A serial killer is on the loose in futuristic New York City. Nicknamed 'the Ripper,' after the brutal way he leaves his victims, the murder suspect is now contacting you about his grisly deeds. As a reporter for the Virtual Herald, you must investigate crime scenes, speak with law enforcement and witnesses, and try to make sense of the cryptic communication from the killer himself. Gameplay is broken down into three distinct phases. The first involves exploring rooms to inspect items, discover clues, and solve puzzles. The second consists of questioning full-motion video characters superimposed over static backgrounds, while the third phase has your character exploring the realm of cyberspace in first-person shooting sequences. Ripper's cast features actors Christopher Walken, Karen Allen, Burgess Meredith, Ossie Davis, and John-Rhys Davies. Over three hours of video footage is included across six CD-ROMs.
Ripper is a frustrating game because it has so many terrific qualities alongside so many bad ones. This game is from Take Two Studios, the same company that produced another much loved AND hated game: Black Dahlia.
Ripper is a cleverly conceived game that transports Jack the Ripper from Victorian London and drops him in the middle of mid-21st Century Manhattan. The game takes place in 2040, to be exact, and our hero is a hunky reporter named Jake Quinlan. A mysterious stalker has been killing women in New York, and the murders are done in a particularly savage Jack-the-Ripper style. There are of course no witnesses or suspects. Jake's hook to the story is that, for some reason, the Ripper contacts him right before every murder.
May 26, 2016 Steve still doesn’t know why he had the idea, but as he looked at the images, he thought to himself: “My God, that looks like the Black Dahlia.” The Black Dahlia, of course, is the nickname. Black Dahlia Red Rose by Piu Eatwell is a re-examination of the Black Dahlia murder. The book looks at gripping new evidence to solve the seventy year old.
Ripper is in the format of an interactive movie (though unlike a more famous interactive movie - Phantasmagoria - Ripper is a real game). It's done with live actors, which brings us to the first of this game's problems. Unlike many games with bad acting, the bad acting in Ripper is done by a largely familiar cast of actors: Christopher Walken, Karen Allen, Ossie Davis, Burgess Meredith, John Rhys-Davies, David Patrick Kelly, Jimmie Walker, Paul Giamatti and David Thornton. Many of these actors are quite talented, but unfortunately you'd never know it from this game. Walken, particularly, in a plum role as an unhinged cop, gives a performance such baffling awfulness that I was staring stupidly at my screen, asking, 'What was he thinking?!' I guess he doesn't feel acting in a CD game 'counts.' Wrong, Chris! We're paying our hard-earned dough just like the moviegoers - in fact, we're paying a lot more! Fortunately, Scott Cohen, the actor playing Virtual Herald reporter Jake Quinlan, does a professional job. I think the game would have been unendurable if this wasn't so.
The graphics in the game are smooth and slick, with intriguing and imaginative environments to explore. The movement is FMV, and it's quite elegantly done. Movement through this futuristic Manhattan is accomplished with a handy database of available locations.
One of the most intriguing components of Ripper is the cyberspace element. In this future society, cyberspace is - no big surprise here - a large part of daily life. A fairly significant percentage of the game is actually played in this virtual environment: the library, the newspaper, and various sites created by characters and organizations in the story.
Included in this portion of the game are several arcade sequences. Now, I know many of us adventure fans resent ANY incursion of 'action' elements into our games. However, I must say that for me, Ripper got away with them for two reasons. First, they are used in a believable context (as 'security' for private cyberspace locations) and second, the game allows you to change difficulty settings for these sequences. With them set on easy, even I could get through them with no problem. This 'security' premise also provided the game's creators to include a variety of entertaining puzzles of the slider and chessboard ilk. Again, in the context they seemed justified and I enjoyed them.
Ripper is not a game for timid puzzle solvers. The puzzles are many and they are NOT easy. Some I found entertainingly difficult, such as following a cryptic set of instructions to install a set of circuits on a computer. Others I found simply obscure, like figuring out the correct array of crystals on a board or adjusting the electrodes attached to an experimental monkey's brain.
