"Elegant, clever variation on the board game"

Clue

Philips and 3T Productions (from the Waddington's and Parker Brothers board-game), for CD-i, requires digital-video card

PROS: Well-produced video segments, simple interface, intellectually challenging, better-than-expected replay value, reduced emphasis on luck, appropriate for families or groups

CONS: Only 12 possible scenarios, repeat players have a decided advantage, first CD-i game to carry parental advisory label

Now the CD-i is really making a play for the attention of the ''Games magazine audience.'' First the system had engaging graphic adventures like Burn:Cycle, then puzzles like Dimo's Quest, and now popular board games like Axis & Allies and this title. So who needs Mortal Kombat?

But unlike ''Axis'', which is exactly like the board game and uses the CD-i to keep records and roll dice, ''Clue'' is a new game, one which in many ways improves on the limitations of the popular family board game.

For those who were raised by wolves or in some other way have managed to grow up without playing the board game, a quick summary is in order. Each player takes the part of one of six suspects in the murder of Mr. Boddy. They're identified by color -- Mr . Green, Miss Scarlett, Mrs. White, Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, and Mrs. Peacock.

Playing cards with pictures of the suspects, six possible weapons, and nine rooms in Boddy's mansion are separated and shuffled. One of each is randomly selected and put in an envelope. The rest are reshuffled and dealt to the players. Their task is to move their pieces to rooms in the mansion, where they can make ''suggestions'' -- i.e., name a suspect, weapon, and room. The first player to the left holding any of those cards must show the card, thereby disproving the suggestion. The winner is the fir st person who can figure out what cards are in the envelope, i.e., who did it, where, and how.

The board game is a classic -- easy to learn, quick to play, a balance of luck and deduction, and a fair match between adults and children.

The CD-i version keeps those traits, while adding significant depth and and atmosphere to the game.

The game begins with digital video of Arlington Hall's butler, describing the backdrop to the murder. The CD-i has three basic stories in which the games are played out -- each provides ample motives for all the characters to want to kill Mr. Boddy, but are different enough to enhance repeated play. The game uses the player memory to make sure you don't get the same story twice, although you can choose to replay a given story if you like.

As in the board game, players select characters and roll a die to move around the mansion. But when you make it into a room, the search for evidence is more than a simple matter of naming a suspect, weapon, and room. Instead, you see a picture of the room (with your character standing or sitting in it), and can move a cursor over the objects there. If you point at something of interest, a magnifying glass pops up. Click it and you'll see a close-up of the possible evidence, with a voice-over by the butler describing it, for example ''gun, fired once... fingerprints Miss Scarlett and Mr. Green''.

Other items in the room that you can point at include secret passages in certain rooms (which whisk you to other rooms instantly, saving you several turns of walking through the halls), exits, a bell to summon the butler, and a question-mark when you point at a character.

If you click on a character, or use the butler to summon them, you can ask them for one of four things: an alibi, a statement (background and motive information), whether they've seen a given weapon, or any unusual observations.

The ''alibi'' is the most obviously useful tool for identifying the murderer -- if you ask for enough alibis, somone will claim to be in a room that no one else saw them in. But you can also identify the murderer by the fact he or she is the only one who'll lie to you. So, if you know Prof. Plum's fingerprints are on the gun, and he then claims to you he never saw the gun, it's a lie and you can conclude he's the murderer.

Simple enough, right?

Well... sometimes the murder weapon is wiped clean of fingerprints....

And fingerprints don't even show up on the rope...

And sometimes the killer cleans up the blood at the site of the murder, meaning you have to look for other clues...

And sometimes the furniture was smashed in an earlier fracas, not the murder, meaning you can't always assume you know the murder location.

In other words, it's a lot more intricate than figuring out which cards are in the envelope!

Perhaps because of this increased difficulty, each player has THREE chances to try to solve the mystery. In the board game, of course, each player could only have one shot, since looking into the envelope reveals the answer.

A few more tools are available to help you. Each room has a flashback scene, displayed by clicking on a clock, that shows something that happened before the murder. These elaborately-produced scenes can help establish motive, explain evidence in the room or fingerprints on weapons... or may tell you nothing of any use whatsoever.

When you summon the butler, you may also ask for a hint. This costs one of your three guesses, but provides you with fairly rich information, such as ''the murderer was a woman'' or ''the murder weapon was one of these'' (with a graphic of three weapons).

This points to an interesting dilemma in the game -- in the board game, each player has two sources of information: the cards in his hand and the revelations from other players about what cards are in their hands. In the CD-i version, everyone gets ALL their information from the TV screen, meaning nobody has an advantage. If one player can solve the puzzle, they should all be able to.

Fortunately, the ''clue'' allows shrewd players to throw their opponents off the trail. By pressing button two after asking for the clue, the butler will tell a lie. This means the player who asked for the clue will still have a valid hint (by knowing what the butler says is wrong), but the other players will want to follow up cautiously. Then again, the deductions they've already made or their observation of the hint-requester may help determine if the clue was a lie or the truth.

Because of the mass of information to be dealt with, a pre-fab form for note-taking is included in the CD booklet. For $50, I'd like to be given a pad of tear-off sheets, but then again, the form is too small to write in anyways -- best to take it to Kinko's and blow it up 175% to 8 1/2 by 11 inches.

What is included, wretchedly enough, is a parental-advisory label, the first on a CD-i game. It's a crying shame Philips is now kowtowing to the morons in congress who demanded a video-game labelling system, but I guess obnoxious restrictions on free speech are the price we have to pay to get the same parasites re-elected year after year.

As for the rating itself, ''Clue'' gets a ''kids to adults'' rating, declaring it okay for anyone over the age of 6, although it's ''recommended'' for children over 10, presumably because of the difficulty. I guess the people at the ratings board had no problem with the subject matter, the blood stains all over the house, the flashbacks of characters whacking each other over the head with the candlestick and the wrench, etc.

Politics aside, Clue is a very good game. According to CD-i magazine, each of the three story-lines has four possible outcomes, meaning there are 12 possible endings to the game. While this is a pretty good value for the money (at 2 hours a game, you'll be in for 24 hours before getting a repeat mystery), it still seems a bit skimpy -- getting the number of endings up to 18 or 21 would have made it nearly impossible to remember old games.

But ''Clue'' still has a towering advantage over adventure-style detective games like the old Infocom mysteries that only had one possible outcome. And the writing, acting, and luxurious production values make it a far richer experience than the board game it's based on. It's still my favorite CD-i title.
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(c) 1995 Chris Adamson

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 04/01/01, Updated 04/01/01