Urban Runner - A point 'n' quickie review

Oh my god, the nineties. The nineties? Oh my god. Oh my god, the nineties. The nineties? Oh my god. I've played FMV games. Even enjoyed a couple of them. But the same crop of complaints tends to come up each time. Things like bad story, bad dialogue, hammy acting, crap video quality, cheap production values, limited interaction and the fact that they come on so many *** shiny, shiny discs that you can make a shiny, shiny fort out of them. So how about a point 'n' click game, which is based around limited interaction, that just happens to use FMV for the graphics? Nope! Turns out they can *** that up too. 'They' in this case being Coktel Notable for the Gobliiins trilogy that drove me *** mad when I was little and oh dear god they made an Emmannuelle game too. ...yeah, for the benefit of our younger viewers if you're too young to remember what Emmanuelle is, chances are you still too young to look it up. but hey! A German magazine gave the game an award for... You'd better not be lying to me, Wikipedia, because I can't read German to check this and I really hope this is true But back to Urban Runner. Almost everything that can go wrong with putting FMV in your game somehow goes wrong here. Almost everything that can go wrong with putting FMV in your game somehow goes wrong here. The video quality's ropey, but functional enough to show you what's happening. The acting tripped over hammy and fell *** first into god-awful sometime after they made one of the villains sound like a *** robot hippo. Also, there's no dialogue; all you get is an ADR voice over. I'm not even sure they brought microphones to the shoot; I'm actually half-convinced they just shot a bunch of footage and put the story together in the edit later The game starts off with two men meeting up in a sauna wearing nothing but towels. Aaaaand... yup! There goes half the audience! One of the is you, who's a reporter, and the other is a drug-running informant... who's dead. One of the is you, who's a reporter, and the other is a drug-running informant... who's dead. Apparently there's some kind of alarm in the place that goes off when corpses are moved leading our hero to run to his locker with the wrong key in his hand. And as he runs out half-wearing a dead man's clothes he's spotted by BERETTA MANMULLET. who's determined to outfit your body with a new bullet-based air-conditioning system. who's determined to outfit your body with a new bullet-based air-conditioning system. ManMullet starts chasing you down... ...badly. But once you get this basement... Okay... without even questioning the fact that he has keys to this place when they ran a mile from the sauna... Okay... without even questioning the fact that he has keys to this place when they ran a mile from the sauna... ...why doesn't he come after me? He's armed, I'm not - I don't fancy my chances here. But no - apparently it's time for a quick manicure and to stare at some pictures... He likes trains. I was not expecting that. From here you fish around the lockers and find a hook & a line, set up a trip-wire on the stairs and then you lure ManMullet down to you by calling his hand-to-genital accuracy into question. MAX: "Hey, Buffalo Bill!" "Where did you learn how to shoot? At the circus?" "Or didn't your Ma teach you how to *** straight?" Well, to be fair she was hardly an expert. ManMullet takes the bait, but stays at the top of the stairs, so you have to hook him in before he falls. ...at least I assume that's what it was meant to look like. Now, we know he has 3 items: the keys to the exit, a gun & a nail file. antonio file Our hero goes for the nail file. Naturally. Ooh, that's a crit. And your hero won't go near him again. Presumably to afraid to test the theory that you can actually *** your pants twice in a row. Presumably to afraid to test the theory that you can actually *** your pants twice in a row. Using the nail file he chisels out a hollow brick from the wall, pulls the secret lever - Using the nail file he chisels out a hollow brick from the wall, pulls the secret lever - Naturally. - and escapes up a ladder. And that's pretty much the intro. the rest of the game, rather than devise cohesive world for you to explore, drags you from location to location to get all the puzzles solved. The interface is... shall we say, functional. The interface is... shall we say, functional. It's standard first-person FMV movement. You click a location and then you watch a transition cutscene and you're there, magic. You left-click on stuff in the world to interact with it and you right-click to bring up your inventory. You've also got your memory which will occasionally fill with important events or documents; neat idea, but Resonance did it better. Then you've got the 3D Viewer, which is how you examine objects IN 3D! ...you probably figured that out. You can rotate most items and zoom in on some others, and you'll meet this to complete some of the puzzles. This is the