WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - Midnight Raiders

Publisher: Sega Developer: Stargate Films Released: 1994

By 1994 full-motion video games had fallen into a few different formulas. There were the multithreaded stories fashioned after Night Trap, running stories riddled with timed button presses a la Dragon's Lair, and basic shooting galleries like the offerings from American Laser Games.

In mid-94 Sega and developer The Code Monkeys hit on a new formula that was quite engaging with the game Tomcat Alley. At its most basic this fighter jet simulator was a shooting gallery, but it featured an innovative system to randomize the encounters by using small clips of the characters saying generic lines or the planes flying across screen to hide the seek time for the next encounter footage.

Midnight Raiders is basically the same game. You play as Joker, a rookie gunner on a team of two helicoptors sent on a mission to rescue a kidnapped scientist being forced to develop a lethal toxin. As this is a rail shooter, you have no control over where you go, only over what you shoot.

The actual shooter bits are arguably better than Tomcat Alley. The very fact that you're in a helicopter allows for more interesting enemy types, as the closing speed is slow enough that you can see your enemies for a longer period of time.

Unfortunately the transitional bits are pretty terrible. There are a lot of really jarring cuts and nonsensical bits butting up against each other.

Midnight Raiders goes a step further, though. Along with the sections in the chopper, Joker actually spends part of the game on foot. Here you have to be ready to shoot anyone you see, as well as reload your gun before the clip runs out of bullets. These levels should offer a welcome reprieve to the flying sections, but I found them to be frustrating as hell. Everything is too dark and too fast to get a read on your targets (remember, this game does not support light guns, it's all controller driven), and I never seemed to have any luck reloading my weapon before the next cinematic scene played (rendering controller inputs null).

Tomcat Alley was a triumph. It showed that FMV games could be exciting again. But while Midnight Raiders apes the formula almost exactly it completely fails to capture the excitement.

This is one of a handful of FMV games that was developed (in whole or in part, it's not totally clear) by a company called Stargate Films. There isn't a lot of information around about the company at the time, though it still exists today as a special effects house called Stargate Studios that's contributed to some major films and television shows, including The Walking Dead.

Stargate worked very closely with Sony Imagesoft on further FMV titles for the Sega CD, which Sony apparently abandoned as soon as it changed course and began planning the release of the PlayStation. The story is that Sony abandoned the games and failed to pay Stargate. A couple of the games – Bug Blasters and Star Strike - were eventually picked up and released by Good Deal Games years later. They both follow the exact same formula used in Tomcat Alley and Midnight Raiders.