Tender Loving Care (Windows)

If you own a DVD-ROM drive for your PC, have you been looking for a game that takes advantage of DVD storage capacity? Or if you just own a regular DVD player without a computer, are you looking for something beyond simple "viewing"? Tender Loving Care is one of the more interesting DVDs I've seen so far because it truly takes advantage of the format's special features and it does this with the simple controls available to anyone with a DVD player via the remote control.

TLC owes a lot to the movie format but it is not a movie that you passively watch, but rather an interactive movie or game. It comes from the makers of*** The 11th Hour and 7th Guest***, two wildly popular computer games for the PC. Unlike the*** The 11th Hour*** and 7th Guest, a computer is not needed to play TLC, just a decent DVD player.

So what is an interactive movie? One in which the viewer controls what happens in the end. Instead of sitting back and watching what the director thinks you want to see, you are basically tailoring the story to your own personal viewpoints as the story progresses. Obviously there are a limited number of plot twists and endings that are possible, but it does guarantee that each time you "watch" this movie, you'll see something a little different.

TLC is a thriller with lots of twists and since the viewers instigates many of the plot turns, it's difficult to guess what will happen next. The player is part voyeur, part detective, part judge and part patient in this story firmly based in the area of psychology. Your guide is Dr. Turner, played by two time Oscar nominee, John Hurt. All you really know in the beginning is that something has gone terribly wrong with one of his patients and Dr. Turner needs your help in figuring out how it could have happened under his care.

The cast includes his beautiful, deluded patient, her husband and a mysterious, seductive psychiatric nurse brought in to care for the wife. The way the game works is that the viewer is shown a bit of the feature length film and then is given a chance to interact with it. The interactive parts include exploration of the rooms in the house and taking psychological tests or TATs.

Exploring the house, reading diaries and poking around people's rooms uncovers clues that can be used to figure out what the heck is going on. The TAT test results uncover elements of the viewer's personality and are used to create a progressively accumulating personal psychological profile of the viewer. Not meant to replace a real psychological exam, the tests affect how the story will progress. Some people will find these tests corny, others will love them. Basically they involve the display of a picture and then the viewer is asked to describe what is going on in the picture.

This DVD carries the following warning: "Contains mature themes, nudity and some violence." And true to these words, many of the TAT questions involve views on sexuality. This is not a good game for anyone squeamish about discussing sex, even if you're playing alone. For others it might be a great "date" movie or a way to discover things you might not know about your significant other. My wife and I actually had a good time playing this game with another couple who we've known for years. When it came to answering the questions, we put it to a vote and sometimes the results were pretty funny.

I'd like to see more games like this come out, but made with multiple players in mind. Playing this type of game on a large screen TV in the living room is much more conducive with a group then trying to huddle around a PC. Of course, you have to be selective about who you view this with. I don't think you'd want to invite your boss over to play this game because of the nudity and sexually-oriented TAT questions.

This game really shows off what is possible with DVD technology. DVD is great for any type of decision-tree game. I assume that the players have some sort of memory (RAM) to store the choices made. If you quit the game before the end, you get a code to put in when you return. One warning though: not all DVD-players are the same. For example, my Panasonic 310 has a feature that allows you to stop a DVD, turn off the machine and then turn it back on at a later date and resume where you left off.

At our friend's house, their Toshiba doesn't have this feature which, I assume, means it doesn't have as much built-in memory to save information. Playing the game on their machine, we ran into all sorts of problems. The disk seemed to skip around erractically, it hung up in places and it wouldn't save our place. On my player, every thing worked fine so I am assuming that the players with more built-in features come with more memory to save the little bits of info such as disk location.

All in all TLC is a cool DVD and it's a great introduction to the world of interactive gaming, especially if you've never played a computer game. Computer gamers might be a bit jaded and frustrated with things like writing down a code to save the "level" but sometimes a break from complicated games is nice and it's certainly much more interactive than a traditional movie experience, or even some of the first interactive movie attempts which just gave you branching choices such as "the player leaves town" or "the player stays in town". If you're looking for something different and new for your DVD-player, pick up a copy of TLC.

Review By GamesDomain