Quote Originally Posted by goldenband View Post
Oh, and Plumbers Don't Wear Ties. A horrible "game" (really a visual novel IMHO), but absolutely hilarious in its shameless, good-natured incompetence and utter half-assed-ness. "You pea-brained preppy! You vain, Volvo-driving vulva!"
That "game" has become literally playable through youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjMAG5IDnek

Quote Originally Posted by Zap! View Post
There's no Screen Actor's Guild for video games. While it may be expensive to make a FMV for car chases with explosions, it's not expensive to hire actors for cut-scenes. In fact it's far cheaper than paying CGI experts to put something in. Remember, we're not talking about hiring Tom Cruise here. They can hire anyone off the street, or better yet, current employees. Let's say you were 22, making $11 per hour, and was the paperwork guy at Konami. You would be more than happy to take a couple of hundred bucks for a few hours shoot on an upcoming game. I know I would at lease. FMV always had terrible actors, and I personally found a certain coolness about that.

No "camera crew" is required either. You hire one college kid (who's taking photography ) with his own $700 camera, throw him $300, and call it a day.
Maybe he should have been more specific about making good FMV video games. If all you want is another generic shitty FMV game then anyone can follow your plan.

For a good FMV game, look into Toonstruck which stars Christopher Lloyd. There are full FMV sequences but most of the game consists of a digitized sprite of Christopher Lloyd interacting with an animated background. Plenty of actual known actors in this one. Of course if a game used full FMV all the time, then you would need to built sets for backgrounds or rent locations to use for filming which would add to the cost.

It still would be even cheaper to make a non-FMV game. Just use freeware CGI software and design your own video game in your spare time, it would literally cost you nothing to do this and plenty of people already do this for freeware games, which are mostly shitty.

With modern games using CGI characters modeled after real actors, this keeps the gameplay to be more interactive and controllable than pure FMV. Rather than switch between CGI during gameplay and live action during cut scenes, they just render everything in CGI to keep it consistent. Having actual digitized actors worked great in 2D, but for 3D games they had to switch to CGI. I would prefer 2D games just fine but that doesn't seem to be what studios are producing now, I guess they want to make a reason for people to justify having such powerful current consoles.