Developer: CtrlMovie Publisher: Wales Interactive Year: 2017 Genre: Interactive Movie
Late Shift is a choose your own path-style game where you play as a student named Matt who forced to help with a heist and must make the correct choices to survive the night. You watch the interactive film and at specific points in the game you make binary choices that lead to different branches. The game features multiple endings with one being the optimal ending.
If you don’t make the right choices earlier, she will pull away and say “No time for love Dr. Jones.” While usually not this bad, a lot of the dialog in this game is poorly written.
I found this game incredibly frustrating. It’s well shot and the actors are all great, but nothing else worked for me. The choices often boil down to being a Good Choice and a Bad Choice with it feeling like a coin flip, and if you chose poorly, you are eventually given a bad ending. This normally wouldn’t be that big of an issue but if you want to go back to redo that choice, you must restart the game and you cannot skip previously seen scenes. Many other choices do not matter at all. Playthroughs also happen to be pretty long, making it a chore to replay. If you want to redo a choice, you have to rewatch up to an hour of the game again just to try the other option. The game also suffers from some poor dialog that would take me out of the game. If you’re looking to play an interactive movie, there’s plenty of better options. Some of the other games by this publisher, Wales Interactive, are worth considering over this game too.
Late Shift is available on a variety of platforms, linked to on the publisher’s site.
Morph Girl is an FMV game inspired by 90/00’s Japanese horror movies such as Ringu. You play as Elana, a widow who is unable to move on following the loss of her wife to cancer one year ago. A supernatural being resembling her wife begins to force itself into her daily life and the decisions you make during the game determine if she embraces or rejects the creature. It’s the first game by Autumn Knight, who later worked on D’Avekki’s game Dark Nights with Poe and Monroe as an editor and game tester.
It maybe lacks the production values that a FMV game by a larger studio would have but it’s an interesting game and I enjoyed the writing. Sadly it’s rare for queer relationships to be depicted in FMV games so it was nice to see a game entirely about one. I was confused by how some of the choices led to various endings. I did get a little frustrated by the inability to skip previously seen scenes too, especially in a game that needs multiple playthroughs to see all the endings, but I appreciated that the playthroughs were only 30 minutes long so it was easy to see it all and repeat scenes weren’t a big deal. Despite my criticisms, I had a good time with the game and appreciate that it explores themes that are unfortunately rarely seen in adventure games.
Developer: House of Tomorrow Publisher: Netflix Year: 2018 Genre: Interactive Movie
Bandersnatch is an interactive episode of Black Mirror where viewers make decisions at key points to determine the outcome of the story. The episode is about a young man who is developing an adaptation of a novel but feels he is starting to lose his grip on reality as he develops the game. Through various points in the story you are offered a choice between two options and each one will lead you down a different branch. I wasn’t very impressed with the options offered and felt very railroaded during the whole thing. That’s probably part of the point of this thing and the story it’s telling, but it also just kinda meant I became bored with the idea of it all pretty quickly. Often when people criticize Black Mirror, it’s for making really basic statements like “what if technology was bad?” I don’t think this is always the case but it certainly felt like it with this episode, while feeling very smug at the same time. I’m not a fan of Black Mirror in general though so this may have been something I was never going to enjoy. There are many other games that do a much better job having meta commentary about choice in games that you can play instead. However, it does get some points for the Jeff Minter cameo.
I guess it doesn’t really matter that much about how I felt about this game. It was delisted earlier this year and as of this writing, I don’t believe any of Netflix’s interactive movies are available anymore. It’s a big shame because I’m not opposed to the idea of them and I heard some of them were good, but Netflix will dip its toes into games and then get distracted and decide it’s not really worth the focus. It feels like they’re going through something similar with their mobile games offering and dropping a bunch of games from their service on there as well. I can’t imagine it helps that no one knows Netflix even offers their games.
It’s not all doom though. People have figured out how to preserve these interactive movies and with some searching online, you can find the preservation efforts pretty easily. Even though I didn’t enjoy Bandersnatch very much, I’m glad it was preserved and will be available for people to check out for years to come.
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is no longer available on Netflix but is easy to find through your favorite search engine.
Developer: Wales Interactive Publisher: Wales Interactive Year: 2023 Genre: Interactive Movie
Unfortunately I am on my FMV bullshit again, and that means looking through the games I have access to and playing as many as I can until I get burnt out on the medium and go back to playing normal games. This time it’s Mia and the Princess Dragon, an interactive movie by Wales Interactive. I’ve played one or two of these by the studio before and didn’t really enjoy them because I had felt you were making branching decisions with no idea how they would go, and then you get a bad ending and have to restart the whole game with no ability to skip what you had seen before. This was how Late Shift worked, a game a lot of people seemed to like from Steam reviews but I thought was pretty bad. However, I am sucker for FMV and Doctor Who, and this is a game starring the 8th Doctor, Paul McGann, so here I am playing this interactive movie.
