Psychotron And Co.

Posted on February 15, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

There’s one more Windows-based interactive movie on my list that I have neglected up to this point: Psychotron. To be fair, it’s actually just a demo that came on a disc with several other demos and 2 full games published by the same company (Merit Software). I vividly remember when I first picked up this title along with 19 others. I perused the multimedia on the CD-ROM, as is my custom. This demo had a number of Cinepak-encoded AVI videos. Videos that are pretty much on the bottom rung of all FMV I have experienced. Seriously, watching this junk almost made me snap and scrap this entire multimedia hobby if it meant I wouldn’t have to watch this kind of nonsense ever again.

How bad is it? First, the tracking lines. Yes, tracking lines. If I were to piece together their game-making process, I would have to assume that they filmed their actors with a tape-based videocamera and then replayed the video in a VCR hooked up to digital capture equipment. They most likely cued the tape in the right place, paused, started the capture gear, and unpaused the VCR. Thus, most videos seem to start with tracking bars.

Then there’s the actual content of the videos. The demo included scenes where you’re trying to get information from a mega-geek in a cemetary and from some mobsters at their poker game. Now, I have to admit that I’m an extremely poor judge of the acting craft. Generally, I can only spot bad acting if it’s really bad, especially wooden acting. These people play their characters as the most extreme stereotypes imaginable for nerds and Italian gangsters. I have edited together 7 videos (first 2 are the geek, last 5 are at the mobsters’ poker table) for your review:

Good acting? Bad acting? Overacting? Like I say, I’m no expert. But I’m not sure if I believe certain whiplash transitions like when the head mobster’s frustration turns to a calm resolve to cap you.

The Psychotron demo is a Windows app (MobyGames reports a DOS version but this demo is for Windows). It doesn’t work in native XP or Windows 95/VMware. Color me surprised. It looks like I will need to find a way to install Windows 3.1 (either on a real machine, via VMware, or through DOSBox) sooner or later to handle a number of games. I would still like to get a glimpse of how this game actually plays. I think this would be a great candidate for my I-movie engine re-implementation brainstorm, especially when I studied the directory structure and found dozens of straight text files that are shown in the game. Simple data structure; that’s what I’m guessing. From a spot check of some of the text files, I learned that the president of the United States in this game’s universe is Richard Marx.

I want to play some new game this evening. There is plenty to choose from on the disc. Here’s the menu:

Selection Menu for a bunch of Merit-published titles

I think I’ll check out that DOS-based full Blade Warrior game. Err, no I won’t. It crashes DOSBox (0.65). For giggles, I tried it in the WinXP command prompt. “Program too big to fit in memory.”

Let’s check out the demo for Isle Of The Dead. This works quite a bit better. The game is from 1993 and is sort of a one-off of Wolfenstein 3D. Your plane crash-landed on an island that happens to be infested with zombies. Explore around the island’s perimeter which is quite safe. Pick up your basic items (health, shotgun & shells, coconuts). You’ll get stuck pretty quick if you don’t use your machete to find just the right spot on the wall of vegetation in order to break through to where the real action is. The deadly action. The deadly, undead action. The nearly impossible-to-get-2-meters-into-the-jungle deadly undead action. One moment, you’re looking at this:

Isle Of The Dead -- Facing off with a zombie

The next moment, the zombie gang is tearing you to pieces (FMV! Flic files):

Okay, I’m pleased to say that I actually played a game today. So this is just the demo of Isle Of The Dead. According to this old review of the game, the full version cost $70! That’s not Canadian dollars, either– 214 is in Texas.

Movie Player

Posted on February 13, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Over on my main blog, I have detailed an outlandish brainstorm which is a direct result of my anguish over having played too many interactive movies in such a short time. Give it a read: Dynamic Uninteresting Movie-Based Adventure System Simulator.

Interactivemovies.org

Posted on February 8, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Check this out: Interactivemovies.org, a catalog of interactive movies by an unabashed fan of the genre. Like water to my oil. Like matter to my anti-matter.

Burn: Cycle: Less Than Resilient

Posted on February 7, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

According to my interactive movie list, Burn: Cycle is the last known I-movie left in the experiment, for the PC. There could be other games whose I-movie-ness I am unaware of. Plus, I have at least one more I-movie for each the Sega CD, Sega Saturn, and Mac systems. I’m seeing that precious light at the end of this cold, dark, interactive tunnel.

