Customer Reviews

Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

It is always a pleasure, especially in current era of 3D shoot'em up games, when a new adventure game in "old style" [2D, point-and-click interface] emerges. It is even better pleasure if it is a good adventure game. And Nightlong by Team 17 definitely belongs to this category.

Your hero is named Joshua Reeve, he lives in 2099 and the game starts when he waits for a beautiful car, gets in it and goes through streets with old friend Hugh Martenson who is a governor of the Union city and currently faces some troubles. He became a target of terroristic attacks and asks Joshua for a help because he saved his life in the past and this is an opportunity for Joshua to do the same in return ...

Nightlong comes on three CD full of perfect graphics, animations and music, the puzzles are on the right level of difficulty and the story pulls you in the game immediately from the beginning. If you are a fan of good adventure games, you will not regret the money you spend for buying it. I only hope that Nightlong is not the last adventure game from Team 17.

Nightlong is a good game in the fashion of the old King's Quest or Return to Zork. The graphics are spectacular, and it has an interesting storyline. The challenges you must complete are fairly difficult, but anyone could get them eventually. The game is rated Teen because of some foul language and the shape of the women, but it's nothing you would't see or hear on TV. The one main problem I had with the game is that it's so short. The box says there's 40 hours of play but I beat it in 3 days after maybe 10 hours of play (I'm on Christmas vacation). But despite that, Nightlong is a satisfying adventure game.

An adventure game like they used to make them -- intelligent, funny, challenging, and thought-provoking. One warning: There's a major bug about a third of the way through the game that crashes the game to the desktop on machines running Win98 or later. The manufacturer's solution? Download a saved game from their website that picks up after the problem. Better than nothing, I suppose.

Ok, there are a lot of great games out there....and this is one of them! So.... you have to like adventure games with puzzles that will sometimes make you say "Ok I'll turn the computer off and get back to it later". But despite this, the graphics are so cool and so polished that this game is a jewel. Plus, the multimedia ambiance is astonishing, and the game goes your pace...you won't get killed answering the door for pizza, or getting glass of water, or patting your cat. As for myself, I take little sips of it, and everytime the caracter changes location, I pray that this is not the last scene. I've been playing with it for months. One last thing.... this game is made by Italian folks. I am not Italian...so I have no interest in pointing this out, except that it makes the lips of the caracters desynchronised to the phrases sounded out in English. By the way, these guys are also the great inventors of other great games like Ark of Time. So let yourself go, jump into this very well though imaginary world, and get absorbed by the night.

:::sigh:::
What can I say about Nightlong? It's tedious, the voice acting is pathetic, the graphics are strange, and the plot is nearly non-existant. This game ignores the details of the storyline, and puts forth all their efforts into opening doors and collecting dead rats. I was expecting an in-depth and interesting game, but was greatly disappointed in the end. There were so many areas where the creators could have pushed the story along to make it more intriuging, but of course they did not.
Also, the puzzles are NOT logical. They're like standardized tests, only once correct answer when there are more possible ones. Lots of pixle searching, which drove me to read a walkthrough. And, with that, it only took me about ten hours to complete the game.
Maybe my expectations were too high, I was hoping for another The Longest Journey. But, in any case, this game fizzled out long before the climax.

Nightlong is a game similar to Myst, Riven, Amerizone, Reah and Dark Side Of The Moon. This short critique is divided into three parts. 1. The good points of the game, 2. The So-So points of the game and 3. The bad points of the game. 1. The good points of the game: Nightlong has a great story-line. It would make a good motion picture. The background graphics are better than average. It set in the future and reminds me of the Judge Dredd movie. 2. The So-So points of the game: The graphics of the characters could stand some improvement [some of them need a great deal of improvement]. Their mouths do not move with the dialog, like a badly dubbed foreign film, which is very annoying not to mention distracting. But it's understandable knowing that it is being translated into many languages. 3. The bad points of the game: The graphics of the characters seem to be a rush job. They are poorly done. Their movements are stiff, especially the mouths. They are to Howdy Doody-like [for the younger set and T. V. trivia illiterate I mean puppet-like]. Although the game is suppose to be in 3-D it is not what I call 3-D. You can't look up down or around. It is like watching a stage play. And in some places the stage is very large. And since you can't zoom in it is difficult to find certain items that you need. But by far the worse point [And a point that is inexcusable and needs to be corrected in any future edition of Nightlong and any new game releases.] is that when you save the game in disk 2 or 3 and shut it down. When you pick the game up again you have to first insert disk 1, then insert the disk where you saved the game. This is a unnecessary nuisance. Tips for the game: 1. Before you play the game get on the Internet and find a good walkthrough in case you get stuck. I advise this for all your games. Although some may look down on this you pay your hard earned money for your games. They should be fun not frustrating. 2. Read plenty of reviews before you shell out your money for a game. And I'm not talking about the creator/manufacturers reviews. Get on the Internet and find reviews from gaming magazines and more importantly [Since some gaming magazines are slanted because the gaming creator/manufacturers advertise in their rags.] find several reviews from Joe and Jane Blow