On a side note, I will take every opportunity I can to recommend the 8th Doctor audio dramas by Big Finish. They’re fantastic and the Doctor gets to actually have character development. Storm Warning is the first one and a solid place to start, but Chimes of Midnight is fantastic and also a good first one. If you live in the US, you can also check out some of these for free through the Hoopla app if your library has it.
Seriously, it’s really good!
You play as Mia, a barmaid working at a dive bar, when a woman who is unable to speak English shows up and is on the run from a group of thugs led by Paul McGann. Pretty quickly it starts throwing decisions at you where you make binary choices. It will show you stats when making decisions but doesn’t give you context for it. You can pause it to see what the stats actually are. I never could tell what these were actually used for and as far as I could tell, they did not seem to have an impact on the story.
Some of the choices made no sense or felt meaningless. Early on in the game you can escape the bar you’re trapped at and leave with the mysterious woman, and get out before the more people arrive, and then your character decides to come back after eating and gets stuck in another situation and it felt like some very important context was missing because we weren’t there. At another point a cannon is aimed at someone and you can choose between warning the friend or stopping the person at the cannon. After you make this decision, someone walks up and stabs the friend anyway. I know this is something that is just going to happen with interactive stories that use FMV, because you can only film so much on a small budget and have to make compromises at certain points, but when it’s so transparent that the choice does not matter, don’t even offer it.
I’m dumping on the game quite a bit but there were parts I liked too. The game features a decision tree, which shows you what scenes you’ve seen before and the whole branching layout of the game. I actually liked the decision tree a lot. It’s probably a big spoiler if you looked at it before playing and it probably destroys the magic of how the game functions for some people but I found it to be really interesting. It showed me that there was more going on than I initially thought and was less linear than I had assumed. It was just interesting to look at and see how one of these games is laid out. The game actually lets you skip scenes you’ve seen before, unlike Late Shift. So I could actually replay the game without feeling frustrated. I will bag on Late Shift every chance I get, sorry. It also didn’t sort the choices into a good and bad decision. Well maybe it did a little, but it mostly tried to sort the game into two different but hopefully interesting choices for you to pick.
Mia and the Dragon Princess was also a lot lighter and more fun in tone than that game. It knew what kind of story it was and just felt like it was trying to have fun. The cast was perfectly fine. I’m sure it was a paycheck job for Paul McGann but he was fine. This wasn’t a Dennis Hopper in Black Dahlia situation.
So would I actually recommend it? I don’t know. I had a better time with it than some of the other interactive movies by the studio. It felt a lot sloppier than some other Wales games but also a lot less frustrating since the choices weren’t funneled between good and bad and it was easy to replay the game to try other branches. So far I feel like my impression with the studio’s games, the ones they’ve developed and weren’t just the publisher on, is that the ones that don’t take themselves too seriously are more fun to play and are maybe worth considering if you see them in a bundle or on sale and know that you’re getting yourself into An Interactive Movie that will last you an hour or two and that’s it. It’s not really a ringing endorsement but I’ve played worse ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Mia and the Dragon Princess is available on a variety of platforms you can find on the developer’s site.
Developer: Digital Pictures Publisher: Digital Pictures Year: 1994 Genre: Arcade
Unfortunately I have the FMV bug again so I played through Corpse Killer, a rail shooter where you are a marine dropped onto an island to stop Dr. Hellman, an evil scientist who is bringing the dead back to life. On your quest you meet a woman reporter, who becomes your love interest at the end, and Rastafarian man who drives you around the island.
For the most part, the game is just rail shooter sequences where digitized sprites of people dressed as zombies walk around the screen and either try to get close to you or throw stuff at the screen. You do this for about an hour and then you’re done. They try to add some variety by giving you some powerups and choosing the order that you do the levels, but you have to do them all anyway so it ultimately doesn’t matter. For the most part you just repeat this sequence of levels and then fight a final boss and the game ends. One level type has you using a dart gun to shoot the zombies, I think to be stealthy. It’s not fun. There’s some optional side missions that give you a little bonus cutscene. They tried! I think there’s only so much you can do when a team films a bunch of zombies running around and then you’re told to make a rail shooter with it. I think it could have still been more fun to play by making the enemies feel less like bullet sponges and eliminating all the situations where there was an attack that was impossible to dodge.
