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Concept »
Hand-drawn or computer-generated animation.
Games that are little more than extensive cinematic sequences in which the player has little interaction with what is happening onscreen. This notion of a cinematic game is epitomized by laserdisc arcade classics such as Astron Belt, Dragon's Lair and Bega's Battle.
The cutscenes are nothing but the pages of a comic book. Audio is usually dubbed over to give them a little more life.
A non-interactive sequence within a game most often used for plot advancement.
When a game's scripted narrative is logically inconsistent with the gameplay. A character could've survived an infinite number of headshots during gameplay but is incapacitated by a single shot to the leg during a cutscene.
Don't you just love it when a game lets you view all the cutscenes without having to play it all over again? Every game should have this feature.
The ability to pause a story scene. This avoids missing plot points if you are interrupted or take a break, or let's you call someone to show off a game's FMV or real time animation.
Sometimes designers add old-school things on purpose to enhance game design. These games tend to be heavily inspired by hardware limitations of older systems. NES, Atari 2600, and early computer platforms (DOS, Commodore 64, MSX, etc...) are common sources of inspiration.
FMVs are pre-rendered videos used in place of real-time graphics. Using FMV was an attempt to make videogames look "more like movies", sometimes with CGI animation and others with live-action actors speaking directly to players. The downside is that FMV requires a lot of disk space, and live-action FMV in particular can look terrible by comparison.
An in-engine cinematic is a type of cutscene that is rendered in real time using the game's graphics engine.
A cutscene (usually using the in-game engine) which allows the user to contribute to or modify the action- such as changing camera angle, zooming in and out, or being able to move the player character around actors playing a scripted sequence.
Pixel art refers to digital images composed of visible pixels, drawn with individual pixel-level intent and precision.
A cutscene that is viewed through the eyes of the protagonist or some other character. POV stands for "point of view".
Static background images that are not drawn in real time.
Common in old first person adventure games, the small pre-rendered movie that plays full screen to take the player from one static pre-rendered background to the next.
Games that overlay realtime characters or objects over FMV (full motion video) cutscenes to lessen the contrast against the realtime portion of the game.
Cutscenes that cannot be interrupted or bypassed through player interaction.
A sub-genre of adventure games, visual novels are a form of interactive fiction that usually have very little in terms of gameplay but often focus more on extensive storytelling, character interactions, decision-making and branching narratives.
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