Full motion zombies!

FMV games: A sad chapter in the history of video games. The advent of the CD-ROM led not so much to improved graphics or sound, but to crappy and compressed full motion video and games so ridiculous that they can easily be included in most “worst of all time” lists. You know these kind of games, you used to play them back in the mid-90s and while thinking how awesome they were.

In any case, FMV games became synonymous with CD games in the early days of the medium and were known for shitty acting, lousy gameplay and money you could’ve instead spent on a quality SNES game. On consoles they were mostly rail shooters. On the PC side of things, FMV was used extensively in adventure games, up until the end of the decade and, in some cases, beyond.

An example from my own troubled childhood would be Black Dahlia for the PC, released I believe in ‘98, which came in 7 or 8 CDs. Can’t really remember. But stay away from it, unless you’re in the mood for some frustrating adventure game puzzles and a Dennis Hopper desperately in need for a career resurgence.

Note: NEC’s PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 was the exception to all this. Not only was the CD-ROM add-on put to good use most of the time, but many of those games wouldn’t have been as good in HUCard format. I also have a greater tolerance for 600MB used for a decent CD-quality soundtrack rather than choppy low-res cutscenes.

Sega CD and Sega 32X: An even sadder case. Sega CD was an add-on released for the Genesis (aka Mega-CD and Mega Drive, respectively, outside the US). It played shitty FMV games. Most of them were so laughably bad they were actually enjoyable. Some, such as Night Trap, became cult hits for reasons unknown. Others, such as Hideo Kojima’s Snatcher, were surprisingly good compared to the rest (altough the game was a port of the PC Engine version, and so not really made for Sega-CD).

The 32X was a mistake. It latched on top of your Genesis and let you play “32-bit” games. Erm, whatever. Most people decided to wait for the PlayStation/Saturn/N64 instead. Perhaps the most outrageous thing about this system were “Sega CD 32X” games, which required both add-ons to work.

Corpse Killer is one of those games. A remarkable product of this forgettable era of video games. Remarkable not because it’s good, which it probably isn’t, but because you shoot fucking zombies. From what little footage I’ve seen of the game – I haven’t played it yet – it looks as if the video is actually of higher quality than its contemporary FMV games, which unfortunately doesn’t say much.

This game seems to have that unmistakable low-budget-zombie-movie feel to it, which makes it all the more enjoyable to people like me. I expect a campy plot with outrageous characters and even more outrageous zombies. I don’t really care about the actual gameplay, so I shouldn’t be terribly disappointed.

I’ll let you know what I thought of it when I’m done playing it.