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Games Entertainment

Fahrenheit 151

Posted by michael from the metric-system-still-not-catching-on dept.
LukeG writes "As games developers constantly seek new methods of tapping into the mass market, the French team at Quantic Dream have taken their inspiration from the television in developing 'Fahrenheit', what they claim will be the world's first interactive TV series, an episodic 3D-adventure set in New York. Here's a full look at this interesting development." See the company's website (Flash-only, unfortunately); or there are several other previews out there (1, 2).
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Fahrenheit More

Fahrenheit

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  • This series... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Sounds "hot".
  • Why is it so unfortunate that it is Flash-only?

    Would you prefer it if it was in Java?

    I can't think of any other popular way of presenting the same material that it shows.

    Flash is present in over 80% of the installed web browser base. I hardly think it is 'unfortunate' for people to use it!
    • Unless your a hardcore Lynx user, then you might be out of luck...
      • ... in both cases.

        When will people learn that ASCII art is the way of the future......

        - HeXa

    • Re:Flash-only unfortunate? (Score:4, Informative)

      by perlyking ( 198166 ) on Saturday July 27, 2002 @10:42AM (#3964299) Homepage
      Its unfortunate because html would be viewable to 100% of people. Did I need to explain that? Theres nothing on that site that makes it NEED to be in flash.
      • Hell yeah. I wonder if we could get common sense web design morals added to the usual slashdot microsoft-is-evil attitude that accompanies stories. That'd be nice.
      • hmmm, it had a look at this with moz which flash is broken in for me at the moment and it seemed ok, and when I looked at it with ie the flash turned out only to be additional eye-candy, which is the way it should be - its a bonus if you've got it but not an impediment if you don't.

        You have to take into account the fact that their target audience is running win9x-XP something on at average at least 1gighertz machine - not linuxer's using lynx via ssh on a 486. Not that there's anything wrong with that ;-)
      • > Its unfortunate because html would be viewable to
        > 100% of people. Did I need to explain that?

        Well, yes. Do you mean by using HTML's <video> tag? Or, perhaps, through the ... oh, god, this is so stupid I can't even make fun of it anymore.

        Television is pretty hard to render in HTML, you'll find.
    • because all non x86 linux users cant view it at all!
    • The linux flash plugin is horrible too... It crashes my browser like mad so I don't use it.
    • Indeed, I have *YET* to see a page, web or anything, that actually ADDED information with the use of Flash. Nor have I ever been tempted to buy anything because the web site used Flash. Have any of you guys ever thought "OOH, OOH, must buy something from this place cuz the pictures are so PRETTY!"

      That is why the word "Flash" and "unfortunate " are somewhat redundant.

      cheerio.

  • Won't Work (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jpegNY ( 584447 )
    Why? Because people don't want interactivity from their TV, they want to sit back, relax and have a "story" told to them.
    • how do you think ABC's new show Push, Nevada [go.com] will do next season?

      Personally i expect it to be a huge hit. A mystery show where viewers also can try to solve the mystery on the internet, first person who figures out where the cash they are looking for in the show is at gets it.

      i don't even watch much prime-time network television and i'm looking forward to seeing how this show turns out (though the longshot prospect of a load of cash may have a lot to do with that), just seems like an intersting idea to me.
    • "The great thing about TV is that it's so passive" - Ted Turner.

      "All we ask is five hours a day" - ABC promotion

  • Centigrade (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I want centigrade, not fahrenheit.

  • Not a TV series (Score:4, Informative)

    by Nick Number ( 447026 ) on Saturday July 27, 2002 @10:46AM (#3964313) Homepage Journal
    I for one was misled by the headline. The company's website explains
    "Fahrenheit" is an original concept that sets out to create a video game in the format of a television series. The product will consist of 6 episodes of 6 to 8 hours.

    A new episode will be made available every four months as a CD-ROM in the traditional distribution circuits.

  • "the world's first interactive TV series" this isn't. "The world's first episodic video game" (or maybe not the first, i don't know) it is. Either way, it's a poor decription, but since when are posts edited...

  • Not a new idea. (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Capcom already did this with a game called Eldorado Gate [sega.co.jp]. Unfortunately, due to the death of the Dreamcast, all the episodes did not get to be released.
  • Sweet! Time to polish off my old Captain Power [imdb.com] gun!!!

  • First Interactive Show???? (Score:4, Informative)

    by dFaust ( 546790 ) on Saturday July 27, 2002 @11:05AM (#3964366)
    Appanrelty nobody remembers Captain Power [captainpower.com]!!!!

