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.
Actually, this game is merely entitled D (Sega Saturn version). No subtitle. I just added that to the post title in an effort to make it less confusing. You might think it’s the same as one of the sponsors of Sesame Street, but the content of the game is actually quite orthogonal to that of a kids’ television show. Let’s dive right in with a representative screenshot:
Admittedly, the foregoing screenshot has been significantly brightened so you have a fighting chance of making it out. But I suppose such effect does undercut the dark nightmare scenario portrayed throughout the story. The screenshot depicts Laura, our protaganist who is also attending art school in San Francisco, discovering a skeleton long ago impaled upon a wall of spikes, a surprisingly common facet of the decoration in the area she is exploring. Thing is, her dad runs a mental institution in Los Angeles, but went nuts himself and started killing everyone. The police don’t feel like tackling the situation. So Laura makes her way from San Francisco to Los Angeles to figure things out. That’s pretty much all the backstory you get. Remember, Laura came all the way from San Francisco for this family reunion. The only reason I point that out is that the game thought it was pretty interesting. Literary criticism is a bit out of my league, but that’s okay since proper literature is probably beyond the reach of whoever wrote this story. They tried to set up this taut thriller of a storyline but threw in some completely superfluous details, to say nothing of the breaks in pacing during the intro sequence when the cinematic editing repeatedly cuts to Laura’s automobile speeding along the freeway. To get from S.F. to L.A., in case that wasn’t clear before.
If it seems like I’m harping on the cinematic and story elements pretty hard, that’s because that’s really all there is to this game. It’s another entry into that wretched genre called the interactive movie, published in 1995 during the rise of such games. Perhaps I’m somewhat prejudiced at this point but my stomach churned at the thought of playing this game. But I suck it up for the sake of the experiment.
The game is somewhat like a horror version of Myst in that you are given very little backstory or context; you’re just plunged into some alternate universe where you’re forced to bumble around, look at stuff, touch things, and just try to figure out what’s going on. Sure, the game allegedly starts in a hospital. But as soon as you set foot inside, you touch an amorphous blob and are whisked off to… well, you don’t know. Your dad’s head appears and urges you to return home. And here comes an interesting facet of the game: You have 2 hours to finish:
Check that out! How many programmers have written analog clock programs? How many of them have actually had occasion to use them in a commercial application? Hats off to the developers in that regard. Getting back to the gameplay, if you don’t finish in 2 hours, it’s game over. The game consists of moving from pre-defined location to pre-defined location where the movement is all pre-rendered FMV. There are occasional items to pick up and use. There are likely opportunities to die a horrible death. I came close to one, but the game was merciful. This time. Laura also has a compact case that she can look at to gather clues. I get the impression that you can only use it 2-3 times per game before it shatters.
BTW, no pausing. You could claim that D is similar to Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! in that respect. I suppose you could technically qualify this game as a real-time interactive movie since it enforces that 2-hour deadline at all times. Not only can you not pause but you can’t fast forward through any animations, not even drawn-out ones that you accidentally triggered a second time, like trying to open a locked door.
I gave this game a fair shake and played until I got hopelessly stuck and the compact wouldn’t surrender anymore clues. Based on what I saw, I think Laura is going to be another character like Claire from Resident Evil: Code Veronica due to the fact that, no matter how many gruesome sights and impaled corpses she witnesses, she will never grow desensitized to the horror. You might think Laura might come to expect disconcerting things in this place.
Okay, the mission is simple: MobyGames is missing screenshots for the Sega Saturn port of the in/famous seminal CD-ROM game Myst (and every other of the 9 ports besides Windows 3.1 and Atari Jaguar). So get in, get the Saturn screenshots, and get out. Nothing fancy; don’t try to understand anything about the island– I want this done by the books.
Myst seems to get a pretty bad rap these days. Hardcore adventure gamers blame it, at least partially, for the downfall of the adventure genre (I would refer those people to Old Man Murray’s article, “Death of Adventure Games”). Really, I don’t see how this game deserves any worse of a reputation than E.T. for the Atari 2600 does– both were quite reasonable games in their own times.