The plot of Ripper, not surprisingly, gets pretty darned complicated pretty darned quickly. Our hero's girlfriend is attacked by the Ripper but survives in a coma. She is being taken care of by brilliant research doctor Karen Allen (very bad casting indeed). In one of the more interesting aspects of the game, Jake has to actually enter cyberspace and help re-assimilate his stricken girlfriend's personality by feeding her information about the Ripper case. I had a really good time winding my way through the complicated plot of Ripper, with its good-looking environments, challenging puzzles and intriguing gameplay. The badness of some of the acting was a constant distraction, however.
Unfortunately, the bad acting is not the game's worst feature. I hear a lot of complaints about the lack of 'replayability' of adventure games. Frankly, I find this criticism baffling. I think a good adventure game should be framed around a strong plot that has a logical beginning, middle and end, and when I've finished it - it's over! I rarely have a desire to play a game more than once.
The creators of Ripper, in an attempt to please these 'no-replay' whiners, have come upon a (supposedly) brilliant gimmick: Ripper actually has four different endings, with each with a different character turning out to be the killer. When you finish the game, it's automatically reset so that you'll have a different killer the next time. Sounds great, right? Wrong. Big time wrong. Why? Well, four different possible killers would be fine if the game could actually support the story lines of four different killers. But it can't. That would have taken more like 20 disks.
The result is that through three-fourths of the game, ALL major characters seem just as likely to be guilty. Now, red herrings are fine, but in any good mystery, all red herrings must be explained and justified by the end of the story. In other words, even though there are false leads and suspicious characters that seem to be guilty at first, when the truth is finally known all threads of the story must make sense. In Ripper this isn't possible, because the plot has to be built so that FOUR people are actually guilty. Pretending that it's just one of them at the end of the game doesn't make up for the illogic of the story.
Despite this game's problems, I really did enjoy myself playing this game, and would recommend it to any adventure gamer wanting a real challenge.
How to run this game on modern Windows PC?
This game has been set up to work on modern Windows (10/8/7/Vista/XP 64/32-bit) computers without problems.
People who downloaded Ripper have also downloaded:
Black Dahlia, X-Files Game, The, Blade Runner, Phantasmagoria, Night Trap, Dame Was Loaded, The, Psychic Detective, Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh
Black Dahlia, X-Files Game, The, Blade Runner, Phantasmagoria, Night Trap, Dame Was Loaded, The, Psychic Detective, Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh
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- 1Vandal Savage
Vandal Savage[edit]
His DC Comics Encyclopedia entry states he was the Ripper.14:35, 27 January 2007 (UTC)Enda80
The Lodger[edit]
The link to the 1913 novel The Lodger goes to a pop band by the same name. Sorry I don't know how to disambiguate it, would someone else please do it?The Sanity Inspector 22:36, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
- Thanks for letting us know. There's never been an article about the book, but that at least used to go to the Hitchcock film based upon the novel. Some freaking putz removed that and put up some insignificant band there instead. Grr. I moved the band to a better name and threw a disambiguation page up. It should help some, but it'd be nice to have info on the short story and novel itself sometime. 17:11, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
Metal Gear Solid 2[edit]
A little spoilerific, butIn Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the main character's past reveals that he was once called 'Jack the Ripper', for he murdered many. This seems relevant, but I'm not sure how to word it to fit in the article. If someone else can, that would be great. If also you find this inappropriate for the article, it is fine to exclude it too. Jon Fawkes 04:18, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps change the title of this to 'Jack The Ripper In Popular Culture'? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.154.218.85 (talk) 19:52, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
Removed section[edit]
I have removed the trivia section to here, pending citation and discussion of notability:
Trivia- In the film Dr. Strangelove, the villain is the deranged USAF general 'Jack D. Ripper', who orders his wing of B-52s to carry out an unprovoked and unauthorized thermonuclear attack in the Soviet Union.
