"Performance art."

It’s a phrase that sends chills up my spine. I went to an arts college in Greenwich Village in the 1980s. It was a great collective spawning ground for more types of self-indulgent, pseudo-intellectual, pretentious, irritating yahoos passing themselves off as "artists" than one should ever have to experience in a lifetime.

Translation: I was rejected by the women (or perhaps the men).

When someone created something that wasn’t funny enough to be stand-up comedy or structured enough to be drama or fun enough to be a good striptease, they called it "performance art." The half-caring, half-sneering, and half-conceived performances of these so-called artists was brought back in horrifying detail when I booted up Mode, one of the early "entertainment" offerings from Corel. Corel may be publisher of some of the best productivity applications around, but whoever is overseeing their game line needs to be taken outside and slapped silly.

Apparently he did not catch the satirical edge of the content, since much of the "performance art" in the piece (and there's quite a bit, Vito's whole schtick is based on this model, the onstage stuff certainly makes regular reference to it) is quite obviously absurd, even ridiculous, and meant to be funny. Anyone approaching this with a bit of discernment would see that we are not embracing the fashion world, or even satirizing it, but rather depicting one particularly strange and often foolish group of people. (Most reviewers seemed to get this, see especially the Indelible Ink review).

Actually this reviewer may have been quite influential in reference to Corel.  Just before Mode was fully released Corel decided to abandon its entire CD-ROM line. Since this decision came within days of the original publication of this review in the influential PC Gamer Magazine, it may have been a deciding factor! Whatever the relative value of this particular title, the general management of the entertainment division was not particularly stellar, and in its demise certain individuals were in fact slapped silly enough to make their heads roll.

Mode comes on four CDs crammed full of video, and we all know that more video means better gaming, right? From the opening sequences to the final credits, Mode is filled with the flashy, mod, hip, fast, jump-cut video that’s our cue to think, "Ah, this is art."

Mode comes on three CDs. This is a significant enough error that it calls into some question whether or not he actually played the game. The information presented as evidence of his familiarity with it could have been gleaned in a few minutes on one disc. Later errors infer that perhaps even this much time was not taken.

Upon entering the game world, you find yourself in the middle of a party given by performance artist Vito Brevi. The guests are the sort of "beautiful people" who vomit between dinner courses and get their inspiration from Peruvian marching powder. The environment is rendered in flat, still photos, which you "navigate" using arrows. These party photos are positively boring, with little rhyme or reason except on occasion, when you click on some and watch a video sequence. But -- get this -- you usually don’t get the "whole person:" their bodies are still photos while only their heads are video. It’s like a high-tech "Clutch Cargo."

The second line of this paragraph seems to indicate that he DID catch some of the satire, despite previous statements. He does call the principal character Vito "Brevi", not "Brevis", but that might be an honest typo. It is hard to argue with his impression of the relative interest of the imagery, since this is ultimately too subjective to measure, but the fact that he says you navigate using arrows calls into question whether or not he even moved the mouse once he was in the game. When you move your cursor over a direction in which you'd like to go it will signal its accessibility by changing to a small rectangle labelled "GO". When you move it over a person that will talk to you it says "TALK". There are no arrows. As for the "frame-in-frame" approach to minimizing video file size, there can be no denying it has serious limitations. Please see the note on the frame-in-frame technique that addresses that issue on this site.

These people talk to you, and you respond using a "mood bar" that allows for negative, neutral, or positive responses. How you respond is what leads you to other clips and what drives the "game." Of course, in any given situation the proper response is so obvious that this weak stab at "interactive content" is pointless.

Further evidence here of lack of gameplay. At the outset of your relationships with most characters they do have a rather predictable kind of response pattern (ie. as in real life, if you are positive they respond positively, etc.), but as things get more complex it can be considerably less easy to predict outcome of mood bar choices. And Vito, from the outset, is quite unpredictable. For a good overview of the mood bar see the section devoted to it on this site.

There’s supposed to be some sort of plot in this muddle, having to do with a dome that you wear on your head. Everyone tells you that you need to be wearing a dome to be at the party, but no one at the party is wearing them. Guess that prop would have cost too much. Oh, there’s also something having to do with a drug investigation by you and a male model who, we’re supposed to believe, is an undercover cop.

The first information presented upon game entry is that you have to wear a "dome pin", clearly meant to be a piece of lapel jewelry. On most people this jewelry is obviously visible. Apparently he didn't even watch the thirty-second intro clip.

That’s it. That’s all she wrote. You go through four disks of pointless conversations with utterly unappealing people, looking for some thread of an interesting story, and none is to be found. This is the kind of "game" thought up by ponytailed men who dress all in black and talk about the "art of the medium." I cannot think of a single person who would find this entertaining.

That's all HE wrote, using unmerited journalistic power to react with immature emotionalism against a creative project that unpleasantly reminded him of a bad formative social experience and therefore did not even rate any of his actual gaming time. This is the kind of review written by bad-smelling poorly groomed men who talk about "the bitchin' kill ratio". There are many people who have found Mode very entertaining (see the posted Reviews), but I'm not surprised he doesn't associate with anyone like them.

Enough is enough. The big red "10" printed in the little box at the bottom of this page is not a joke, nor is it given lightly. This is a badly shot, badly acted, badly edited movie shoved onto CD-ROM. No one should shell out $40 for something just because a company that was too bored or disinterested to create a real game hides its lack of interest behind the notion that it’s cool, it’s hot, it’s new, it’s different, it’s in. This is garbage, and as long it keeps coming it our way, we’re going to keep sending it back.

The first line indicates that he feels that by this point he has written enough copy to justify his salary on this job. The "10" was given as lightly as every other part of the review. He shelled out nothing, and no one should be forced to respect the opinion of a 'reviewer' too bored and disinterested to even play the game he's been assigned just because he spent all his time playing the new flight simulator he thought was cool, new and different. This review is garbage. And he never sent it back.