Obviously the FMV is the reason why anyone would play this. Since I played the remaster from a few years ago, all the digitized sprites are now in a higher resolution and it just looks weird to me. They’re all much more crisp than the background they’re walking on. I think the original game actually looks better in a way, because the background and zombies are at the same quality level and it fits together better. I do like seeing the cutscenes at a higher quality than what it originally shipped at on the Sega CD. I’ll admit that I am a giant baby and some of the zombies creep me out a little, especially when they do the jump scares in front of the screen. I am not proud of this.
I wish I had enjoyed watching the cutscenes more. The tone is right, they’re intentionally doing a more campy approach, but there’s just not a whole lot going on other than the brief moments when you get to see Vincent Schiavelli do something as the evil doctor. It’s clearly just a paycheck job for him but he’s still trying to do something with the limited material he has and is the most fun to watch. I was surprised at how uninterested I became in the other cutscenes. I love garbage but they were mostly very boring. As you can guess, a game about voodoo and zombies may not be the greatest when it comes to race, even if the villain is a white guy. It could have been a lot worse but it still sucks.
The game then ends with you shooting zombies in front of a blurry photo of Vincent Schiavelli’s face and then it cuts to a scene of the woman reporter in a bikini at the beach, after she’s spent the entire game flirting with you. I guess they knew their market for this game. After the credits, it ends with a memorial to Vincent Schiavelli. Well, ok.
It’s not a great game and it’s boring, which is probably the worst thing a game with FMV can be. There isn’t even any gore. I understand why that’s not happening on a Sega CD game, especially after the whole Night Trap thing, but it’s still funny to see in a game with so many zombies.
Since it was the rerelease of the game, at least it has a lot of bonus stuff. The behind the scenes stuff is fun. I was surprised by how many videos were made and preserved since the making of this game. It’s goofy that you have to buy them with points that you earn from playing the game, but you can unlock everything after a single playthrough. At least it gave me these gems from someone interviewing the cast.
Talking with the lead actress: “Do you think kids will like this game?” “I think it’s going to be fabulous”
And interviewing Vincent: “Do you have a favorite moment in the script?” Laughs “What are you talking about?”
I get the impression he didn’t think very highly of the script but he’s very nice to the makeup crew while they work on him so there’s that. He did do at least one other video game though, one of the Dune RTS games. I didn’t realize the game had Bill Mosely as one of the soldiers until I watched the behind the scenes stuff.
There’s documents like a Corpse Killer 2 design doc. It looks like Virtua Cop is referenced in this one. There was also a pitch for a Cold War inspired Corpse Killer ‘53. I just think it’s funny they had multiple sequels in mind as they were making this one. Again, it’s fascinating that all this stuff got preserved when you see that other companies like Sierra basically threw out everything when they closed. I think this part of the remaster is great.
The remastered version also adds a new level where you shoot 3D models and also sprites of the two founders of Limited Run Games. It’s bad and I don’t know why they added it, other than to insert themselves into the game. It’s optional and just exists for points so it’s easy to ignore.
This is probably too many words about a rail shooter for the Sega CD. It’s not good but I’m glad that the rerelease has lots of bonus stuff because mediocre games should be preserved too. I don’t know if I would recommend actually buying it since the game itself is very tedious and Limited Run Games as a company is…well…..not great, but at least they didn’t half ass it?
Corpse Killer is available on Sega CD, Sega CD 32X, 3DO, Saturn, Windows, Macintosh, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch.
Developer: Hypnotix, Inc. Publisher: DreamCatcher Interactive Year: 1997 Genre: Arcade; Interactive Movie
By the end of the 90’s it was becoming clear that the world of FMV wasn’t going to be the next place for Hollywood to conquer, but that didn’t stop some companies from still giving it a shot. Soldier Boyz is a rail shooter based off a movie of the same name created for HBO, and brings back the cast from the film to shoot new scenes for the game two years later. A billionaire has hired a Vietnam vet and convicts who have been sentenced to life to rescue his daughter from terrorists in Vietnam. Unfortunately, the heroes of the story immediately come off as unlikable. When the Vietnam vet (played by Michael Dudikoff) proposes his plan to use prisoners from a youth detention center (who are all played by much older actors) to rescue the woman, the billionaire father expresses concern that kids are being sent to die. These concerns are immediately shrugged off by our hero, who then hosts interviews to assemble his team. It’s possible that the writing in the original movie was better, unlikely since it received universally negative reviews, but every character in this game who is not a white person is written to be a racist stereotype.
