INXS: Make My Video

"What in the hell is this? Your video sucks!"

A long time ago, there was a series of games that allowed you to try and make yourself into a video producer while using the music of several different groups that spanned the early nineties. In this installment of Make My Video, you take on the job of re-mixing and editing a few songs from Marky Mark in an attempt to make a successful video. Although the premise of the game is nothing short of stellar, you may find that the game seems to lack replay and a tutorial option. If you can get into the game, you may find it to be something a little different than the rest of the pack!

As with most of the Make My Video series, there isn’t a story line that you’ll find within these games, and you’ll be limited to three songs that you can mess around with and hopefully make some progress on in order to get through the game. There really aren’t many options that you can mess with in this series, but it is fun to mix things up through each of the games. Depending on which of the Make My Video games that you play, you’ll have the opportunity to tear apart the different videos and attempt to make a new one to pass through the artists. This isn’t always an easy task, as you get into the game because you have to make the video just right or start all over again!

Now, as you get into the game play, you’ll have several different options that will allow you to put a video together with various effects. The tutorial that the game gives you {as brief as it is} will tell you just how to go about making the video and what to avoid in the process. Then, once you get started, you have to select an effect from three flickering screens and choose the right on in order to get the right effect. This doesn’t seem like a big deal until you put it all together, but it’s almost a guarantee that if you don’t get the right portions of the video, it’ll be rejected quicker than you can blink.

All of what you have to work with may not seem that hard, and you can do some pretty cool things with the video clips, but once you’ve gotten the clips altogether, you can play it all the way through to see what you’ve done. If it looks right, send it in and hope that you get the desired effect. Control that you find here is nothing special and it’s all laid out for you to use with the original Genesis three-button controller that only takes a few minutes to learn. Beginners to a game such as this should have no problems figuring out how to work with everything that the game has to offer, so there isn’t a need to read the instruction booklet extensively!

What really caught my attention was the quality of the video sequences. With all of the Make My Video games, the visual accuracy of the music videos that you work with are extremely clean and lack most of the grainy qualities. What I mean by this is that Sega CD games have a tendency to have a very grainy quality involved with the FMV sequences. However, the quality of the videos that you encounter here have next to broadcast quality visuals and depict the videos as you would see them on MTV in a manner that would make you think you’re watching that instead of playing a video game!

Audio wise, all of the songs that you find with each of the groups in these games {Marky Mark, Kriss Kross, INXS, C&C Music Factory} are some of the top hits that these groups have had throughout the nineties. As always, the music that you here is just what you would hear on CD’s and otherwise, with crystal clarity coming through on every beat and note. The sound effects that you have are some pretty interesting ones as well, which gives you the feel of mixing a song. Scratches, verbs and mixing sounds pretty much round out your sound effects, so if you’re looking for some extensive mixing sounds, you won’t find them here.

All of the Make My Video games are pretty much the same save for the artists that perform in them. Giving you the ability to mess around with their music videos and attempt to come up with something a little different is a cool idea, but the way that the games are set up makes it extremely difficult to produce a perfect video! For most gamers, it'll get extremely old after the first twenty minutes of play, and once you’ve mixed together a video and had it thrown in back at you, it may be a chore to go through the steps again. Replay through the games are short because you have to work with only three videos per game and once you’ve seen them, you’re not seeing anything new a second time around.

If you’re into games such as this in which you control the outcome of an artists video and you like to remix music in general, you may find that this series is for you. However, if you can’t stand having your hard work rejected based on the way that you feel a video should go, then you should probably avoid this series like the plague. One of the marketing ideas was to sell this game separately with different artists doing their best videos. But, if you’ve played one of these games, then you’re really not going to find anything new and the game play is same in each of the four games featured!

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/27/02, Updated 01/27/02