Last night I threw a game away without finishing it. Out of the cd drive and into the trash can. Here's why:
Flash back to the infancy of computer games. From roughly '93-'95 typical personal computers were capable of displaying video. Think of the possibilities! We can now make multimedia entertainment featuring...video!
The only problem with this, of course, is that there was only about 1 good game to ever come out of the FMV craze, and I played just about all of them. Aside from the excellent Gabriel Knight 2, there were the absolutely terrible Phantasmagoria (1 and 2), The 7th Guest and its sequel the 11th Hour, and others. The idea here is to take almost all of the interaction away, to have the user do some asinine activity, then play him a video as a "reward". These games stunk to high heaven, and finally the genre was all but abandoned.
Flash forward to Thursday night, when I popped in the game Missing (US name)/In Memoriam (Europe). Here's the gimmick, the game's 2nd cd is supposed to be a copy of one sent by a serial killer. If it can be decoded, it will hopefully reveal the location of 2 kidnapped people, Karen and Jack. Upon installation the game asks for a valid email address, and you receive messages through this account during the game from supposed colleagues who are also trying to decrypt the cd. Basically, then, the whole game is this decoding nonsense.
As you "decode" the cd, you are gradually shown clips from Jack's video log, and eventually footage of this killer (The fucking Phoenix) stalking his victims. Two big problems here:
1. Decoding is a matter of doing one of the following: solving a jigsaw puzzle, finding the name of a place on the internet, looking up some symbols on the internet, hoping someone emails you the answer, some logical puzzle, or some ARCADE GAME. The research puzzles are so blisteringly boring that you will not be in the slightest part interested in learning any of the bits necessary to divine the answer.
2. The videos are not compelling enough to make you really try.
The 11th Hour had, at least, mildly interesting video sequences in between completely ridiculous puzzles. This game has shit. I tried to finish the game quickly with a walkthrough last night, but failed. The designers, near the end of the game, decided that the gameplay time was far too short, and added a "Space Invaders"-like arcade sequence to the game (yes, a spaceship and killing little pixelated aliens, but with the added twist that it's very easy to crash into the walls) which you can only control with the infernal MOUSE.
After 5 minutes of crashing into walls, yelling, and hitting the counter, I quit the game, took it out of my drive, and threw it the fuck away.
Please, do not play this game. Do not buy it, do not pirate it. Do nothing but scorn "In Memoriam".