[Texas]

I remember being a big fran of the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective series and Dracula Unleashed from the 1990s. These seem alot like adventure games to me. Their have certainly lots of adventure games based on these two charectors. Yet their is nothing on this sight about either one. In your opinion are these games adventure games? What is your view of them in general.

[marshal99]

They are FMV adventure games , i hasn't had the chance to play the sherlock holmes ones but i loved the dracula unleashed one. They replace the music for the dvd version with a ripoff. Should have included the original - Carl Orff's O Fortuna

Dracula unleashed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kn5k1pFxgw

[SamandMax]

I used to like Consulting Detective back when I had it on the Sega CD but I don't know if it'd hold up that well, a lot of those FMV games are hard to go back to.

[gamingafter40]

In my opinion, the whole FMV game era was a temporary anomaly from a period when video compression and CD-ROM storage technology were maturing and everyone thought games were going to become "just like the movies."

What was missing in most cases was interactivity and flexibility -- no matter how much was spent on the physical production of the footage, or how good the writing, these games almost never gave the player much of a sense of control. I always felt like I was being pushed to do something specific to make the story move forward, and was otherwise at a standstill, instead of being gently led along or nudged toward the designer's intended path. Most of the time the FMV games ended up being go-here-talk-to-this-person kinds of affairs, heavily scripted, without a lot of freedom for the player to explore and try things out.

It was just too expensive to design and film EVERY possible action and response, and so these games inevitably became limiting. The most successful example I can recall was Return to Zork, which managed to keep the character interaction to a scripted minimum and still allowed the player to adventure fairly freely. It used the FMV footage to enliven the proceedings, not as a substitute for actual game design. But the interaction was still canned, and realistic acting sometimes made reactions seem inappropriate if the lines were played in a different order than the actor was reading them.

Animation with voiced dialogue is much more flexible, and seems to be the right compromise at which the industry ultimately arrived.