Thursday, May 6, 2010

In defence of FMV games – PART 1

With the semi-recent release of FMV horror game Hysteria Project on PSN, plus various Laserdisc games turning up on the Wii over the past year, I thought I should talk about my love for FMV games. I wrote so much, I’m posting this in 3 parts. My review of Hysteria Project will be in part 3 (coming later), while the above photo is explained within.
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I sincerely enjoy FMV games. Not in the so-bad-it’s-good way (though this is sometimes the case), but sincerely, in the same way I enjoy Valkyria Chronicles or a really good club sandwich. Articulating this isn’t easy, since it would seem the entire world, and all of my friends/colleagues who write about games, hate the genre (actually, fellow HG101 blogger CJ Iwakura once mentioned on the HG101 forums that he liked them... I think). FMV games are finally dead everyone always cries, and cretins in the development world pour scorn on their colleagues from former years for making them, while they go on to make yet another space marine FPS. Browsing reviews, both old and new, for FMV games presents not just criticism but barely contained rage in the written form. I can’t change the world’s thinking, but I’ll carry the banner for this unfairly maligned genre. Yes they’re flawed and restrictive, but if you like cheesy horror, sci-fi or kung-fu B-movies, like Tremors, original Godzilla or Jackie Chan’s early stuff, then you should love FMV games. I mean, aren’t games on some level meant to entertain you? I could talk about the mechanics of shmup dynamics, or controlling space in a fighting game, or the depth found in some RPG battle systems, but in the end I can still enjoy something as basic as an FMV title.

Mad Dog II - DOS version

I think the main reason for the hatred of FMV games is their price in relation to the quantity and quality of the product (by virtue of using video they’re fairly short with little replay value), especially compared to titles released in the same year: “Why pay $50 for a one-hour Sega CD game, when I could buy a 40-hour SNES RPG for the same price?”
I have only once paid more than $10 for an FMV game, and that was for “the FEAR” while visiting Japan. It cost $20 and came on four DVDs. Everything I have bought has been second-hand – and for a quarter of a price, many have given me four times as much enjoyment as some critically acclaimed games. If you’re open minded and pick the titles up for cheap (or download them online), then they’re a lot of fun, especially with friends and beer, or just a casual Sunday.


Anyway, the opening photo is the work of Tom “Night Trap” Zito, from his photography website (the woman is Nicole Wittenburg, 2002).
During my time at Retro Gamer I must have emailed Tom at last six times, asking for an interview, eager to talk with the man who created so much of what I’ve enjoyed over the years. Each time he refused, until his agent demanded that I stop contacting them. Tom, if you’re reading this, drop me a line, I can guarantee you positively biased coverage.
Tom considers HG101's very promising offer.

Anyway, I’m going to list all the FMV games which I’ve played (I went through a huge 16-bit FMV binge around 2007), which is nowhere near a comprehensive list, and is missing most PC titles, but should be a primer for those curious (and hopefully the comments section will yield further titles for us to check out).


Two of the biggest problems with enjoying FMV games today, is that:

1) By virtue of them using a lot of video-footage, many are multi-disc games, meaning if you intend to pirate them they require lengthy downloads – especially if they’ve been split over 30 RAR files on megaupload. If you’re buying them, you run the risk of a missing disc, or a scratched disc which renders the collection unplayable (as happened to me with Psychic Detective).


2) There appears to have been a big console/PC split, with most console developers abandoning FMV games around the PS1 era. A few PS2 FMV games were made specifically for Japan, and according to FMVworld some were re-released for PS2 and Xbox in the US, but a lot of modern titles seem to have ended up on computer platforms without console ports. This means if you do manage to download them, you need to fiddle around to get them running on current systems, after which you’re stuck at a computer monitor playing them. For me, the joy of an FMV game is sitting on my couch, much like I do when I watch films (who the heck enjoys watching films at a computer screen?). Unfortunately this means my experience with computer-based FMV games I limited.


