your favorite FMV game?

[goldenband]

I recently found out about Kingdom: The Far Reaches (originally the almost-unreleased Thayer's Quest on Laserdisc). I'm not sure that it looks good, but it seems intriguingly ambitious for an FMV game.

I've been trying to get the Critic to review that game (and its sequel) for ages! My wife and I really enjoyed playing through it on the 3DO.

It's such a nostalgia trip to see that 1980s-style animation. It's a flawed game but a rewarding one while it lasts, and the fact that the sequel actually came out and completed the story is a rare example of a happy ending for that sort of thing.

As for the title question, some of my favorites are:

• Kingdom: The Far Reaches (3DO, also on CD-i) and its sequel (CD-i, though we played it on an old Mac)
• Psychic Detective (3DO, also PS1)
• De Zaak van Sam (CD-i)
• Night Trap (Sega CD & 32X, also 3DO)
• Fahrenheit (Sega CD & 32X)
• Dracula Unleashed, Iron Helix, Panic, Tomcat Alley, Wirehead (all Sega CD)

Oh, and Burning Soldier (3DO) nearly injured my hand from all the button mashing, but it's otherwise a nice-looking, nice-playing game. Knife Edge: Nose Gunner on the N64 is sort of the same deal, but it renders the landscapes in real time AFAIK so it's not a FMV game per se.

[djc]

I'm not sure I would count Mansion of the Hidden Souls (great game) as FMV as there is really no FMV to speak of. It's all computer-rendered (no live action).

There are a few more I did think of though that I want to add to the list:
Voyeur (CD-i/PC) - for whatever reason I always liked this game
Phantasmagoria (PC) - one of my absolute favorites

For sports FMV games, I'd go with:
Mike Ditka's Quarterback Attack (3DO/PC)
Slam City (Sega CD/32X/3DO)
Prize Fighter (Sega CD)

Worst FMV game I played:
Supreme Warrior

[Stalvern]

I'm not sure I would count Mansion of the Hidden Souls (great game) as FMV as there is really no FMV to speak of. It's all computer-rendered (no live action).

Video is video. It has nothing to do with whether the video was filmed or animated. The game streams Cinepak files off a disk; they don't turn into something else because an actor isn't on the screen.

If you're getting this idea from the "full-motion" part, that doesn't mean live action (which is why we have "FMV" games and not "LAV" games). It's redundant '90s marketing-speak reiterating that the video, in fact, moves. It's essentially meaningless – there's no such thing as partial-motion video.* This is why nobody uses the phrase except to talk about the style of games whose PR came up with the phrase in the first place.

*I Googled "partial-motion video" out of curiosity and actually found a few references to it, but none of them agree on what it might happen to be. Commodore apparently mentioned it to journalists as a feature of the Amiga CDTV, but the same sources also cite the fantastically stupid phrase "still video", so I have no idea what they're talking about, unless Commodore were so desperate for that bandwagon that they tried to conflate "video" in the sense of moving pictures with "video" in the sense of any screen output at all. There's a Wired article from 1995 that uses it to describe video with a low frame rate, which still is video, with all the motion that it entails. I saw a 2002 paper on distance learning that calls analog TV signals "full-motion video" and compressed digital video "partial-motion video", which would include friggin' Blu-rays. I even found a book from this year called The Media Snatcher that tries to legitimize "full motion" by contrasting it with the "partial motion" of... scrolling and sprites. All of this is nonsense; the phrase is just an oxymoron.

[Cafeman]

Dragon's Lair, Space Ace. That's it.

[CaptainCruch]

When I first played Rebel Assault on my Mac CD-ROM in 1993, I thought it was the greatest game ever! I still have a soft spot for it. Also, the original Mad Dog McCree is brilliant in all its cheesiness.

[djc]

*I Googled "partial-motion video" out of curiosity and actually found a few references to it, but none of them agree on what it might happen to be.

When I hear this term, I think of Plumbers Don't Wear Ties or Zelda on the CD-i (e.g. static images that quickly shift from one to the next giving the illusion of some kind of progression).

[noah98]

I always really liked Road Avenger on Sega CD. In some ways, I felt like I was actually driving, not just hitting prompts.

[GeoX]

Always liked firefox in the arcade. Hardly a great game but the controls and video was smooth and I couldn’t stop going back to it!

[ASalvaro]

Always liked firefox in the arcade. Hardly a great game but the controls and video was smooth and I couldn’t stop going back to it!

I was reading that you can play Firefox in Mame..I might try that soon

[MSR1701]

Sewer Shark; love the absolutely cheesy FMV, and the in-game soundtrack is pretty good.