Okay, it's not a PC game, and it's barely an action game... but I'm
mentioning it here anyway.
"The Sacred Pools" was a never-released game created by SegaSoft back
in the mid-90s, during the height of the "Full-motion-video" game
craze. It was ultimately cancelled because pre-release reviews were
very negative (the tail fell of FMV games pretty quickly) and - aside
from some publicity shots - very little was known about it. Then one
of the associate producers of the product found some old CD-Rs of the
game and uploaded them* to archive.org...
So of course I had to try the game out. I've a weird fascination with early-to-mid 90s games, and while I don't have much love for FMV games
in particular, I love seeing how the technology of that era was put to
use. "Full Motion Video" had been the holy grail of video games for so
long, and once technology was actually available, it's amusing to see
how developers had no idea how to use it. A few games ("Wing Commander
3", "Command & Conquer") figured it out; others ("Mad Dog
McCree","Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine" floundered. "The Sacred
Pools" was somewhere in between.
The tech is fairly impressive; the video is surprisingly sharp for a
game created in the mid 90s, even if it does take up only half the
screen. The transitions between the video are fairly smooth too, and
the overlays fit into the video pretty well. It's a far cry from the
muddy, interlaced, 256-color movies used in games just a few years
prior. The sound is a bit weaker; there's compression is pretty harsh
and there's noticeable artifacts. Well, something had to get the
bitstream down to something an 2x optical drive could churn out, I
guess.
The acting and sets are surprisingly... average. The FMV generation
was infamous for its awful acting, poor cinematography and
unimpressive sets, but "The Sacred Pools" verges on mediocrity. It was
almost, at times, a convincing universe. The gameplay is really where
the game falls flat, though; it's merely walking through a mazelike
world (triggering videos of doors opening and strolls down corridors
with each button click), and weak interactions with monsters (mostly
running away) or other characters (through an interface overlaid on
top of the video). There's just not very much to do, and what you can
do isn't very enthralling.
Still, it's nice to see a game once consigned to the dustbin of
history before it was even given a chance to emerge into the sunlight
at last. It's not going to convince many gamers as to the worth of the
FMV era, but for fans of retro-gaming, it's a delight to see this
snapshot of mid-90s gaming.
* Try them here.
https://archive.org/details/sacredpoolsprototypesdumps
There's the Saturn version (the one I tried), a Playstation 1 version,
and a Win95 version. Hey, I guess this /was/ PC games topic after all!
;-)
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