Let’s keep this I-movie train chugging. Tonight’s game is Frankenstein: Through the Eyes of the Monster. Mission: Collect screenshots. Yet, whenever I start up an I-movie, I always hold out a faint glimmer of hope, that maybe this one will be different than all the others, worthy of a modicum of respect. You’d think I’d learn.

This game puts a spin on the classic Frankenstein tale. It begins with minimal, Myst-like exposition where you hear audio playing out the scene of being falsely arrested for the murder of your daughter, subsequently convicted in a kangaroo court, and hanged. When you awaken, you are on Dr. Frankenstein’s table. The doctor is played by Tim Curry, with whom I’m most familiar for his turn as an Austrian villian in Loaded Weapon 1.

So you get up, blunder around the lab, look at things, and endure Frankenstein’s torturous lectures about science and how incredibly smart he is. Remember having professors in college who were world-renowned experts in their fields but felt that it was a crushing burden to actually teach classes and regarded you with the utmost contempt for merely daring to be in their presence? Now imagine one of those professors with a gun and inordinately marginal patience for your novice inquiries. You walk around and find a chalkboard with some insane ramblings and the good doctor takes time out of his busy scribbling schedule to tell you how brilliant he is for composing the formulas you see. You wander over to an early prototype of the periodic table of elements and Frankie is pleased as punch to let you know that he has discovered a new element, and that he is to be considered intelligent for doing so. The new element is called lifestone and is reportedly the key to bringing the creature to life.

But you aren’t his first attempt to re-animate something. On another shelf you find the doc’s handwritten notes, which are every bit as difficult to read as a nominal pharmaceutical prescription. Here is Frankenstein’s research note for a makeshift catfish:

It is with this note that I learn how I can end the game. If you irritate the doctor too many times by picking up this note and poking him with it, he will pop your re-animated rear (I told you he was packing)– a welcome release since I couldn’t figure out where I was supposed to be able to go in this game aside for all around the laboratory and up above in the castle turret.

Okay, Critical Path, let’s get something straight up front: I don’t like you and you don’t like me. But I need screenshots from you to feed into your MobyGames entry. So let’s just hurry up and get this over with. Deal?

But nooooooo… Critical Path isn’t going to make life easy for me, is it? Why should it? The program needs to be properly installed to the hard drive via a setup.exe utility which reliably fails out with this dialog no matter what:

I even tried it in the Windows 95 VMware image I keep around for these types of emergencies. Darn you, Critical Path, you just had to slight me one last time, didn’t you?

You might be curious about my longstanding feud with this game. I discovered it early in my days of buying old, cheap video games for the purpose of studying multimedia. This game certainly didn’t disappoint in that department– it relied on a variety of basic multimedia formats to achieve its aim. However, when I used a QuickTime-capable player to play through all of the .mov files, I was quite stunned by what I saw or, more to the point, what I didn’t see. I didn’t see significant substance, gameplay, or any particular length of play. I believe this is the first time I really saw an interactive movie in action (sort of) and I would never have quite the same rosy outlook on life.

Here are the details: It’s a post-apocalyptic world — nuclear devastation or some such — and you’re part of a military outfit that’s trying to transport survivors to a safe zone. You are a faceless male. Your copilot is Kat, played by a stuntwoman by the name of Eileen Weisinger (apparently the game’s biggest selling point). Your craft is shot down over some island. You’re still faceless and injured but are now situated at some control console for the island’s base. You have full voyeuristic control of all the cameras in the facility as well as some of the other mechanical gear.

Fortunately (?), the CD-ROM provides some slideshow stills.

Your job as the faceless, injured cohort is to guide Kat through the base. According to the FMV sequences I viewed, this isn’t always as easy as it sounds. There are areas where hordes of orange jumpsuited mutants are closing in on you. You have to find the right console button to activate a machine gun to take them all down. In another juncture, Kat is hanging on to a crane hook and you have to navigate her to safety vs. boiling lava. Remember, this is all accomplished with FMV.

I would hate for you, the reader, to go away without a deeper understanding of what the game’s video is like. So here’s the trailer for Critical Path that comes on the CD-ROM. This is the final insult– YouTube can’t even convert the QuickTime file properly. There are a lot of skipped frames but you’ll still get the gist.

See Also:

• The Daedalus Encounter, the spiritual sequel to this game

At MobyGames:

• Critical Path

Tonight’s interactive movie (shudder) seemed a bit ahead of its time in its use of Adobe PDF technology. At least I had never seen this particular use scenario before: The CD-ROM for Beyond Time contains a directory called answers/ with a locked PDF document. Back in 1997, you could call the toll-free number for DreamCatcher Interactive, the publisher, and pay $10 to retrieve the password. Enterprising, though it could be that they knew no one else would create a strategy guide.

It’s not uncommon for games to ask you to install extra support software such as DirectX, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Windows Media, or Apple QuickTime. All of these examples tend to be fully backwards compatible with previous versions. That’s not good enough for Beyond Time which demands QuickTime v2.1.2; the latest version 7.x won’t qualify. I do what I must:

QuickTime v2.1.2 still works famously on Windows XP. I was a bit worried whether the existing QuickTime v7 would still work. The operation seemed to cause problems with the file associations. But otherwise, v7 still works. And so does Beyond Time.

As some readers may know, I have zero love for the I-movie genre. I hope to spend as little time with this game as possible. Fortunately, the game is sympathetic to my disposition and helps me along by not tractably allowing me to proceed very far in the game. The setup is that valuable relics are mysteriously vanishing from museums. A particular curator has enlisted your help to go snoop around an archaeological dig in Egypt and see what you can find. I may be missing a few connecting details in there but darned if I’m going to watch it all again.

So I find myself at the dig site. The gameplay is Myst-like in the point-and-click slideshow fashion. It moves much quicker than Myst, which I appreciate. I walk up and down the dig site and eventually find and turn towards this statue:

It flashes light at me. Apparently, the flash blinds me to the point that I can’t see the mouse cursor anymore which pretty much makes the game unplayable. Restarting the game yields this same problem at the same point. I’m not too heartbroken.

I will give credit where credit is due– the ambient sounds are beautifully presented and the acting (what little I saw of it) was not entirely atrocious. However, the video all looked a little too home video cam-ish which is an amateurish blemish that typically mars these I-movies.