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Sure, I Guess I Can Play Nothing But Bad & Questionable FMV Games For Charity For More Than Twenty Hours

by zombiepie

Preamble It's that time of the year again! This blog is later than it should be, but better late than never. As you may have heard, this weekend will mark the start of the Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run, a Spring charity event hosted entirely by the Giant Bomb community. For a while now, I have been one of the streamers leading the charge to try and raise as much money towards charitable ca...

Preamble

It's that time of the year again!

This blog is later than it should be, but better late than never. As you may have heard, this weekend will mark the start of the Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run, a Spring charity event hosted entirely by the Giant Bomb community. For a while now, I have been one of the streamers leading the charge to try and raise as much money towards charitable causes as possible. This year, the Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run will champion Pencils of Promise, a charity the group has previously worked with. Pencils of Promise is an educational charity that builds schools and fosters educational opportunities in Ghana, Guatemala, and Laos. If you have appreciated my blogs and threads on the site, the Community Spotlight feature I author every week, or find joy with any of my tomfoolery elsewhere, please consider donating whatever you can spare; small amounts are greatly appreciated. For those unable to donate, feel free to share my charity page wherever you can, and don't forget to catch the fun THIS WEEKEND in the Giant Bomb chat or possibly on my Twitch; links are provided below.

To keep with tradition, I will be torturing myself with adventure games, but this time, I'll be a bit more specific regarding my tools of torture. Every game I play for the GBCER this year will feature or use full-motion video (i.e., FMV) in some capacity. I'm going to be a bit generous and not just limit myself to real-life actors in front of a camera, but even then, most of what I will be playing will be nothing short of pure torture. I tried to group the games I was considering playing into themes. Eventually, I gave up when I realized I didn't have enough material to make hard categories spanning three whole days. So, without further ado, let's jump into my plans!

Links:

Schedule:

  • Friday, April 4th, from 3:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. PDT
  • Saturday, April 5th - 10:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. PDT
  • Sunday, April 6th - 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. PDT

Day 1: Friday, April 4th - 3:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. PDT (Possible Bonus If Time Permits) - A Tour Through Chu-Teng

It wouldn't be a ZombiePie charity stream without some weird shit.

For those of you who have been on Giant Bomb long enough, you may recall one of my most successful blogs, a write-up about Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou. Sure, it didn't get the most comments of something I have published, but it was apparently read by the game's creator, Osamu Sato, and that's a significant victory in my book. Tong Nou's sequel, Chu-Teng, was previously shrouded in myth, with the creepypasta community questioning whether it ever existed. Luckily for all involved, that proved untrue, and the game's ISO image was made public on the Internet Archive in 2014. Later, an English fan translation of the game was published, and most of the game's mysteries were effectively settled. As someone who has played Tong Nou no less than three times, and even streamed the game for a previous incarnation of the Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run, I made it my mission to play and finish this game and even last year promised to put it on my GBCER agenda for 2025. I had to know more. Was the game unfairly censored because of the previous game's wacky religious tones? Did Sony, the game's distributor, get cold feet and block it from coming out of Japan? What dark backstory could there possibly be to explain why it was thrust into obscurity shortly after its release?!

Well, after playing and completing Chu-Teng, I can tell you that the reality is that it is just a vastly inferior follow-up to Tong Nou. Don't get me wrong, the game still has the bizarre visuals and story moments that made the first game "special," but there's no doubting the fact that this game lacks "punch." Unlike its predecessor, Chu-Teng is a much more scripted and linear Myst clone with the same trappings of Myst clones of the late 90s. Unlike Tong Nou, there are plenty of Game Overs to worry about, and worse, there are minigames meant to break up the monotony of the point-and-click gameplay. Those minigames are a real pain in the ass, by the way, because they appear to be locked to your monitor's refresh rate and don't emulate all that great. There's a way for me to work around that, and the minigames are few and far between, so they are not that big of a black mark against the game. However, it was a real bummer when I realized that most of the game's visuals are copied and pasted from the first game, and there is far less free-form exploration. Nonetheless, the game is still a visual trip, unlike anything you have likely seen before. It's bizarre, to say the least, and the handful of times when it fully goes off the rails, at least punches in the same weight class as Tong Nou. The issue is that there are many more valleys to its peaks, and the greater emphasis on traditional point-and-click gameplay seems diametrically opposed to the first game's transmigration overtones.

There is a canonical reason for this giant spoon.

If I have additional time, I am willing to share a bonus game alongside Chu-Teng: Qin: Tomb of the Middle Kingdom. Qin is a more orthodox edutainment game from Time Warner Interactive, the people who gave you such delightful titles as Rise of the Robots, Primal Rage, and T-MEK. It has its moments and conveys a far more serious story in which you control a member of a research team looking for a secret elixir of life within a buried city in China. There are scenes in the game that are meant to teach people Mandarin Chinese, and these moments are at least admirable. What is funny to look back on is how it imagines a future in which relations between China and the United States would have been better and a path in which China forms a democratic government.