To be clear, I was never all that excited about this game, but I can see how others might enjoy it. I have heard it described as a pretty, clickable slide show and I think that about sums it up. The last time I played it was in the summer of 1995 when I borrowed the Windows 3.1 version from a friend. I didn’t have much idea what was going on then and it doesn’t make much more sense now. Though I do know someone who claimed he could finish the game in a minute and a half flat from start to finish. Somehow, I still don’t think I would find the speed run very compelling.
Playing this game reminds me of assorted physics and electronics labs that I had to use in the course of the undergraduate studies– it’s hard to find functional equipment. Every other screen in this game has a switch but almost all of them do nothing. And there’s never anyone around to help you out. And certain books in the library don’t offer assistance, like this one that’s on the fritz when you try to read it… or watch it or something:
I suppose it could be that no one truly enjoyed this game. Everyone was just so captivated by the well-rendered graphics and the occasional, primitive FMV — courtesy of the fresh, shiny CD-ROM technology — that they never realized that this was not a particularly fun game.
Still, I have to give it credit for being pretty and all. That has to count for something.
I’m glad to know that Gaming Pathology readers are as interested in this project as I am and shared in my disappointment that I couldn’t run Lost Eden. VAG came through with a suggestion to downgrade DOSBox. Unfortunately, even DOSBox 0.63 begs for mercy. I came up with the brilliant idea to actually run the game natively through Windows XP. I was hesitant to do this the first time since I remembered the instructions advising against running under Windows. The game actually does run in the WinXP Command Prompt, but without sound, and only in fullscreen mode. I can’t capture screenshots from any of my utilities and I can’t get the Command Prompt to operate in a window and still play the game.
Mans R. proposed and implemented another solution: A VMware image running FreeDOS. This turns out to work, though, again, without sound. No matter– the game has subtitles which are likely far superior to the voice acting (though the MobyGames entry mentions that some people thought the soundtrack was good enough to release separately).
So I can get screenshots using the VMware image. They come with VMware frames but I have a process to remove those automatically later before I submit them to MobyGames. This is Eloi, a character in Lost Eden, and he is old:
Remember, this is a game about a land of intelligent dinosaurs and the humans who coexist with them. So now I am able to view the intro FMV in all of its silent, subtitled glory. Given the length of the sequences between subtitles, the designers sure were proud of the FMV. It’s actually quite beautiful by 1995 standards. It speaks of a crumbled alliance between the dinosaurs and the humans. Then I am thrust into the first part of the game where I, Adam, the Prince of Mo, must wander around the Citadel of Mo — which is not nearly as large as it sounds, thankfully — searching for the long lost secret of what makes the citadel so impenetrable by T-rex’s. It’s also my birthday, or “coming of age” day, and everyone in the joint has a Coming Of Age Day present for me.
Here is a sample gameplay screen:
On the bottom, there are items that you have accumulated. On the top is your location and the number of characters presently in your party. Characters will come and go during the game, according to the manual. It looks like there are enough slots to hold at least 4 and perhaps up to 5 characters. Clicking on the characters, or right-clicking the mouse, takes you to the status screen where you can pan to individual characters, talk to them, or ask them questions regarding your items. Clicking on your character in this sub-screen will take you to game information (save/exit/settings/etc.). In the primary gameplay screen is a constantly rotating cube as a mouse cursor. You can point to where you want to travel to next, or perhaps whom you would like to talk to next. At first, I was a little annoyed that, unlike Of Light And Darkness, this didn’t appear to have hotspots to indicate where you could move. But, somewhat cleverly, the rotating cube forms arrows as it rotates to indicate possible directions of movements, and transforms into a scaling eyeball icon to indicate that something can be examined.
