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ZombiePie's FMV Friday Special For Extra Life & The Glorious Return Of Site Chat (Temporarily)

by zombiepie

I Have Awful/Wonderful Plans For Extra Life 2025 It's time to play some FMV-based nonsense for the kids! It's been a while since you last saw me writing about FMV-based edutainment on this site, and I do apologize for that. My retrospective on The 11th Hour and the downfall of Trilobyte Games will continue, even if Halloween is far behind us. So, to make things up to you, I'll make my contribut...

I Have Awful/Wonderful Plans For Extra Life 2025

It's time to play some FMV-based nonsense for the kids!

It's been a while since you last saw me writing about FMV-based edutainment on this site, and I do apologize for that. My retrospective on The 11th Hour and the downfall of Trilobyte Games will continue, even if Halloween is far behind us. So, to make things up to you, I'll make my contribution for Extra Life this year a hint at an upcoming series I plan to share on Giant Bomb in text form. When I covered Ghost on the site, I mentioned that the mid to late 90s, and all the way into the early 2000s, marked a period when the interactive or multimedia encyclopedia was its own genre of sorts in the world of PC gaming. Microsoft Encarta took audiences by storm, and imitators immediately followed, with dozens of game studios cropping up to produce hundreds of works to tap into people's inclination for anything multimedia at the time. Developers and publishers from all parts of the education and text sphere emerged in hopes of striking it rich in the multimedia mines, whether it be HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Marvel Comics, or even Scholastic Corporation. The book and comic book industry viewed Encarta as an existential threat. They spent big bucks on interactive encyclopedia projects, and the vast majority went belly up before the dawn of the new millennium.

Now, after months of exploring the dark underbelly of multimedia edutainment, I can safely affirm that most of these things are absolute dreck. The vast majority of works during the 90's multimedia "Golden Age" amounted to little more than slideshows with simple animations or video footage with very little gameplay. When it comes to the wild and wacky world of FMV, I wouldn't mind that as much if the cinematics were crazy enough to keep me interested, but very often, they don't. Instead of complete insanity, you get droning lectures on animals or history with zero pizzazz. However, during my adventure down this dark path, I have encountered some multimedia edutainment works that rose above the norm. In this case, I found two works in a short-lived series of interactive encyclopedias from Europe. Those games are Crusader: Adventure Out of Time (i.e., Crusader: A Conspiracy in the Kingdom of Jerusalem) from 1997 and its sequel, Vikings (i.e., Vikings: Adventure Out of Time) from 1998. These two games avoid all of the significant pitfalls of your usual multimedia works from this era, while delivering on all of the upside.

Because when I play video games, I want to learn about history while I play!

First, the game's stories, whether they be the one depicting a forsaken crusader on a journey to clear his name of treason or the one involving a young Viking seeking vengeance for his father's murder, are absolutely bonkers and shoot for the stars. The Crusades game has Abraham at one point appear out of nowhere to teach our main character, who is dying of leprosy, how to make a Gollum. On top of that, he sounds like Larry David. And the Vikings game, at one point, has us replacing our hand, cut off by Loki, with a metal gauntlet. Shit GOES PLACES with both of these games, and it is an absolute delight to watch! But what makes the best FMV-based acid trips so memorable? If you said, "When the actors are the developers and programmers wearing cheesy costumes ripped from a Spirit Halloween store," then, goodness, do I have GREAT NEWS FOR YOU! The production values for both of these REEK of the late 1990s in all the best ways, and as you might guess, the voice acting and acting in general are a complete disaster in the best way possible! So, I hope that these games and my plea that those of you who have enjoyed my writing and Community Spotlight contributions over the many years I have been here can inspire you to either tune in or send a few dollars my way. Speaking of which....

How Can You Support Me?

Let's do this for the kids!

For the past three years, I have rounded out Giant Bomb's community contribution towards Extra Life by streaming on Sundays rather than on the event's main day, Saturday (i.e., Game Day). After getting Jeff Grubb's blessing, I am happy to report that I have the staff's support to host community or user streams from shortly after UPF ends through Sunday evening. That amounts to about three days' worth of user-based charity streaming. That's a lot, and I definitely want to thank everyone who made this possible for allowing such an opportunity to happen. Whether we meet or goal or not is besides the point. Every dollar raised between now and the end of the year will greatly help the children that Extra Life endeavors to support. However, if the game I am playing or my other calls to action have you interested in sending me your support, here are some basic times, dates, and charity links for you to review:

So, if you can tune in, that would mean the world to me. Also, if you can't donate, that's fine by me as well. I have been doing the charity stream stuff for a while now, and I can confirm that, sometimes, what keeps you going more than anything else are words of encouragement. I don't have huge expectations, nor do I have any donation incentives to speak of. I set my donation goal at $1,000, but I would be the first to admit that I do that every year —and I've never met it. All I want to do is stream some silly nonsense and have fun with you, my audience. We have been through a lot over the past year, and to see a community institution like Extra Life weather the storm and come together like this says a lot about the power and strength of each of you.

Also, there's the glorious return of the site's emotes!

GUESS WHAT'S BACK BAYBEE! THAT'S RIGHT! GIANT BOMB SITE CHAT IS BACK (For Three Days)!

We are so back (for the next three days)

So, huge props to Chuck for putting his dark magic to great use the past few weeks to bring back the Giant Bomb site chat for Extra Life 2025! Yup, you heard that right, Giant Bomb Site Chat, and all of its emotes, are back for the next three days to help us host user and community streams associated with the Giant Bomb Extra Life Team. I know many of you were bummed when it was announced that Giant Bomb chat wouldn't be coming back, especially with the new site migration, but knowing how essential community streams are for Giant Bomb's Extra Life efforts, Chuck made some literal magic happen and has chat up for all of you to enjoy for the next few days.

Even if you don't plan to tune in for a considerable portion of the event, consider dropping by to use or pop off some of your favorite emotes from the many years that the site chat has existed. It's a real trip down memory lane just looking at it and seeing all of the tools and systems just the way they were when we last saw it up and running.

And as I said, this is only a temporary return of site chat, and I make zero promises that this represents anything more than a one-off. When I kill the feed at around 6:00 pm this Sunday, that's possibly it for site chat; possibly forever. Nonetheless, that doesn't mean we can't have fun toying around in a chat many of you know and love. If anything, I hope to see some of you spam those very emotes that once could have gotten you punished with a three or five-minute cooldown during Giant Bomb's E3 coverage many moons ago.

But one more time: