Interactive Movies

In the nineties, video games made a radical shift. Super Mario started it, and the advent of CD-Rom finished it. Games now deliver stories where-as before they were about competition. High scores have given way to beating "bosses" for bragging rights. Game developers fancy themselves as movie makers...

Unfortunately, they are usually bad ones.

Quake 3 was a retro game when it was released (around) 1998. In 1998, games are squarely in the story telling camp. However, Quake 3 rolled in as a multiplayer only game, mostly sidestepping the story for points based competition. A few other games gained popularity around the same time: Unreal Tournament and any other FPS that hit the counter. These games proved that competitive games have "legs" and do not get boring quickly. Quake 3 functioned just like the Atari games of the early '80s.

Just last year, Id Software, the makers of Quake, abandoned their multiplayer paradigm in favor of story telling. What we got was Doom 3- a great game that I no longer play. Once you complete a story based game, there is usually no point in revisiting it.

Does this mean that all story based games are inherently bad? No, some are worth playing more than once. Here is a top ten list of what I consider to be the cream of the crop of story based games:

10: Baldur's Gate Franchise: A classic Dungeons and Dragons tale which ends with the main character turning into a deity. Classic stuff.

9: Gabriel Knight 2: A werewolf story, and the only interactive movie on the list. Decent acting for a game and a fantastic movie.

8: Myst: The story is made more compelling by the way it is presented. A God like character writes worlds into existence via his books. His sons burn the books, and trick the player into freeing them after they are imprisoned by their father. The movies are not detatched from the gameplay, making it seem more real.

7: Metal Gear Solid 2: Few console games have great stories, but the Metal Gear series rarely disappoints. The cut scenes are too long, though.

6: Final Fantasy 7: Easily the best in the series. Watching a main character die halfway through was shocking - as was losing the equipment on said person!

5: Myst 3: Easily the best in the Myst series - with fantastic acting to boot.

4: Planescape Torment: Who is the nameless one? Planescape is such a strange world, making you want to discover your character's identity!

3: Ultima 7: The Guardian storyline is one of the classic RPG yarns. I argue that 7 is the best in the series.

2: Warcraft 3: The first act is a little slow... Until Arthas starts laying the smack down. Arthas kills his father, the king, in one of the greatest cutscenes in gaming history.

1: Halflife 2: Halflife is genius - The story is mostly standard scifi fare, but it's the storytelling that makes this one great. No cutscenes and a nice, slow pace. Everything is presented to the character in game, never taking you out of the world. Come to think of it, you never actually see you character in the game!