Burn: Cycle didn’t work for me. I’m not sure how I should feel about that, necessarily. When I popped in the first of the 2 game discs, it offered to let me play right away, off the CD-ROM:

So far so good, and I appreciate the no-nonsense, no-install-hassle, cut-straight-to-the-chase attitude of this game. Pressing the Play button is rewarded by this dialog:

This is one of the worst kind of cryptic error messages you can possibly receive. Generally, it means that your machine is just too advanced to run this ancient software. The dialog reads: “Application Error: BURNCYCL caused a General Protection Fault in module 0417 1DE7BURNCYCL will close.” The only reason I typed out that text was so that Google could pick it up and hapless googlers can find this site and learn that, although someone else shares their pain, there is still no hope.

Next, I tried my Windows 95 VMware image. It didn’t GPF but it also didn’t play due to this error:

This must be a hardcore I-movie, without even subtitles. This is when I finally recognize that this Win95 install isn’t set up to recognize VMware’s virtual ENS1371 audio hardware. I have no idea how to set it up, either, or maybe it’s more trouble than I care to bother with. That brings tonight’s experiment to a screeching halt.

There is hope, however. This game is for Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Mac. I am trying to get an emulated Mac environment running for another Mac-only I-movie in my pile. Failing that, there’s always — groan — an actual Win3.1 or Win95 machine.

Law & Order: Dead On The Money

Posted on February 6, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Tonight’s game is Law & Order: Dead On The Money, based on the popular television show. I somewhat expect this to be a better version of In The First Degree, especially when I see that the game was created by Legacy Interactive. I remember being impressed when I perused the multimedia for their emergency room simulation Code Blue.

The game is 2 CDs large. The installer wants to copy the first CD in its entirety to the hard drive. When you start the game, all of the intro and tutorial segments run from the hard drive. Then you are prompted for the second disc when it’s time to dive into the main course. That’s when you see this dialog:

Law & Order: Dead On The Money -- Java Dialog

Eagle-eyed geeks will notice that the dialog’s icon indicates Java. I have seen quite a few interactive movie games based on Microsoft Visual Basic, as evidenced by the presence of VBRUN?00.DLL files (Critical Path, The Daedalus Encounter, and Quantum Gate all spring to mind). But this is the first commercial game I have encountered that runs on Java. Why, in theory, that should mean that it’s portable across any platform that can run a Java app… which pretty much means it can run on Windows. No, that’s not necessarily true– it seems that there is a Mac port of the game as well.

Law & Order: Dead On The Money follows you, a detective paired with Jerry Orbach’s character (whom I know best from an old episode of Tales From The Darkside where his deranged pal fell in love with a mannequin) investigating a woman’s early morning murder in the park. Before jumping into the action, the game has tutorials for both the detective and trial portions of the games, delivered by computer-generated, pre-rendered versions of the actors from the TV show. I edited the tutorial bookend animations together into this YouTube video so you can get an idea of the decent animation quality:

You begin the game by investigating the crime scene. This entails interviewing the man who first reported the body and checking the surrounding area for garbage that might double as a clue. This game has red herrings in quantity unlike many games which follow the Law of Conservation of Game Resources, where there are never any extraneous objects. Fortunately, partner Jerry gives helpful clues about what may prove useful. After you are satisfied you have gathered enough information, you proceed to some other place available to you on the map:

Law & Order: Dead On The Money -- Travel Map

Next, I head to the medical examiner’s office to get her analysis of the situation. Each of the locales you can travel to allow you to pan 360° from the point where you’re standing, and perhaps travel to another office, or look at assorted objects. Since the remainder of the video files rely on QuickTime files, I suspect that the panorama effect might be achieved with QuickTime’s QTVR technology, but I’m not sure.

Next, I bring up the case file and decide that I should submit the blood and hair samples (hair found under the victim’s fingernails, not matching her own) to the crime lab for study. Here is the master case file screen which has a stupendous amount of information:

Law & Order: Dead On The Money -- Case File

One of the key components of this game is time. You have 7 days to solve this case, or perhaps bring it to trial. I can’t remember where that time limit comes from, precisely. However, time flies in this game. Moving a few meters from one location to another in the park and leaning over to pick up a used ketchup packet can take up to 15 minutes. Yet traveling from Manhattan’s upper east side to Long Island takes about the same time. I’ve never been to the the Big Apple, but I hear that the latter feat is not supposed to be possible. I could be mistaken.

