Blade Runner (PC)

I'm through with 'A' games now, so this week I'm moving up to games beginning with the letter 'B', starting with another game request: Westwood's 1997 adventure game Blade Runner.

Amazingly it took 15 years for a proper Blade Runner game to get made, though developers like Hideo Kojima had been... paying homage to it the best they could in the meantime. Well okay there is another game called Blade Runner released in 1985 for 8-bit computers, but it's actually based on the soundtrack to the movie. Seriously, it's stated to be a "video game interpretation of the film score".

I'm not sure if it's a coincidence that Westwood's game came out a few months after the Director's Cut DVD of the movie, but it certainly seems like good timing. Sadly I'm not going to be able to compare the game to the film, as I've somehow neglected to ever watch it. There's two theatrical cuts, a TV cut, a workprint cut, a Director's Cut and a Final Cut, and I haven't seen any of them. I know it stars a detective called Rick Deckard who definitely is/isn't a robot and I know where the Millennium Falcon is hidden amongst the skyscrapers, but other than that...

Actually you know what, I'm not going to half-ass this for once; I'm going to use this article as an excuse to finally watch the film for the very first time before I play the game, right now! Such is my commitment to excellence and my dedication to providing insightful commentary... or maybe I'm just trying to put off having to write about the game for a bit longer. Either way this article may now also include MOVIE SPOILERS.

(Click the pictures to... see them in exactly the same res as they are now. Sorry, but this one's stuck at 640x480.)
Read on »