    For those who don't, you'd buy the toys, then sit in front of the TV and shoot at the bad guys to rack up points (or good guys if you had a bad guy's vehicle)... and the TV shot back!!! If you were hit too many times, you're vehicle's pilot would be ejected!

    Oh, those were the days.
  • "'Fahrenheit' is an original concept that sets out to create a video game in the format of a television series. The product will consist of 6 episodes of 6 to 8 hours."

    Assuming that these 6-8 hours are the estimated playing time per episode, you're going to wind up getting only 40-50 hours of enjoyment out of this game. This isn't terribly brilliant in terms of longevity; I only purchase a game if I expect to be able to have fun with it for weeks on end. I'm not going to bother buying this if I'm just going to buy a disk every day for a week and have them all completed the same day I buy them.

    This also explains why I haven't bought a new game for about five months now.

  • I could swear that this has been done before with a very harsh backlash from the videogaming community. Does anyone remember the early 90's where you had five hours worth of cut scenes, and ten minutes worth of real interactivity? I do, and it was horribly stupid. The SegaCD had tons of these, and they all sucked.
  • From the article [ferrago.co.uk]:

    Inspector Carla Valenti and her team-mate agent Tyler Miles are in charge of the investigation.

    In this game, the cops are the bad guys. Carla Valenti is one of the cops.

    In the real world, Jack Valenti is the head of the MPAAfia [mpaa.org].

  • This is essentially what freeloader.com [freeloader.com] are doing, albeit with older games. I think their general idea is to get now 'budget' games e.g. SpecOps, GTA2 etc., and split them up into multiple parts or missions, much like this Farenheit.

    So I don't think the idea in itself is new, but their implementaion of actually making a game with the intention of releasing it in parts is quite novel I think. And risky of course, let's just hope the game is half way decent otherwise someone's going to be wondering where all their money vanished to.
  • It's encouraging to see new concepts in gaming. There's nothing wrong with many conventional games, but it seems that often you'll be in the middle of something and you'll realize that you've played this game before except the character was a viking/spy/soldier/cop/crook etc.

    This looks interesting though, it looks as though they've invested serious resources in the storytelling and plot lines, something that sometimes really helps a game succeed (but sometimes not, did anyone here play 'The Longest Journey') and it looks as though they think they can pull it off.

    On a technical level, how are they going to keep people from diverging too much. If in one person's game, the main character finds the clues and evades the cops, and in another's he doesn't and he doesn't, how are both people going to play the next episode. Being railroaded into plot holes could get irritating, but not getting railroaded might mean not getting to finish.

    At the end of the day though, if they can get enough people coming back for a couple of episodes, we'll start seeing allot of this - cash cow potential that it has.
    • I agree. It is encouraging to see new ideas, even if the seem a little off.

      Even if this is a failure, it may spawn other smaller advances in video gaming and television.

      Oh, and Flash isn't really the devil as some may think. It's just another way to present information. If the information does not come across it's bad, but plenty of designers and developers screw up simply HTML as well.
    • I get the impression when they say 'interactive television show' what they actually mean is just a game where each level is released at seperate time intervals.

      Just like in Max Payne or the majority of other games, you're forced to complete certain objections and your route through levels is pretty much linear.

      'Interactive Television Show' is just a cool term for a new concept.
  • I didnt like the arcade game dragonslayer. though it had the nice cartoon graphics, the element of control and response was sucky compared to what I was used to.

    I think being in the middle is a sure way to meet death. be one thing or the other, but I don't remember anybody being successful at both, in anything.

  • Plots are all the same (Score:3, Insightful)

    by t_allardyce ( 48447 ) on Saturday July 27, 2002 @11:59AM (#3964541) Journal
    Max Payne was a pretty boring game with all the gangster/cop/maverick/revenge clichés and dialog that sounded almost like a parody (except it wasn't). I'm not saying it was crap, it had its moments and it was quite fun to play, but it certainly had very little re-playability (except for a bit when you discover the unlimited bullet time cheat :) ). Every month someone releases an 'amazing' new game with 'a plot written by the same person who wrote X movie' and 'multiple story paths that dynamically unfold because of your actions' but in reality it never happens.

