I've long theorised that the thing that killed the Mega CD was western publishers and their obsession with FMV, since the PC Engine CD, which had almost no support in the west, and had no FMV games, was a pretty big success (in Japan, at least), just by having lots of good games. Until now, though, I hadn't actually played any of the western "interactive movie" style FMV games, only the likes of Road Avenger and
Strahl: the "laserdisc arcade" school of FMV games that were made up of long strings of QTEs and cool-looking 80s animation. Those games are pretty fun, if very limited.
Supreme Warrior Ying Heung is the first interactive movie I've played, and using the word "played" is an act of generosity it doesn't deserve. The story sees an evil warlord attacking a small town in sixteenth century China, demanding half of a magic mask from the local martial arts master. If he gets the mask, he'll be all-powerful and go on to rule the world. Unfortunately, the master is too old to fight the warlord, and his best student is injured. So it falls to you, a collection of disembodied limbs attatched to a movie camera to save the day.
There's some good things about this game, that I should mention before I continue with its burial, so here they are: the production values are surprisingly good, in a mid-90s American TV show kind of way, and the video quality is a lot better than most live action Mega CD games. That's about it, though. The big problem is that the developers have tried to make something a bit more sophisticated than the typical QTE festival, and it just doesn't work. This is a problem shared by one of the aforementioned laserdisc arcade games, Cobra Command (aka Thunderstorm FX), which added a fiddly, semi-functional crosshair shooting element to proceedings. Supreme Warrior manages to be go even further with the complexity, and while Cobra Command was pretty difficult to play, this game is practically impossible.
The actual game part of Supreme Warrior has you fighting the warlord's three henchmen, then, if you somehow manage to beat them, the man himself. The fights are completely live action and first person, with the henchmen punching and kicking in the direction of the camera, while you're expected to punch, kick, and block in accordance with the little prompts that appear at the edges of the screen. The problem is that the prompts sometimes don't appear, and sometimes hitting the right direction and button doesn't do anything. I made a few attempts at fighting each henchman, and I never landed more than two hits on any of them. It just doesn't work on any level: it's no fun to play, the basic mechanics don't work, and your hands and feet flying in from the edge of the screen look stupid every time.
I wish I could say it was a shame that this game turned out how it did, and that the concept had so much potential, but I can't see how else they would have done it. I guess they could have made it a simple QTE game like the arcade games that had been originally released almost a decade earlier, or they could have used the movie segments as mere cutscenes to a more traditional action game, maybe with Mortal Kombat-style digitised sprites. But neither of those solutions really offers the kind of interactive movie innovation towards which Digital Pictures strove. Since no-one else has managed to make a good game from the concept in the decades since, maybe it's just not possible?
I've seen this game before and I think it's interesting that you pose the question of how else they could've accomplished things. That's certainly a good point!
ReplyDeleteI think the digitised sprite-based fighter a la Mortal Kombat would've been a good way to go, but maybe with "dramatic beats" punctuating the fights. For example; if you push an enemy towards one end of the stage, it would cut to a scene where your fighter motions to kick the guy through a wall, and you'd have to hit the button prompt to pull it off. If you don't, you just go back to the normal fighting gameplay until you can force the opportunity to come up again. And of course, they'd have the opportunity to do the same to you so you'd have to be at the ready to defend yourself via QTE should they successfully trigger a scene.
Maybe each fight could've had scenes you had to trigger in order to win, or the arcade ladder/story would branch depending on the sequence of scenes you successfully triggered? You always seem to see fights in movies, anime and cartoons where the combatants break things up so they can exposit dialogue at each other, or throw each other through windows or off of balconies or whatever - maybe Digital Pictures should've focused on that element of fighting when designing this one?
It really is a good question you bring up though, and a good, like, mental exercise for anyone. How would you do Supreme Warrior better, while still being able to market it as taking advantage of the "interactive movie" trend at the time... such a good thought exercise!
i think you've got some good ideas here! the mortal kombat style could really work, and the story stuff could be done kind of like the ring out animations in real bout fatal fury, but instead of a sprite animation, there's a unique fmv that plays when you win that way. (and since it's a single player story-based game, and you always fight the same opponent in the same stage, you'd only need one fmv finish for each stage)
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