Episode 15 is a tame favorite of mine because of the games featured (the extended Yakuza trailer, and the intro to
Resident Evil Outbreak), and Shinobido Imashime, a stealth action ninja game for the PS 2. The theme song for the intro, "Style" by High and Mighty Color, totally rocks. The intro itself shows many sophisticated features, like a level editor, the ability to move the bodies of fallen enemies, plenty of kill animations, and some aware artificial intelligence.
Episode 16 is a lot more dramatic and interesting. It features an approximate crapton of anime-based games, or games with anime cutscenes, which was the best you could do for anime on G4 in late 2005. (Colorful? Bitch, please!)
Anime-based games include the Diablo-esque Lodoss War game, and Berserk, both for the Dreamcast. Curiously, they feature cutscenes rendered with the games' engines instead of original 2D animation.
An original game with anime cutscenes shown was Elemental Gearbolt, a lightgun game for the PS 1. The clip has haunting music, and shows a tall blond woman with Vampire Hunter D's fashion sense investigating a mysterious ruin. As she touches carvings etched into the ruins, images flood her mind, of soldiers marching, a crescent-shaped piece broken off of an amulet, people with arrow-shaped tattoos on their foreheads, and someone frozen into a strange stone disc.
The wind blows off her hat, and she jumps down off of a rock to find... the other half of the amulet that she saw in the vision.
Timecode- 8: 22: "Cinematech Presents: Girls Kissing in... 02:06". Yes, a countdown to the kissing scene between Niobe and Persephone in the Enter The Matrix tie-in game. This just goes to show how much jibba-jabba the Wachowskis could wedge into a script before they got to the freaking point of a scene. On top of that, the kiss counted down to was... unsatisfying, to both parties. The way that Cinematech inserted (male) clapping and hollering could be seen as sarcasm. But Niobe kisses her again, once more, with feeling, to much applause and Persephone's satisfaction.
I think it was more about Persephone, program that she was, getting as close to human love as possible. The second kiss is better because Niobe pretends that she is kissing her own boyfriend. Am I getting interested in The Matrix again? Gah, no! Jimmy, take it down! Take it down!
12: 14: Weep at the beauty of the intro to Wild Arms, one of the first of many PS 1 RPGs. The art and music are beautiful, and emphasizes the three main characters in the game. While the Wild Arms games may have been mediocre, their intros were usually pretty good.
19: 54: Holy crap, it's - Sewer Shark! The epic tale of man's struggle to reach Solar City by clearing the sewers of unwanted riffraff and such. Your copilot, Ghost, calls in to Villainous Glutton Stenchler to get information on the next target. As bad as these FMV games were, I dig the Danny DiVito-esque guy playing Stenchler. His assistant lady seems to be having a bit of fun with her role, as well.
The Spoony Experiment did a two-part review of Sewer Shark as a part of the FMV Hell series. The first part is here, and you MUST watch it if you want to see Spoony nigh-single-handedly rescue this game from the scrappy heap.
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