THE LIST

For quick reference, Wikipedia has a hopelessly incomplete list of FMV games. Alternatively there’s also the FMV World website, which despite lacking several major titles, is much better. For kicks, I’m going to score eachgame out of 5 stars (disclaimer: these should not be taken too seriously, since I contradict myself as and when I feel like it). The games started out in order of release, but I soon realised most lists online were incomplete, so stuff like It Came From the Desert was shoehorned into strange places. If there’s an FMV title you loved, but it’s not listed here or in the Part 2 and 3 previews, post in the comments!


I’ve focused mainly on games which are specifically FMV-based, as opposed to only containing FMV like the original Resident Evil, or Burning Rangers. I’m going to list the system I played the game on, though it’s worth checking to see if other versions were available.


Dragon's Lair (CDi)
Dragon’s Lair 2 (CDi)
The granddaddies of them all... Sort of. The thing with Dragon’s Lair and other cartoon-based FMV games, is that I have trouble categorising them in my mind alongside live-action FMV titles. At the very least you need to make a distinction between the two, with their own sub-categories. In which case I’m actually a live-action FMV game fan, who dislikes most cartoon-FMV games. Whereas live-action can take on the air of a good B-movie, cartoon titles tend to be below the quality of most Saturday morning shows, and nowhere near the level of a top-quality anime.
Dragon’s Lair is fairly good, but you take a title like Time Girl and it’s like watching the same beer-mats go round in a washing machine. Both Dragon Lairs also focus heavily on QTE gameplay, which to be fair I’m quite forgiving on if the game is interesting, but the shlock medieval setting here just doesn’t do it for me. I had them both for the CDi but traded them in because I’d probably have more fun watching them on youtube.
SCORE: **

Cobra Command (Sega CD)
As a cartoon-based FMV game I actually preferred this to Dargon’s Lair because it plays like a rails shooter (move a cursor and fire at enemy choppers). It’s also got a cool-looking city nightscape for its opening level. The Sega CD has downgraded visuals over the Laserdisc version, but the new (at least i think it's new) synth music is pretty cool. It’s a lot of fun and is really neat homage to Airwolf (both were first released in 1984). There’s recently been an iPhone re-release.
SCORE: ****

Space Ace (iPhone)
Same problem as Dragon’s Lair. I played the iPhone version for a bit and while it’s pretty cool in places, I just got bored of it. Too much silly jumping around which annoyed me – it’s like an extended third act in a bad Disney/Hollywood movie, where the protagonist and antagonist are battling it out, the good guy always on the verge of defeat until he find his inner stren... zzzzzzzz
SCORE: *

Time Gal (Sega CD)
There are brief scenes throughout history where you push buttons to avoid Time Gal getting into scrapes. Areas you need to jump to are shown in a bright colour, and success maintains the footage rolling. The whole thing feels disjointed and ugly and, out of frustration, I used codes to skip through the footage.
SCORE: *

Road Avenger (Sega CD)
Pack-in title for the Sega CD. I enjoyed this a lot more than Time Gal, despite the similarities, since it does kinda feel like a coherent, extended cartoon of sorts (actually, I might be biased because of my love for the Mad Max trilogy of films). After your wife is killed, you take to your souped up car and cause mayhem and carnage as you drive down and eliminate the gang responsible.
SCORE: ****

Mad Dog McCree (CDi)
Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold (3DO)
There aren’t enough Western games, and the setting in these two is fairly cool, if a little hammy in places. It’s no Lonesome Dove, but following clues to get the sheriff out of jail and them finding maps to use the correct route to the enemy hideout is pretty cool. Enemies appear randomly on each screen, so there is a bit of variety. Letting them both down is that some versions have very strict shooting time-frames (I played on the CDi and 3DO), and if you miss-time it you’ll get hit and die. This is especially irksome during the quick draw rounds, where you need to hammer on the button to unholster your gun and swerve across to hit the guy before he can draw. Reloading is also a pain since you need to shoot your gun-chamber icon. The Sega CD versions look hideous. Re-released for the Wii in a bundle pack.
SCORE: ***

Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (Sega CD)
Interesting premise, where you visit people from an A-Z directory and slowly unravel clues to the crimes. The end-game section is rather clever, where a magistrate asks questions about what you’ve uncovered, and you need to provide evidence from your book. A nice, slow burner. Received two sequels.
SCORE: ***

Who Shot Johnny Rock? (CDi)
Liking this depends on how much you like prohibition gangster clichés. Otherwise it’s quite an accomplished little detective mystery/shooter, with some perfectly suited hammy acting (note also that the bartender here is the same one from Mad Dog). Here you play some gumshoe private eye hired by some dollface broad looking to find the sleazy crooks who whacked her man. Or something. Basically you shoot through four areas to collect clues which are then used to crack open a safe revealing the murderer (one of the four people you previously questioned), at which point you must solve clue and then head back to the murderer’s place (an eightball in the safe means the killer was the guy running the poolhouse).
What makes it so great, is that instead of having to reload your gun, you have a finite amount of bullets which you can fire in rapid succession, almost like a machinegun. If you run low on bullets, you can buy more using your starting sum of $2000. This also acts as your health meter, since you need to pay a doc to patch you up. This is a clever, streamlined system which solves the problem of how to make reloading intuitive – unlike in games like Mad Dog McCree. Good use of randomisation in the shooting scenes too, which keeps things lively. I also want to point out that it actually accomplishes more than Heavy Rain does, in that the murderer here is different every time despite the game relying on restrictive video footage. Heavy Rain, which consisted mostly of QTE gameplay, had a dynamic polygonal engine which would have allowed for some clever randomisation, and yet its plot is cast in stone.
SCORE: *****

Night Trap
Perhaps the best known of FMV games, there’s a meaty feature on it at HG101.
SCORE: ****

Sewer Shark
Sister title to Night Trap, both of them apparently were filmed by Tom Zito and then sat in a warehouse for several years, waiting for home technology to catch up and make them a viable release. Sewer Shark plays like a rails shooter, with some clever randomisation in the form of different routes you need to select, as screamed out by your co-pilot. Although the visuals are repetitive, and the footage is recycled a lot, I’m scoring it highly because the writing is great. Dialogue is as funny as it is absurd, perfectly acted with gusto, and the sublimely ridiculous ending is well worth persevering to see. A must play for FMV fans.
SCORE: ****

Double Switch (Sega CD)
Like a more complicated version of Night Trap in an apartment, where you protect tenants from various suited thugs by activating traps as they get close. It’s got Deborah Harry (Blondie) and quite a cool music video in it (anyone got the full thing?). Although technically more accomplished, I prefer Night Trap due to the setting and story, but both are worth playing.
SCORE: ****

Ground Zero: Texas
Of all FMV games, this is probably my favourite. It’s got a plot which is kinda like Tremors meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Battlestar Galactica, with a bit of Mad Dog McCree thrown in. Costing apparently $3 million to make, it’s actually got quite a decent B-movie plot with reasonable acting: the army have set up a secret base in a small Texas town, since they’ve become aware of aliens masquerading as humans, threatening to TAKE OVER THE WORLD.
Using a series of cameras you need to wait for an alien to reveal himself and then shoot him. What makes it fun to play is that, despite being like Mad Dog McCree with infinite ammo, there’s some excellent use of randomisation (oh, and a shield to protect your camera from return fire). In one scene in a bar there’s four gamblers playing a card game, and although you know one of them is an alien, it’s not until the final reel of footage that he reveals himself – until then it could be any of them. This keeps repeat playthroughs fresh. Early stages also have a lot of civilians wandering around, forcing to keep calm, and there’s four cool scenes where you need to rescue one of your team from being captured (this also gives you a code for later on). Later stages degenerate into all-out blasting, but it’s still a lot of fun throughout. This comes highly recommended – I have naive hopes that since Sony was involved in publishing the original, we might see a higher-resolution version made available on PSN, using the original footage. Or hell, even an emulated Sega CD version would be cool.
SCORE: *****