I was starting to get into this game. Unfortunately, it seemed to freeze up on me the first time I got a message on my in-game cell phone.

One more video, since they’re so well done– here’s the intro for the game This appears to be a clone of the opening credits except that the computer-generated doppelgängers fill in for the actual actors.

I see from MobyGames’ entry on the game that the “Dead On The Money” idiom (which means to be precisely correct) didn’t translate well into French (La Mort Dans l’Arme => The Death By Weapon [?]) or Italian (Omicidio a Central Park => Murder In Central Park, I’m guessing), and probably not Russian either, though someone else will need to verify.

Spycraft: The Great Game

Posted on February 5, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Some readers have recommended that I lay off the interactive movies, for the sake of my own sanity. I thought about it. But I see this list of known, unprocessed I-movies staring back at me from the surface of my gaming command center and I just can’t bring myself to abandon, or even postpone, the mission at this point, no matter how much it might be wearing on my psychological and emotional well-being. That, my friends, is commitment.

Besides, the next game on the I-movie roster — Spycraft: The Great Game — is one whose movie sequences I have perused before using a video decoder I helped reverse engineer and re-implement. Thus, I know it’s not all bad. In fact, the movie sequences are very good. Further, when I actually played the game this evening, I realized that it’s not pure I-movie but actually places heavy emphasis on some very unique puzzles. For that, I have placed this game in the puzzle games category in addition to the I-movie category, and I think even the I-movie category is iffy.

You play some CIA guy. There’s a big international event brewing. You are summoned into the director’s office to be on a team to investigate a new international crisis. But first, there is training. Generally, these are unique puzzles with a little faux FPS-type action thrown in for good measure. For example, the first training exercise is to use an image enhancement device to make out the license plate on the following picture:

The game features a lot of convenient little gadgets. Between two of the training puzzles, your tutor shows you a camera that operates on film but explains that it has backup, low-resolution images stored in a digital chip. What’ll they think of next? (This game was published in 1996.) Actually, now that I think about it, that device would work better for espionage applications (or would have worked better before film cameras were more or less crushed by digital counterparts) if it operated on more of a steganographic principle and allowed a knowledgable operator to snap innocuous photos on the film and secret photos on the digital chip.

The game is filled with tools that are so sophisticated that it’s a wonder why they need human intervention at all. But there wouldn’t be much of a game in that case. Here’s another interesting puzzle:

Spycraft -- Kennedy Assassination Tools (K.A.T.)

This is the K.A.T.– Kennedy Assassination Tools. This program uses a camera panorama to reconstruct a 3D wireframe model of an assassination site. You need to find two places on the scene where the bullets impacted. Then, use the tool to draw a trajectory to figure out where the round was fired from. Use the panorama camera view to find the suspect and then use the suspect ID computer to put together a computer sketch of the suspect. Finally, you can ask the computer to perform a search for possible matches based on the sketch.

There are lots of information resources in this game, including your PDA and your computer which both have access to impressive databases. Among other things, you have an org chart of your immediate superiors and reports. Here’s the dossier for one your subordinates:

I thought the game designers were taking things pretty seriously until I saw where she lived. Chevy Chase, Maryland. Come on, Spycraft, what do you take me for? But on a whim, I googled. Well, I’ll be– town of Chevy Chase, dot org. In fact, there does exist a Chevy Chase Blvd. in Chevy Chase, MD (though no Chevy Chase Road). I can go to bed knowing I learned something new tonight.

The answers to the puzzles always seem to be multiple choice. This is fortunate in most cases, such as the license plate puzzle. Rather than actually having to make out the grainy characters on the plate, the solution is obvious out of the three given. However, the choices grow more bountiful later in the game. And don’t you dare guess. If you get the wrong answer too many times, the director reassigns you to the CIA World Factbook division, which I’m guessing isn’t thought of very highly inside the Agency, or at least not in this game’s story arc. Here’s that particular game over video:

You know, I should start listing the games from this experiment that I have really enjoyed and that I want to revisit someday when this experiment is over, or when I simply need a break. This game definitely makes the cut.

See also:

Interrogation Minigames

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Interactive Movies