Good Full Motion Video (FMV) adventure games
 

Lately I've been getting into FMV games. They unfairly have a bad reputation - sure there are some real stinkers, but there are some gems if you look hard enough. I can think of two games that I found to be quite excellent:

Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within. The storyline is solid, the acting is solid as well, the integration of prerendered graphics against FMV is done very well considering the game was released at a time when the best video compression available was the original Windows AVI. That said, the video is presented in a less-than-letterbox format that allows the video to look good even considering the faults of the compression format.

Ripper. Excellent storyline, well thought out puzzles, great music (more games should use Don't Fear the Reaper), decent although not great acting. Though it does have Christopher Walken, even if it's not his best perfomance.

Anyone else know of any other good FMV adventure games?

I found the last 3 Tex Murphy games excellent. Good acting, immersing atmosphere. They were way ahead of their time.

If you played Prey, while you are being kidnaped that same song is playing...

Best FMV adventures are Tex Murphy games, they have everything: great music, puzzles , story and acting is not bad as in other FMV adventures.

Do they work on Win XP?

I really enjoyed Tender Loving Care, but I know many people think it's too gameplay-lite.

You'll find many suggestions in this thread. :)

I recently installed and began playing The Dame Was Loaded. Some info about the game can be found here:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/dame-was-loaded

It didn't get uniformly favorable reviews (but then again, very few games do), but I am finding it quite entertaining. It runs in DOSBox after performing a strange little maneuver, the details of which can be found here:

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/comp_l...=2000&letter=T

It was worth the bother. The game designers, I believe, were all in Melbourne, Australia, but the game takes place in the United States.

Get some Tex Murphy into you. The only FPA I'd play again.

I just finished The Beast Within for the first time and was incredibly disappointed. The more emotionally demanding the scene the more hokey it got; this was, I think, due to sub-par acting... or poor directing (I can't really decide). Making matters worse, I totally lost interest in the story during Chapter 4 with all that tedious "research" (which really boiled down to clicking on absolutely everything and everything and everything but always managing to miss at least something which meant that every screen in every area of that whole blasted chapter had to be pixel-hunted to infinity in order to progress the story).

By the end my total lack of interest in the story and my inability to even emotionally connect to Gabriel (who I really couldn't bring myself to respect), left me with little idea of what was even going on. By the second half of Chapter 6 I was so utterly lost and confused as to the plot that I never even figured out what the opera had to do with anything. I was watching an opera in an opera house, but had no idea why! Nice music, sure, but "...huh?" Worse, the game never seemed to explain itself when everything finally played out.

Eh. Sorry for complaining so much. I just worked for hours and hours to get through that game, and then felt so cheated. The first half of the game was actually pretty good, but everything went completely downhill after that (and fast).

I love FMV adventures... :9
Bad acting can be great fun too but when it isn't, it is never as awful as bad voiceacting, which can ruin an entire game.

Yeah, Tex Murphy is great. Black Dahlia is also a good dark detective story with some hard puzzles.

My favorite FMV adventures (combination of prerendered graphics and cut scenes with real people) are:
Zork Grand Inquisitor... one of the funniest games ever made
Bad Mojo... lovely, cheesy acting which adds a lot to the fun
The Journeyman Project 2 + 3
Spycraft
Dark Side of the Moon
Temujin... nothing prerendered about it but not everybody's cup of tea.

Yeah, instead of just complaining about GK2 I ought to be a bit more helpful:

I always really liked the Journeyman Project games. The second and third are FMV-based. Yeah, the acting is even more hokey in those than in GK2, but I'm a sucker for time travel stories. :)

I just now got JP1 up and running in Windows 3.11 in DOSBox. There's something immensely satisfying about getting a game to run perfectly by running it within Windows within DOS within Windows. :D I've forgotten how immersive these games really are...

Yes....They can be made to work with a little ( or sometimes a lot! ) of fiddling about.

Steve's XP Corner on quandaryland.com shows in detail how to run each of the Tex Murphy titles ( and many other DOS/pre XP Windows releases).

Another fine source of help on the TM series is The unofficial Tex Murphy site.

Is there a taboo regarding mentioning DOSBox on this board? Granted, some FMV games don't run on it from the get-go, but its support just keeps getting better and better.

Personally I use Virtual PC 2007 to play the Tex Murphy games. And Ripper.

This one's only released in Hungary so far, but there are plans for an English version and they have a trailer in English.
http://www.yoomurjak.com/?menu=media&page=trailer#

Don't know where you might've gotten that idea, I mention it all the time. :) I couldn't imagine a computer without DOSBox on it.

It's been a while since I last played them but I think they work. Maybe you have to switch on the Win95 emulation. If you want I can try the Pandora Directive for you (that's the only one I have here at home).

I adore FMV too! :)
Is Missing: Since January or In Memoriam a FMV? Oo

One of my old favorites is a fairly uncommon game, Urban Runner. The acting isn't always the greatest, but it kept me intrigued for weeks.

Hmm... There's a lot to do around the house, but I never allowed myself to read all the notes, and look at all the objects, because I wanted to advance the story and see what happens next after answering the questions.

I suddenly remember that I borrowed this game to my sister over a year ago! I'll have to get it back! :P

--Erwin

Looks interesting, but I hope they don't use the music that was in the trailer.