Games for Lunch: The Dig

In a nutshell: In space, everyone can hear you talk a lot.
8/7/2008 5:15 PM | 0 Comments | Page 3 of 3

0:43 There's a lot of chatter before Lowe pries the boulder loose with the shovel. After all that, the actual dislodging is pretty anticlimactic. "My rule is, if you can pick it up, take it with you, because you never know when you might need it," says Miles. Good advice for adventure games as well as life!

0:45 "Stick a fork in us, we're done," says Lowe. "Who writes your material, Commander?" asks Robbins. "I get it all out of the newspaper, Robbins." Me-OW!

0:46 Back to the shuttle, I tell Borden to set off the nukes. Cut to a wide shot of the asteroid and shuttle above earth. The music swells as the shuttle backs away from the rock in all its grainy glory. "Do it!" The explosion seems underwhelming, but it was strong enough to open up the surface of the rock. "Let's see what Atilla looks like after plastic surgery," Lowe says.

0:48 Down on the newly craggy surface, Brink wants us to go down into a tunnel. He says the tunnel was not created by the nuke. It is "very ancient ... old, but not as old as the asteroid." He doesn't know what this means. I do. ALIENS!

0:50 There's a stone projection and a metallic plate on the wall of the tunnel. The trio prattle on about how this is obviously "not natural." "But who could have put something like this in a tunnel"?" Lowe asks. I'll say it again. ALIENS!

0:52 Robbins wants to tell Houston immediately about this amazing, alien-implying discovery, but Lowe stops her. He says he's has secret orders to look for an alien presence from the beginning. Lowe sends a secret code back to NASA to tell them of the find. Brink falls in line enthusiastically, but Robbins sounds a little less sure of herself in agreeing.

0:53 Lowe pushes on the metallic plate, causing it to drop down into the tunnel. Seems like an odd move, to me.

0:56 More chatter with the crew. Brink is worried about Robbins now that the "mission parameters have changed." Robbins is a bit bitter that military secrecy might stop scientists from studying this important find. The characterization is kind of flat, but compared to most videogames, it's Shakespeare.

0:59 I've run out of things to say to my crew mates, and I can't seem to figure out what to do. There's a small dark opening where the plate used to be, but I can't seem to do anything with it. More guessing and checking in the next hour, I guess.

Would I play this game for more than an hour? Yes.

Why? The pace is sluggish and the "gameplay" so far is simplistic and uninteresting, but the clever characters and writing have me intrigued.

This column is based on a cheap, used retail copy that I picked up from a thrift store, which then wouldn't run on my thoroughly modern computer. I ended up using a copy of ScummVM on my hacked Wii to play my legal purchase. Honest!

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