See that blurry mess to the right of the tree? That’s an enemy
I suppose some people would be able to move on from this intro if the game improved. The game doesn’t focus on the characters much after this and most of the FMV in the rest of the game is focused on shooting people in Vietnam and the player character reacting to it. However, the actual gameplay is awful as well. As critical as people were of games like Mad Dog McCree and Space Pirates, at least they were functional. The mouse went where you moved it, fired when you clicked the left mouse button, and you could see what was happening on the screen. Soldier Boyz is unable to even do this. I constantly fought with a lag on the mouse movements that made it difficult for me to shoot anyone. The game is a blurry mess too. The video quality is ridiculously poor and the scenes are disorienting. Nearly every time you shoot someone, the camera cuts to your character’s reaction and then cuts to another character. I’m not especially a fan of the wave of FMV rail shooters that we saw in the 90’s but this is the worst one.
I wouldn’t recommend the game to anyone but if you really must play it, it is playable in ScummVM. The engine used in this game was used for a few other games, although I know nothing about them other than Marvel Comics Spider-Man: The Sinister Six also being a poor game from the streams I saw of it.
There’s no reason to play this game and nothing interesting about it other than film director Darren Aronofsky helped shoot scenes for the game. It’s unfortunate that everything he shot is basically unwatchable but at least he would go on to better things (well, most of the time).
Soldier Boyz is no longer available for sale but it’s probably available on your abandonware site of choice.
Next month will be ridiculously busy for me so I made a quick little zine about modern games using FMV for the Zine Month alternative jam using Electric Zine Maker. FMV Will Never Die is a free zine on Itch.io covering recent games with FMV. I created it for the Zine Month alternative jam, which I think was ending tomorrow but I guess not, oops. But that’s fine, I doubt I would have finished it if I sat on it for any longer.
I basically have a 40 page version of this sitting on my computer but I keep slacking off on doing a nice cover and formatting so this goofy version is what people will have for now. I had fun finally making something with the Electric Zine Maker though and doing all those bad doodles and I suppose an expanded version of this is something I can look forward to getting out there in another month or two. That will also feature reviews of older games as well as reviews for more modern games and expanded reviews for some of the games in this.
Electric Zine Maker is just a blast to use though. Sometimes it’s nice just to make a thing very quickly and get it on Itch before you get tired of the idea. Highly recommend checking that out.
When the use of cd-roms for games became mainstream in the 90s, there was a massive explosion of people taking advantage of all that extra space by adding full motion video to their games. A lot of great games were released during this time but it became a short lived trend since there were also a lot of bad games released. Having grown up playing a lot of these games, I’m now (mostly unironically) a fan of FMV in games and love seeing what new games are using it on Steam and Itch. While FMV can limit what kind of games can be made, I think it also has advantages. Video of real people or things can possibly help players connect to the story being told and even low budget or bad FMV can be charming. While it sounds intimidating to record something for a game, it doesn’t mean it must be a big production and there are a lot of tools to easily add video to your game.
Adventure Game Studio Adventure Game Studio is a free and open source game engine for making point-and-click adventure games. While most games made with the engine are 3rd person adventure games, the engine can be used in a variety of ways. This excellent tutorial by Space Quest Historian shows how someone who has never used AGS before can make a first-person game that uses FMV. Even if you have no interest in using AGS, there’s some good advice in here.
Anyone can record video for a game as long as you have a smartphone. Making FMV doesn’t mean you need to have massive camera, people doing makeup and lighting, and a cast of actors. I’ll talk about it later but last year I made a game with my cat and an iPhone.
Plan all the video you’re shooting in advance – Make sure you know everything you’ll have to film before you start shooting your game. It will be a massive headache to go back and get more video once you’re halfway through coding the game and realize that you forgot to film something.
Organize your videos – Make sure you have a good folder structure and naming scheme for your videos. If you have a lot of little video clips, it can quickly become overwhelming to figure out what videos are used for what.
Charles Engine for Unity If you are more interested in doing a Choose Your Own Adventure/branching narrative game, I can recommend the Charles Engine plugin for Unity as an option. The Charles Engine was made by Charles Games, developer of games like Attentat 1942 and Svoboda 1945. I made a very tiny FMV game using this plugin with my cat last year and while I would maybe recommend having an actor less difficult to direct than a cat, making a game with the plugin was very easy and the engine provides an easy to use tool to plot out all the nodes and branching that your interactive story will use. But the plugin can do more than just interactive movies and the tutorial that comes with the plugin has you eventually creating a game set on a fake computer desktop, kind of like making your own version of Her Story.
