FMV Gaming- Get your geek on!

Star Trek Borg is my favorite FMV (full motion video) game and is available absolutely for free download here because it’s old and considered obsolete. I don’t think it is, and here is why.
As a child, I loved to read choose your own adventure books. I think mostly because I was lazy and somehow at an early age I figured out that I wouldn’t actually have to read the whole book. As video games moved from consoles like the Atari 2600 to personal computers graphics were still very limited. One way to make a game look better and more realistic was to include video, the crappy video was often better than what computers of the time could render. I think every Gen Xer remembers the stunning graphics of Dragon’s Lair in the arcade. How was this possible? It was a cheat. Simply put it was chose your own adventure on laserdisc. Playing a cartoon was so much more exciting than dots that were supposed to be a centipede. These FMV games or sometimes called or interactive movies did the same at home.

I was so excited when I heard about Star Trek Borg, I bought it on release date. The only problem was I didn’t have a PC to play it on. A few months later with my tax return, I spent over $3,000 for an IBM Aptiva CH8, a doorstop by today’s standards, but with that PC and the CD-ROMs I was off to defeat the BORG!
It was an amazing Star Trek one-off movie that took place in the 24th century with Q and a great cast, on the voyager sets in a sidequel to the Next Generation episode The Best 0f Both Worlds. I often think it should now be remastered for Blu-ray as a movie, but until then if you aren’t interested in downloading and playing the game, which I recommend, there are several fan edits on youtube worth watching.

If you are intrigued, other great FMV games I can recommend are Star Trek: Klingon, The Dame Was Loaded, Johnny Mnemonic: The Interactive Action Movie, X-Files The Game, Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, The Daedalus Encounter starring Tia Carrere, and for those of you who have the capability there is a rare Laserdisc game “Mystery Disc: Murder, Anyone?” showcasing Lea Thompson’s first on-screen role.

If you want to get truly geeky about FMV gaming you can build your own game box for under $20! Get a working windows 95 or higher compatible PC with monitor, speakers, mouse and keyboard from a thrift shop. Do a fresh install of Ubuntu Desktop (free Linux-based operating system) and DosBox free from the Ubuntu store. For the brave, you can just install MS-DOS using these instructions. The games are mostly free, even hard copies are dirt cheap on eBay. No excuses. Get your geek on!

For more information check out http://fmvstory.com/

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