Phantasmagoria 1 - Gore/No-gore/Low-gore

I noticed that Phantasmagoria 1 has options for a "censored" version. I assume the "censoring" is for violence and gore and not for worty dirds.

Has anyone here played it both ways?

Does the "censored" version have non-gory versions of the same videos? or does it just leave them out?

Do you miss anything important by playing the non-gory version? Or just images of people spewing blood?

Hi, Jenny!

I played the "uncensored" version, but I believe the "censored" version eliminates the videos of the murders of Carno's wives (the videos are triggered by clicking on certain items in the game and some of them are quite graphic), as well as the alleged rape scene in Chapter 4. I don't remember any swearing in the "uncensored" version, though.

I wrote a walkthru for the GAMERS forum on Compuserve based on the "uncensored" version, so I never did play the other one.

Susan

Thanks. I found a picture from the "censored" version



Hard to believe, isn't it?
They use those little squares the way they do when covering up pictures of naked people.

I can't even tell what she's looking at in the picture.
For all I know it's a cat licking its hind end.

It looks like you'd miss too much with the "censored" version.

I played the censored version, cause I have a weak stomach, and still was haunted by the game. You don't miss anything. What is does is blur the gory parts like in the screen Jenny copied over here. But you still see plenty in other parts to scare you.

There are several possible endings, and I won't give them away here.

Jean

Hi, Jean!

Did the "censored" version show any of Carno's wives' murders? I remember each one was triggered by clicking on something in the game, and some of the murders were pretty graphic.

I could only find two endings (one with and one without certain items in my inventory). Was the ending where Adrienne runs through the secret passages encountering dead bodies possible playing the "censored" version?

Susan

Hi, Jenny!

The girl is definitely Adrienne (the main character in the game), but I can't tell either what she's looking at.

BTW, I still have the walkthru I wrote somewhere on my hard drive. I believe the game originally came out in 1995, so do you think anyone would be interested in reading it if I uploaded it?

Susan

As far as I know........the entire game will play in the censored mode......just pixelated where the gory parts are......as in the above picture. I played only in the uncensored version; so that's just a guess......but i don't think the censored mode cuts out any parts.

Liz is right, the whole game will play in censored mode. I do remember seeing the murder of his wives, with the graphic stuff blurred out.

It's been a few years since I played, but I think I remember the scene with Adrienne's run through the passage.

A good game, but scary, scary, scary!!

Jean

there are?!

I played this game years ago, and I was very disappointed with the ending. At the time I looked on the internet and couldn't find any info about how to get other endings. (I was new to the internet though... I may have missed something.)

-emily

Hi fov:

I know of 2 endings for sure. I had a different ending than a fellow at work did because of different ways we had the lead character act. I teased him that it goes to show men and women sure do think differently.

Jean

Jean.......are you thinking of Phantas 1 or 2??......I'm pretty sure there is really only one ending for Phantas 1......though there are different ways to get there. Phantas 2 (i believe) has 2 different endings.

When I played P1, I got caught so fast I didn't find the dead bodies.

I liked P2 better. And played both endings.

Hi Liz:

Phantes 1 has two different endings, unless the guy at work who played it wasn't telling the truth! I played Adrienne as a strong character, and he played her as weak, so the endings were different. If I see him around at work I'll ask, but it's been several years so he may not remember exactly what happened.

It's possible that the very end scene is the same, however, not all characters have the same fate in the two different ways to play.

Jean

Hi, Jean!

I believe no matter how she gets there, Adrienne will always end up in the Exorcism Room. Most people refer to the two routes Adrienne takes to get to that room as two different endings.

Susan

Hi, Jenny!

Yup, that's my walkthru alright. For some strange reason, "and is not to be distributed or reproduced without the express written consent of the
author" is missing from the copyright blurb <eg>. I've never heard of that website, so I doubt if I gave them my permission to post it.

Susan

Do you think P1 was more difficult?

I don't remember much of the game (i.e., couldn't tell you what path I took), but I want to know if this part of the ending is the same--

SPOILER BELOW!!!
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Does Adrienne's husband always die, no matter what you do?

I am hoping to acquire the game for the PC and play it again (played originally on the mac, don't have a mac anymore...) and would love to know if there's a possibility of a happier ending. I have P2 but have not played yet, so far haven't gotten it working on XP. Will probably try it on my older win98 machine but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

-emily

And who knows where they got it from. Maybe from some other site that was missing the "and is not to be distributed or reproduced without the express written consent of the author."

At least they put your name on it and gave you credit for it.

Emily, the answer to that question can be found on the last paragraph (before the 5 stars) at the bottom of this page
http://www.sierraplanet.com/phantas1/reviews.html

I don't want to post it here because it might spoil the game for someone.

Hi, Jenny!

The only site I uploaded my walkthru to was the GAMERS forum on Compuserve. I had requests from a couple of members of GAMERS to post it on their internet site, but that was it.

Susan

Yes I think P1 is harder than P2.

