This review is going to be a bit different since it’s not the typical “Game.” As a matter of fact, it is not a game at all, but rather a “digital comic.” It is available not as a UMD, but directly for download from the Playstation Store. You can either do that directly through the PSP with a Wi-Fi connection, or download it on your Playstation 3 if you have one and then copy it over. You cannot, however, directly view it on the Playstation 3. It was released quite some time ago, but with the announcement of the other digital comics coming from Archie and Marvel I felt it was appropriate to release a review for it now.

The Cryptics was created by Steve Niles and Ben Roman with Niles taking the writing credits and Roman doing the art. It’s the story of classic monsters like Dracula, The Wolfman, and Dr. Jekyl/Mr. Hyde hanging out together as friends in the 4th grade. These are not the versions of these characters you are used to seeing, and with them being in 4th grade it is much more light hearted. I had not read any of the comics before nor heard anything about the series so it was all new to me. What I got was a decent series that would make me smile at times, but nothing to really make me burst out laughing or anything. Each story is rather short, just a couple of pages from what I could gather from how many panels there would be, so the stories lend themselves to quick bursts. They almost have one of those daily newspaper comic strip type feel to them. Great for something quick, but not a whole lot of substance, and not something I’d really feel compelled to “keep up with” such as a running series from the staple Marvel and DC characters.

The way it plays out in the digital form is that it will show one panel at a time, sometimes panning across and maybe adding in the sound effects and word bubbles later on. There is no voice acting, you still have to read the dialogue, and there is no motion for any of the action going on. They did, however, add sound effects at certain times and music play throughout. Another cool aspect of it being digital is the use of DVD-like special features. They can be viewed on their own, or spliced in through each comic. Towards the end of the comic an icon will appear to hit a button, you hit that button and it will play the special feature related to that clip. As cool as that concept was, for the most part I felt that the comic specific features were a little too along the lines of patting themselves on the back. They will talk about how they liked a particular story because of how they thought it was clever or funny, and sometimes would tell you WHY it was funny instead of letting you “get it” and decide for yourself. I still give them credit for putting any effort into extras.

The extras are definitely something that were needed though, because if you were to just watch the comics back to back (you can choose each one individually, like a DVD chapter select) it will really only take you about 15 minutes to get through them all, and that includes the load time. Load time is not long, maybe a second, but still, that’s a factor into “padding” runtime a bit. It’s hard to say if it’s something you’d really want to watch over and over again anyway, so this experience is over rather quickly.

In the end you have to ask yourself if this will be worth it to you. I was glad I went through this experience, as brief as it was, because it offered me something different when on the go. I have since deleted it from my memory card and PS3 hard drive, and I will probably never watch again, but at the same time the cost is a factor as well. It was only $2.99 to purchase this on the Playstation Store. When I looked up a trade paperback of the series on Amazon it was $14.03 new and $7.00 used. Although I can’t do a direct comparison (I don’t know how many stories are in the trade compared to this PSP comic) but it seems like a good value to me, even if it’s just to kill the hour or so to watch everything included in this 189 MB download.

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