So far, this is just typical adventure fare. Allow me to spoil the game all the way up until you learn the secret for building T-rex-proof citadels: Wander around the citadel, familiarize yourself with places you can travel, including the citadel foyer, the main hallway, the king’s chambers, your bedroom, the mummy crypt, and the execution chamber. Eloi, the advisor is talking to your dad, the king. Pop says you can’t leave the citadel because it’s dangerous out there. Eloi meets you in your room to tell you to sneak out the side door with Eloi’s sister, Dina, to go visit Grandpa Tau, who’s dying. You stealthily cross the snow-covered plains with Dina to watch their old pterodactyl die. He gives you some items before croaking. You trek back to the citadel and visit the cryptkeeper. This is when he gives you your present of a courage amulet. You give this to Dina to give her courage to enter the executioner’s chamber to talk to the executioner because she has the ability to translate his gibberish. He then gives you your present– the tooth of the guy who designed the citadel. A clue! …
Bored yet? I sure was. I got a little further and figured out the secret to building the uncrackable citadels. Then I got a prism. I didn’t have the motivation to jump through the next hoop and figure out what to do with it. What I’m getting at here is that the proceedings are — at least the beginning of the game — rote adventure game tedium. Alas, I never got to see the strategy or RPG game elements.
Do you still care about the unbreakable citadel secret? There’s a giant lizard underneath the place blowing on a giant horn that apparently scares off the T-rex’s. I think that has something to do with it. Then there is the matter of keeping the citadels safe while they are still under construction. It turns out the secret here is harmonious collaboration between the non-T-rex dinosaurs and the humans. The dinosaurs are on construction detail while the humans fight any T-rex’s who drop by. Or the duties might be reversed. Either way, it didn’t seem that earthEden-shattering. But apparently, it would have been necessary to coordinate that kind of effort later in the game to construct more citadels in order to protect more humans, and probably to re-energize strained dino-human relations.
Here’s another game that falls into my “always wanted to try playing” category: Of Light And Darkness, a 3-CD game from 1998. It is most notable for the voice talent of James Woods as some character named Gar-Hob.
Immediately after installation, the game exhibited a trailer for some Interplay-published Star Trek game or another. Who can keep them all straight? I just didn’t appreciate the fact that I couldn’t find a way to easily skip it once I realized the media wasn’t related to the immediate task at hand– Of Light And Darkness.
If I were to have to explain what this game is about, which I suppose I have to, I would claim that it’s about the coming apocalypse. You know, end of the world. I am a little unclear about what exactly is bringing about armageddon. There are intonations throughout the game that manmade pollution brought about by manmade greed are to blame. Spiritually, it has something to do with a bunch of apparitions appearing. Perhaps the manmade bad stuff is causing the apparitions to arise, which in turn are bringing about the end of the world. In order to avert this apocalypse, your job is to redeem the apparitions.
Enough storyline. Of Light And Darkness is, in fact, a game in a strict technical sense, complete with actual gameplay and goals. If I didn’t understand much about graphic technology and played this game in 1998, I would be absolutely stunned by the imagery on display– extremely smooth and detailed 3D graphics. However, I know better, and I know that this is purely a pre-rendered, FMV-based interactive movie. That said, I can honestly tell you that the graphics are exceptionally sharp and the game is well-produced, even if it is a bit difficult to wrap your head around.
Technically, the game is a bunch of individual pre-rendered FMV files strung together with some control logic and a few item objects superimposed on the proceedings. The FMV files are all MVE files, the sort used in many games published under the Interplay umbrella at the time. Your player is stuffed in a dazzling location. You then move the mouse around. Moving it to the extreme left or right of the screen affects a rotation around the current location. Sometimes you can look up (probably down in certain locales as well). When the mouse pointer icon is moved over certain hotspots it transforms into a pair of walking feet indicating that you have hit upon one of the pre-ordained paths and may move there. When you move to a new location and scan around, sometimes there will be apparition artifacts, or sometimes videos that attempt to explain more of the story, as seen in the screenshot below. Or, more likely, there will be one or more colored orbs, of which a blue example is also seen in the screenshot below:
Apparitions will occasionally appear. They don’t really hurt you directly (you don’t have a power meter in the game). But occasionally you will be accosted by an apparition and the game will notify you that you have 1 minute to dispatch the apparition or armageddon will begin. And you thought you had deadline pressure at work? The way to do away with apparitions is to combine a red orb, a green orb, and a blue orb to create a white orb, and then flash the white orb as a Ghost-B-Gone apparition exterminator. They’ll be back. Good thing that orbs are littered around the landscape and keep regenerating.
