Playing old bad games of course.
I haven’t played Night Trap in ages, as you can tell by the ridiculous amount of missed Oggers. This is one of those games that would perplex most gamers today. Back then though, FMV games were something else. When done well, they were great. They haven’t aged well but still hold a good chunk of nostalgia for someone like me to see past the rough spots.
Anyone ever play Night Trap or any FMV game from back then? I was a big fan of Sewer Shark. Shoot the tubes dog meat!
if you like this game then you must love ljn cecil
I read about Night Trap way back when but never played it. Did play Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh, awesome game.
Night Trap is one of those rare games that if you played it at the time, it was great. If you try to play it for the first time now…not so much. While I recognize the flaws in FMV games and I’m glad that gaming didn’t go in that direction, I still have a soft spot and enjoy many of them.
Wow, Night Trap. Boy, that caused no small amount of busy-body hand-wringing back in the day.
I never played many FMV games. Actually, I think the only one I played was one of the Wing Commander games, which doesn’t really count because they had an actual budget. A lot of FMV games fell into a gap in my computer life. I never owned a game system as a kid, and didn’t get a PC until late 1992, so a lot of my computer gaming was on my old C64, and a lot was cRPGs like the Gold Box games, Bard’s Tale 3, and, of course, Wasteland. That 1992 Packard Bell wasn’t really up for gaming so it wasn’t until around 95 or so that I got a machine capable of playing games. And by then, I had Doom 1 and 2, Descent, and Rise of the Triad. And by 95/96, the genre was already all but dead. Such a short window.
So, I remember them, but didn’t much interact with them.
I remember shaking my head every time I saw it on the news talking about how Night Trap was a “murder and torture simulator”. Thankfully someone actually played the game and pointed out how you were there to rescue the girls and the kills in the game were about as violent as a creature double feature movie from the 50s.
Wing Commander 3 is still one of the high water marks in video gaming history. Amazing in all regards.
You are right, once the FPS market took off, FMV and adventure games in general went away. While right now we are having a new rise of adventure games, I don’t see FMV ever returning. If you are so inclined, Phantasmagoria is $10 on GoG. It is batshit crazy and something that would never be released today.
Coming next year, the return of the greatest of all FMV adventure game franchises, Tex Murphy! After 16 years Tex returns In Tesla Effect. Just in case you didn’t know, Cecil. 🙂 And a full trailer is up at http://www.texmurphy.com
I LOVED FMV VIDEO GAMES, CECIL! So yeah, I have a list of favorites as well:
Make My Video games
Wirehead
Tomcat Alley
Midnight Raiders (“C’mon I wanna see my kids grow up!”)
Ground Zero Texas
Double Switch with Corey Haim, R. Lee Emery, and Debbie Harry
Prize Fighter
Corpse Killer
Farenheit
Egad!
I’ve not played any of them but have managed to re-live the fun of the mid 90s with the help of Cubex55 on YouTube (some collective of insane gamers who longplay anything from Atari 2600 to 3DS titles).
I really, really want to watch Maximum Surge (AKA Game Over) which is stitched together from scenes of various Digital Pictures games (Maximum Surge itself, Corpse Killer, Prize Fighter…) and promises to be incredibly terrible.
Before PS2 and the DVD era I used to love FMV in games although I only had one FMV game The X-Files The Game for the PC that a lot of people have slated as bad but I thought it was great.
All the games I had for the PC back in the 90’s were all point and click adventure games with Broken Sword series, Blade Runner, Star Trek A Final Unity and The X-Files Game.
My favorites were Sewer Shark, Ground Zero Texas, Tomcat Alley (loved watching those snap-tite models blow up….again, and again, and again) and Corpse Killer.
It always surprised me, if you read the credits, some of the talent behind the scenes in these things. John Dykstra “directed” Sewer Shark. Dwight H. Little (not an A lister – but a competent enough director) did Ground Zero Texas. Vincent Schiavelli starring in Corpse Killer. I think there was a short lived feeling at one point that FMV might really have been the next big thing.
My old Sega CD still works and not too long ago I took it out, plugged it in and gave it a try to show my kids some old school gaming (i tried my Intellivision too – couldn’t get it to work). I was shocked at just how unplayable these games were to me now. These were games that at one time I was actually pretty good at and had finished all of them. Now, I just really sucked at them. I guess I’m spoiled on modern controls/controllers. My kids were like “you really suck at this” and I was like, “no, I could actually play these games at one point”.
I remember when this came out was way too poor to afford this game but I did have a sega genesis. I remember thinking “this is gonna be the future of gaming” lol, boy was I wrong.
With the soon-to-be released Tex Murphy game, Tesla Effect, some of us are hoping that future is still coming.
I just remembered Quarterback Attack on the Sega Saturn (yes, I picked the Saturn over the Playstation – and I still have it and it still works). That is probably the single worst FMV game I ever played.
I had a Saturn and PS1 but I was (and still am) a game junkie. Although my PS1 got a lot more use than my Saturn. Never played QB attack but I never was into sports games. Unless they were like DBZ where you had chainsaws and rocket launchers.