Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine

"In Defence of FMV Games"

Full motion video (FMV) games get, I think, a bad reputation. Sure, they might be slow, grainy, and very limited in terms of gameplay. The acting was bad, the writing was worse, and there was very little about them that was particularly believable. I could go on like this, but like it or not, FMV games do hold a special place in the history of gaming. These were among the first attempts to integrate multimedia into the gaming experience.

Perhaps it's merely a symptom of being a certain age at a certain point in time, but I do have rather fond and vivid memories of playing FMV games on the Sega CD, fully aware of how corny they were, but entirely willing to suspend my disbelief. This was the key to actually enjoying these games, you had to accept what you were seeing, in all it's B-movie glory. Perhaps you didn't have a great deal of control over what was happening, but that wasn't really the point. These games were about losing yourself in the experience.

Nowhere was this experience more fully realized than in Rocket Science's "Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine." This game holds a unique distinction for being perhaps the best game in one of the most maligned genres. The cream of the crap, if you will. While hardly the kind of thing that would stand up to modern cinematic games, and certainly not ahead of it's time by any stretch, Loadstar did manage to capture something that other FMV games had clearly been aiming for. No, it didn't really feel like you were "playing" a movie, nor did the FMV "immerse" you in the game, as were often the claims made by FMV game developers. Instead, you got something clever, idiosyncratic and heavily stylized that seemed to draw you in, if you let it.

The game starts up with a quick news report about an explosion on Charon, the moon circling Pluto, which has, oddly enough, no relevance on the game whatsoever. This is followed by a scene of Tully landing his freight ship, the titular Loadstar, at a local port on the moon. The conversation between him and the "air traffic controller" is littered with fictional jargon and local slang that you, the gamer, can't even begin to comprehend. He then enters a bar and has a talk with some old friends, gets into an fight with the sheriff's nephew, and takes off in search of his next, and allegedly last, haul. This leads him to a guy named William Snid, who offers a significant sum of money for a nondescript haul that turns out to be none other than camels! All this before you even begin to play the game!

Right off the top, we have two elements to this game that put it above others in the genre. Firstly, it does away with the traditional approach of having "you" the gamer be the main character in the story, and brings in an actual actor to portray Tully Bodine. Since there's really no way to have a bunch of actors talking directly to the camera without it looking completely ridiculous, this is a major relief, and makes it that much easier to flesh out the story, even if said story is pretty cheesy.

The other thing that stands out right away is the absurd level of detail that went into this game. You have a whole slew of odd characters, many of whom have seemingly no relevance to the game itself, like the "spoken of but never shown" Molly Matlock, or the Sheriff's nephew, Vernon, who shows up, gets punched in the face, then disappears. There is a short bio for many of these characters in the instruction manual, along with a glossary to help you make sense of some of the slang and tech-speak. There's also comprehensive technical info about different vehicles that appear in the game, detailing how they operate, and even the fictional manufacturers that produced various parts. There's even short videos accessible from the main menu that show you different enemy vessels in action.

As for the game itself, well, it's quite literally a rail shooter. All of the action occurs while the Loadstar travels around various location using a network of railways. You use the D-pad to aim your cursor around the screen, as well as steer your ship around the various twisting and turning railways. It can be a bit of a pain trying to steer wile aiming, but you get used to the rhythm after a while. There is no single way to reach your destination, but there is generally a fastest way, which (especially in level 1) is the one you want. In order to reach this destination, you need to either head towards some landmark off in the distance, or use the compass (heading indicator) at the top of the screen. You also need to watch out for roadblocks, incoming vehicles and other obstacles along the way. Also, if you end up stuck behind some Sunday driver, you can press C to honk the horn at them... seriously, and doing so will cause them to speed up, preventing you from rear-ending them and taking damage.

Helping you out in this endeavour is Mort, you onboard computer, who is represented by a smiley face with an oscilloscope for a mouth. He'll occasionally pop up in the corner of the screen during the game to warn you about an incoming obstacle, point out the location of a service station, or simply criticize your driving. Despite having a tendency for sarcasm rivalled only by Bubsy the Bobcat, Mort is the most believable character in the game.

Of course, this wouldn't be much of a rail shooter if you didn't do any shooting. Instead of using a projectile weapon, you attack enemy vessels by firing some kind of radio frequency disruptor, which is most likely a quick way to cover up for not having any projectile animation. Enemies fire back using actual projectiles, and you can "tag" these with a shield beam before they hit you in order to prevent from taking damage. There is also a fully active shield, but it fully depletes your shield meter pretty quickly, and there is a more powerful weapon in later stages that depletes your fuel. It can be a bit strange to open fire on an enemy, not see any weapon hit them, then they suddenly explode, but given that the projectiles would have looked fairly dumb, I think we're better off.