END OF PART 1

I will upload Parts 2 and 3 at a later date. Some likely inclusions:

PART 2
It Came From The Desert
Kingdom the Far Reaches
Iron Helix
Mansion of Hidden Souls
Star Wars: Rebel Assault
The 7th Guest
Burn Cycle
Corpse Killer
Fahrenheit
Jurassic Park
Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine
The Masked Rider: Kamen Rider Zo (beyond description – features Ryo Hazuki!)
Tomcat Alley
Chaos Control
Psychic Detective

PART 3:
Gabriel Knight
Phantasmagoria
Supreme Warrior
Wirehead
Voyeur
Thunder in Paradise
Jeopardy
Earth Command
Lost Eden
Snow Job (on of the best designed FMV games I’ve played - a real gem)
the FEAR
Casebook series (a modern series of FMV games)
Braindead 13
O Story
Imabikiso (Japanese visual novel on PS3)
428: Fusa Sareta Shibuya de (Japanese and on the Wii/PS3)
Hysteria Project

32 comments:

  1. It's like you wrote this post JUST for me.

    I've played every single game listed, and I enjoy them all to smoe extent.


    But you're missing quite a few American Laser Games titles. They practically dominated the genre; they might have even done more than Digital Pictures.

    -Crime Patrol
    -Crime Patrol II: Drug Wars
    -Quick Draw Show Down
    This is among the hardest FMV games ever made. You need split-second timing for the expert levels. You can't pull the gun from the holster until the icon says so, and the expert mode is ridiculously strict. The 'boss' is a real-life quickdraw expert, and he is FAST.
    (Also, the villagers run out and loot his body when you win!)
    -The Last Bounty Hunter
    Far as I know, this was the 'last' ALG game. It's like an extended Mad Dog McCree game, and really good(and difficult). I never got to play it until it got a DVD release(better than nothing).


    Road Avenger is probably the best of the animated ones. Good story, great animation(the style screams old school), and it's quite difficult.

    Expert mode is nuts; you don't get on screen prompts, you have to go by the animation to know what to do.

    Dragon's Lair 2 hates me. I've played it recently on one of those Ultracade cabinets(a new one has Dragon's Lair 1 & 2 and Space Ace), and I can barely reach the third stage. Space Ace, in comparison, is a joke.


    You also neglected to mention Brain Dead 13; PC and Sega Saturn(maybe PS1?).

    Animated sci-fi FMV-esque game, it is absolutely hilarious. A slacker electronics repair guy goes to a haunted mansion to fix a mad scientist's global domination machine, and gets assailed by his crazy variety of monsters and mansion traps. A must play.
    ("You're not one of those funky-lookin' mad scientist guys bent on takin' over the WORLD are ya?"
    "How did you know?"
    "Man, I've played a LOT of video games, and I KNOW an average-"
    "AVERAGE? AVERAGE?! I AM NOT AVERAGE!")


    Great write-up otherwise. Ground Zero Texas, Night Trap, Sewer Shark, Double Switch, all great campy fun.

    Corpse Killer is fun times, since it's pure B-movie schlock.

    Wirehead is pretty ridiculous too. It's amazing how much depth some of these games have in terms of alternate outcomes and multiple scene takes; like in GZT with the different aliens hidden as different people.


    Also, I'd love to see a Tom Zito interview. The guy had it real tough during the infamous Night Trap senate hearings. They never let him get a word in.

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  2. Oh, never mind, you did get BG13. :P


    Masked Rider is an interesting case. They made that game out of a live-action movie, the same one that spawned the pilot episode of the series that followed Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in the US.

    The game is actually more true to the film than the series was, since everyone is Japanese. But not by much. It was seriously chopped up to create the illusion of multiple paths.

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  3. Last post, I swear!

