This Month's Most Viewed Games Tagged 'puzzle, adventure, DOS, horror' on The Great Games Experiment http://www.greatgamesexperiment.com/css/logo.jpg en-us Made during the height of the "interactive movie" boom in the computer game industry, Phantasmagoria is notable for being one of the first adventure games to use a human being as an on-screen avatar. Actress Victoria Morsell spent months in front of a bluescreen filming the hundreds of actions players could direct her character to perform. The game was released on seven CDs to accommodate the massive amount of video generated by this process. Today it still stands as a record of sorts for the largest number of media cuts used in a game, though several other games including an adventure game based on The X-Files television series have matched it in the sheer number of CDs used. However, if it were to use modern day video compression codecs while keeping the same resolution, the game could probably have shipped on as little as one or two discs. On the other hand, however, the seven discs were used to highlight the seven days, during which the story takes place - the game could easily fit about five discs, even without the advanced video compression. Also, it is worth mentioning that large portions of data were repeated on each CD, to avoid disk swapping when playing the game.

The game script was about 400 pages long, four times the size of a regular movie script, and an additional 100 pages of storyboards set the style for the over 800 scenes in the game. The game required four months of filming alone and over 200 persons were involved in the production, not counting the Gregorian choir of 135 persons that was used for parts of the music in the game.

Source: Wikipedia Article

]]> 14 Apr 2007 12:45:09 In 1996, Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh by Lorelei Shannon was released. Though still enormous in size coming on five separate CDs it was in no way as large as its predecessor.

Dropping the unique adventure game style interaction in favor of an interactive movie format, A Puzzle of Flesh was more expensive to produce and less popular with audiences tiring of video clip-driven games. Though some concluded that it was a substantial improvement over the original in several areas, others dismissed the game, criticizing it for its completely different atmosphere, lack of creativity, interactivity and excessive violence.

The plot of the second game in the series revolves around the character of Curtis Craig, a 30-year-old man working in a company managed by the enigmatic Paul Warner. Curtis' mysterious and traumatic past is a key element in the plot, as he pieces together his experience to form a picture of his soul, one whose discovery might lead to his demise. Harassed by quasi-delusions which seem all too real, Curtis aims to uncover the truth about his family, co-workers and most importantly, his own existence. As his delusions become more and more real and begin to have an enormous, terrible impact on his surroundings, Curtis must confront his fears or risk getting devoured by what lives within him.

A Puzzle of Flesh has a fairly standard interface, with the cursor shaped into the distinctive logo of WynTech

Source: Wikipedia entry

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