I’ve been on a bit of an FMV game kick recently between revisiting older / remastered games and checking out some new games from the last few years. I’m finding that they’re pretty fun to play with my partner and also as a group with friends!
I cannot for the life of me recall what my first encounter with an entire game made out of FMVs was outside of seeing them in magazines but playing D a few years ago renewed my interest in them and led me to check out more. A couple of contemporary ones that I’ve liked in particular are Erica, and Death Come True. I haven’t played any Sam Barlow games even though I really want to. Oops!
My partner and I are lining up some time to play Psychic Detective on PS1 at some point but I am also not-so secretly looking for recommendations, especially on PC because all I seem to be able to see on Steam is either Sam Barlow, Wales Interactive, or (mainly Korean) Asian harem fantasies. Gimme that weird shit!
in the what’s that game (easy mode) thread one of my choices was Top Gun: Fire at Will and i specified the FMVs they used in that game. one of the game over screens was a lady calmly looking back at the camera and saying something, then suddenly it was a game over. i never understood what the hell was happening and why i was failing the missions despite not crashing the plane.
anyway, here’s a video with all the game over scenes specifically timestamped to the lady i mentioned above
Oh! Shinobi X/Legions! It’s not an FMV game at all, but because it came out in 1995 it has a bunch of extremely of the moment FMV cutscenes that some civic-minded individual has posted online.
Shinobi X is the perfect intersection of two of my favourite parts of mid-90’s games: digitized sprites and grainy FMV.
Can we include games WITH cutscenes and not just made up of them? If so I’d like to mention my first real memory of them with Cannon Fodder on the 3DO!!
They blew my mind then and quite frankly do now as well, just in a different way.
If not please disregard my post and do not watch the video!!
Good timing LeFish. I coincidentally just remembered the pizza incident in Tender Loving Care and meant to thank you for the recc from a few months back. Appreciate it.
I’m a big fan of the Phantasmagorias. They’re both horror themed point and click adventure games. Unrelated otherwise with different dev teams even. P1 is slow and unsettling, and P2 has more corny B-movie vibes. I do like P2 more.
One game I’ve been meaning to check out is Blue Chicago Blues. From what I understand, it was written by a Japanese team and then sent off to an American team to film. Sounds like a fun time and the Saturn version was recently fan translated.
there ought to be a way to turn a player’s natural language description of a choice they’re making in a game into a decent prompt for a generative ai, such that it could reasonably generate a video of the consequence of that choice that is within the confines of the overall story. if that turnaround can be made quick enough you could have something like a dynamic fmv game.
and as long as the generative ai sucks enough, it could be pretty fun.
I played Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus? a couple of weeks and it’s… not good? The premise is that your main character is a meek young adult woman joining a family online quiz where pretty much everyone hates each other and you find out that someone tried to poison your uncle at a recent family reunion. The idea being that during the quiz you privately team up with different family members to answer questions and try to find out clues as to who poisoned your uncle.
I like the premise but the actual structure of the game doesn’t involve any actual deduction. Instead, you uncover clues by repeatedly having to play the game to team up with different people and answer prompts differently. Which would be fine if not for on more than one occasion I didn’t get a single clue when I teamed up with someone. Even if the original play through was just over an hour and that you can also skip scenes after the first play through, it would still take a saintly amount of patience to find enough clues to get the proper ending.
Which is not to say that it’s all bad. They have some really good actors playing all of the characters with a mostly decent script - the guy who plays your uncle Marcus is the guy who plays David Wallace in The Office USA and he has some really bad stuff to work with but he makes it work.
I bought it for 29p and I’d only recommend checking it out if you really want to check it out.
Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus is actually one of my favorite Wales Interactive games, although that isn’t saying much. I played it towards the end of a 6-7 game long Wales Slog, so it was refreshing to play something with an interesting premise. I 100%ed it because I’m trying to do that for all their games (don’t recommend), but I did NOT waste time pulling out a guide after my first playthrough. It seemed wayy too tedious for me to figure out on my own
Edit:
While I’m here I feel like I should share a FMV game I actually really enjoyed, Breakout 13
It’s just really cool and unintentionally funny at times with it’s gamer talk. Very enjoyable experience right here
Is Breakout 13 the one where you need to buy it’s DLC to get half the game (allegedly)? I’ve been put off from getting it for some reason but I’m more inclined to give it a spin if there’s an IC endorsement.