This game is now quite old. It's still pretty fun though. The best attraction is the wisecracking main character.

Some of the puzzles are of the tedious "search and search and search until you find that one item that you didn't see" variety. In fact, the puzzles were generally a weak point in the game. I got bored with them and checked UHS for solutions.

I didn't get bored with the plot though, which was rather fun.

a decent game, what you would expect from a quality company such as dreamcatcher, however , gameplay very slow and redundant, graphics are very good when you go to cut scenes, other wise basic gameplay is fuzzy, with no way to increase video display, with my geforce 4600 it begs to be challanged
a good game at 10 bucks, worth it

Keeping in mind the age of the game, this was a decent, if somewhat frustrating outing for the adventure game genre. The game takes place in a BLADE-RUNNER inspired near future, which is evident by the flying cars and the dark metroplis in which it is set. The plot revolves around a terrorist group and a corporate conglomerate trying to harness a new invention that may very well turn into global mind-control. Your character has to figure out the truth of what is occurring and choose which side he is on.

As I said, the look of the game is straight out of the BLADE RUNNER game from a few years previous. But the gameplay is much different - at its core, it's still an adventure game. You collect items to be used on objects at later times, sometimes in combination with other items.

We've seen this variation more times than we can count, at this point - however, I have gotten used to the recent games and the innovations they have offered, so it was a bit of a shock to jump back 11 years to "the way things used to be" - by this I mean there were many unwelcome elements to the game that served to draw it out longer than it should have. Most notably, getting from one pre-rendered area to the next often meant having to sit still and wait while my guy walks from one side of the screen to the other.

Furthermore, this being an event-triggering game means you may talk to one person, then talk to a few more and find yourself at a seeming dead end, because you don't realize that the first character you talked to NOW has something new to say or offer based on events you've triggered since talking to him. This backtracking stretches the game out longer than it should be.

Also, in an attempt to add some depth, I guess, the game features ALOT of objects you can scan that end up being useless. This, however, causes you to miss some things along the way. I would search a cabinet and have the character tell me everything that was in there, and what objects he was taking. Later, I'd search a shelf and be told "NOTHING OF INTEREST." And yet sitting ON that shelf was the very object I needed, I just had to see it and click on it separately - this feels like a bit of a cheap trick!

What's even more irritating is the attitude and voice acting of the main character. I think they were going for a film noir style, but half the time, clicking on something useless would result in him simply saying "NAAAAAHHHH!" At other times, though, you wouldn't even get that, but a simply shrug of the shoulders as if to say, "what do you want me to do about it!?" I don't know why, but I found this "attitude" to be supremely annoying!

The story was par for the course for an adventure game. Predictable, entertaining enough but certainly not worthy of a film or book adaptation.

Graphically, the game was pretty good considering its age. Once again, think BLADE RUNNER style drab and dark. It certainly isn't pretty, by any stretch - but it has a consistent style appropriate to the story.

If you find it cheap at Half-Price Books as I did, you'll make an enjoyable weekend distraction of it - but I wouldn't go out of my way to add it to your collection.

Thought folks would like to know this game runs fine on Windows 7. I'm an old adventure game fan and if you played and liked Blade Runner you will probably like this game also.
Just right click on the setup.exe file on the first CD and choose to install in Windows 95 compatibility mode. Worked for me.
There is a bug in the game which makes it crash at a certain part on newer systems beyond the Windows 98 period. There is a save game file available to get past the crash point or you can use a virtual machine emulator to play the game.
Still worth the hassle IMO if you like these types of games.