    Re: Double Switch's Tunnel Vision, I highly doubt a full version exists. :P That's taken directly from the scene in the game where you can watch their performance.

    There is another recording of the song a little later when a mummy attacks them, and you have to protect the band; they actually incorporate it into the performance.

    I never even knew what that song was called until now, but I still remember it.

    As far as Double Switch and Night Trap, NT definitely has the better setting(it genuinely creeped me out when I first played it), DS has more comedy and replay value. The enemies are randomly generated, even the story ones.
    It's never possible to catch everyone.

    Also, Corey Haim starred in it(RIP).


    Should also mention the Power Rangers FMV game on the Sega CD. It's silly, but fun, possibly done by the Masked Rider team. It's a quicker nostalgia trip than watching the episodes again, that's for sure.

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  4. I <3 all FMV games. So there.

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  5. The PC had the best interactive movies, e.g. The Pandora Directive, Black Dhalia, The X-Files, The Ripper etc. Can they be categorized as FMV games too?

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  6. Btw just read the titles to be mentioned in future posts. You should really check out the Tex Murphy trilogy (Under A Killing Moon, The Pandora Directive and Overseer). Some of the finest the genre had to offer.

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  7. You shouldn't mention the wii(ware) releases of those maddog games, they weren't ported correctly and don't actually work properly. The game loads the bad outcome before the good one and 1 frame is not enough to 'shoot' the bad guy.

    Shoot too early, die. Shoot too late, die.

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  8. I actually have played more FMV games than I ever wanted to, which is no where near as extensive as this list and the upcoming parts, but seems to be more than the average Joe playing games in the early 90s.

    I appreciate the animation quality (and the sexy women) in Space Ace, Dragon's Lair 1 and 2 (especially 2!), and Braindead 13, which are all actually very well done, but the games were just no fun. I beat them all though either way. There's another new FMV cartoon game with top notch animation as well that was never released but gameplay videos exist. Too bad I forgot the name.

    The only games I actually liked of these amount to four. Gabriel Knight 2 and the last three Tex Murphy games. They all still have that B movies quality feel, but something about the characters really makes them believable or not as "over-the-top" as many FMV games tend to be. I especially like the way the Tex Murphy series handled the acting and presentation, with each sequel toping the last in seriousness, believability, humor, writing, and performance.

    But those games of course play like adventure games, since they are and all, and you get the added benefit of the characters thinking or talking between movie sequences, creating a much stronger bond than an on-the-rails FMV game or one filled with a ton of QTEs.

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  9. Does Wing Commander 3 count? Because that practically the most high class FMV ever.

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  10. There's an FMV game based on The Vampire Diaries, which was a young adult horror series from the 90s or so, and was recently adapted into a (somewhat altered) TV series due to the popularity of Twilight and True Blood. I need to write about that, eventually - it's really bad. There's a website out there somewhere that has a ton of pictures and such.

    I just bought a copy of Burn: Cycle at a thrift store for a buck. I remember it being the subject of an injoke between my friends and I in college but I can't remember for the life of me why.

    Tomcat Alley! That one, along with Sewer Shark, was one of my favorites. It had full screen video, and I always thought it looked better than others on the Sega CD. There are a few other ones - Supreme Warrior, Prize Fighter, some Scotty Pippin basketball game, all of those Make Your Own Videos, Midnight Raiders, some other zombie shooting game...

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  11. I played Voyeur a while ago and I kinda liked the concept of having only extremely indirect interaction (wasn't there an adventure game last year that used a similar concept where you had to guide a character through remote controlled security systems? No FMV, though...)


    I also remember the erotic/psychoanalysis game Tender Loving Care from 1998.

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  12. I remember a couple of similar looking FMV shooting games in the arcades at Disney World in the early 90s. One was western-y, the other was SF-ish, I think. Any ideas?

    And regarding Burn: Cycle...
    YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE, MAN?!?!
    WHEN YOU GO TO SEE THE BIG! GOLD! BUDDHA!
    AND YOU PICK THE LEAF? WITHTHEVIRUSONIT!

