Corpse Killer (Sega Genesis CD 32X)
My token game for the CD 32X combo… But why?
Both the Sega CD and the 32x weren’t exactly considered successes, despite a few stand-out titles the early 90’s had some severe shifts in gaming technology (CD storage, polygonal graphics) that just couldn’t be truly embraced by these early attempts to beef up the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis)… Doesn’t mean people didn’t try.
Combining the two add-ons opened up a library of 6 Sega CD 32X titles including Night Trap, Corpse Killer, Fahrenheit, Slam City with Scotty Pippen, Surgical Strike and Supreme Warrior… All FMV titles with 4 of them produced by Digital Pictures.
This is the token FMV game I decided to purchase for the Sega CD 32X, Corpse Killer.
Even though FMV titles are generally poorly regarded, I’ve already had the chance to review Goosebumps: Escape from Horrorland, right out of Dreamworks interactive. As a explorative-puzzle adventure, Dreamworks were in a great position to leverage cutting-edge special effects, some great actors and a combination of miniature sets and digital extensions. Good FMV is expensive and I feel that games like Night Trap, Double Switch, 7th Guest and Goosebumps: Escape from Horrorland take those FMV elements and actually incorporate them really into the game.
Corpse Killer is another story. Similar to games like Sewer Shark, Mad Dog McCree and Texas Ground Zero, you’re shooting things against a video background. It’s not an elegant effect, it hasn’t aged well and the game play portion is incredibly shallow.
As I played through the game however, I discovered there was more to this game than I first realised. Once you abort your first mission, you’re placed on a dashboard full of different FMV clips filling in the back story. If you can navigate to the map screen, you can actually undertake side quests for points, health and magic bullets. For a game where the main story is so rushed, I was blown away by the strategy required to make it to the end of the game (Hint: I didn’t make it).
You could say I got bored with this game (obviously) and the review I produced reflects that by spending way too much time talking about the Uwe Boll House of the Dead movie.
If we decide to ignore when House of the Dead (the movie) and Corpse Killer were released, the game could nearly feel like a sequel to the movie. It doesn’t add much to the game play, but it was fun to draw the parallels while playing and trying to plot a timeline for the islands demise.
End of the day, Corpse Killer was literally a token title for my Sega CD 32X, I bought it just so I could say I have one of these very few releases. Normally when I have a game this bad, I’ll make a comment like, “It’s a system exclusive, this is the only way to play it and even though I can’t defend it, it’s still unique”… Well, Corpse Killer, like most Digital Pictures games, was released on nearly everything. Sega CD, Sega Saturn, Macintosh, PC and sometimes systems like the 3DO.
While producing this episode, I found a great ‘behind the scenes’ video from Digital Pictures detailing the process of making an FMV game. Even though it’s easy to look and laugh at how terrible the games are… This feels like it’d be the ultimate job. Working on a video game with a low-budget and small crew, you’re literally filming some action and drama before heading back to the studio to do VFX work for the game play portion.
While the results aren’t groundbreaking, it looks like the team behind it are having a blast and watching the ‘behind the scenes’ really makes me wonder if we can ever get to this point again? Especially with the amount of high quality YouTubers and self-taught programmers, could we ever have an FMV revival?