You also need to take the behaviour of the different enemies into account. This is where the videos come in handy. In level 1 for instance, you will get attacked by a series of automated police drones called SAPs. At this point, however, your only actual crime is speeding, so the SAPs just tell you to slow down, then ram the front end of your vehicle, and blowing them up has generally very little consequence, other than inviting more to do the same. However, if you mistakenly blow up one of the many passenger caravans than flies by, then the SAPs go on an all out assault. Other vessels will merely surveil the area, but will proceed to retaliate if fired upon. This makes it all the more important to know your enemies, and to fight back strategically, instead of just blasting everything that moves. Unfortunately, this strategic element is ditched in later stages in favour of a much more conventional approach.

Of course, when I say "later stages," it's with bittersweet memory that I in fact mean "both other stages," as this game only has three to speak of. While the gameplay itself doesn't really change from one stage to the next, each one has it's own unique challenge. Level 1 is about clearing the stage as fast as possible, while avoiding fighting more than necessary, Level 2 is about defending against much more aggressive enemies, while dealing with much more complex navigation, including a series of forks in the track where failing to choose which direction to turn leads to instant death. In level 3, navigation has been greatly simplified, but you now need to fight off heavily armed enemies, conserve fuel, and avoid a rival trucker whose determined to ram head on into your ship. In the end, each level still suffers from the same repetition that befell nearly every other rail shooter, but it's hardly the game's fault if you were expecting something deeper.

The end of the game (I'll spare you the actual spoilers) goes on to imply that this was meant as merely the first chapter in a series of games, which puts a lot of other things into perspective. The level of detail, the extraneous characters, and even the news report about the explosion on Charon, they all seem to suggest something much bigger and richer than a 3 stage rail shooter. Sadly, like so many other fledgeling game companies, Rocket Science forgot to take the economic realities of the industry into consideration while cooking up their plans for world domination. Loadstar 2 was promptly abandoned, and the company gave up on FMV games altogether before moving on to the equally unsuccessful but much loved Rocked Jockey and Obsidian.

The graphics are pretty much what you'd come to expect from an FMV game on the Sega CD. They're grainy, a little jumpy at times, and hardly what one would call cinema quality. They are, however, full-screen, and at least a little bit clearer than those of other games in the genre. The enemies can sometimes look a little awkward in the way they're superimposed over the track, but again, this was a common problem back then. The various cutscenes in the game do suffer a bit from the SCD's small colour palette, but less so than other games.

The scenes themselves have also not aged all that well, especially in the set design and special effects departments, keeping in mind that this was 1994, and it was still commonplace at that time for sci-fi programs to use models instead of CG. The acting is hardly anything to write home about, but I'd still give them credit for not trying to load up each character with "tons of attitude," as was part of the reason many of these games seem so cheesy. The characters here aren't trying to be super hip, they're just playing their parts, at least well enough to convey what's going on, though that stage punch in the bar is really pushing it.

The writing isn't really anything to rave about either. At times it almost seems as though the whole game is a parody of science fiction, seemly mocking it's own cliches and pointing out just how ridiculous the genre can be. Of course, this might be a little too post-modern for a game of this type, and it's far more likely that the script is just far too ambitious for an upstart game company to handle, and wound up going completely over the top. Nobody's going to win any awards here, but I've seen worse things make it to air on the space channel. This was also the first time I heard the word "bastard" used in a localized console game.

The music varies in quality from one part to the next. More specifically, it's pretty good during the actual game, and utterly terrible during the cutscenes. The game music is a fairly upbeat (if generic) blend of futurism and electronica, and fits the stylized nature of the game quite well, with the music from stage 1 being a real standout, and stage 3 being a bit hard on the ears. The cutscenes, however, go ahead a with full-on B-movie soundtrack, complete with synthetic orchestra and the occasional electric guitar riff. I honestly can't think of any instance where this formula actually worked. Why do low budget filmmakers insist on using it?

In the end, I fear that I might be the only person, or at least in a very small minority of people, who actually find this game (let alone the entire genre) enjoyable. It's not a game for those who enjoy depth, nor for those who are into free-roaming, sandbox gaming. This is a game for people who want to just cart around and shoot things, and it doesn't really get any more complicated than that. In good conscience, however, I just can't give a game of this nature too high a score, but for being as good as FMV gaming is ever going to get (for better or worse) I give this game a 5 out of 10.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 03/17/08

Game Release: Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine (US, 1994)