Day 2: Saturday, April 5th - 10:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. PDT - An FMV Extravaganza

It wouldn't be an FMV extravaganza without child actors.

Saturday, April 5th, is the day in which I will likely wish death upon myself because what I have planned for the Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run is nothing short of a "bad time." If things go according to plan, I should have up to eleven hours of the worst FMV games ever made. Some of these games are ridiculously short, and others are painfully long. If needed, I have "backup" games in case I run through the games listed here quicker than expected. At minimum, the games I hope to play on Saturday are:

Of these games, only Goosebumps approaches anything resembling a good gaming experience. That game has Adam Wylie, Eric Lloyd, Isabella Rossellini, and Jeff Goldblum selling their lines like their lives depend on it, all while wearing comically cheap costumes. The rest of the games on this list are just shit. Critical Path is the worst game on this list, but it is mercifully short, with my first attempt at it clocking in under an hour. Urban Runner is far longer and more ambitious, but it shouldn't take me more than two hours. Terror Trax is one of the worst things I have played this year, and it has two comically terrible audiobooks that I would be more than happy to share if I meet my donation goal. Santa Fe Mysteries is the first part of a two-part series and showcases some PEAK FMV acting. That at least carries a game you play entirely using a fake in-game PDA.

Quantum Gate is... SOMETHING!

The two "wild cards" are Quantum Gate and Angel Devoid but for two entirely different reasons. Quantum Gate is one of the most insane games I have ever played, and that's saying something. It is an art-house movie project that ended up getting funding for a larger commercial release, but only if the creator repurposed it as a multimedia video game. Then, the person who funded it was nailed by the FTC for fraud in the "longest-running securities fraud case in Silicon Valley history." Be warned, the backstory to the game is far more interesting than the game itself.

I cannot promise there will not be scanlines during my streams.

On the other hand, Angel Devoid is a game I tested to make sure it works on modern hardware, but I have yet to finish it. I try to have at least one of the games I stream for the GBCER be entirely new to me, and this is the one I have picked for the occasion. I have been told the game is incredibly unforgiving, and the monologues are painfully long-winded. The best estimates place the game at the two to three-hour mark, and looking at some of the screenshots, the game's production values seem hilariously inconsistent. Some costumes and set pieces evoke a neo-gothic aesthetic, whereas others feel like they were bought cheaply at a soon-to-close for the year Spirit Halloween. So, it sounds "perfect for this feature.

Day 3: Sunday, April 6th - 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. PDT - Star Trek Sundays

Ending the charity streams with a BANG!

This stream will be a far more straightforward gimmick. Two well-known "traditional" FMV Star Trek games and two educational ones blur the lines. Star Trek: Borg and Star Trek: Klingon are both legends in the FMV interactive hall of fame and need no introduction to those familiar with Vincent Caravella's time with Star Trek: Borg. The games have "incredible acting that sells the entire experience and carries both as watching and playing experiences. They're both barely video games from an entirely orthodox perspective, but who's splitting hairs at this point? If you can tune in, I promise you'll have a blast because John de Lancie as Q and Robert O'Reilly as Gowron in their respective video games need to be seen to be believed. Fun fact: both games were developed and published by Simon & Schuster during the brief period in which the publisher dabbled in multimedia games like many in the publishing industry, the most notable example being the Scholastic Corporation. Star Trek: Klingon is especially notable because it had supplemental features meant to "teach" people how to speak Klingon. During the charity drive, I plan to share one of these, an audiobook by Michael Dorn of Worf fame. Unfortunately, the other, a multimedia dictionary, is uncooperative with modern hardware, and I doubt I will be able to share that.

Let's sit back and chill on the final day while getting nerdy about Star Trek.

The third entry to this dramatic conclusion to my efforts to raise charity involves Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual. It was between that and Star Trek: Captain's Chair (1997), both multimedia interactive games from Simon & Schuster. The difference is that Star Trek: Captain's Chair shot-for-shot recreates the bridge of various starships from Star Trek lore, plus a hidden bonus one, whereas Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual provides a complete recreation of the Enterprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not wanting to be pressed for time to jump between multiple ships, I opted for the Interactive Technical Manual, a digital recreation of the printed Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual. After some more hectic streams and concepts, kicking back and recalling my favorite episodes of TNG and the most iconic moments to take place on the Enterprise-D seems more than apt. If anything, it feels cozy. The game has the sound effects you'd want, and the text's narrator is the voice for Enterprise-D's computer, who came from actress Majel Barrett.

Links ONE MORE TIME!