The decor and color of the game are really madness-inducing, so I think the designers reached their goal in that department. You really get the feeling that the weight of all the world’s sins are weighing down on your shoulders, but in a quasi-humorous manner. Like the pride place: There is a theater that represents pride. A pleasant, disembodied, female voice explains in a dispassionate, informational tone what pride is and why it’s bad. This sin room will come into play later on in the game, presumably. There are certain junctures where a cacophony of voices is heard snidely reciting financial terms or words associated with money: “Stock market! Dow Jones! Mercedes!” I think this is supposed to have something to do with greed and the badness thereof.
It’s a pretty game and I want to like it. But it’s tough since I have so little concept of what’s going on and exceptionally low regard for the interactive movie genre. It may look like an expansive 3D world but it’s actually exceedingly constrained. If there’s one feature I can appreciate about the game, it’s the fact that moving from one spot to another is very quick, particularly through long tunnels, an exercise that would be tedious in normal 3D games. This type of game makes me wonder how hard it would be to make a replacement game engine on the basic assumption that the engine could not possibly be that complicated. It primarily plays some FMV files, the format of which is well-known and fairly well supported in existing open source software.
One thing I enjoy about this game, and have enjoyed ever since I studied the multimedia files on the discs a few years ago, is a few odd musical numbers from the game, one during the opening credits and one during the ending. This is the intro movie, featuring “Mondo Apocalypso”:
The lyrics for that song sound fairly straightforward. I’m more interested to try to figure out what on earth they’re saying on the rap during the credits, “F-Death” (starting with understanding what “F-Death” even means):
The first time I heard the song I thought it sounded like Lil’ Kim. Of course it’s not. Some of the lyrics I’m able to make out include “Everything you know is incorrect, Eugene… you can’t collect your underwear, and you stare at your abductors, when they hook you up to electrical conductors and they pull the switch… this could be Roswell…” The chorus sounds like, “F-Death! Party in the ruins!” over and over again. It’s all there for your listening pleasure.
I knew this project would not be without its hitches. Tonight’s game is Lost Eden by Cryo. It is already in MobyGames but needs screenshots. I decided it would be useful to focus on games that just need screenshots vs. totally new games since I have a mounting backlog of games to insert into MobyGames (also working on that this weekend). It did not go well. Trying to run the game under DOSBox 0.65 has bad results. It brings Windows XP to its knees in a way that makes it nearly impossible to even bring up the task manager in order to forcibly terminate the emulator. I decided to try my luck in an OS that has a better reputation for stability — Linux — and things went worse. DOSBox freaked out in much the same way but was also capturing all input events. I was left with no choice but to assassinate the X server with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace.
I was able to capture the installation screen, though. Enjoy:
So, no Lost Eden unless, perhaps, I pull an actual DOS-based box out of the storage closet. But I don’t see why not playing it should stop me from reviewing it. I was sort of looking forward to this one since the manual includes a foreword by an old-school D&D fanboy who actually states, “These days the quest is on for the ultimate Adventure Game – the Interactive Movie.” This game was released is 1995 and with retrospect, that passage is absolutely hilarious. According to the MobyGames entry, the game was also released for the CD-i and 3DO systems, 2 other systems known for this type of FMV fare. MobyGames’ description also claims that Lost Eden is comprised wholly of pre-rendered FMV. Sure enough, the MultimediaWiki lists this game as using Cryo’s HNM multimedia files.
However, the manual makes it sound as if there are some other elements to the game, some kind of adventure/strategy angle. The story, in a nutshell, is that in this land called Eden, there’s an evil dude who commands T-rex dinosaurs to attack humans. You are a prince who lives in a fortress impervious to dinosaurs. Now that you have come of age, you are going to lead a quest to discover why it is that your fortress is so tough (the secret was lost) and work to build more such fortresses in different valleys so that other humans can also be safe. And, if you have time, you’ll also go after the main bad guy.
I would have loved to see how the game allowed the player to accomplish all of these goals using only pre-rendered FMV.