only game of played where you need to click on an item, then click somewhere else to examine it - it's more of a pain in the *** than it needs to be. You've also got jokers, which give you finite number of hints to use if you're stuck. It might refill after a while, but I never used them so I wasn't paying attention. Now, you might wonder why there's an Inventory icon up there when you can just right-click. Well, it's because it's the only way you have of using one item on another. Right-clicking unselects whatever item you had in your hand, y'see. God, that one got me stuck as hell for a while. The plot unfolds as a conspiracy mystery. You have a film which implicates a politician in doing the bad things with the drugs, so his guys are intent on taking your balls. But at the same thing you're been hunted by the police as a murderer due to your corpse contact in the intro. Then this woman shows up and the two of you partner up for the rest of the game. At this point you're in one of two midsets; A) you generally don't know what's going on with the plot and this woman came out of nowhere or B) you've read the story synopsis in the manual which spoils this particular plot development. I'm pretty sure a good mystery plot relies on the kind of gradual reveal that this isn't. The whole feeling I get from this is one of incompetence; the fact that this team was able to make CD-ROMs stream video any kind of timely manner doesn't excuse the fact that they clearly didn't watch a single one of the clips they were actually streaming. I'd suggest some kind of take-a-shot game for every instance of shoddy story-telling but there would be deaths. My favorite example is when you have to scope out your now-dead informant's hotel room and you manage to engineer a chance meeting with the woman he was staying there with. Immediately cut to the two of them post coitus. If this is the kind of thing that pisses you off, then I've got some bad news; by about halfway through the game, you'll have just devolved into shouting questions at your monitor. by about halfway through the game, you'll have just devolved into shouting questions at your monitor. Why do you steal a nail file from this guy rather than TAKE HIS GUN AWAY FROM HIM? Why do you need to input a sequence to operate a dumb waiter rather than just UP or DOWN buttons? Why do I need an electricity supply to turn a valve? How do you use this flashlight to blind a thug when it's further away from you than HE is? How in the *** does the Caps Lock key unlock an elevator? Did I really have to set a bin on fire? How do you pretend this police badge is yours when it has SOMEONE ELSE'S FACE ON IT? HOW DO YOU WORK?! There's some parts of the which are actually kind of interesting; The section where you find out how to drain a well so you can escape through it is fun to work out and you've got the added tension of ManMullet hunting you down. ...although that tension drains away fast because you have to hang around in one place too long for him to even catch you. Even diving through the corridor he's skulking up-and-down doesn't hurt because he's still got the aim of an inbred Stormtrooper. But enough of all that because I've found the worst bit of design in the entire game. Towards the end Ada becomes injured and you have to choose whether she lives or dies and not in a 'moral choice' or 'epic sacrifice' kind of way - no 'SOMEONE HAS TO STAY BEHIND' or anything like that - you get the yes or no popup window asking you whether she dies or not. In total, this changes about fifteen seconds of footage and doesn't even impact her character epilogue afterwards. In total, this changes about fifteen seconds of footage and doesn't even impact her character epilogue afterwards. The short way of saying all this is that it's pointless. I suppose, if nothing else, this differs from the rest of the pack a little bit. Many FMV games put a focus on you being isolated. This game does not do that. There's always somebody about; sometimes they want to pick your pocket, sometimes they want to kill you sometimes they want to bump uglies within four minutes of meeting you they want to kill you sometimes they want to bump uglies within four minutes of meeting you but you're very rarely alone and, therefore, very rarely out of danger. If only we could feel some tension outside of an arbitrary timed sequence. It's not really worth it unless you actually enjoy sneering at dodgy design decisions... ...which is pretty much the mission statement of this show. There's hammy acting, sure, but the fact that there's no real dialogue makes it really hard to mock and that really limits your enjoyment... ...not that the voiceover they use instead is any good, but it's just not as riffable as some other FMV games What little of the plot they explain isn't really worth it and yeah, it's easy enough to get running on ScummVM nowadays but you really need a level of either masochism or nineties nostalgia to get any enjoyment out of this.