    The games that are _really_ popular are the ones that don't rely on the plot but on freedom, such as the GTA series or almost any RTS game, or MMORPG, this is where the player creates their own plot instead of being fed one like they're watching a movie. All plots are going to be restrictive if you have to follow them - i.e. if you have to make it to some place to advance the game just so the director can show you their amazing cut scene. It would be nice, say, if in Max Payne you could have seen your wife being murdered, and then decide if you wanted to pursue the gangsters that did it and beat them to the ground, _or_ go to the pub :) I just don't think you can call it fully interactive unless the player has a choice. I don't think plots are very compatible with video games.

    Personally my ultimate idea for a game would be a full 3D city/world where you could do anything you wanted - a fully realistic life sim, where you could lead as boring or interesting life as you pleased except without the consequences, and with _lots_ of config settings (basically, the matrix). GTA3 came as close as anything sofar...

    Yes, i know, if i dont like plot based games i shouldn't play them, i'll shut up now.
    • Personally my ultimate idea for a game would be a full 3D city/world where you could do anything you wanted - a fully realistic life sim, where you could lead as boring or interesting life as you pleased

      Yeah, I'm waiting for Snow Crash: The Video Game as well.

    • Yep, I've been waiting for one of those for years. Simsville was supposed to be like that I think, but that was scrapped, unfortunately. Shenmue came close, but you couldn't really interact with most objects beyond picking them up.
  • As a fellow poster noted, El Dorado Gate was to be episodic. Even earlier than such, a game called Siege of Avalon, released for the PC, was I believe one of the first games to be billed as an "episodic adventure", where they released the game in chapters. First chapter is free, any more after that would cost a certain amount, and new chapters could only be downloaded. Right now, the game is on retail stores with a package of all chapters out of the box.

  • reminds me of quake (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tabby ( 592506 ) on Saturday July 27, 2002 @12:10PM (#3964581) Homepage
    oddly enough this reminds me of Quake. I got the shareware off a magazine cdrom and enjoyed the first episode so much I bought the remaining episodes. Now if I could have bought only the second episode instead of having to buy all of them at once perhaps the last three episodes wouldn't have sucked so much compared to the first.

    I like this idea - I think it would also be interesting to have occasional episodes where you play different characters, maybe the bad guys for a little bit.
    • I really should finish reading articles before posting. But my dial-up is so slow I had to do something while waiting for the second half of the article. ;-)

      "...formula is the ability to play as different characters, actors if you will..."
  • It sounds like a really good idea, the game doesn't sound good, but the episode thing is nice.

    I am not heavily into games, but the few I do choose are good, and I'm picky about it. Often I would finish the game and just want more. Once you are hooked onto characters and the plot of a good rpg/action, you will undoubtably pay for the next part.
    The key, of course, is making a good game in the first place, and getting people hooked. You can't charge too much for each episode, and then not give enough to the person paying for it. I hope they issue a quality control measure somehow.

    I always wanted Planescape: Torment to continue (although, that would be kind of hard to do, maybe a resurrection by the lady of pain?)or even a game like Deus Ex would have been awesome, it had a great story. I enjoyed Arcanum, but felt it lacked on the main plot. I can't even think of games that would be just awesome to keep going, but in itself, end each episode.

    I'm still looking for a good game with an incredible story that just doesn't end, and the developers just abandon it.
  • This is more like one of those video games with like, 2 seconds of game play between 6 hours of sketchy plot clips.

    Hope it's better than most of those out there, because most of them suck.

  • Bullshit. There've been other attempts, none of them particularly successful:

    • In the 50's or 60's, there was some children's tv show that had you overlay a transparent plastic sheet on top of the tv screen. At certain points of the show, you were asked to draw an object into the program to "help" the heroes get out of some kind of jam. Granted, this is not really interactive, but if you're a 5 or 6 year old with a lot of imagination, it is. I never saw it, and I don't remember the show's title, but there was a spot on the shows on NPR a few months ago.
    • In the 70's, the early video game consoles were often described as "interactive television"... Granted, video games are only television in the sense that they're literally being viewed on a television... it's not broadcast tv with actors and stuff, but it's truly interactive.
    • In the late 80's, there was yet another stab at the interactive children's show. Called "Captain Power", you used special light gun toys to shoot at computer-animated bad guys to help out Captain Power. The show sucked, and I don't think your scores were shared or posted anywhere, so there wasn't a community aspect to the show, but it was *kindof* interactive.

    This new show might be something newer/better, but it's not the first. Maybe it'll be the first successful, truly interactive show. But why is it that I get the feeling that by "interactive" they really mean "you can buy product-placement props in realtime?"

  • Stemming from the idea of multi-path books that were available decades ago, a company called Brilliant Digital Entertainment created Multi-Path Movies in the hope of hybridizing the media of games and movies.

