Another Internet Cynical Essay About FMV Games

As I already said, FMV got a supporting role, while at the core there was some solid gameplay (3D space flight-sim / real-time strategy). That's what they did right.


Yes, in hindsight it's pretty much obvious what went wrong, but not so much why it went wrong. When FMV was new, almost everyone in the games industry got crazy, thought "this is the future", several companies released FMV "games" almost totally devoid of any gameplay whatsover, and thought just having videos in it would make people love it. Did they really think people are that stupid? I'd find interesting what exactly motivated the "early CD craze" like that.

Yes, most of it may very well be "hindsight bias" - now we think it should have been obvious it wouldn't work that way, but back then nobody could have known. But I'm not sure. There were at least some game designers who were critical about it even back then, but it seems most of their colleaques didn't listen (or didn't want to listen).

Thinks like Silent Steel come to mind. It's like Taking all the spaceflight out of wing commander 4 and simply adding a more branching story based on dialogue choices.

The problem was that it just wasn't good enough to make people want to replay half the game just to figure out where the heck they went wrong and which choice exactly made them not find some stupid gizmo that made their submarine detectable.

The good thing was that the filming was at least a cut above most of the other terrible FMV crap out there (Did the article mention that Johnny Mnemonic game? I don't remember).
 
The article doesn't mention Myst series, pretty relevant on topic.

I've generally enjoyed FMV games as a retro thing (I got computer with CD drive 1998). There are so many games of the early CD age that are unlike anything else.
True, that's often for good reason; but I rather play an absolutely horrible game that's different from anything I've ever played than a below-average game which is like hundred better I've played. And of course some of the quirky inventions more or less work.

Besides I've always hated vector graphics, that's one of the reasons I prefer WC1&2 to X-Wing/TIE (or even WC3&4). Bad video pleases my eye more than blocks and bitmaps FTW.
Even modernly I'd prefer to see more FMV and less CGI.
 
Besides I've always hated vector graphics, that's one of the reasons I prefer WC1&2 to X-Wing/TIE (or even WC3&4). Bad video pleases my eye more than blocks and bitmaps FTW.
Even modernly I'd prefer to see more FMV and less CGI.

Well, Xwing/Tie + WC3&4 don't use vector graphics, they're polygonal engines and have more in common with the 3D of today's games than the old vector engines of say Battlezone or the Star Wars arcade game.

Still I think I see your point - the hand-drawn work of WC1&2 has more personality -

but IMO the grace imparted by the 3D engines in Xwing and Tie Fighter more than made up for the impersonal and abstract nature of the polygons. Unlike the WC series, maneuvering is itself fun in Xwing...

WC3&4 lacked the grace of Xwing and Tie but at least the sense of scale and interactivity of the game-world benefited from the 3D conversion.

after all you can't exactly shoot a turret off a 2-D bitmap or fly through its hangar...
 
Disagree with you a bit here. I played WC1+2 about the same time I got into X-Wing and TIE Fighter, and, while I loved the hand drawn, personalized, and colorful feel of WC, I thought the engine didn't feel "real" enough compared to X-Wing/TIE. Even though those games had very bland ships that all seemed the same, the did look more realistic when they flew because they weren't limited to 26 pre-rendered viewing angles, that got a bit pixelated when you got too close.

Then WC3 came out and it seemed like it married the best of both the worlds. It had the smooth polygonal graphics that the LucasArts games had had, but the textures and markings were so much more colorful and personal like the early WC games.

The only complaint I had about WC3 was that the ships seemed too big...
 
Disagree with you a bit here. I played WC1+2 about the same time I got into X-Wing and TIE Fighter, and, while I loved the hand drawn, personalized, and colorful feel of WC, I thought the engine didn't feel "real" enough compared to X-Wing/TIE. Even though those games had very bland ships that all seemed the same, the did look more realistic when they flew because they weren't limited to 26 pre-rendered viewing angles, that got a bit pixelated when you got too close.

Then WC3 came out and it seemed like it married the best of both the worlds. It had the smooth polygonal graphics that the LucasArts games had had, but the textures and markings were so much more colorful and personal like the early WC games.

The only complaint I had about WC3 was that the ships seemed too big...

I agree with this completely - the ships and their markings and textures in WC far exceeded whatever the X-Wing series managed to do (up until X-Wing Alliance) even in the early games, WC1+2. They always felt more like naval ships in space.

The thing about the polygonal engine is that all the ships ended up looking like...polygons. Where as the Wing Commander ships managed to look like...ships. Probably because of all the great color.
 
Then WC3 came out and it seemed like it married the best of both the worlds. It had the smooth polygonal graphics that the LucasArts games had had, but the textures and markings were so much more colorful and personal like the early WC games.

The fully bit-mapped 3-D ships of WC3 were a revelation for me. The combination of elaborate FMV and a cutting edge game engine was a one-two punch like I haven't experienced from a game since. Playing WC3 for the first time is the strongest gaming memory I can recall.

