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Adventure / Gabriel Knight 3 / Page 3
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Did we say boobies? We meant hookers. Wait... no, that's not right...
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Gameplay
Although the game's controls and interface aren't finalized yet, it showed off enough to get a grasp of how easy it is to control your character. You can easily use the keyboard arrows to move the camera around any direction you want, similar to how a FPS works. The mouse allows you to interact with your surroundings. See an interesting picture? Click on it, and a small menu will appear on the mouse cursor, giving you the options to zoom into it for a closer inspection (very helpful), try to use an object on it (for example, using a quarter in a payphone). The general interact button is the main function, in which Gabriel usually comments on exactly what he sees and usually sticks his own personal opinions in as well. From personal experience… he tends to like the pictures with naked chicks in them.
Controlling Gabriel isn't difficult either, although I myself haven't found too many uses for it. All you have to do is click anywhere that he can walk, and he will walk there. He tends to walk a little too slow for my tastes though, and you can hit ESC to skip the animation. As a matter of fact, you can hit ESC to skip any movie sequence or animation that bores you. I did manage to find one part in the game when you actually did need to move Gabriel around instead of just clicking on surroundings. When you first encounter Lady Howard (a rather large woman who likes to wear hats that you could get lost under), she is chatting away with her friend in a museum. If you click on her directly to walk up to her and initiate a conversation, she will notice you, and turn away. Instead, you have to direct Gabriel into the darkness behind the 2 ladies. Once you are out of their direct line of sight, clicking on them will reveal a "listen-in" command, allowing you to sneak in on their conversation without them noticing you. Very cool!
Right clicking anywhere on the screen brings up the basic options menu, allowing you to change a great number of things. The most important seemed to be the graphics options, which allows you to fine-tune the game to your computer. The beta I received was a developers/debug copy, and so the game was fairly choppy at times. I'm not exactly sure if this was my own computer configuration, or because of the debug mode running in the background. I also noticed a great number of options were not implemented yet, although this isn't something to worry about as this part of the game isn't finalized yet, and is bound to be fixed. One thing I do know is that GK3 runs in D3D mode. I'm not sure if there is a software rendered (there isn't an option to select video cards), so its safe to assume that GK3 is a 3d-accelerated only game. I myself would prefer this route taken anyway, as it allows for so much more detail to be put in the game.
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