“Interactive movie” pushes the envelope on CD-based entertainment

Although on first spin a user might be tempted to call this title a game, Spaceship Warlock (from Reactor Inc.) is billed as an interactive movie.

What’s that? Since the genre is still loosely defined at best, an “interactive movie” could be almost anything. Like some role-playing games and all movies (well, maybe not all, considering what’s coming out of Hollywood these days), there is a plot — and you are a character in that plot. The story follows you (or vice versa) as you are kidnapped by space pirates and ultimately help them fight the prototypical evil empire, which has blasted the planet Terra out of its orbit and into the void of space. The pirates of Spaceship Warlock, at first glance a truly smarmy bunch, are really trying to find and rebuild Earth.

Great graphics. What’s most obviously impressive about Spaceship Warlock is that the worlds through which you travel are realized via truly imaginative 3D graphics and animation effects created by Reactor’s Joe Sparks, a former aerospace simulation artist for NASA/Ames Research labs. (Sparks, who is also a musician, is responsible for the catchy tunes throughout the title as well.) The disc is worth buying just for the graphics and effects.

Entire cities, spaceships and a multitude of alien creatures occupy the screen. Most of the action is seen from a first-person point of view, i.e., as if you were holding the camera, but there are also expository animations that set the scene or play out a battle. The producers of Spaceship Warlock have borrowed significantly from Hollywood to create these animations.

Not a game, not a movie. You begin on a rather desolate, urban planet and learn pretty quickly that it is in your best interests to leave ASAP. Though the title has a linear thread — like a movie — you must, like a good game player, figure out how one accomplishes the required task. For a first-time game player, this is no mean feat — and herein lies the rub. Though the majority of people who’ve played with Spaceship Warlock love it, die-hard game players think it’s too easy, and dedicated movie-watchers find it perplexingly difficult.

We suspect this was a fine line for Reactor to walk; thus, it’s not surprising that the title is perceived so differently by these two groups. Those used to games want Warlock to be a lot harder than it is, and they don’t quite understand that movie lovers don’t like to think too hard.

People who really want to experience an “interactive movie,” i.e., a story line they get to participate in without a whole lot of thought, are equally stymied by the need for some proficiency with gaming — at the very least, knowing what kinds of questions to ask to move you to the next level of action. Long acquainted with the joys of passively absorbing what a director wants them to see, traditional movie lovers, or those uninitiated with gaming conventions, may very well give up in frustration and mightily fight the urge to use the Warlock disc as a frisbee.

IS THE BEST INTERFACE NO INTERFACE?

The paradigm for the structural design of this title is that of a discovery game: it is up to you, the user/player, to find or discover the clues that allow you to move forward. Choices arise, and you may have a number of options — some of which move you along, while others “kill” you instantly. Such games, and there are many of them, rarely have an elaborate user interface; the game will only give you feedback to your own actions. This raises the question: When is no interface the best interface?

Games rely on user logic. Games require trial and error, and in the specific case of Spaceship Warlock, you may find yourself clicking on the mouse for days trying to get something to happen. This title definitely subscribes to the minimalist school of user interface — for everything from moving through the scenes to acquiring and using objects, only a bare amount of instruction is given. The rest is up to you to figure out, with wildly fluctuating results.

For example, you may be given a warning about some impending danger: “You feel intense heat coming from your left.” You look left and sure enough, the floor is on fire. Using only the map of the tunnels through which you are traveling, you must figure out whether you can get around the fire (you can’t), or some way to put it out (it would be unfair to tell you how).

Speed: the curse of CD-ROM. If you have some familiarity with the video game world, however, the next roadblock you meet with Warlock is the slow access time of CD-ROM. (As mentioned in last month’s review of Verbum Interactive, this will be a recurring theme in criticism of CD-based titles.)

But the creators of Spaceship Warlock have taken great pains to compensate. A big part of this workaround is the catchy soundtrack. Rarely are you left waiting in silence for the screen to change, which has a remarkable effect on the way the game feels. With the sound turned down (you cannot turn the sound off), the waiting becomes much more apparent and annoying.

This disc, then, is an object lesson in how to use sound and sound effects effectively, without making them appear as useless or gratuitous as they so often do. The drawback to the soundtrack is that it can get annoyingly repetitive because the music relies heavily on short sampled clips that loop over and over again. This is one way to minimize the amount of data that must be processed by the computer from the CD. (Spaceship Warlock requires a Macintosh with 4 megabytes of random access memory, an 8-bit monitor and, obviously, a fast CD-ROM drive. The data files themselves require an enormous 128 megabytes of storage if you want to load them onto a hard disk.)

No response. Another speed problem is far more serious: the program cannot respond to the fast pace necessary for a computer game. You find yourself clicking wildly at the mouse without any response. It is quite frustrating to be caught up in a battle against evil space aliens and not be able to act and react quickly. The compromise is that your enemy is not attacking you with any blinding speed either. So at least it’s a fair match.

This, however, is not totally a CD-ROM problem. Spaceship Warlock was constructed with MacroMind Director — an animation program — and its interactivity tools are not sophisticated enough or optimized for the kind of speed that video games require.

Reactor president Mike Saenz says the Macintosh itself is another speed culprit. Anything that has to do with graphics display is slow on the Mac, since it doesn’t build in the dedicated, fast animation chips that even cheap video game machines have.

WHAT’S ITS SIGNIFICANCE?

Despite the limitations of the technology upon which the title is based, Warlock is beautiful. For that we can thank former comic book artist Saenz, who worked hand-in-hand with Sparks to create characters, write, direct, animate and program. And considering the sheer heft of the title, we are reminded of the old “dancing bear” adage: the wonder is not that it interacts well, but that it interacts at all.

Spaceship Warlock doesn’t break new ground as a game, but it does show very well how interactivity can be added to a linear plot. If we look at Spaceship Warlock as an interactive movie, or more appropriately a prototype for an interactive movie, we begin to see how today’s visual media may soon be dramatically reformed.

Japan, Inc., loves it. But what’s more impressive about Warlock than its present is its future. Reactor is working on a new engine for the title, sans Director, which should speed interactivity significantly. And Saenz says he and Sparks just returned from a trip to Japan, where many of the giants in the video game market have expressed “strong interest” in converting Warlock to formats that can run on their game machines.

- David Baron and Denise Caruso