It always makes me smile seeing how cyclical the world of video games can be. One genre of gaming that has received the harshest criticism over the years has been the full-motion video or FMV-style games. They were a product of the introduction of CD-ROM technology in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and by and large most of those early FMV games deserved all the harsh criticism they received. In the majority of cases developers just plain didn’t know what to do with the vastly expanded storage capabilities of the CD-ROM format, and so sticking full-motion video cutscenes into games “just because you could" became standard practice and the FMV game genre was born by developers creating entire games out of live action cutscenes that were pieced together into an interactive story. The main problems with FMV games back then were first that the technology of the time couldn’t do justice to the media itself. The choppy, grainy, muddy-looking FMV segments on Sega’s 16-bit powered Sega CD add-on for the Genesis were pretty vomit-inducing, and even higher end computers of the time didn’t fare a whole lot better. The FMV genre became a joke and, even years later when technology could produce results that would do the genre justice, the stigma was still there. The second big problem with FMV games was that developers back then really didn’t have the budgets necessary to hire good actors. Early FMV games are filled with some of the mos...