Soldier Boyz (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
121A playthrough of Dreamcatcher Interactive and MPCA's 1997 FMV rail-shooter for PCs running MS-DOS, Soldier Boyz.
Played through on the "chump ass" difficulty level. As far as I'm aware, the difficulty level has no bearing on the ending of the game or the sequences that you see throughout.
Soldier Boyz is an FMV "shooting gallery" style of game, similar to the classic American Laser Games' titles (Mad Dog McCree, Who Shot Johnny Rock?, etc.). The video is always running, and you interact by shooting and talking with an overlaid gun-sight. Since it's based on the 1995 movie of the same name, it has a bunch of (high-school?) kids serving time for things like murder that have been promised a full pardon if they risk they're lives going into Vietnam to save some important guy's daughter.
The story is pretty unimportant, since the main point of the game is to shoot everyone in the face before they can shoot you. It does a somewhat unconventional way to influence the flow of the game that you don't often see in FMV shooters - there are certain characters that you can call out to and they'll give you hints (and sometimes items) that are usually fairly useful.
The video quality is terrible, but good enough to be servicable most of the time. It's full screen, but it tears pretty badly when there's any real camera movement. With a really fast machine this can be largely compensated for, but I can't help but feel that if a P133 can't run it without shearing the image, there's something that probably should have been fixed in the game's code. It's also pretty muddy looking, which is understandable given the amount of video smashed onto a single CD, but it begs the question - why didn't they release it on 2 CDs instead? With the massive swaths of brown and green in most the environments, it can be pretty easy to lose sight of the enemy and get shot before you know what's going on. It's nowhere near as bad as Mad Dog McCree was on the Sega CD (some scenes in that game were so grainy that they had to actually put photos in the manual to show where the enemies would appear!), but it's certainly poor by 1997 standards.
And here's something that might surprise you - or shock you - or scare you: it stars Michael Dudikoff (from American Ninja and Tron), and was directed by Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, The Wrestler, Requiem for a Dream). You'd expect with those two that, even if the game weren't any good, their working on the movie portion would at least make for a good movie, right? Hahaha. Oh boy.
Don't get me wrong. I love the game. I would just never call it a particularly good game, but I enjoy it quite a bit nonetheless. It's typical FMV tripe, and if that's your thing, I'm sure you'll love it too. If you don't understand the appeal of FMV shooters, this won't change your mind one iota.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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