Talk:Megalopolis: Tokyo City Battle

Are AS-1 experiences video games or ride films?

Hey, I don't have any issue with removing that Gameplay section cause it was basically empty, but AS-1 ride films are interactive experiences with "gameplay", and a Gameplay section proper should EVENTUALLY be re-added to the article. Which raises an interesting question:

Is an AS-1 experience a video game, or a ride film? AS-1 experiences are MOSTLY ride films, but PARTLY video games. And to me, the more I think about it, I think it makes sense to define these as video games. And by that definition, if AS-1 experiences aren't games, then FMV games aren't either. And it seems strange to call something like Burning Soldier just a "film" with interactive elements. It's not wrong, but I'd feel better putting AS-1 games in the category of "video games". CartridgeCulture (talk) 19:39, 12 June 2021 (EDT)

If it's interactive then I'd call it a game. Lots of games are little more than interactive cartoons. - Hivebrain (talk) 20:40, 12 June 2021 (EDT)

going off of the footage I've seen, I believe only Scramble Training had an interactive element - the rest were all pretty much just simulator experiences which ran off of laserdiscs (Scramble Training likely did too, but don't know the specifics on how they married the disc up with interactivity. I imagine it was a la Dragon's Lair) - Ted618 (talk) 13:56, 13 June 2021 (GMT)

Oh! Gotcha, interesting. Sorry for sounding presumptuous! That's crazy. I'm really curious now, about how difficult it was to swap software. They couldn't have had like... removable controls or something, right? Maybe Megalopolis' software just deactivates the controls? And now this makes the AS-1 a sometimes-interactive motion simulator. So it offers both games and ride films. This is really interesting. Thanks for the article expansion too, this is all wonderful stuff. CartridgeCulture (talk) 20:48, 13 June 2021 (EDT)

from what I've read (i.e. whatever's in the references on the main AS-1 page that I still haven't got round to adding), I'm led to believe that AS-1s merely needed a laserdisc and a new "chip" (which stored data about the movements that the shuttle should make) to run a different experience like Megalopolis. The sources I have unfortunately don't elaborate on how it accommodated Scramble Training, but I imagine it needed a bit more than a chip in that case - Ted618 (talk) 03:19, 14 June 2021 (GMT)