Thosw: The Act

It was originally released as a coin-op. (Underlying hardware was a Celeron-class PC)

"The Act was never meant to be an iPad game. If things had gone as planned, arcades would be a profitable market and The Act would be that market's most popular game. As fate had it, arcades fell apart and so did The Act.

The "emotion" game was conceived and canceled before anyone knew what an iPad was. And yet here it is, available on the iTunes App Store. Today. Right now. [er, well, the article is 10 years old]

You're probably wondering what an "emotion" game is. The Act, far as I know, is the only one. You control the emotions, obviously, of an on-screen character, navigating them through a series of dramatic scenes, ultimately completing a story. In this case, the character is a lovestruck window washer, and the story is his slapstick pursuit of a sexy nurse.

Emotion games are like playable movies. You would probably mistake The Act for a feature cartoon from the early 1990s, if it weren't for the "game over" screen that appears when someone doesn't properly man the controls.

The Act feels simultaneously familiar and foreign, like you've seen it before, but plays nothing like it. Which is weird, though not as weird as how it got here. On our iPads. This is the story of two very different men: the former, who acted on a 25-year-old vision of the future of entertainment, and the latter, who transformed it into an affordable mid-day distraction for your tablet computer."

https://www.polygon.com/2012/10/23/3544106/the-acts-twenty-year-journey-to-create-an-emotion-genre

Animators wer ex-Disney, and their style was akin to Don Bluth of Dragon's Lair fame.

The game mechanics were completely unlike Dragon's Lair and the early laserdisc games. The input was an analog spinner and I speculate that one of the reasons it didn't quite make it as a bar game was because the finesse required was unlike what you'd expect from conventional games. Apart from a chase scene that made part of the endgame, you weren't so much flinging the spinner to the left or right, as tweaking it a few degrees of rotation to the left or right to see what sort of reaction it would engender in the other characters in the game with whom you were interacting.

It was a fantastically fun game mechanic -- for everyone who wished they could have Dirk the Daring go a few inches to the left and just walk around the obstacle rather than getting eaten by the monster to the right or falling through the pit directly in front of him -- and for that reason, very hard for a player accustomed to "arcade games" to figure out WTF was going on if you didn't have the audio cues (again, difficult in a loud bar) to guide you through the game.

I'm glad it got released to a broader audience than the eight actual cabinets (awesome design) and the 25 prototype kits that made it out when the coin-op project went down.

It's a fun game and worth playing. It is utterly unlike any cartoon-based game ever produced.