Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney (DS)

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Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney isn't a puzzle game; it's a game about following a train of thought. The sooner the player gets with the program and starts thinking like a super-sleuthing legal eagle, the sooner they'll succeed. That's because, at its core, Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is an interactive novel -- a throwback to the days of text adventures, when the written word (or ASCII text, to be more precise) was a game-maker's only tool. We're not playing games on the Commodore Vic 20 anymore. The Nintendo DS can out-compute a home PC from the '80s with its touch-screen tied behind its back. So why make a game so reliant on reading and writing, when hardware can support modern multimedia bells and whistles? The creators of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney must really have something to say and a ton invested in how they say it. Why else would they continue to choose such an old-school (some would say archaic) way to do so?

They had an excuse for the low-fi vibe of the first three games. The trilogy of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney games were originally created for the GameBoy Advance. The rudimentary, anime-style graphics and hand-painted backgrounds were accentuated by limited animations. Paired with evocative music and sparkling writing, the games were a stellar achievement in videogame storytelling. They took players on the journey from rookie lawyer to hot-shot attorney. Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is the first to be created specifically for the Nintendo DS. It's a reboot of sorts, one that takes better advantage of the Nintendo DS without straying too far from its retro roots -- and they did it with an economy that played to the strengths and limitations of their platform.v The game begins long after the Phoenix Wright series took place. Wright, having lost his license to practice law, now moonlights as a piano player and card shark. Apollo Justice is a wet-behind-the-ears rookie who finds himself thrust into a handful of complex murder trials. The game's story spans five seemingly unrelated cases. Apollo's job is pretty much the same every time. First, the guy's got to investigate the circumstances of the murder. Players move from location to location, interviewing witnesses and searching the crime scenes for clues.

New to the series are a handful of forensic procedures that take special advantage of the Nintendo DS. When dusting for prints, players pepper the surface with powder by tapping the touch-screen. Blowing into the microphone brushes away the excess residue, leaving only the latent print. Also in Apollo's investigatory arsenal is a bottle of Luminol, which can be sprayed on surfaces to search for hidden blood stains. These interactive activities aren't puzzles per se. They're more like accents, moments that make the player feel more involved in the action.

One case finds Apollo investigating a murder that happened backstage during a rock concert. The scenario riffs on the old locked-room motif: The victim and the suspect are the only two people in a dressing room. We soon learn that there a dozen different ways that a sneaky conspirator could have tweaked the circumstances to pull off the perfect crime. Part of the investigation leads Justice to an audio recording of the night's performance. At the controls of the venue's five-track mixing board, the player can adjust the levels of each instrument, analyzing each microphone for clues that will help shed light on the mysterious circumstances. It's a scenario not unlike Brian DePalma's movie "Blow Out," in which John Travolta accidentally makes an audio tape of an assassination. This ability to transform traditional mystery tales and transport the player into the middle of the action is one of the game's major strengths. If you've ever wondered what it feels like to be Sherlock Holmes, Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney has you covered.