Troublesome Dicks

Troublesome Dicks
The three dicks teaming up and posing.
Developer(s)	Lunatic Entertainment
Publisher(s)	Lunatic Entertainment
Platform(s)	PC, Wii, Wii U, PlayStation Move, Xbox Kinect
Genre(s)	Point-and-click adventure with turn-based RPG battle system

Troublesome Dicks is a Point-and-click adventure in a film noir detective setting. Set during the Prohibition Era it follows three unsuccessful private detectives who have been unable to get work since crime declined. Although the three are initially at odds, trying to sabotage one another so that they can get the clients that do come in seeking help, they are eventually forced to pair up when they discover what is really going on in the town. Although random encounters do not occur, battles can be initialized with various foes (often initiated by the foes themselves, such as mobsters and JAZZ Police), where the game switches to a turn-based battle system similar to Final Fantasy VII. During certain intense moments that are intended to be timed, these battles may instead happen in real time. The game's title is intended to be a triple entendre: It refers to the group as being detectives ("dicks") who get in the way of the plans of the game's primary (albeit hidden) antagonist; another meaning where the "dicks" refers to them being "jerks" but with the "troublesome" part meaning the same thing as the first meaning; and a final meaning where it simply has a sexual connotation for no reason at all other than to have one.

There are three main characters in the game: Thor, who has been finding himself only able to sleep in his office; Loki, who has serious anger-management issues and Baldur, who has sunken into a severe depression and finds his only comfort at the bottom of his eighth bottle of cheap wine. There are also two secret characters that can be recruited through the use of proper event taking: Scott Aho, a speakeasy bartender/boxing enthusiast associated with the trio and Detective Doofy, a member of the police force who can be swayed to the dicks' side.

Each character eventually receives a crystal shard embedded in their chests that allows them to "ascend" — or transform — into some form of monster specific to the character to aid in combat, though each with their pros and cons.

Introduction

The game starts out with an introductory cutscene with the starting character, Thor, read in a mock-film noir style. Below is an excerpt from this cutscene:

"It was a dark and tumultuous night. The spiders crawled like goulash across the support beams of my dark and dreary office. The only place lately I could get any sleep. My cup o' noodle burbled like a baby with a bagel, stirring me from the only rest I'd gotten that week. My head was pounding off the drunken stupor of the night before to this and the heady percolating of the coffee pot, sitting in its corner like a prizewinning champion. 'Way too much foam', I grumbled to myself. I didn't even know coffee could get foamy.

I felt like a thronobulax at a board meeting. The world still spun and whirled, though if it hadn't I may have thought I had already cashed in my chips. I hadn't had a dame call me in 37 days, and despite being on the right side of the law I couldn't help finding myself itching for some perp somewhere to kidnap a hysterical broad's rich husband or steal her precious Maltese chicken. Crime had been lax in the city as of late, at least to a level the fuzz could handle themselves and troubled dicks like me had nothing left to do but sit and twiddle our thumbs or slip into a local speakeasy. One guess as to which choice I came to."

Gameplay

Thor in out-of-battle "noir" coloration.

Although it portrays itself mostly as a typical point-and-click adventure type game as often seen in the 1990s, Troublesome Dicks has a few unique traits up its sleeve. For one, the game possesses occasional random battles, much like RPGs such as Final Fantasy and Lunar: Silver Star Story. During battles any item currently in a characters' inventory may be used as a weapon or a usable item, to varying effect. Another unique feature is that several characters are played all at once that the player can switch between on the fly; also, should one character initiate a random battle and another character is within "hearing range" of the other character, they will rush to their aid—assuming that they don't dislike the character so much to just let them take the beast(s) on all by themselves.

Another interesting feature of Troublesome Dicks is that normally the game takes place in a film noir style, with everything seen in black & white monochromatic shades; rarely will anything in the normal play appear in color, though some very important items do. That being said, the instant a battle occurs (scripted or not), a flash of light occurs, not only blowing all of the characters' hair back and putting them into battle stance but also converting the game to be in full, vibrant colors. While characters have HP bars showing and they have various stages of injured animations, they will also slowly fade to grayscale before passing out if their HP reaches 0. When a battle finishes, the colors remain for a second or so as they "leak out" of their locations and fade away back into the general noir colorations.