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  13. Wow Great read cant wait for the next 2. I am the outcast of my gaming friends I LOVE FMV Night trap is one of my favor games of all time! THANK YOU

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  14. @Sean Lean: The unreleased arcade FVM game that you mentioned is called The Act: An Interactive Comedy.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzYy7kPdwAc
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSyQ3a1oVZc

    - Chao

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  15. Awesome post, I'd like to see you cover Fox Hunt (PS1) and Slam City (SCD/32xCD/3DO/PC?).

    For anyone that's ever played supreme warrior - ever seen the scene where the fire boss is in a paddling pool with a rubber ducky? I triggered it once by mistake and have never got it since or found anything online about it. One of my favourite FMV games ever for sure.

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  16. I know I'm gonna revive . . . when I am, on the road . . .

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  17. There's a lot of adult FMV stuff, isn't there? There was Riana Rouge, developed by a company founded by a Playboy Playmate, who also starred in it. I downloaded it but it refuses to run in XP - I guess it needs 95 or 98.

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  18. cj_iwakura, you forget about Drug Wars, Space Pirates and one about firefighters, Demolition Man.

    There are actually FMV games with different genres — Way of the Warrior, Mazer.

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  19. Thanks for pointing out the titles I missed, CJ et al, I'd read about the Crime Patrol games, but had never tried them. I'd also seen pics of Foxhunt's boxart, but again have never run across it in my travels. One to watch perhaps!

    I had no idea the Mad Dog games were unplayable on the Wii - they're pretty strict on the CDi as it is!

    Burn Cycle is totally worth a dollar and can be finished in... 3-4 hours I think? It's a bit cringeworthy - I wouldn't play it with friends or relatives in earshot.

    I was hoping this would bring some fans out of the woodwork, because something I want to touch on in later posts is that with today's download infrastructure, FMV games could be distributed easily and cheaply, and be perceived as better value than previous full-price releases. I would totally pay $6 for Psychic Detective off PS1, for example. And considering the Casebook games cost like $5 a downloadable episode, I'd love to see them available online. I emailed the team asking if they'd console ports, but never heard back.
    http://areo.areograph.com/

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  20. Oh, Enemy Zero and D on the saturn... almost forgot about those two (D was on psx aswell methinks)

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  21. @CJ Iwakura
    I emailed you via your blog email, though I don't know if you use it

    @Anon
    D falls into the FMV bracket, loosely, but I'd say Enemy Zero was more 3D polygons and functioning mechanics (mazes, invisible enemies) than an FMV-based game.

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  22. Great Article!

    Another title you forgot was Escape From Cyber City, for the CDi.

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  23. What was that FMV game where you played some Greek (or Roman? or medieval?) warrior and had to fight against all kinds of stop-motion mythical beasts?

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  24. Love FMV games, so happy with such a list, though I disagree with your Dragon's Lair reviews - though it's easy to understand why they're disliked. Possibly the fact that I have them memorized may have something to do with it.

    Also the second game has some amusing dialogs and the plot kind of goes off the wall.

    I wish people would make FMV games again because they're fun and it's always crappy when an entire genre ceases to exist. Have they evolved into games like Heavy Rain?

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  25. In a lot of ways, Heavy Rain reminds me of an FMV game. But what I liked about FMV titles, is that I liked watching entertaining video footage. I loved the skateboarding sequence in Psychic Detective for instance. It was an awesome few minutes where you were supposed to read someone else's mind - but the rock music and first-person skating was fun to watch.

    As I also half-jokingly pointed out, most FMV games tried to use randomisation to make each playthrough different. Whereas Heavy Rain, contrary to what is said about it, only really has one final outcome. I have to laugh every time David Cage says that he's done something new or different with the game - since it less accomplished, in terms of dynamic design, than a game like Johnny Rock, where the murderer is different each time. And mechanically Heavy Rain isn't on the same level as FMV detective game Snow Job, which was a rather fun little investigation for the 3DO.

