HOLLYWOOD INTERACTIVE

PC-based movie games put you in the action

Enough talk about interactive movies. I don't think any of us wants to sit in
the dark and let the yahoos in the back row decide on an ending. Movies by
committee would be about as much fun as voting--and as ultimately unsatisfying
to the losing minority.

It's different on the computer. Although PC cinema shares traits with the
theater- and TV-based interactive movies that next-wave futurists tout--you play
a part in the outcome, make the actors follow your lead, and so on--on the
computer, you, and only you, are in control. You're not a slave to the wishes of
strangers.

Plopped on CD-ROM discs, which have the room for the necessary video and audio
tracks, these filmlike titles typically put their moving pictures in a miniature
window and run them at about half the speed of television. Such size and speed
shortcomings may make you squint at the screen and wonder if the movie's been
badly spliced, but they're the fault of current hardware limitations, not the
software designer. Down the digital highway, full-screen, full-motion
interactive video will come to the desktop, and to the TV, too.

Today, though, you can sample several entertaining interactive movies on your
home computer. They may come disguised as games, but they're as much for
watching as for playing. Take Media Vision's Critical Path, for instance. The
plot's bones are a bit bare: After your chopper's crashed on a tropical island,
you guide Kat, your one uninjured comrade, through Generalissimo Minh's factory,
a maze filled with booby traps and bloodthirsty goons in orange outfits.

You don't control Kat as much as guide her and watch her back. You can send
brief messages--turn right, turn left, yes, no, that sort of thing--and when she
gets in a jam, you can activate the factory's internal security, blasting bad
guys with a remote-controlled machine gun or stopping the conveyer belt she's
riding toward a fiery furnace. Clues to the access codes of such infernal
devices are scattered throughout the diabolical Minh's journal, which you have
at hand.

The result is an engrossing action-adventure movie. Hardware demands are stiff,
though: You'll need a top-flight PC or Mac jammed with a CD-ROM drive, sound
card, and at least four megabytes of memory to watch and play Critical Path. If
you have that on your desktop, book a showing as soon as you can. Two thumbs up.

Viacom New Media's Dracula Unleashed takes a slightly different tack. In this
Victorian mystery, you travel through nineteenth-century London as Alexander
Morris, gathering clues and objects as you probe the strange circumstances of
your brother's death. You're on the prowl for vampires, the Count included.

Here, though, the video is broken into small chunks, interspersed as scenes that
you watch. The interaction in Dracula Unleashed comes from the game's graphic
adventure-style elements, not the video. If you're at the right place at the
right time, you'll hear and see clues that will take you to more places, more
people. You affect the storyline by the sequence in which you visit these places
and meet these people.

This approach is a bit less satisfying in the end, for this game feels less
interactive and its video seems less central to the telling than in Critical
Path. Still, with impressive production values and a professional cast of
actors, it's a big step up from the cartoonlike animation of most computer
adventures. A split vote--one thumb up, one down--for Dracula Unleashed.

A slew of other CD-ROM interactive movies will have hit the shelves by the time
you read this. One to watch for is Access Software's Under the Killing Moon, a
two-disk action extravaganza that stars Margot Kidder and Brian Keith. Featuring
a combination of computer-generated 3-D animation and realtime video, Killing
Moon promises to be a killer.

As higher-powered hardware comes of age and CD-ROM becomes a home-computer
standard, PC movies are sure to get bigger, better looking, and more ambitious.
Just make sure you don't spill the popcorn while you're punching buttons.