Ohhhh… this is really starting to hurt. Okay, let’s go: Quantum Gate. This is — you guessed it — another interactive movie genre video game. This one was published by an outfit called Hyperbole Studios, reportedly all the way back in 1993. They subsequently produced a sequel and yet another title. I wouldn’t have expected them to have lasted beyond 1995. But it seems that they were responsible for The X-Files Game as late as 1998. They still have a web presence as of this writing, though the latest date seen anywhere on the site is 2002.

I was going to upload their propaganda video (their term, not mine) to YouTube but screw it; I’m not even going to dignify it. I remember watching this little promotional piece years ago when I first procured the disc. It spoke as if I-movies were going to revolutionalize the industry and that Hyperbole’s titles were watershed events in the history of computer gaming. The final insult was when the CEO of the company, one Greg Roach, was named the Steven Spielberg of multimedia (attributed to The Houston Chronicle, in case you ever need to discredit that newspaper).

You might think that given the vintage of this title, I should cut it some slack. Think again. Let’s walk through my brief playing experience. There is a short company logo animation followed by the title animation, then the menu shows up. Note that if you ESC through the first two animations, none of the menu options are clickable besides “Quit”, which seems to fit right into my plan. Still, I went the long route for the sake of screenshot recon. There is a screen that explains the complex controls. Hint: If the mouse takes the shape of a hand pointing left, you can click the mouse to move left.

Jumping into the start of the game:

QG, you had better not dare tell me that I’m humanity’s last hope. Well, to its credit, the intro didn’t actually claim that, but I think it’s more or less implied. I mean, what game tells you that some other guy is responsible for the fate of earth and you’re just running support?

Anyway, and from what I can put together (it’s not the most coherent story), earth is eminently doomed because of pollution — shame on mankind, as always — and the U.N. has a plan to do… something, I’m not entirely sure. You’re part of some military group that has to launch through space in a special gate (this might be the game’s eponymous gate) to another planet far away. You then attend a poorly managed briefing where someone explains the classified fate of earth. Then, a slightly senior officer explains how it’s going to be your job to help secure the planet from the race of bugs that currently inhabit it. Or something.

Look, I’m getting really tired of trying to sort out these bastard stepchild sci-fi stories. Let’s move on to characters, who I’m sure the creators were quite proud of. First, there’s your character, a military guy — military vanguard or some such — who walks around in a perpetual state of disbelief and whose most common line of dialogue happens to be more or less the same as South Park’s Mr. Slave character. Then there’s this character:

He comes off as a Vin Diesel wannabe, which is strange since Vin Diesel wasn’t a star until well after this game was made. He makes life miserable for everyone else in the room with his antics and interruptions. Thing is, his material is, far and away, the most interesting part of the proceedings. I don’t really want to spend anymore time on characters. No, wait, here’s one more character I always get a kick out of gazing upon– Dr. Scientist Lady, the one who invented the Quantum Gate:

Okay, about those “proceedings” briefly referenced above, I will admit that Quantum Gate has a unique cinematic style while stipulating that different is not always necessarily a good thing. Most of the game (that I saw) showed cinematic sequences (that you can’t skip) where there was a wide, letterbox-style picture depicting the people who were presently talking. Video images of that person talking are overlaid on the picture. Sometimes, one video finishes and another video — of the same person — emerges on a different part of the picture and takes over.

As you can see from the above screenshot, you are occasionally granted the opportunity to have your character interject something. This is apparently of little consequence, but the game throws you an interactive bone anyway. It’s also much worse than a screenshot can possibly convey. Imagine the most painful mumbo-techno-jumbo-jargon-packed Star Trek episode you ever watched. Now imagine not being able to fast forward it or even turn off the television.

The whole initial briefing implies that there will be combat with some alien bugs. Eventually, I get to try my hand at a simulation of such combat. The combat consists of a pre-rendered FMV sequence where some vehicle roves across alien terrain looking for the alien bugs and locks on. From there, I have to press the space bar to fire on them. I could never get past the second bug. My loss.

That’s it. It’s all over for tonight. But as I look at my list of unprocessed I-movies, I already know that I haven’t seen the worst yet.

I have no shortage of interactive movies yet to process. Today’s game is In The 1st Degree developed by Brøderbund, popularly known as that software company with the weird ‘o’ in its name. This is the third I-movie in a week that has referenced San Francisco. D made a completely superfluous reference to the city. Beyond Time showed us a brief pan of downtown SF to assure us that the game is supposed to begin in a Frisco museum. But In The 1st Degree is entirely set and filmed in the city by the Bay. As a current Bay Area resident, I can personally vouch for the authenticity of this game and I had a good time figuring out where the characters were presently situated in the tiny (by American standards) city. Why, here’s an authentic sequence driving down a famous San Francisco hill past a famous S.F.-style cable car:

Someone’s Dead. Someone’s Lying. Can You Prove Murder One? That’s the game’s tagline. There was a kerfuffle between a Frisco artist and a Frisco art gallery owner and the owner wound up shot to death. You play the district attorney and your ultimate goal is to get the artist convicted in court with murder in the first degree. Not second degree, not manslaughter, and certainly not an acquittal. You want murder one.

The first part of the game deals with reviewing documents, dossiers, and crime scene photographs. You drive around town and interview the witnesses at their homes or their places of commerce. And you also review the tapes of the witness interviews conducted by the police inspector:

As you can see, you get to review the tapes at your Pier 5 office, overlooking the Bay, Yerba Buena Island, and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The game’s writer(s) knew San Francisco and it shows in the characters’ dialogue which, BTW, is extraordinarily well-delivered by the standards of the I-movie genre. The second part of the game is where you go to trial with the evidence you have gathered and secure the most severe conviction you can. I didn’t get that far but I can honestly say this is the best I-movie I have seen to date and one that I would actually like to play again, perhaps to completion.

I knew that there was something different about this game when I first studied the QuickTime multimedia files some years ago. In The 1st Degree is fond of using the time-honored exposition-by-newscast narrative device where the story unfolds from the lips of television news anchors and correspondents. I would upload some samples to YouTube but YouTube has the worst time converting QuickTime files while retaining accurate A/V sync. At the beginning of the game, you (the DA) are sitting at home (which looks to be located in Noe Valley, if I were to guess), eating dinner:

What does a successful (we hope) DA eat? Looks like celery, cottage cheese, cookies, and a pastry. But about the main course on that plate — why, that looks for all the world like one of many fine Chef Boyardee pasta-in-a-can products. And — wow — that’s one honkin’ big cell phone, but this was a 1995 game. Ah, how far we’ve come.

Some interesting technical trivia about the game: Even though my computer display is set to use 1280x1024x32-bit color, the game complained that I needed at least 256 colors. It worked fine when I demoted the video mode to 800x600x16-bit color (8-bit isn’t even an option). Also, the game uses MIDI music to great effect. Even though the game claimed not to recognize my MIDI device, the music played and sounded great.

See Also:

• D
• Beyond Time

At MobyGames:

• In The 1st Degree

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