The Platinum Diaries | NCIS

Why This Game?

I have been sit­ting on this one for a while, but decid­ed it was final­ly time to crack this one open over the week­end and grab the rel­a­tive­ly easy plat­inum in NCIS for PS3. This is one of those famous­ly easy games to plat­inum, all of the tro­phies are unmiss­able, but what end­ed up being more inter­est­ing was how much fun I had with it. I’ll get to that a bit lat­er, but suf­fice to say that this might be my most-rec­om­mend­ed easy plat­inum ever earned.

Was it Quick?

I’m hon­est­ly not sure if this is the fastest plat­inum I’ve ever got­ten, but it’s def­i­nite­ly up there. Con­tain­ing a total of 4 episodes, this game is super short. Each episode should take you some­where around an hour, though they do vary in length a bit. In a day where I had oth­er things going on, I was eas­i­ly able to fin­ish the game and col­lect my cov­et­ed 100% in just two sit­tings. (9 out of 10)

Was it Easy?

In stark con­trast to the entry from last week, this is about as easy as you can get. Just play through the game and you’re done. Com­bined with the short length, this makes it feel like one of the eas­i­est plat­inum tro­phies out there. There are a cou­ple of crime scenes in the game with some rea­son­ably tough clues to spot, but I nev­er used a guide and came out pret­ty quick­ly. Yes, if you’re look­ing for a mind­less plat­inum, this is where you should look first, per­haps even before the major­i­ty of the Tell­tale games out there. (10 out of 10)

Was It Fun?

This one looked like a bit of a slog from the out­side look­ing in. I’m pleased to say that I could­n’t have been more wrong. Let me be clear: NCIS is not a well-made game. The char­ac­ter mod­els look awful, I am still con­vinced one of the voice-actors is com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed and some of the con­trols are baf­fling­ly poor­ly thought-out. That said, some­times a game tran­scends qual­i­ty and just becomes beau­ti­ful in spite of its flaws. Com­ing into the game hav­ing nev­er seen a sin­gle episode of the NCIS TV show, I could not dif­fer­en­ti­ate between inten­tion­al wack­i­ness and hasti­ly designed jank­i­ness. This made for con­stant hilar­i­ous moments that deserves its own drink­ing game. (9 out of 10)

Any Oth­er Thoughts?

Going into this game, I expect­ed it to be fair­ly sim­i­lar to the CSI games I’ve played in the past. In many ways this end­ed up being true, but where those games can end up tak­ing them­selves more seri­ous­ly than per­haps they deserve, it felt as though NCIS knew exact­ly what it is: a hasti­ly-devel­oped cash grab for a pop­u­lar pro­ce­dur­al crime show. Going into this game with the right frame of mind will make you enjoy the entire expe­ri­ence and come out the oth­er end­ed with one of the eas­i­est plat­inums out there.