Vid Grid (Jaguar CD) review "Long Live the New Flesh"

While most FMV titles are laughably poor, they at least had SOMETHING to bridge the gap between the tedium and confusion. Night Trap on the Sega CD had the bad acting , scatological references and even those pitiful Auger costumes that consisted of men with women's garments wrapped around their faces. Heck, even those awful Make My Video games had pseudo-thespians spewing nonsensical discourse at each other. Due to these awful idiosyncrasies, they have have gained cult status for being among the worst of the worst.

They were pathetic but at least they'll have recognition for being pathetic. Like how Escape from Plan 9 and The Room have rabid cult followings because despite being awful, they are laughably awful and at the very least some kind of camp kitsch humour can be extracted from the subject matter.

Vid-Grid however, is a special kind of bad, almost on an exploitative level. The Jaguar's CD add on, like other systems of its ilk, was hopelessly pushed as “Compact Digital Media Player” on a “64 Bit Multimedia system.” With developers obsessing over what they could do, they forgot what they should be doing. The Jaguar CD's ability to produce early Playstation one graphics on some titles was evidence that there was at least some ability to create titles that successfully bridged the 16-32 bit gap but sadly, the FMV allure has claimed another victim.

The game works as an Interactive Video slide puzzle where a music video is cut up into squared segments and scrambled up. While it plays you have to slide the pieces into their correct places until the video ends. If you do this, you can REPLAY THE VIDEO. (An actual selling point on the back of the case blurb.) After that, its on to the next video, except the puzzle pieces are smaller and there's more of them. It's horrible but at least you get to see some awesome videos, right?

That is, of course, if you enjoy the select few bands and artists available. There are nine tracks in total and feature fairly respectable names such as Hendrix, Metallica, Ozzy, Guns n Roses and Peter Gabriel but even if you were able to enjoy the game in itself, if none of these suit your taste in music, it would be an utterly pointless experience. Apart from Sledgehammer by Gabriel, I hated all of the others and could only stomach that one, I mean, I'm not barbaric enough to force myself to a watch muddy compressed version of Enter Sandman when even in 1995, they probably had music channels that played songs like this regularly and with better video quality.

Vid-Grid was a pack-in Jag CD game and existed only to whore out the consoles ability to play videos because people thought it was going to the next best thing. It's awful but not even funny enough to mock, unplayable but hard to analyse because even the developers didn't know what the results would be and stupefying because it actually exists. A horrible failure.

Community review by Vorty (December 06, 2015) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.