A promo video of the X-Files Game by Fox Interactive. I found this video in a CD Gaming magazine around 1997. Browse the newest, top selling and discounted macOS supported games New and Trending Top Sellers What's Being Played Upcoming Results exclude some products based on.
We like TheX-Files. We like the all-spanning voluptuousness of Gillian Anderson. We like how she's fatter and blotchier in the early series. We like the predictability that when Mulder and Scully split up like the Scooby Doo gang, Mulder gets to see something cool and convincing while La Anderson gets to shine her torch around and show off her puckered questioning lips in the half-light at the wrong end of the warehouse.
We like its hokey and - let's face it - its monumentally crap title sequence (Mulder and Scully burst into a room at one frame per second, some geezer gets to fall crappily into a maelstrom, and somebody dicks around with an electro-static ball). We like the Cwacky episodes' when M&S find some Cwhacked out' characters and make jokes and that. We even like the way that every location -be it Russia, Texas or Belize -looks like a particularly woody bit of Vancouver.
We like lots of things about The X-Files. But, unfortunately, we don't like this - The X-Files game.
To describe it, you could use the phrase 'arcade adventure', but it's actually more of an interactive movie with all the signs and portents that description brings.
You play Agent Craig Wilmour, a YTS trainee working at the Seattle field office of the FBI. You're in the X-Files universe (somewhere around 1996), so everywhere is smoky, like too many irons have been left on. Everyone wears a very grim expression and speaks in a violent whisper, preferably without opening their mouths very much.
Mulder and Scully visited this rainy blister of a city on the northwestern seaboard to investigate something (not sure what). They disappeared (not sure where) and haven't been heard of since (not sure why). All you have is a piece of paper with their last known address, accoutrements like guns, mobile phones and torches, and the resources of the FBI behind you. Your mission is to find M&S and maybe get dragged into a vortex of intrigue en route.
The whole game has been shot and directed by the film crew and talent behind the TV series, so every locale has that glorious X-Files sheen to it. Every character's face looks like a leather sandal. The locations and the frequent FMV sequences are perfectly shot. Authenticity is paramount.The game underneath, however, is the most rudimentary, basic, mind-numbingly ponderous adventure we've seen in a long time. It's like the last 20 years never happened and we're back to Zork-level complexity. CGO NORTH' you might as well type as you click the mouse. CEXAMINE PICTURE' you could've tapped as you clicked on the irrelevant picture. Some conversations allow you to chose a mood, be it stroppy, funny or elusive. Some conversations simply appear as a list of questions to which the response is always the same, no matter how many times the question is asked. We went back to the same motel over and over again and asked the same clerk the same question and she gave the same reply. Not a blink.
Of course, Gillian and David and Mitch (Pileggi, scary slaphead FBI boss man Skinner) are in it, as well as Cancer Man, X (black guy informant from series four) and a bunch of other actors from the roster. But Skinner appears early in the game then quickly disappears, and M&S only appear towards the end. By then you're on CD eight and you'd rather be involved in their untimely and violent deaths than saving them.
But, of course, you can't kill them. The whole game gives you the illusion of freedom: you can open most drawers, examine most pictures, even talk to seemingly irrelevant characters. But the storyline is completely linear, pushed on in a predictable, slow-loading, episodic manner (if you fancy it, you can do a full install, but only if you've got 3.5Gb of spare hard disk).
Someone, who's maybe seen the end of one of the bad X-Files episodes, has been handed a pamphlet called What X-Files Fans Want And Like In A Computer Game: A Statistical Survey, where focus groups and marketing people have Cgot down' with some low-foreheaded, six-fingered X-Files fans from some greasy outback town. They've said: We want to guide a totally unknown character in a straight line through The X-Files universe and be teased with the expectation of interacting with major cast members, only to find that the well-shot visuals are just a cover for a shabby, primary school attempt at an adventure game.
And that's what they got.
Imagine... you have a binary file and don't know its contents. Or some software creates binary files you have a specification for but don't want to decode them manually.
Have you ever looked at hex dumps and felt how hard it is to make sense of it? And to remember the meaning of all the bits and bytes?
