before time runs out.

Your case file is limited to 52 items, with the option to trash any that you later confirm are useless. You can’t pick up any new items or reports with a full a file – a few times this forced me to leave a scene, clean the file, and come back, wasting some valuable time. Items are also a separate icon from their reports – both will take up space in your file. This tripped me up a few times when selecting an item as evidence, as the item itself doesn’t contain the same information that its lab report does.

You will also get the opportunity to talk with witnesses and suspects. Briscoe does the introductions (and the actual talking), while you select one of three questions from a notepad on the right. There’s always one correct or valid question and two bogus ones that don’t advance the case. The bogus ones are glaringly obvious. Think:

“What’s your favorite color?”
“Which way did you see the suspect run?”
“Do you like cheese?”

It’s clear the developers aren’t trying to trip you up here. The “Interview” trait will remove one of the bogus options and leave with you with just two choices, but that really seems unnecessary. If you do manage to pick a useless question, the speaker will just give a non-committal “Nope” kind of answer. If they take the time to say more, you’re on the right track. The “correct” question will also never disappear until you ask it, so if it keeps staying in your options, that’s another strong hint. As far as I can tell, you can never fail a conversation or lock yourself out of important information.

Ultimately, you will use the accumulated evidence to drag to a “Search Warrant” or “Arrest Warrant” tab. Fill these tabs with good supporting evidence and you’ll get your warrant. Miss anything and Van Buren will tell you it’s not enough for the judge. The lab report/item issue means it can be difficult to figure out how to communicate your intentions versus what the game is expecting, but you can keep submitting warrants without penalty. This system also means you cannot search or arrest just anyone, so there’s no possibility of picking the wrong suspect. If the seven days end without you having arrested the killer, the game ends. But if you’ve collared the right perp, it’s on to the trial phase.

The trial half begins with some critical evidence being thrown out on a technicality (as it goes…). You and ADA Southerlyn are offered two days to perform further investigation. At this point, you still have enough information to continue the trial and these two days are really just tying up any loose ends from the police half. If you’ve got some final lab results to come in, or some final witnesses to question, this is where you’ll do it. There’s no changes to the investigation interface – despite the change in profession, investigations play exactly the same. It’s also entirely reasonable that you’ve left no stone unturned and don’t need to do anything with these two days.

Your main task, then, is to assemble your case on the Subpoena tab. Here, you will add the witnesses and evidence that will be directly available for you to call out during the trial. Specialists like the crime lab technician or Det. Briscoe himself will speak for the evidence, while witnesses will reiterate whatever information they gave up to the detectives.

You do not set up lines of questioning or get to preview them here, but you should have some idea of what each person or item is going to bring to the table. If unsure, put it in the subpoena. Better to have and not need – your score probably takes a hit, but you aren’t required to call everyone you’ve ordered to show up. “Wrong” or useless witnesses will even let you know on the stand, with statements like “Frankly, I don’t even know why you called me here.” Again, no penalty other than embarrassment.

When you’re ready to begin, hit “Go to Trial” and watch ADA Southerlyn lay out the opening statements. From here, you’re given a notepad with every witness or expert you added to the subpoena. Click on one to call them to the stand. You’re again given multiple choice questions with fairly obvious textual clues about which one to ask. I don’t think you need to worry about the order you call witnesses or the order in which you’re building the story for the jury. You just need to make sure you cover all the critical evidence.

The defense attorney gets the option to cross-examine every witness. Here, you’re watching for him to overstep so you can throw out a dramatic objection. The objections are based in real(ish) law. By far, the two most common are “argumentative” and “calls for speculation,” but you won’t need to know the law to make progress. In practice, just listen for his obvious change of tone. “Why were you out late that night?” is fine. “IS IT BECAUSE YOU WERE BUSY KILLING THE VICTIM?!?!” is not. You click a simple hand up button at the bottom of the screen to object. You don’t even have to pick a reason to why – ADA Southerlyn handles the rest.

There is a pretty extensive legal library available on Southerlyn’s office computer – Legacy’s Emergency Room roots are showing through. If you want to read up on California statutes and get a better idea of what would actually be allowed in court and why, you certainly have the opportunity. But veterans of the show (or similar) are probably already covered. And if in doubt, you can simply object to everything with no obvious penalty. I tried objecting to literally every single thing the defense said and only got toothless, repeated chiding from the judge. I have no doubt it tanks your score, but you don’t get thrown out or fined for contempt like I would expect.