- A number of companies also produce Jack the Ripper figurines or toys (including Mezco and McFarlane Toys), sometimes leading to public protest, as when the family of victims of alleged serial killer Robert William Pickton objected to the sale of Ripper dolls at the VancouverVirgin Megastore. [1]
- In the film Red Eye the hitman played by Cillian Murphy uses the alias named Jackson Rippner. When another character said it wasn't very nice of his parents naming him that he responded by saying That's what I told them, before I killed them/.
- Arcayne(cast a spell) 15:48, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
More Ripper fiction addenda[edit]
The Ripper Code by Nabil Shaban. Novel at Amazon, short film at Daily Motion. Nabil Shaban has appeared in several films, including Born of Fire (1983), City of Joy (1992), Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein (1993), Gaias børn (1998), and Children of Men (2006) - wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by William Trevor Blake (talk • contribs) 23:40, 15 November 2012 (UTC)
Carole Nelson Douglas's darkly sumptuous crossover /Alternate Wold Newton Universe IRENE ADLER series (starring the Conan Doyle character from A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA; THE Woman, who beguilded and bested Sherlock Holmes)features references to the Ripper, especially motivating the investigations in the 'story arc' novels CHAPEL NOIR and CASTLE ROUGE, in which the Ripper is found to be a deliberately celebrated example of an all-too-common sadistic crime...While the élites--aristo, affluent, and arty--including Bram Stoker--are busy secretly reading PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS, and the series' gang, plus Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, encounter horrid femmes et hommes fatale, including Rasputin, Dracula and a horde of neo-Attis-cult self-castrators.
Anne Perry, whose own dark past was fictionalized in HEAVENLY CREATURES, won great praise for her grim THOMAS PITT series novel, THE WHITECHAPEL CONSPIRACY, which uses an S. Knight-type Ripper theory as backstory to a later, but related complex murderous revolutionary plot.
John D. Macdonald invented eco-terrorism in his THE GREEN RIPPER.
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER's 'Watcher'-mentor, Giles, was nicknamed 'Ripper'.
Perhaps someone reading here would know whether the true-crime case celebrated as 'The Yorkshire Ripper' has itself inspired fiction.
The case of 'the Black Dahlia', itself so often fictionalized, has often been compared to that of the Ripper; they may be, respectively, the second and first most famous unsolved murders.Juxtaposing speculative-solution books, JACK THE RIPPER: THE FINAL SOLUTION and BLACK DAHLIA AVENGER may be particularly compelling. As DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE seemed obiquely prescient of the Ripper case, (Towne/Polanski's) CHINATOWN seems a danse macabre with forgotten elements of Hodel's (BD AVENGER) theory of the Dahlia (and related) crimes.
209.247.23.85 (talk) 00:51, 5 January 2008 (UTC)Lindenfir
Possible modification for 4th June 2011 episode of Doctor Who:In the 2011 episode A Good Man Goes to War of the BBC TV series Doctor Who, it is suggested that Jack the Ripper is stopped by being killed and eaten by a Silurian. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.9.225.204 (talk) 19:00, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
I found something else that has Jack the Ripper in it. He's a character in the first chapter of a Japanese Light Novel called Fate/ Apocrypha. In it he's actually a young girl who wants nothing more then to go back to her mother's womb... or something like that. There's only one chapter translated and for as much as I know the only chapter there is right now. You guys can figure out if you wanna add that in to the article or not. The English translation of it can be found here: http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/index.php?title=Fate/Apocrypha:Act_1_Unbirth
Thats actually what sparked my interest to come to the article. 216.16.182.212 (talk) 00:10, 30 August 2012 (UTC)
Music[edit]
Infernal Majesty has a song about the Ripper on their 'None Shall Defy' album, called 'Anthology of Evil'. They recorded a second song about the Ripper ('Daughters Of The Abyss') for their unreleased 'History Of Hell'.
Iced Earth also has a song about the Ripper, called 'Jack' on their 'Monster Show' CD, and Motorhead has a song called 'Jack The Ripper', although I don't remember off-hand what album it's from. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.193.142.207 (talk) 11:36, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
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