![]() ![]() Stupid, unbelievable, clumsy, even insulting to one’s intelligence - but on a gut level, the game actually works, and in this review, I shall try to show why it does. ![]() One thing that Phantasmagoria was never intended to be, and one thing that it is definitely not, is «funny» (well, anything, including King Lear and Schindler’s List, can be «funny» if you wire your brain in certain ways prior to the experience, but that really says more about yourself than these works). ONCE MORE CHAPTER 1 DOWNLOADBut with the digital download epoch upon us, and in an era in which a 2Gb-weighing game is looked upon as a pitiful indie project, nothing remains of that reverence, and these days, people who still launch Phantasmagoria, or people who agree to kill some time to watch a YouTube playthrough, go into it expecting nothing but a bit of giggly, campy fun - and come out of it fully satisfied. At least in those early days, to play the game you had to extract it from its imposing seven-CD package (a record of sorts), one look at which already implied a certain reverence. in Sierra’s own Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within ), and then as more time went by and the FMV experience withered and died in the face of the 3D graphic revolution, the novelty wonder of Phantasmagoria quickly wore off, and the game eventually saw itself humiliatingly relegated to lists of «Worst Ever» titles, or, perhaps even worse, to the wobbly area of Campy Guilty Pleasure. But as time went by and the FMV experience learned to overcome some of its original problems (e.g. ONCE MORE CHAPTER 1 MOVIEThe very fact that even the respective Wikipedia article, put together from dozens of sources, remains one of the longest articles on a Sierra game, shows just how definitively Phantasmagoria has passed into legend: good or bad, it remains a one-of-a-kind watermark of human achievement in the sphere of merging together the digital game and the video movie media.Ĭontrary to the impression one might get from reading certain retrospective descriptions, initial reception of Phantasmagoria was not overtly negative - the whole thing radiated different! so starkly that even those critics who were, from the very start, offended by the silly plot, bad acting, lack of taste, and clumsy gameplay, had to admit that there was still something special about the game and there were even those so taken by that something special that they did not even notice the silly plot, bad acting, etcetera. It has been written plenty of times about how quickly Sierra ran out of budget, how chaotic and painful was the entire process of filming and editing the game sequences, and how, despite all odds, the game still managed to be profitable, ultimately becoming Sierra’s best-selling title, though quite far from critically best-received. ![]() Now that graphic resolution, video editing software, and optical disk storage capacity were more or less up to par, she launched herself into the project with verve, without even realising all the innumerable technical difficulties that would still go along with it. ONCE MORE CHAPTER 1 SERIESThat the FMV format would be tested out on a horror game was pretty much predetermined - Roberta Williams had wanted to do a bona fide horror game for years (her Laura Bow series had tiny elements of horror throughout, but was still essentially in the detective mystery genre), however, she felt that digital animation was an insufficient medium for a convincing horror experience and that only live actors could make the player truly empathize with whatever was going on. In 1993, Gabriel Knight: Sins Of The Fathers successfully advertised itself as the herald of a new age in computer gaming (if not in the art world in general) one year later, King’s Quest VII showed the world that a computer game could be (almost) as beautiful as a Dysney movie and with Phantasmagoria, Sierra’s plan was to demonstrate that a computer game could easily compete with a movie, period. This is in a big part due to the arch-heavy promotion arranged for the game by Ken Williams: as the legitimately next in a series of innovative projects led by his wife Roberta, Phantasmagoria received the VIP treatment from Sierra On-Line back when Sierra On-Line was at the height of its artistic, critical, and commercial fortunes. Roberta Williams’ Phantasmagoria was hardly the first FMV (full motion video) game to be released on the market - the format, in its classic form, had been activated at least three years earlier, with titles such as Night Trap and The 7th Guest - but it arguably remains the most famous, or, rather, the most in famous representative of this dead-end genre. ![]()
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