Hellcab (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
313A playthrough of Time Warner Interactive's 1993 first-person graphic adventure for PCs running Windows 3.1, Hellcab.
This video shows only one path through each of the areas - each of the time periods visited to have multiple ways to finish. There are at least two endings to the game (I'm not sure if there are more), and both of these endings are shown at the back end of the video.
I used to play this constantly as a kid. I never quite could understand why - as an early, commercially released Flash game, it's incredibly unstable and crashes constantly. It's an absolute resource hog, and even on the recommended 486/75 it could be a painful experience (ugh those load-times between each screen!), and overall was a terrible multimedia "demo" trying to masquerade as a high-end graphic adventure.
So then, why bother? Well, it's got a whole lot of goofy character that makes it far more appealing than it should be. Spanish comic artist Pepe Moreno directed it, and even though the animation is hideously stilted and laggy (to be fair, this is one of the first "multimedia" PC CD titles, sharing its market with some ancient copies of Encarta, Grolier, and some early shovelware Doom add-on level CDs), it's got this really absurd feeling of consistent cheekiness throughout.
Personally, I really feel like this is one of those games that are so awful that you can't help but enjoy it. ...well, until you try to play it.
Please excuse the awkward editing seams at a few points in the video. My original recording was about four hours long after all the sections I had to keep repeating with the game's bevy of problems, including runtime errors, blue screens, audio dropout, and solid system lockups. One of its crashes even managed to corrupt my Windows installation! Whee!
I've thoroughly shattered the lenses in my rose-tinted glasses by playing this again, and wish that I'd not dredged up long since buried memories of rage at how broken the game has always been. Hopefully watching this video satisfies your urge to reexperience the game without those ugly reminders of tech fail.
______
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
Visit for the latest updates!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/NintendoComplete/540091756006560
https://twitter.com/nes_complete