Hopkins FBI is a point and click adventure, similar to classics like Dog Day, X Files and Sanitarium. You play Special Agent John Hopkins of the FBI and can interact with your environment with mouse clicks and menus. The interface is very intuitive. This is a thinking person's game. As the company's website states: "You're supposed to use your brains, not spill them".

Premise

A terrorist, Bernie Berckson, obtains two nuclear warheads and ransoms the U.S. Government to meet his demands. The government refuses to negotiate, and both warheads are exploded over California and 50,000 people die (they must have been small bombs!). The FBI finds Bernie thanks to the efforts of Agent John Hopkins. The opening animation shows Bernie getting the chair. He gets the first shock and is bloody, but mysteriously survives. The lights go out and he disappears. As Special Agent John Hopkins, you caught him the first time, and now you're after him once again.

Playing Hopkins is like watching a live action comic book. The animation is superbly done; tremendous care went into the sound, music, production and visuals. The hand drawn cartoonish animations are some of the best I've ever seen on Linux. The game uses the SDL library with beautiful results. The colour, great music and fullscreen mode really lends itself to enhancing the comic book quality of this game. But don't expect something like a lighthearted Superman graphic novel. The mood of this game is dark, dark, dark. There's enough gratuitous blood and violence to make Friday the 13th look like a Disney flick. And the game is filled with lots nudity, just for nudity's sake. This game is a teenager's dream come true.

A problem with some adventures is that the puzzles can be unreasonably difficult, making a trip to a cheat site unavoidable. This game is very reasonable; although they required thought, the solutions to the puzzles made sense. Veteran gamers might find Hopkins easy. Nevertheless, the visuals and music alone are enough to keep everyone interested.

Playing Under Linux

Installation proceeded flawlessly; just remember to either remove the user option or add the exec option in your CD ROM's entry in /etc/fstab. A full install is 411MB, but you can cut this down to 18MB if you run animation off the CD, which worked well for me. The manual that comes with the game was obviously written by a non-English speaker and without a spell checker. In fact, the English throughout the game is unbelievably rifled with typos, spelling errors and awful grammar. You have to see this to truly appreciate how badly this game is in need of editing. However, for me it just enhanced the quirky nature of this bizarre game. I'm strange.

I had some technical issues. Hopkins rocks in full screen, mode, but the game hung one of my machines in full screen. A letter to MP Entertainment went unanswered. After sending a second request, I received a vaguely helpful terse reply. They also ignored my request for information about the release of Hopkins II. Don't expect too much help with problems from this company.

Conclusion

This is actually a 10/10 penguin game. Everything about it is perfect for me. I had to subtract .5 points because of the awful customer support. No doubt, if you don't need tech-support, this may indeed be a 10/10 game for you. However, if typos and grammar errors bug you, then perhaps you'd agree with the 9.5/10 rating. Hopkins FBI happens to be my favorite game that I ever played on a computer.

At this point, if this game sounds appealing to you, and you don't mind awful customer support, I promise you a good time. On the other hand, people with delicate sensibilities should beware. If you think there's too much violence and nudity on TV, you shouldn't even look at the package this software comes in.

Hopkins FBI

Premise

Playing Under Linux

Conclusion

Screenshots