Old Night Trap Mini-Documentary

Have been downloading, burning, and archiving Sega CD games all week. Trying to get all 148 official releases compiled, and Jesus Christ, is there ever a deficit of decent games for that system.

For those who were much smarter than I back in the early to mid-nineties, and resisted plunking down $400 bones onto this Genesis add-on, you may not be entirely aware of just how much of a dumping ground this system was for crappy experiments in full-motion-video. (FMV)

FMV, of course, never really took off in the gaming industry, since gamers prefer to play their games than to watch them, and besides some forays into PC gaming, as well as a few failed exploits on the 3D0, and CD-i systems, companies like "Digital Pictures" played and died almost exclusively on the Sega CD.

A few interesting titles did come out, however which played a role in shaping the video game industry. Perhaps none quite so infamously as "Night Trap."

This game provided a few wacky American senators their first fodder for what is now an ongoing debate on Video Game censorship. Though I'm not entirely opposed to a movie-industry style restriction system for video games, what was so funny about the roaring controversy over Night Trap was the sheer harmlessness of the game; by today's standards particularly, but even by the standards of the time in which the game was released.

The following mini-documentary shows a bit of the insanity that dogged the game. The disappointment, of course, is not that the game was unfairly attacked... but rather how no one ever really talked about how much the game actually sucked.

From now until the end of time, solely because of the disproportionate amount of controversy mounted on this steamer, gamers interested in the history of the industry will be forced to play a complete waste of their time, just to get a sense of the beginnings of the video game rating system.

What a waste.



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