But the flight engine was still clunky compared to Xwing/Tie. I mean, the 'feel' of the game was flatter and control response was...lumpy....for lack of a better word, even if the tech was far superior.
 
Star Wars vs Wing Commander. FIGHT!

For my input, X-Wing was a terrible growing pains sort of experience. Tie Fighter hammered down all the odds and ends and created a product that both had an interesting atmosphere and played really well. X-Wing Alliance was, unfortunately, a retrograde experience by comparison... complete with the return of the terrible Death Star runs.
 
Please don't.

Really, this is an apples and oranges fight. The tactics and flight style are night and day here, two completely different ways of playing two completely different games.

If you want to do comparisons just keep it to the tech stuff - anything WC did X-Wing should have been able to do too. Well, there's an interesting on topic point in and of itself. With all the stock footage X-Wing had laying around, why did they bother with campy talking heads when THEY could have been doing FMV?
 
With all the stock footage X-Wing had laying around, why did they bother with campy talking heads when THEY could have been doing FMV?

Because time is linear. X-Wing shipped in 1991 on five 3.5" diskettes and was designed so that it would still run on low end systems (I actually played it first on a 286/12 and thought it was still fun).

The thing about the polygonal engine is that all the ships ended up looking like...polygons. Where as the Wing Commander ships managed to look like...ships. Probably because of all the great color.

I *really* like the simple ships in X-Wing and TIE Fighter... and I think it's a shame they had to go back and slather textures (and stupid Redbook audio tracks!) all over the games years later. It was a cool quick style that made for a game that was nice and quick in a way Wing Commander wasn't at the time.
 
I *really* like the simple ships in X-Wing and TIE Fighter... and I think it's a shame they had to go back and slather textures (and stupid Redbook audio tracks!) all over the games years later. It was a cool quick style that made for a game that was nice and quick in a way Wing Commander wasn't at the time.

agreed, there's something stately about the simple shapes of X/Tie, suits the game's impersonal tone very well - I'm playing through the Tie-Fighter Collector's CD on dosbox, and at 640x480 the game has actually aged really well.

The ships are abstract enough that even without a historical lens the game looks stylized rather than antiquated.

Explosions are crap, but they sound good so I forgive them!
 
the tie fighter collector's cdrom had the option to turn off the textures and turn on open GL shading.. it was pretty fantastic looking, even for the age.
 
Apart from all that talk about the game engine etc. I think the real difference is the gameplay. X-Wing/Tie-Fighter are far "harder" simulations (not in terms of difficulty - although that is propably true, too - but in terms of how "realistic", how simulation-like it was) than the Wing Commander games. Most blatant example: You had to manage your energy (betwen Engines, Shields and Weapons) in all but the simplest missions if you wanted to accomplish anything. In Wing Commander you weren't even able to do this until later in the series, and even then it was a more or less useful gimmick, instead of an essential element of gameplay.
 
From memory, I always re-directed power from the repair system to shields and weapons as part of my mission start routine, in WC3/4.
 
I *really* like the simple ships in X-Wing and TIE Fighter... and I think it's a shame they had to go back and slather textures (and stupid Redbook audio tracks!) all over the games years later.

I'm willing to forgive them for the textures in Alliance because the game was surprisingly good, even if the last couple of missions were incredibly tough for no particular reason.

However, as much as I love John Williams, there was a lot to be said for the old MIDI tracks from other games. Dark Forces was great in part because of the music and the same goes for the rest of the LA games of that era. Dumping the movie music into the mix didn't add much of anything.
 
I'm willing to forgive them for the textures in Alliance because the game was surprisingly good, even if the last couple of missions were incredibly tough for no particular reason.

we should probably stop talking about Xwing any-time now.

BUT

by the time we had Xwing Alliance, we were in the era of 3d-graphics cards so I mean, textured objects were basically a given. Xwing vs. Tie was in the transitional period, so, the revamped Xwing and Tie games in the Collector's Series didn't necessarily benefit from the pixelated textures that were thrown on the old models.

However, as much as I love John Williams, there was a lot to be said for the old MIDI tracks from other games. Dark Forces was great in part because of the music and the same goes for the rest of the LA games of that era. Dumping the movie music into the mix didn't add much of anything.

Very true, but at least with Xwing Alliance, an iMuse-like system was successfully applied to the original soundtrack, nearly seamlessly blending various themes together in response to mission events and the player's actions.

But I still prefer the original compositions of the MIDI era too...Tie Fighter and Dark Forces really stand out.
 
I never played any of those awful games he mentioned which is probably why i thought the FMV era was great as I only played WC3 4 and the C&C games

Also, WC movie was terrible. I am glad he mentioned that.
 
I never played any of those awful games he mentioned which is probably why i thought the FMV era was great as I only played WC3 4 and the C&C games

You missed the point that I was making on the front page. While few were as great WC or C&C, they're mainly awful now that we have 15 years of modern masterpiece games to compare them to. Most of the games that that guy pans were super fun with amazing FMV at the time, which is what matters most.
 
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