Alter Ego

Product Details

Alter Ego From Viva Media List Price: $29.99 Price: $16.99 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Ships from and sold by Amazon.com 3 new or used available from $16.99 Average customer review:

Product Description

WHEN EVIL HAS MORE THAN ONE FACE … YOU NEED MORE THAN ONE PERSPECTIVE. After a strange aristocrat dies and his body goes, missing a series of gruesome murders shake a small town. Rumors of a supernatural monster abound, and this latest spurt of crime has the entire village shaking in fear. The local police are beside themselves and have made no headway in solving the crimes. Detective Briscoll, a man of logic and principles and Timothy Moor, a poor immigrant turned petty thief, become unlikely partners in solving these terrible crimes. Alternating between these roles, players will investigate the strange events and gradually reveal the secret. DOES EVIL EVER DIE? A dark, macabre storyline that combines horror, adventure and role-playing elements to create a gripping murder mystery. Detailed 3D characters and hi-res backgrounds complete with realistic lighting and shadow effects. * Lead the investigation alternating between the 2 main characters – Briscoll, the Detective, and Moor, the Thief. Over 25 NPC characters to interact with throughout the investigation. * Over 80 game locations in the town of Plymouth and the surrounding area to explore.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6556 in Video Games
• Brand: Viva Media
• Model: 838639006199
• Released on: 2010-08-03
• ESRB Rating: Rating Pending
• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows XP
• Format: DVD-ROM

Features

• WHEN EVIL HAS MORE THAN ONE FACE, YOU NEED MORE THAN ONE PERSPECTIVE.
• The death of an eccentric aristocrat is the first in a series of chilling murders that shake the town of Plymouth and the surrounding countryside in late 19th Century England.
• DESTINY DOES NOT SHARE ITS SECRETS The paths of detective and thief become intertwined in the aftermath of a blood-lust killing spree that has shaken the town of Plymouth. Will they be able to stop these horrible crimes and solve this macabre mystery?
• TOGETHER, NOTHING WILL ESCAPE THEM! Only together, will the eyes of detective and thief see it all. Players alternate between both main characters as they investigate these sinister crimes to reveal the dark secret behind them.

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Customer Reviews

Moody Dark Mystery Adventure - but don't expect a Hollywood Ending Being a fan of mystery adventures, once I read the storyline, I knew this was a game I would have to play. The game has a dark gothic mood to it, the graphics are impressive, and the two main characters in the investigation present you with two different styles of gameplay. Playing as the thief, the game is more of a point & click adventure as you're more preoccupied 'gathering' (stealing) items in hopes of escaping to America. Playing as the detective, the gameplay is more in the spirit of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries as you're gathering evidence and have to use your deductive skills to piece all the clues together. The ending comes out of left field - so don't expect a typical Hollywood wrap-up here. Alter Ego deserves credit for having a much deeper storyline and more complex characters than typical adventure fare. Overall, I was pleased with the game and would recommend this to anyone in search of a good dark mystery adventure. Game runs well after clean driver install I experienced the exact same problem with the game and did suspect SecuROM, but never got the usual "insert a valid disc" dialog box. I ended up contacting tech support and got a reply rather quickly. Their customer support told me to run some maintenance and do a clean install of the latest display drivers. Sounded like the typical thing they'd say, but what the hey, my machine was ripe for some maintenance anyway, so I ended up running defrag and disk cleanup. Then I uninstalled my video card drivers. I made sure to go to ATI's site (I have a Radeon HD5700 series) and download the newest version. I restarted the machine and lo and behold: the game loaded up in a matter of 10-15 seconds. I'm about halfway through, it's very engaging so far, a dark feel with a very unified style and rewarding gameplay. SecuROM 7.42.0001 detected -- Game won't play Warning!!! This game uses SecuROM 7.42.0001 The requirements listed on the box (actually a cardboard sleeve over a DVD case) are very low: OS: Windows 7/Vista/XP Processor: 1.5 GHz Memory: 512 MB RAM 4 GB free hard drive space Video card: DirectX 9 compatible video card with 64 MB video RAM Computers much older than mine, and with much poorer video cards, could meet these requirements. But when I installed and tried to run the game, it slowly loaded to a black screen, the DVD eventually spun down, and the black screen persisted until I used Control-Alt-Delete so I could close the game and get control of my computer. It's done this every time I tried to start the game. I get as far as a window showing Play, Setup, Website, and Close. I click Play and wait while the disc spins and spins. Eventually the screen turns black and that's as far as it gets. No notification of anything, no splash screen from the publisher, the game never gets past the disc check. The disc slowly spins down. Come back in 30 minutes, it still hasn't started. It's frozen solid. The Setup option allows you to choose resolution, set antialiasing and shader to 0, play windowed, or use vsync or not. None of these settings had any effect. I tried them all, one by one and in combinations. I tried both while connected to the Internet and not. Antivirus uninstalled. No good. No emulation software was ever installed on the computer, so it doesn't look like a blacklisting problem. It's just plain failure of the SecuROM copy protection to detect a valid DVD. Remember when games would tell you to insert the disc when they failed a disc check? Not SecuROM. It freezes your computer instead. ProtectionID v6.4 identifies the version of SecuROM on the Viva Media version of Alter Ego as 7.42.0001. I bought the game here at Amazon. I was able to play Tomb Raider Anniversary, which uses an earlier version of SecuROM (SecuROM 7.32.0012), on the same computer. It seems SecuROM gets worse with every successive version. 7.42.0001 is obviously more restrictive. They are so anal about pirates playing the game within a week of publication that they won't let legitimate purchasers play it ever. SecuROM is getting worse. And the publisher will never admit that it's their copy protection that is causing your game not to run. They always blame your computer, or your drivers, whether you have a 3 year old aging game computer or a top of the line state of the art computer. And once you pay for the software, your money is gone. The most they'll give you is another copy of the same crippled game. Too bad I lost $29.99 on this crippled garbage. The only NoDVD cracks I could find were for the European versions, so no help there. If I absolutely felt I HAD to play this I'd have to visit Pirate Bay or some similar place and download the Euro version and crack it. If you know your computer has difficulty with SecuROM v7 "protected" games, don't make the same mistake I did. If you haven't had problems so far, don't be too sure you won't with this one. Maybe I'm actually lucky the game wouldn't start right from the beginning. While using Google to try to troubleshoot this game, I found posts from gamers who got partway through it but were unable to finish because it was so buggy and kept crashing. Maybe that's because the game itself is buggy, but it could also be another manifestation of SecuROM in a more insidious form. Do a Google search for SecuROM trigger functions to see what I mean. --------------------------------------------------- update: I've found system requirements that are different from what is on the game box on the Steam and the Adventureshop websites: The Steam website lists higher minimum system requirements than the game box: * OS: Windows 7/Vista/XP SP 2 * Processor: 2.5 GHz Single Core * Memory: 1 GB RAM * Graphics: 128 MB 3D Video Card (Geforce 6600/Radeon 9600 or better) * DirectX®: 9.0c or higher * Hard Drive: 3 GB free hard drive space * Sound: DirectX sound card The Adventureshop website lists different requirements, that are even higher for video card. It also adds Windows 2000 and does not list Windows 7, which is strange. OS: 2K/XP/Vista CPU: Pentium IV Memory: 512 MB system memory Video memory: 256 MB HD: 5 GB free Audio: 16 bit stereo I suspect the requirements on the game box are incorrect.