A screenshot of the game I made with Charles Engine
Narrat Narrat is a lovely tool for making interactive fiction games, with a layout that seems to be inspired by RPGs like Disco Elysium. But that’s not all it can do. The creator of the engine also made A Walk Through the Forest, a short interactive fiction game where you walk on a trail through a forest while the narrator talks about their personal thoughts. Parts of the game can have you looking at video of parts of the trail. Narrat also has integration with Godot if you prefer to work in that engine. Hopefully one of the takeaways from this post is that your game doesn’t even need to have people in it, it can just be video of nature or animals.
GDevelop I was recommended the tool GDevelop by game developer Damon L. Wakes. They added video into their golfing game Nine Hole Ninja because they felt it was the easiest way to add a story in the final hours of the game jam. What they liked about using GDevelop (link to Mastodon post) was that videos are game objects just like sprites or particle emitters: you drag them where you want on screen, and then there are events to start/pause/show/hide them based on conditions you choose. Nine Hole Ninja plays them over top of each level when it starts, then deletes them when they’re done.
I hope this post was useful and you’ll consider putting video in your next game, whether it’s a personal story or a total schlock fest. I also recommend this article that lists 10 tips from folks that have made games with FMV before. If there’s other tools that you use for this type of thing, please let me know in the comments!
Aren’t games great? So many exciting ones came out this week too! I sure hope a civil war doesn’t break out in the United States this weekend! If you recently released something that you want included, always feel free to send me an email, message me on social media (see About page), or just reply to this post with a link to your thing to let me know it’s out. Or even if you didn’t make it and you just think it’s neat, let me know!
Look at a Picture of Walter Becker for 1 Hour In this Game Boy and browser game you must look at a photo of Walter Becker of Steely Dan fame for one hour without doing anything else? Can you do it?
PIZZA PRANKS Videogame Tape Club The creator of indie game compilation zine Indiepocalypse has started a program for distributing games on USB drives inside tape cassettes. There’s already a few games for sale and it seems like it’s pretty easy to get your game distributed through it, and he’s also been very open about helping you start your own tape club if you want.
The Pony Factory The Pony Factory was originally a game in the first Dread X compilation created by the same designer as the retro looking FPS Dusk. This is a standalone release that adds a tiny bit more to the game as well as some additional polish. I enjoyed the original release of the game, as well as the rest of the Dread X compilations.
Until the Last Bullet Does this game look “good?” No, but it is a FMV rail shooter now available on Steam so I am required by law to include it on this list.
Sunken Stones A game that does look “good” is Sunken Stones, which has just released a new demo on Itch. It’s a puzzle strategy game with roguelike elements where you are a pirate captain and fight foes.
Other random things There’s also been a lot of Pokemon related discourse I have no interesting in but I did enjoy this post on Cohost recommending indie games inspired by Pokemon. This free Pokemon coloring book that was uploaded to Itch is also fun.
I don’t know if it qualifies as an indie game since it’s licensing a huge franchise, but I think the release of Stargate: Timekeepers is interesting. I never watched the show but we now have a stealth tactics game based on a show that ended over a decade ago. Reviews on Steam are mixed but most of the complaints seem to be that it’s a stealth game and not something else, which seems pretty silly. FWIW, IGN seemed to like it.
The first Megami Tensei just received an English translation. The article on Time Extension goes into a lot more detail about the history of the games and where you can download it.
Being involved with the Michigan game dev scene means that I’m aware of plenty of smaller games that may not be at the top of every games preservation list. One of these is When Oranges Attack. When Oranges Attack was a game developed by PixoFactor (now known as Pixo VR) and playable on Facebook to promote Minute Maid orange juice. Players created Rube Goldberg-style contraptions, similar to The Incredible Machine series, to help oranges tip over Minute Maid orange juice so actor Ty Burrell cannot drink it. FMV of the actor would play while you were trying to solve puzzles and whenever you completed one successfully. There were five levels, each with a different theme. Between levels there was an orange juice themed clone of the game Pipe Dream. Players could also enter a UPC code from Minute Maid orange juice to unlock a bonus 6th level.
The game was only online for a short period of time before being taken down and no one has dumped the game so it can be preserved. My understanding is that the code for the game was hosted on Minute Maid servers so I couldn’t just ask someone from Pixo to anonymously dump the game to the Internet Archive. That said, if you do happen to have access to the game, could you uhhhhhhh dump the game to the Internet Archive?
There’s not much proof the game even exists online except for a couple of websites that mention it along with a handful of screenshots. This first website is a blog that had a paid post to advertise the game and features a few screenshots and a description of the game.
There is also this website from someone who has worked in various advertising campaigns that also has a handful of screenshots.
Once again, if you have any additional knowledge about this game or if the game mysteriously ends up online, let me know!
