Here's a full-motion video game that ought to be revived:
Vid Grid!
The above screens are from the
Atari Jaguar CD version of the game. It was one of the pack-in games for the Jaguar CD. There's also a version for IBM PC/compatibles out there, which I believe is the original version.
I remember when it was first announced that this was going to be one of the Jaguar CD pack-ins. I hadn't played the PC game before that, but hearing that this was going to be an FMV game made me feel initially that this was going to be an awful move, as most FMV games were utterly lame. A lot of the FMV to dress up some ordinary 16-bit style game with cinematic sequences, or used FMV as the focal point for really simplistic "trial-and-error" memorization games.
On the contrary, once the Jaguar CD was released, most of the naysayers (myself included) felt that this game not only wasn't sucky, but was actually quite good!
Vid Grid is an FMV puzzle game. This wasn't just a puzzle game with some FMV slapped on it to dress it up. Rather, the game used FMV in an integral way. You had several popular music videos, which were cut up into several pieces on a grid (3x3, 4x4, etc.) and scrambled. The object was to reassemble the music video...
while it was playing.
While there were other puzzle games like this that had used still pictures, the fact that
Vid Grid employed FMV made it much more challenging. Camera pans and sudden scene changes would make it a little more challenging, since you really had to concentrate on which piece you wanted to move, and to what position. Many puzzles were either "drag and drop" or of the slider variety (like the little sliding puzzle games, where one piece was missing and you'd have to slide the squares around). Some of the later puzzles added twists, like flipping some of the video pieces so that they were mirrored (you'd have to flip them back to normal), or a "perfection" variation of the "drag and drop" game (where dropping a piece in the wrong location would rescramble the entire puzzle again).
This would make a great budget puzzle game on today's consoles, or maybe even as a PSP game! What do you think?
