a great lawyer game with a bird related name, i wonder if there are any more like it
Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law serves as a parody of Ace Attorney in many ways. Though, I haven't played those games yet, but I imagine the format is very similar.
'The Burning Question' is clearly the weakest of the interactive episodes and each episode gradually gets better and better. Though, honestly, if 'Personal Piracy' were an episode of the series, it would be one of the show's finest episodes. It's incredibly well written, satirical, and comedically on point.
As for whether or not this works as a game or not is another story. It's interactive, sure, but it doesn't feel like it uses the medium to its full potential, hence the lukewarm rating. In addition, some of the connections between the evidence and the case are obtuse and questionable.
But I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a good time while playing it. It was a lot of fun.
'The Burning Question' is clearly the weakest of the interactive episodes and each episode gradually gets better and better. Though, honestly, if 'Personal Piracy' were an episode of the series, it would be one of the show's finest episodes. It's incredibly well written, satirical, and comedically on point.
As for whether or not this works as a game or not is another story. It's interactive, sure, but it doesn't feel like it uses the medium to its full potential, hence the lukewarm rating. In addition, some of the connections between the evidence and the case are obtuse and questionable.
But I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a good time while playing it. It was a lot of fun.
A diet Ace Attorney game wearing Adult Swim clothes. The game uses a pretty basic system from the Ace Attorney series when cross examining witnesses and suspects, as well as a pretty bare bones system when searching for clues outside the courtroom. The UI is about as intuitive as navigating through a DVD menu.
What keeps this game afloat is the humor. It is what you would expect from the show of the same name, although Colbert being absent is slightly noticeable even though the stand in imo does a good job impersonating him.
This game is also extremely short. Whether or not that is a good or bad thing is up to your discretion. The whole game is about as long as one Phoenix Wright case despite that it's divided into several cases. You can easily breeze through this game in one sitting in under 3 hours.
What keeps this game afloat is the humor. It is what you would expect from the show of the same name, although Colbert being absent is slightly noticeable even though the stand in imo does a good job impersonating him.
This game is also extremely short. Whether or not that is a good or bad thing is up to your discretion. The whole game is about as long as one Phoenix Wright case despite that it's divided into several cases. You can easily breeze through this game in one sitting in under 3 hours.
At least it's short. Honestly you're probably better off pulling up all the animated bits on Youtube. The leaps of logic when it comes to presenting the right evidence in the courtroom scenes is more frustrating than any dated joke.
Some good good laughs in this, worth a look if you miss these guys, but underwhelming as a game. Weird busted save system too, maybe best to just batter through it in one four-hour sitting.
I'm not a fan of the show much but it's an alright AA clone
Diet ace attorney but dumb... fully into it.
I loved Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law and Space Ghost Coast to Coast when they were on Cartoon Network. So when I was in the US in 2008 I picked up a copy, which was fine because I had a Free Loader.
Whelp before I got around to playing it there was an update that stopped the Free Loader from working and so I didn't get a chance to play it and I've never seen it available in Australia.
Anyway, after years of beating Phoenix Wright, I felt like it was time to take on the birdman. I finally managed to play it (admittingly through emulation) and yeah, it's good.
It takes Phoenix's gameplay and slaps it into Harvey's world, but all of the scenes are animated and the tone is more akin to Birdman's. There's little tension in the game, only presenting evidence during a trial seems to loose you any crests, which is a good thing too given that much of the fun of the game is from seeing what happens if you say something ridiculous... usually during those parts you can select another option until you get the correct one (and so the challenge is identifying the right response and picking that one last).
There are sections of the game where I had to visit each place to try and find where the next cut scene was and two times where it was a case of present everything in every room to figure out what was required (though once I felt dumb not realising what it wanted).
The story's are mmm..... like the show and there are good jokes in there.
But it's probably not worth rushing out to get.
Whelp before I got around to playing it there was an update that stopped the Free Loader from working and so I didn't get a chance to play it and I've never seen it available in Australia.
Anyway, after years of beating Phoenix Wright, I felt like it was time to take on the birdman. I finally managed to play it (admittingly through emulation) and yeah, it's good.
It takes Phoenix's gameplay and slaps it into Harvey's world, but all of the scenes are animated and the tone is more akin to Birdman's. There's little tension in the game, only presenting evidence during a trial seems to loose you any crests, which is a good thing too given that much of the fun of the game is from seeing what happens if you say something ridiculous... usually during those parts you can select another option until you get the correct one (and so the challenge is identifying the right response and picking that one last).
There are sections of the game where I had to visit each place to try and find where the next cut scene was and two times where it was a case of present everything in every room to figure out what was required (though once I felt dumb not realising what it wanted).
The story's are mmm..... like the show and there are good jokes in there.
But it's probably not worth rushing out to get.
