Now think about that for a moment, they gave Night Trap a perfect score. In fact, they gave Night Trap ALL perfect scores, as far as they were concerned this was one of the best games of the year. GamePro said that Night Trap was a game changer, the type of product that would change the way we looked at games. They were right about one thing, Night Trap made me a lot more cynical about full-motion video games. And this perfect score from GamePro is genuinely puzzling. Most of your favorite old school games didn't even get a perfect score, yet Night Trap gets one?

But I digress. As I looked back at GamePro's reviews of full-motion video games, I discovered that the magazine was eerily inconsistent. For example, they would give two similar games radically different scores, seemingly complaining about what the other game was praised for. In their review of Sewer Shark they said, "the controls are primo and you need 'em! You can only steer your ship at specific points called "Tube Jumps," which are difficult to spot in the darkness and amongst the debris." Yet, in their review of Cobra Command (a game with essentially the same gameplay), they complained that "You might think flying a combat helicopter is pretty tricky, but this game does the work for you. Too bad! Wanna-be chopper pilots would enjoy the action more if they could control their own destiny."

When it came to reviewing these games, GamePro scored Sewer Shark a 5.0 and Cobra Command a 3.0. What's more, these two magazines are only one month apart, so how could their tastes have changed to radically?

The same goes for Tomcat Alley and Fahrenheit, two different action games released one year apart. When Tomcat Alley (a Top Gun-style jet fighting game) was reviewed, GamePro said that the action was "no sweat, especially with these super-precise controls." Yet a year later, when they reviewed The Masked Rider: Kamen Rider ZO, GamePro was whistling a different tune. Apparently the limited control is good for one extremely shallow full-motion game, but not another.

The most curious inconsistency came when they reviewed Revenge of the Ninja. This traditional full-motion video game was released soon after the Sega CD versions of Tim Gal, Road Avengers, Space Ace and Dragon's Lair. These are all games that GamePro loved, giving each and every one of those titles high marks for their solid controls. Yet, GamePro writes that "Dragon's Lair is the standard that point-n-clicker graphic adventure aspire to, and Revenge of the Ninja doesn't get that far." What was it about the Dragon's Lair controls that were better? How exactly does this game fail? None of these questions are answered, and instead Revenge of the Ninja is given a 3.0.

The controls for the Dragon's Lair-style full-motion video game has remained unchanged since its inception. It's ludicrous to see GamePro say that a game like Time Gal has good control, but Revenge of the Ninja does not. Both of these games have crummy controls. They always have and always will. They often require you to guess what you're supposed to do next and be entertained when you repeatedly die. But who cares? The game looks good, right? There isn't a score low enough for a game like Dragon's Lair. This is an unfair experiment of a game to see how far people will go to watch something they could see on TV. It worked and GamePro bought it hook, line and sinker. What was GamePro thinking?

But there's good news. Thanks to the Sega CD and the unnecessary supply of full-motion video games, we were given one of GamePro's craziest warnings. Back in 1994 they warned about the dangers of full-motion video when they issued this warning about Ground Zero, Texas: "VIOLENCE ALERT: Real actors means real people herking and jerking as you zap 'em." That's right, there's nothing more damaging to a young game player than listening to a voice actor pretend to die. GamePro is more protective than my mother.