    As for parts 2 and 3, there might be a slight pause, since I asked CJ Iwakura to add a few reviews of his own for games I haven't played. I hope to have it before the end of next week though!

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  26. Just before Christmas I managed to score a Sega CDX in great shape for cheap along with 2 and a half games: Dragon's Lair, Tomcat Alley, and Disc 1 of Ground Zero: Texas. Dragon's Lair is annoying, but Tomcat Alley is actually pretty enjoyable. I've only played it once so far, as it isn't quite THAT compelling, but it had an enjoyable Saturday afternoon syndication vibe to it, and there's almost some actual gameplay as well. Never really had a chance to play any of these games when they were the next big thing, so it was kind of cool to play TA for the first time from that perspective.

    On a related note, I remember my uncle being into this when he was a lad, and I was a smaller lad:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Power

    The figure being ejected from the plane was impressive.

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  27. It was actually Masked Rider Black RX that spawned Saban's Masked Rider (and the Power Rangers three-parter that served as a pilot), rather than the ZO movie (though some scenes in ZO and J were used in later episodes).

    And yes, both letters in ZO are capitalized. Shotaro Ishinomori was pretty crazy.

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  28. I'm going on a bit of an FMV kick lately, buying titles like Ripper, Phantasmagoria 1 and 2, Black Dahlia and the Tex Murphy games while downloading Gabriel Knight.
    Night Trap is my all time favourite though, right down to the repetitive cricket sample when you select the external view of the house. Nostalgia overload!!!

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  29. Shoot man. I've been discovering the Road Avenger novel and caught this blog on Google; it is a great write-up. I think that FMV is really an under-produced genre that with today's tech could be really enhanced. Maybe it would be less video-driven during actual play sequences but perhaps they'd come up with a way to turn the Silent Hill style of play into something that is like a cross between films and Wii FPS gameplay...I don't know.

    Thanks for the read.

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  30. Thanks for the great blog. With in the last 2 years I've discovered emulators and roms. I unfortunately don't have my original sega cd or any systems that I grew up playing FMV games on.

    I do want to say that one thing FMV games did for me was create a whole new world. I'll never forget when I first booted up Sewer Shark and Ghost "David Underwood" begins yelling at me, it was like wow, he's talking to me. I didn't think about it being recorded or like a movie, I was probably 12 at the time. I just remember this guy was my friend and I needed to work with him to win the game.

    Being able to download and play these games again "all above mentioned" did something for me that seems to have been forgotten these days. With the internet being accessible at our finger tips, reliving moments of entertainment media from our past no longer need to lay dormant in our memories. It's not like the 80s or early 90s when you heard a song on the radio and didn't know the name of it. That song would stay in your head for weeks, until you heard it again. Now, all you need is the chorus, type it in google and you have your song. My songs were the FMV games of the Sega CD and 3do era.

    I know I could have looked them up on youtube years ago, but that spoils the feel of actually playing them again. Even emulators change the original nostalgia I got from popping in a cd and loading it up, but hey that's what the internet is for and we work with what we got.

    I know FMV games are surpassed because sets, costumes, and gear cost to much money. Now why didn't I mention actors, well because take a game like LA Noir. They hired 200 some actors to play the roles of the in-game characters. So apparently actors are still affordable in games, but the rest end up being limitations that are unacceptable in mainstream Call of Duty days.

    I hope that FMV games will still have a place in the market someday. I swear I seem to care more for a live actor I'm in control of rather than a faceless character like Fall Out. Like I was telling my brother, when I played Wing Commander 3 and Mark Hamill died, I said; "No Way! That's Luke Skywalker he can't die!" and turned on the invincibility.

    I would hope that in today's market, a FMV game will still have a place, since everything now days is about choice and what is gaming to us old school gamers if we don't have the choices we so long for of yesterday.

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  31. New FMV game that I've been helping develop and they are looking to release more and better titles as well. Take a look.. www.gamecadeproduction.com

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