It cashes in on the aforementioned B-movie tropes associated with the genre, seemingly embracing the limitations and history of this peculiar genre-and it works! It really does. These episodes vary in quality but are all pretty solid, striking a peculiarly dissonant tone-shades of Welcome to Night Vale, with a healthy dose of camp. Her big-eyed, breathless charm (presumably inspired by the screen persona of her namesake, if you’re a bit sloppy with the spelling) is enjoyable throughout all six episodes. Not just FMV game great, but “I would like to see her in things on television” great. None of the performances are bad-at worst they’re vaguely sinister and inexplicably moist-but Cunard is consistently great. Cunard is indisputably the star of this show. Happily, Munro (Leah Cunard) is eminently watchable.
It’s unlikely that this is what they were going for, which is a shame, because otherwise the game succeeds in its intentional, over-the-top campery. His over the top “posh man voice” is grating beyond belief. Poe is deeply annoying for the duration, and his sinister manner is less that of his namesake and more “owns a mannequin leg and sniffs bicycle seats.” You met this guy at university, once, and then went out of your way to never meet him again. “He”, of course, is Poe (Klemens Koehring), the impossibly posh, perpetually damp, and more than a little creepy male half of this duo.
They’re also secretly lovers for reasons I was never able to grasp. The eponymous duo hosts a local radio show in the fictional town of August, on which they discuss dreams, nightmares, mysteries, and the unknown. Wales Interactives’ The Complex (2020) very recently offered a far more polished and well-made experience than one would typically expect from a game of this genre and budget.ĭark Nights with Poe & Munro is presented as a “season” of short vignettes, each largely self-contained aside from a few threads of continuity. Developer Sam Barlow is particularly notable for the way he’s taken the genre in innovative new directions with Her Story (2015) and Telling Lies (2019), managing to side-step the B-movie pitfalls entirely. As filmmaking tools have become cheaper, more advanced, and readily available, the FMV game has seen something of a resurgence. It’s inevitable, then, that the FMV game occupies the same space as the B-movie in terms of production value. Namely, “making films is expensive,” and “making video games is expensive.” The thing with FMV games is that they are at the mercy of the production realities of both film and video games. Looking at it today, it’s less the Giallo-tinged misogynistic boob-fest its legend might suggest, and more Benny Hill with trap doors. Not only is this not the case, but for all its infamy, Night Trap is incredibly tame. It isn’t that at all, but that didn’t seem to matter. The proliferation of home video, and subsequent flood of what were termed “Video Nasties” in the UK, were still fairly recent, and this is how Night Trap was perceived: A video nasty in which Little Billy controlled the onscreen violence. Comprising of video footage with real actors at a time when 16-bit violence was causing an uproar, it’s not hard to see why there was so much concern. At the time, FMV appeared to be the future, or at least a cornerstone of it.
DARK NIGHTS WITH POE AND MUNRO REVIEW FULL
Though certainly the most popular game involved, Mortal Kombat was not the sole catalyst for this industry-wide shiftĮnter Night Trap (1992), a Full Motion Video game on the Sega CD that was equally controversial. Ultimately, the US government threatened to take that responsibility, the games industry caved, and the ESRB was formed.
But, as long-time observers of the video game industry know, it is an industry determined to avoid responsibility as much and as often as it can. By 1992, pressure from these groups for the industry to self-regulate had been mounting for quite some time. Or so parent’s groups would’ve had you believe.Īs easy as it is to mock these “won’t somebody think of the children!?” types (though it is and you should), it’s worth remembering that at this time video games were entirely unregulated. No, Little Billy wanted to pull his old man’s spine out through his butthole and use it to desecrate the star-spangled banner. No longer was Little Billy content to toss a baseball with his old man, or whatever it is they do over there. Mortal Kombat (1992) was the worst of the bunch, and those new-fangled 16-bit graphics made the carnage REAL. They were soulless, mindless, gore-laden brainwashing machines designed to turn YOUR children into Charles Manson on bath salts. Back in the early 1990s, video games were the “big bad” in the US.
0 kommentar(er)
