Ripper Review

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Ripper

Review by Jake Quinlan As Told to Skinny MinnieMarch 2002

Ripper is a full-motion video, first-person, point-and-click adventure game.

The year is 2040. It’s a lurid November night here in New York City. There’s a new breed of blade-wielding serial killer splashing blood across the headlines of the Virtual Herald, and you’ve been reading all about him thanks to me, Jake Quinlan. The police are stumped and the public is hooked. Another body, another byline; nothing personal, but I’ve got a job to do.

“You are the writer of words. I am the taker of souls.”  I can still vividly recall that first eerie transmission over my handheld computer. The twisted voice and distorted facial image gloated over the newly eviscerated victim, a poor dry cleaner in the Bowery who was sliced to shreds. “You are my voice.  You will hear from me from time to time, like any true friend.  Maybe you know me, maybe you don’t. Someday you might stare me in the eye, and you’ll know. Yours truly, Ripper.” Why does the confessor pick me to boast to? Is there a chance I really do know him? I’ve met a lot of nutcases in this dank, dismal city, but they’re usually not the ones to fear. It’s the calm, peaceful, gentle souls secretly driven by dark obsessions that are the truly dangerous ones …

This self-proclaimed Jack the Ripper clone is seen by my editor, Ben Dodds, as a story that could carry a paper along for months.  He puts me on it full-time and assigns the lovely junior reporter Catherine Powell to be my assistant. Mixing business and pleasure has never been my forte, but it doesn’t take long for ours to become more than a professional relationship. I only learn how independent Catherine can be and how little I really know of her later, after I find her stricken comatose in her apartment. Was she trying to confront the Ripper herself? It looks that way from the clues in her apartment.

Picking up the threads of Catherine’s secret investigation as she lies in the ICU at Tribeca Medical Center, I vow to avenge her attack and catch this psychopath once and for all. Catherine left many coded clues and cryptic messages for me to sort out, obviously in the event of her unforeseen demise. The puzzles would prevent the Ripper story from getting into the wrong hands too easily, I guess. She was always fond of crystals and astrology and combined these passions with riddling references to the England of the 1800s. Now all I’d have to do was crack the codes and follow the leads and contacts she left behind …

I have my work cut out for me, though, as the Ripper continues to transmit word of his ever-growing list of seemingly unconnected victims. Males and females both elderly and young are disemboweled then abandoned. None are robbed or raped. No point of entry or exit from any crime scene can be determined, nor are any fingerprints left behind. Even the type of slashes from the blades the Ripper uses are hitherto unseen by doctors and hardened detectives alike.  The newer targets are virtual reality web designers and internet gaming aficionados. What connection can they possibly have with a dry cleaner and a cub reporter?

Impeding my progress even more is the apparent lockout attempt by the NYPD detective assigned to the Ripper case, Vincent Magnotta.  Magnotta seems to have an underlying itinerary all his own, which frequently includes damaging or misplacing whatever evidence there is about the Ripper’s victims. After Magnotta leaves a site where a body was found, I conduct my own investigation and gather up jagged clues. A codename emblazoned on a coffee cup that Magnotta “accidentally” smashes at the crime scene later provides a clue to the Ripper, after I piece the damned cup back together again at any rate. My interviews with NY residents who happen to be near later crime scenes when the Ripper strikes sometimes produce new leads, despite constant denial from Magnotta that progress can be made in this case.

When you’ve been covering the NY scene as long as I have, you get the dirt on everybody from lowlife crooks to evidence locker officers. Refreshing peoples’ memories about their own pasts can open up new avenues, but you can make a few new enemies that way too. Hey, if you ever take my place, you can decide whether to remain Mr. Nice Guy or not and see if it takes you anywhere different.  As for me, I’ve got a slasher to find and I’m running out of time …

Touching base with Dr. Burton, the unorthodox surgeon assigned to Catherine’s care in the ICU, is nearly as frustrating as dealing with Magnotta. She too seems secretive and unwilling for much progress to be made in easing Catherine out of her comatose state.  Burton’s staff claims that Burton is the best in her field and capable of rebuilding an unconscious patient’s memories from inside the patient’s brain, thus bringing the patient back to consciousness.  Every time I insist on these memory-building attempts, Dr. Burton mentions potential escalation of damage to Catherine’s emotional state and refuses to do more than monitor Catherine’s current status. How will we ever really see the face of the Ripper if not through the images buried in Catherine’s mind? Maybe I can find someone else to help me with this task …

I eventually sense that there is more than one turbulent story waiting to be uncovered here. Through stealthy break-ins, secret file and access card impounding, bug planting, and general law-breaking behavior, I find that I am right. Trips to a local bar and a smokehouse, as well as to the police station and to the morgue where the Ripper victims are being held, all reveal much—too much actually.  As I get closer to the Ripper, I actually become a suspect in the case in Detective Magnotta’s eyes! How else could I possibly know so much, and how come so many of my recent story contacts keep winding up dead?

I must repair damaged computers from Ripper victims in an effort to piece together their possible links to the serial killer. Some victims were obviously intent, in life, to hide whatever connections they had with the Ripper. Sequestered inventory items must be uncovered from their ingenious hiding places within such seemingly innocuous items as a clock, a bank, and a parlor gaming table to aid me in my quests. A computer hardware magazine later offers assistance once I pick it up. Secret organizations need to be uncovered and infiltrated, and their connections to all suspects investigated.

Gone are the days of yesteryear when the internet was merely a huge cluster of static bulletin boards. Nowadays the web is rife with virtual arenas called “wells,” and everything from nonviolent and violent gaming to banking and industry is done interactively online in these wells through virtual reality helmets and computer equipment. I’ve been pounding the pavements of this city long enough that my gun and shooting skills are well-honed, and these skills serve to help me break in to different web wells and get ever closer to catching the Ripper.

Another suspect I add to my growing list is one of the original and premier virtual reality enthusiasts, Joey Falconetti, aka Falcon Eddie. A renegade from the law, Falconetti’s obsession with all manner of knives, as well as his documented criminal activities, warrant continual surveillance. Much detailed investigation work and password decoding also reveal Falconetti’s connections to many of the victims, as well as to other suspects on my list …

How the undercurrent of secrecy about the Ripper and his methods, as well as his true identity, will finally be discovered looks like it will encompass a string of unique riddles, deadly games, and challenging shootouts. The final Ripper confrontation that I so long for may even occur outside of the confines of normal life, out there in cyberspace, amidst friends and enemies alike.  At least that is how this reporter predicts that the story will finally end, but maybe if you were me, it might be different … The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Take Two Interactive Publisher: Acclaim Released: 1996

Available for: DOS Windows

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Screenshots

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System Requirements

486/50 MHz 2X CD-ROM drive VGA card with 512 K memory, VESA compatible or VESA driver installed (PCI or VLB recommended) 10 MB free hard drive space Sound card (Creative Labs, Media Vision, Gravis Ultrasound); Ripper uses the HMI sound drivers 6.5 MB free extended memory (XMS) Mouse Supports Windows 95

      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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