In The 1st Degree Adair and Armstrong / Broderbund Software, Inc. 1995

An intriguing CD-ROM courtroom adventure, this casts you in a role of a District Attorney in San Francisco who must build a case against James Tobin, a well-known painter, who stands accused of murdering Zachary Barnes, co-owner (with Tobin) of a hip art gallery. Your goal is to secure a first-degree murder conviction (with a grand theft thrown in for a good measure) - anything less would be considered a defeat. But, as you may guess, this is no simple task, for the shooting can easily be made to look like an act of self-defense, and the witnesses are either not very cooperative or not very reliable. The game is divided into two sections: during the first, pre-trial phase, you will examine the evidence from the murder scene, review the police interrogations of the defendant and the witnesses, and conduct your own witness interviews, hoping to cajole or force out of them any helpful testimony. You will gradually discover a fairly complex web of relations among the main characters in the drama, plenty of possible motives, and at least a few plausible crime scenarios. Furthermore, you will never be completely sure just who is telling the whole truth: Tobin's girlfriend, who also had a brief fling with the victim? the victim's wife, who seems almost too cooperative? Tobin's assistant, who appears to know much more than he admits? The second phase of the game, the actual trial, is where you must elicit the appropriate testimony from the witnesses (praying that they won't change their stories) and undermine the strategies of the cunning defense lawyer, all under the watchful eye of the local media, whose members will not spare you withering criticism in case you blunder. You will quickly learn how crucial it is to ask the right questions (even during the pre-trial phase): select a wrong approach, and the witness will clam up, depriving you of a chance to get some helpful information. You will no doubt be replaying the interview sessions over and over again, trying out various questioning options in an effort to chart out the right path. The game certainly boasts crisp, attractive photography and video; the acting is solid (which, in CD-ROM game terms, means 'on par with your average daytime soap'); and piecing together a viable courtroom strategy proves sufficiently challenging to keep a patient gamer interested. But playing it over and over again takes its toll.
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2CD ISO Demo881Mb (upped by Egon68)
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