several things recently have reminded me of this old trailer for a PC game called "Maabus" that i used to watch all the time as a kid. i did think the Advanced 3D Graphics were Super Cool and i did kind of want to know what was up with this weird robot adventure but mostly i was obsessed with this song (Think About The Way by Ice MC, an early 90s eurodance jam). this particular youtube upload cites having acquired it on a Softkey Game Empire shareware disk and i'm 99% sure that was also where i got it.
i'm realizing that in spite of remembering this sometime in the past few years and digging up this trailer then too, i don't think i bothered looking up any gameplay footage, and doing so now gives very few results on youtube. wild. so, as far as i can tell, this game was not particularly popular, and i wouldn't be surprised if more people remember this game from its trailer on shareware discs than from actually playing it. weird to think about lol
Pretty much the only reason I remembered it (and uploaded this trailer, hi folks) is because Ross Scott did a somewhat thorough video on the game, top to bottom, front to back.
It is a deeply inscrutable FMV adventure game, where, if memory serves (it's been a few years), you're a manned drone exploring an alien crash site on a remote island. The plot is a bizarre stream of consciousness that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Ross even notes the game is so obscure he might be the first person to document the ending on Youtube. That's largely because unlike Myst (cited as a similar type of game), Maabus tries to be decidedly more action oriented, which means its stuffed full of "miss a prompt and instantly die", almost like proto-QTEs (but way less intuitive).
Before Ross's video my only context was also "that weird game trailer with the catchy dance music" and I was sort of blown away when Ross's video unlocked that memory.
The other thing I remember about the trailer (which I, too, got from a Game Empire disc back in the day) was how proud they seem to be about how long it took them to make. "9800 Hours of 3D animation rendering"? Would have taken them a little over 408 days straight with no breaks; more likely they had multiple people (and multiple computers) churning out frames and they added all the results together. "5320 Hours of complex programming"? Would have taken one guy about 44 weeks of 5-day work shifts, assuming normal working hours.
"710 hours of music selections," though, that's the one that always puzzles me. Did they spend 710 collective man-hours deciding what music to use?
I remembered this trailer making some bold claims but I didn't remember the choice of music; I guess Microforum loved doing that cuz the extremely amusing and very 90s trailer for their fighter EXPECT NO MERCY is also set to some 90s eurodance ("Move It Up" by Capella; thank you YouTube's audio detection system) and it's the best.
(those fatalities still look hilariously bad)
senpai, this is... beyond moral kombat [resisting the urge to wink into the camera with his whole soul]
(am i mishearing this or is this guy's master really calling him "senpai"? looking at screenshots and footage of the game is not giving me any hints as to what this guy's name actually is - everything just calls him "player" or "student")
i looked up some gameplay footage and it's absolutely unhinged
there's some real Classics of Game shit in here.
- skip to like 8m13s for some real primo minigame content that puts that Kai's Power Goo license to use
- this game has an evil clown named Evil Clown
- the fight at around 19m30s playing fucking passport.mid for some reason
- there's an inscrutable bomb defusing minigame before you fight the final boss
- all the FMV acting is hilariously weak
- the Totally Not Kung Lao Or Raiden From Mortal Kombat guy does a fatality that zaps the player character so hard his balls explode
- also, this is based on a (presumably very bad) movie?!
A+. absolutely incredible. 10/10
