Level Up.pdf

408 LEVEL 16 Cutscenes, or No One’s Gonna Watch ‘Em Anyway
through cutscenes (if the game gives them the option to do this!) in order to
“ get to the game. ” To avoid this, you should first ask yourself this very
important thing:
CAN IT BE DONE IN THE GAME?
We’ ll answer that in a minute. Just as there are many ways to make movies,
there are many ways to make cutscenes: full motion video, animated, flash
animated, prerendered, puppet shows, and scripted events.
Full motion video (or FMV) cutscenes were popular when video games
were first being published on CD media. Titles like Wing Commander III:
Heart of the Tiger (Origin, 1994), Command and Conquer (EA, 1995), and
The Horde (Crystal Dynamics, 1994) featured live - action cutscenes featuring
Hollywood actors and production values. FMVs are usually produced by an
outside production company, as they require all the resources of a motion
picture production.
FMVs became so popular during the mid - 1990s that several systems
dedicated to playing interactive movies were produced. Game systems
like the 3DO Interactive player, Philips CD- I, and Sega Mega CD (as well as
PCs) specialized in games with extensive or playable FMV sequences such
as Night Trap (Sega, 1992), Sewer Shark (Sony Imagesoft, 1992),
Phantasmagoria (Sierra Online, 1995), and Psychic Detective (EA, 1995).
Even though DVD media can easily handle the file size of the videos, FMVs
have become less popular with game developers these days. They ’ re
usually deemed too expensive to produce for something the game ’ s
audience may not even watch.
Animated cutscenes or full motion animations offer a stylistic alternative
to FMVs. A cell animated or stop motion animated cutscene is converted
into a video format playable by the game ’ s engine, which is then shown
during the game ’ s title and story sequences. Players have no control over
the game during these sequences. Due to the involved production, generally
long shooting time and cost, animated cutscenes are scarce in video
games. However, there have been many gorgeous examples of animated
cutscenes such as the Neverhood titles (Dreamworks Interactive, 1996), The
Curse of Monkey Island (Lucasarts, 1997), and the Professor Layton series
(Nintendo, 2007).
Flash animated sequences are animated sequences created in Adobe
Flash, which, due to the use of still images and simple movement, lends
the animation a certain distinctive visual style. While Flash is often used
for a game ’ s animatics, some games used Flash animations for their
cutscenes such as in the Sly Cooper series (SCE, 2002), and the first God
of War.