Synalyze It! allows you to create a “grammar“ for your binary files interactively. Unlike in regular hex editors or viewers the files are interpreted automatically for you! Analysis of binary files has never been easier.
Additionally Synalyze It! is a full-featured Hex Editor for Mac OS X allowing you to edit files of unlimited size and interpret the bytes with dozens of text encodings.
Essentially it’s a modeling tool for arbitrary file formats that is being used by software developers and data stream experts as well as in computer forensics.
The grammars are stored as XML files and contain all the structures that may occur in a file of a certain format, just like XML schemas. It’s even possible to inherit structures from others (like in OO languages) so you don't have to repeat for example a length field that appears at the beginning of each structure.
X Files Game Mac Free
Synalyze It! is an extremely flexible and useful tool for viewing binary file data. It enables you to easily apply a structured format to your file bytes and convert them into meaningful displays of data.
Synalyze It! provides formatters for common binary types like ICC, PNG, TIFF, WAV, ZIP and dozens more. That alone is useful but, if you’re a programmer creating a custom binary file format, Synalyze It! is priceless.
With Synalyze It!, you can create custom data formatters for your personal binary files. Instead of struggling with cryptic lines of hexadecimal, you can view and label data values as floating point or integer, signed or unsigned, with any byte length. Your files can even modify the formatting, allowing you to create settings on the fly to variably view your data.
If the standard formatting tools are not enough, you can write formatting scripts using Python or Lua. I quickly got ambitious and was soon in over my head exploring Synalyze It!’s features. When I emailed a question to the developer, the technical support was outstanding. I was sent a complete solution to my problem that also served as an advanced Synalyze It! tutorial.
I doubt that I will ever fully exploit the potential of Synalyze It! but the value I’ve received is already many multiples of the price I paid.
X Files Game App
John Goodman
For some well-known formats you can download grammars here. Matching grammars are suggested automatically when you open a file.
Right now you can download Synalyze It! for Mac OS X and give it a try. In case of questions or problems please give me feedback. The latest changes can be tracked here; stay tuned also on Twitter.
If you like Synalyze It! consider buying the Pro version in the Mac App Store.
The Pro version has even more useful features beyond hex editing.
Hi,
I just bought the pro version of Synalyze, and I am very glad I did. Thank you for taking the time to bring this excellent tool to life.
I’m the author of an open-source program called SleepyHead, which is used for reviewing CPAP machine data (used in Sleep Apnea treatment), and already I’m wishing I discovered Synalyze a lot sooner, as an awful lot of binary format hacking is involved thanks to the manufacturers not releasing documentation.
I particularly like being able to use expressions in the length fields.. I spent ages looking through the example grammar and scripts only to find I didn’t even need them thanks to this feature. (It pays to read the manual first.. ;)
Keep up the good work!
Regards
Mark Watkins
Mac Hex Editor for Professionals
There are some hex editors for Mac available but only Synalyze It! allows to create a grammar for automatic file decoding in a specialized grammar editor.
- Simply open the file you want to analyze
- Create an empty grammar
- Select bytes in the hex editor and add an element or structure to the grammar using the context menu
- Enhance the grammar in the grammar editor
Other special features of Synalyze It!:
- Supports various encodings like ASCII, EBCDIC, UTF-8 or UTF-16 (see ICU for all supported encodings)
- Lets you easily see if a file is compressed with the histogram view
- Opens even huge files ultra fast by loading only the visible part of a file
- Hex editing works with the same mouse and keyboard commands like in common text editors
In case you need a tool specialized in disk editing, I recommend to check out iBored.
Recent updates:
2020-01-05: Added grammar for Commander Keen 1-3 saved games
2019-09-13: Version 1.23 released with dark mode support
2019-05-16: Added grammar for Ducati Data Analyzer dda files (thank you, Jack!)
2019-02-17: Added grammar for Atari Lynx .lnx files (thank you, Brian!)
2019-02-14: Added grammar for uImage files on Linux (thank you, Lukas!)
Older additions to the web site can be found here…