SpaceKids

SpaceKids is a good look at what interactive movies looked like just before the CD-ROM format became the new standard for extensive multimedia-rich content storage -- instead of meg-heavy digitized actors we get byte-thrifty pre-rendered sprites in front of 3D backdrops, twirling around the screen and stretching or skewing in realtime with every possible bump or jostle. To please the kids, pretty much everything in this game that isn't made of candy has got a human face with big, pleading eyes on it somewhere. Gameplay loosely follows the model set by Dragon's Lair: non-interactive animated segments (sometimes prolonged ones) are punctuated by episodes of player input, consisting of moving the actor of the moment -- sometimes our protagonists, sometimes their opponent -- in the right direction at the right moment to pass some timed obstacle or choose a fork in the plot. Unlike Dragon's Lair, death does not lurk around every corner; failing to successfully traverse the obstacle (or, uh, interact vaguely with the new strange situation in the arbitrarily appropriate fashion) generally yields only another opportunity to do so.