Awesome FMV games from the past!

[Pericolos0]

Back in the mid 90ies, a game called creature shock was released. It was basically one of the many FMV games released back in the day, railshooters with hardly any real gameplay in them.

here's how home of the underdogs reviewed it:

Creature Shock is one of the worst games ever made and a poignant example of how shallow gameplay can kill the game despite whiz-bang graphics. Let's first get the (very thin) plot out of the way: in 2123, faced with a delicate problem of overpopulation, mankind is forced to seek other planets to colonize. Three space ships are therefore constructed, each having a specific destination in the solar system. The first, Myrmidon, will be sent towards Mars while the second, Aztec, will explore Venus. Finally, the third, Amazon, will be in charge of exploring the planets Jupiter and Saturn and also their moons, which (presumably) could support life forms. Near the end of its four-year voyage, the Amazon disappears and leaves only a distress signal transmitted by the ship's probe. In order to understand what exactly happened, you must, with the help of the Lynx FTL Scoutship, go to the last known position of the Amazon and discover what has happened to the ship and its crew.

Rule number one in computer gaming industry: good graphics do NOT a game make. Creature Shock violates this rule right from the start. It has nice graphics. Astounding, in fact, given that it was made in 1994, long before the advent of 3D accelerators. The graphics are so wonderfully textured and smoothly animated that they put most other games to shame. But...that's it. If you don't have a mouse, your out of luck here. Gameplay can be summarized as: point, click, click, click, click, click, point, click, point, click. Woo woo! Excitement! I think a monkey who pointed and clicked at the right things would be rewarded with a nice cutscene every now and then, and can actually finish this game. Stage one has you piloting a ship that you can't speed up or slow down, that you can't see what your targeting, that you don't know how close you are to your goal. Then, when you blow up some huge thing, a ship I imagine, you get to stage two where you exit the ship, get some nice graphics and then commence pointing and clicking at monsters to kill them. Your targeting cursor is *automatically* pegged to the alien, so the only way you'll miss your shot is if you can't click fast enough (either that, or you can't find your mouse). I was amazed at the lack of control, the lack of plot and not to mention the lack of thought on the part of the player required to play. Track-based shooters with lots of prerendered cut-shots are indeed the bane of our existence. I don't even know why I'd upload this game here, other than perhaps the fact that there aren't yet many Real Dogs on the site, and I was itching to blast some games to oblivion. I warn you now: avoid this Real Dog like your life depends on it.

I love this game! But looking back on it, it really does have awful gameplay. The game consists of you exploring alien bases and underground facilities, all with prerendered video. You can choose a direction and then a video will play until you get to the next section. Sometimes you'd encounter a monster, and fighting it consisting ove basically 2 things, blocking when it strikes and shooting at its weak points (usually the eyes) by clicking with your cursor. The enemy was just a video playing and you had to click in the rigth spots at the right time. Today this sounds ultra boring but back then it really was probably the most immersive game imagineable to me.

And I still love it, for it's day, the cgi rendered videos were actually pretty good looking, and the character animation actually isn't bad at all. The monster designs are still pretty unique looking, and teh game still has an overall unique feel to me .

the fucking awesome intro where a spaceship gets eaten by an alien asteroid

shoot the eyes!!!

spider thing with iron teeth!! (i was terrified of this back then)

this is the guy you play with

Check out this ingame video, I think the cgi is still pretty good, compared to other FMV games from those days

the game also had 2 parts where you flew your ship trhough space, starfox style. It really sucked and felt like a completely different game, I hated these parts when I was a kid, thank god there were only 2.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEF-F-ZaNYg

Other FMV rail shooters I loved were

cyberia:

(watching this again gets my heart pumping just like back n the days )

and deadly tide:

(I still love the submarine designs and awesome atmosphere this game had).

These games are probably, together with lost eden, the reason why I got so interested in 3d and gamedevelopment.

What FMV games do you love from back in the 90ies?

[PhilipK]

gee i remember cyberia. damn hard game one mistake and you're dead.

[merkaba]

Wow, I remember playing the demo of that game. It was a fun time waster, though I think I had a hell of a time trying to kill one of the creatures (I can't remember now what I was doing wrong)

*edit*

That looks like to be the most boring last boss I've ever seen. It was all well and good, for its gameplay style, up until the point in the big room and the view of earth....then it became very 'meh' as you watched the same painfully spliced AVI sequences over and over.

But...I guess that's the point about FMV being sucky Like I said, I enjoyed the demo...but I guess any more than that might have been a chore.

[Mazy]

Haha yeah, I remember playing a lot of Cyberia, really liking it back then because it had fancy 3D. What a horribly unfun game that was

[leileilol]

nothing gets better than Maddog McCree.