A game based on Harvey Birdman published by Capcom sounds like some sort of miraculous dream combo. Like, damn, a law sim/visual novel by the company that perfected it with Ace Attorney! Harvey Birdman already is equipped with boatloads on weirdos to keep a similar wavelength of playful humor; get some clever puzzles in, dynamic art, a- HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA i can't do this anymore this game fuckin blows.
Farmed out to a third-party developer mostly responsible for crunched-out licensed games, and being noticably unfunnier than the actual show's finest hours, this is a visual novel/puzzle game to avoid. Puzzles are either mind-numbingly easy or sheer trial-and-error to see which one of your various pieces of evidence actually match. You have little interactivity with the repetitive environments, besides object hunting to see which one lets you progress. You can only save within gameplay, which means you must start a case to save the fact that you finished the previous one. Subtitles? Don't make me laugh. Sometimes, they're completely out of sync. Sometimes, they say the wrong thing entirely. Sometimes, THEY'RE MISSING. This makes Harvey Birdman inexcusably inaccessible for the hard of hearing, but I suppose being deaf is an advantage for how much you get hear the SAME. QUIPS. OVER AND OVER.
I won't be too hard on the graphics, given the cutscenes and characters look about as good as the show's cheap Flash animation would allow [not to knock on the show, I am very aware of how low-key budgets were on the earliest Adult Swim shows]. You just wish they had gone with the same intricacy as Phoenix Wright's art style. I will be critical of how little Hanna-Barbera rep you actually see. I don't know if WB had issues with who got into the game, and the obscurity of characters featured on the show is appreciated, but shit, it seems like after case 2, you hardly even see Peter Potamus much. Dixie and Pixie appear twice, Inch High is here for maybe 2 minutes, Secret Squirrel makes a return. Yakky Doodle's appearance was amusing, with no less than Steve Blum voicing him. Still, I don't know, man, it doesn't even seem like they do much in the way of memorability. Give me some Scooby-Doo weed arguments or Flintstones mafia bullshit. We're instead stuck with some insipid and poorly-plotted stories about Birdman suddenlt being jailed, Peanut being arrested for music theft and suddenly it's about clones and DRM now???? The writing did nothing for me.
If you're a big Hanna-Barbera completionist or desperate for more Harvey Birdman content, you'd be just as well watching a playthrough of this pitifully-short game. It's, at the very least, filled with fully voice-acted cutscenes and some fairly amusing Street Fighter cameos [it's the 2000s in a US-exclusive Capcom release, so this is the only IP you're seeing here]. Otherwise, even if you download it illegally, it's an utter waste of hard drive or Memory Stick Duo space.
Farmed out to a third-party developer mostly responsible for crunched-out licensed games, and being noticably unfunnier than the actual show's finest hours, this is a visual novel/puzzle game to avoid. Puzzles are either mind-numbingly easy or sheer trial-and-error to see which one of your various pieces of evidence actually match. You have little interactivity with the repetitive environments, besides object hunting to see which one lets you progress. You can only save within gameplay, which means you must start a case to save the fact that you finished the previous one. Subtitles? Don't make me laugh. Sometimes, they're completely out of sync. Sometimes, they say the wrong thing entirely. Sometimes, THEY'RE MISSING. This makes Harvey Birdman inexcusably inaccessible for the hard of hearing, but I suppose being deaf is an advantage for how much you get hear the SAME. QUIPS. OVER AND OVER.
I won't be too hard on the graphics, given the cutscenes and characters look about as good as the show's cheap Flash animation would allow [not to knock on the show, I am very aware of how low-key budgets were on the earliest Adult Swim shows]. You just wish they had gone with the same intricacy as Phoenix Wright's art style. I will be critical of how little Hanna-Barbera rep you actually see. I don't know if WB had issues with who got into the game, and the obscurity of characters featured on the show is appreciated, but shit, it seems like after case 2, you hardly even see Peter Potamus much. Dixie and Pixie appear twice, Inch High is here for maybe 2 minutes, Secret Squirrel makes a return. Yakky Doodle's appearance was amusing, with no less than Steve Blum voicing him. Still, I don't know, man, it doesn't even seem like they do much in the way of memorability. Give me some Scooby-Doo weed arguments or Flintstones mafia bullshit. We're instead stuck with some insipid and poorly-plotted stories about Birdman suddenlt being jailed, Peanut being arrested for music theft and suddenly it's about clones and DRM now???? The writing did nothing for me.
If you're a big Hanna-Barbera completionist or desperate for more Harvey Birdman content, you'd be just as well watching a playthrough of this pitifully-short game. It's, at the very least, filled with fully voice-acted cutscenes and some fairly amusing Street Fighter cameos [it's the 2000s in a US-exclusive Capcom release, so this is the only IP you're seeing here]. Otherwise, even if you download it illegally, it's an utter waste of hard drive or Memory Stick Duo space.