I really can’t talk more about the case without starting to spoil it. Just be prepared for the legal half to take about as long as the detective half, a “rebuttal subpoena” is a thing, and there will be a few more twists and turns left to navigate. Each stage of the trial also acts like a checkpoint. The defense will always be trying to get the case dismissed, and if you haven’t proven enough suspicion up to that point, the game will indeed end. If the trial continues, you’ll have more opportunities (and necessities) to do more investigation until the crucible of the courtroom leaves only the truth.

As a case, I have no complaints about Dead On the Money. It’s a good adventure game yarn that would make a reasonable episode of the show. There’s enough whodunnit twists to keep you guessing, with more going on that just “villain do murder.” I had a pretty strong expectation of how it was going to go, only for that to get upended quickly, which I take as a good sign. The two halves of Law and Order are also covered well. It maybe cheats a bit with investigations working exactly the same, but the courtroom drama is unique and interesting on its own.

Mechanically, well, that’s a bit harder. Even with the magnifying glass perk activated, the game’s not afraid to throw some pixel hunts at you. Going back to the same location three or four times makes you feel pretty dumb, even if you had no way of knowing which piece of scattered trash would be the key to the whole thing. Keeping a difference between the item and its lab report meant that I was never sure which was safe to throw out, which in turn makes that case file size limit a pain point later on.

I also think the game isn’t that hard. It was always going to be an accessible, budget title – one of those “games for people who don’t play games” – so it’s probably not fair to expect a serious challenge. And I admit missing things along the way and missing a few warrant attempts. But, as said, I feel like a lot of that was having the right idea but struggling to explain it to the game. I also think the optional perk system is pretty fantastic. Even if I think the game’s a little too blatant, being able to adjust the difficulty with these bonuses is a great addition.

I don’t love the rating system, which honestly seems like an afterthought. After both the detective and lawyer halves, you’re presented a simple percentage score on how you did. It’s not broken down at all and feels arbitrary. If I get an 86%, how am I going to do 14% better the next time? I do appreciate some kind of score, and it potentially encourages replays – like the old XX out of XX adventure scoring system – but I wish I had a little more to go on.

The weakest point, by far, are the graphics. I feel like this look was pretty common for budget titles of the era, but this is definitely some plastic-looking CG and blurry environment details. Some models, like Van Buren, look fantastic and surprisingly close to their actor. Others do not. It sure feels like they’re aware that they never got Lenny right, with how much he looks like Jerry Orbach seeming to vary from scene to scene. Recognizable characters aside, locations and people never look much more than serviceable.

It’s also going to be a nightmare to run on modern systems. To ease system specs for the time, this is a pure multimedia adventure – no graphics are ever rendered by your system. Instead, the game relies on a duo of multimedia programs no longer supported – QuickTime for PC and Java SE. You’ll never get this to run on a 64-bit Windows system, while even emulated attempts struggled somewhere (interface worked but video was black, video worked but interface didn’t appear, played the opening video then crashed, etc). I had to go back to the aging Windows XP laptop to make this happen at all.

If you’re a fan of Law and Order and adventure games, yeah, hop on board. If you enjoy detective adventure games, well, I’d be surprised if you weren’t already in that first group. If you’re here because lawyer adventure games are pretty rare, well, they still are, and this game might not scratch that itch. The legal half is interesting enough, but the detective half is not optional and the unique lawyer work is just a lot of clicking text on a legal pad. Finally, if you’re a serious true crime junkie looking for a tightly-woven challenge with expert presentation, you won’t find that here. This one is basically comfort food.

 

The Good

True to the show, a good split between the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders.  Good performances from both the supporting characters and the three show vets. Perk system makes for a nice, variable difficulty. You do indeed get the inter-scene titles with the “donk donk”. Great to hear Lenny again after all these years.

 

The Bad

Budget title, so doesn’t look great, and broadly accessible, so not too difficult. Investigation options and clues are limited. A dog gets hurt for no great reason. Not sure it can be run successfully on modern (or virtualized) hardware.

 

Lenny: “We have a search warrant, step aside.”
Suspect: “You can’t just come in here and violate my privacy!”
Lenny: “Yes we can, read the fine print.”