    Since they were designing at a time when the market consisted primarily of telephone modem users, their work relies heavily on polygon representations of scenes, so that the storage requirements are small and richly rendered graphics can then be sent rapidly over low bandwidth channels.

    They produced quite a large body of work with popular characters such as Superman, Ace Ventura, Xena, Pop Eye. The remnants of the work can be seen at the BDE [brilliantdigital.com] site.

    The idea never really caught the public's interest, though, despite free versions being available on the web. Similarly, earlier attempts by media conglomerates never were able to draw consumers into interactive TV. It remains to be seen if there is a sustainable market or whether passive entertainment remains popular. After all, it serves as a means to immerse one's self in a distraction from a divorced universe, where one can remain separate and non-participatory out of choice, a mode where the most relaxation may be achieved for some.

  • claim to being first interactive series... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JimBobJoe ( 2758 ) on Saturday July 27, 2002 @01:10PM (#3964776)
    what they claim will be the world's first interactive TV series

    In reality that happened here in Columbus in December 1977, with, at the time, the most sophisticated pilot cable TV project ever--QUBE

    Read about it here [media-visions.com].

    From the article:

    "The row of five buttons were reserved for responses to Qube's original interactive programming. Each of the five buttons could be assigned a meaning at the headend, allowing up to five answers to a question -- at least 'yes, no or undecided'. The headend could poll all the boxes, collect all the responses, and immediately report to viewers the percentages for each of the possible answers...."And we had interactive games, like a card game where the five buttons were used to play the hands. We had community auctions, too, where items were sold live by an auctioneer in the studio, each incremental bid made through the remote. The bids were locked in by constantly polling the network. An our subscribers also could interact with us directly through special programs called, "Qube at Your Service", which combined phone calls with questions that viewers would answer on their remotes. We always tried to be as responsive to our subscribers as possible."

    The article discusses why QUBE failed.

    Perhaps the following should be more noted by fellow Columbians:

    "Two programs originating in Columbus went national and still flourish today. Pinwheel grew into a new cable channel, Nickelodeon. Sight on Sound evolved into Music Television, known worldwide as MTV."

  • In Ray Bradybury's Novel Fahrenheit 451, there was this interactive TV wall thing, where a character watched this soap opera, and every so often, the characters on screen would freeze, turn to the camera, and say in mechanical tones.. 'So, what do you think.. <Frank Smith>'?, waiting for the viewer to say something (anything), whereupon the show continued.. It was a critique of television, and Bradbury's prediction that a bit of fake interactivity could make people total zombies, without even enough free thought to ponder how much meaning or communication was really happening on TV.

    So I wonder if that's where they got the name Fahrenheit from. Very ironic, if so.

  • Wing Commander: Secret Ops [secretops.com] already did this.
  • ...all those Choose Your Adventure books you used to read as a kid? You know the kind, "If you want to venture into the right cave, go to page 87; If you want to trust him, go to page 92" and so on.

    It also looks strikingly like those really awful FMV games that came out when the hottest CD-ROMs were spinning at 2x and needed the CD to be loaded into a case and then slid into the drive (remember those infernal things?). There were a few good ones, my fav being The Seventh Guest, but the rest were dreadful point-click-choose-a-scenario games.

    But more than anything, it reminded me of Night Trap [defunctgames.com], the game-movie that had some panties and violence and caused a ruckus back in the early 90's. Sure the game was awful and the "movie" was so bad it set new standards. But it had the same premise, to be "interactive entertainment" with "actors."

    You can go so far to say that RPG's are interactive television shows or films. Basically you control characters who have emotions and relationships and whose decisions change the situation around them.

    Wow, this is truly revolutionary gaming fun.
  • I think the actual challenge here is to make the actual gameplay interesting enough to catch the attention of 16 year olds and remain interesting for older players as well. If the action bit of the game is too low teens will not buy the next episode. If the interest part of the game is too low, older players will not buy the next episode.

    Using modern 3D game engine technology to immerse one in a Myst type of RPG is certainly interesting and if the AI is good this game could gain a cult following.

    In any case good luck to them for taking risks in the otherwise not exactly risk prone PC gaming industry.
  • Wasn't "Fahrenheit" also the code name about five years back for a Microsoft/SGI vanture to merge Direct3D and OpenGL [wired.com]? IIRC, that ended really well, with SGI claiming that, surprisingly, Microsoft screwed them [theregister.co.uk]. Oops.

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