Oh play it uncensored.....! The only game campier was Harvester. C

I think I may want to play it both ways to see the difference. I switched from uncensored to censored at the end of Chapter 4 and found that in some of the scenes you can't tell what's happening. For example there was one scene where one of the women is being murdered. You see her lying there with a big funnel in her mouth at the beginning of the scene, and after that the image is all squares, except for little glimpses of the murderer's face now and then. So I don't know if he was feeding her her own intestines or what.

Jenny........that's pretty much what's happening........it's pretty gruesome; but still a great game. One of my all-time favs!!

I'm curious, those of you who liked Phantasmagoria,

Did you like it because it was camp?
Did you like it because it was scary?
Other reasons?

And those of you who didn't like it, why is that?

Not scary enough?
Not enough suspense?
Too much gore?
Not enough gore?
Gore unrealistic?
Didn't like the ending?
Other reasons?

Hi, Jenny!

I enjoyed "Phantasmagoria" because it was scary, but I felt a lot of the gory scenes were unnecessary and only there for shock value. They really didn't add anything to the game, IMHO.

Did the murder scene you referred to take place in the greenhouse? If so, I think it was dirt that Carno was shoving in her mouth.

Susan

No it was the one that you saw when you clicked on the mirror in the room that had the old-fashioned phonograph player and some kind of electrical chair in it.

I saw the one in the greenhouse in uncensored mode, so I know what that looked like. He shoved a garden trowel with a sharpened point into her mouth and then gouged the rest of her face with it. It was pretty gross. Not the sort of thing I wanted to see right after dinner.

Hi, Jenny!

Oh yes ... the murder in the mirror <shudder>! I thought all of the murders were grossly overdone, but I did enjoy the eerie atmosphere of the game, and how things changed ever so subtly from one day to the next.

Susan

Then there was the one in the dining room mirror, where he rams the woman's head down on a bottle so it splinters and cuts through her eye socket and into her brain. Later on you can find her body in a barrel in the wine cellar. Earlier on Adrienne had sampled the wine from one of those barrels and seemed to think it was tasty. I wondered if it was the same barrel. Yecch!

Hi, Jenny!

I thought that all of the murders were over the top. Now that you mention it, I do remember Adrienne tasting the wine from one of the barrels. Yecch is right <G>!

Susan

I probably love this game cuz I'm a big horror fan......and this was the first CD-Rom game I ever played and I love FMV and I just thought it was the coolest thing i'd ever seen. I couldn't believe that they could make games like that that were so fun and crazy and I felt like I was right there with Adrienne all the way and i loved it. It was so much cooler graphically than the King's Quest/Space Quest games and I love all those........(pant pant pant) Better stop before I can't.....i'm just getting started!!

I thought this game was too easy. I remember playing it over one week, probably the quickest I ever played a Sierra game. I also remember the murders being incredibly graphic and disturbing.

I'd like to play it again because it's FMV. At the time, I didn't realize this game would be only one of the few FMV games Sierra put out. The FMV was my favorite thing about of the game.

-emily

I checked out a few old posts from 1995-1996 about Phantasmagoria at Googlegroups last night. People had all sorts of opinions about it. There were some complaints that reminded me of complaints I've heard about Syberia - that it was too easy, that it was made "for the masses" and had no puzzles, or too-easy puzzles. Some people objected to it's single cursor, preferring an interface more like GK1, where you choose which action you want your cursor to perform instead of having it decide automatically. People would frequently compare it to Under a Killing Moon, which had come out the previous year and which also used FMV, though not to the same degree as Phantasmagoria. It's interesting that Ken Williams used to post on the newsgroups back then.

It's strange to think that Roberta Williams was working on Phantasmagoria at the same time she was working on KQ7 because KQ7 is such a different game.

Emily, if you're interested in playing it again, I can pass it on to you after I'm done with it. A very kind GBer gave it to me for free.

Hi, Jenny!

I thought the puzzles were just right. IMHO, it takes away from the enjoyment of a game if you're stuck on a difficult puzzle for what seems like forever. My only complaint was that a lot of the gory scenes were unnecessary and only there for shock value.

Susan

I never played P2. Phantasmagoria was an obvious attempt by Sierra, and Roberta, to take their games beyond the King's Quest genre. The attempt was finally realized in the GK series.

There was some gore and violence in P. But from past correspondence, complaints came, not from the fact that it was there, but from the fact that it was gratuitous. Did killing the cat, in any way contribute to the plot. Of course not.

Tim

Jenny, that's such a nice offer! Check your email.

emily

ps Ken has said many times on Sierragamers that Phantasmagoria is one of his favorite Sierra games. It's interesting to hear his take on it. It was obviously a huge risk for Sierra to take.

How could he say otherwise, considering?

Tim

Hey, Tim!

Nice to see you here :-)! I agree completely about poor Spaz, the cat. We already knew that Don was wacko and possessed, so it wasn't necessary to kill the cat to prove it. As much as I enjoyed the game, along with the eerie atomosphere of the mansion, I felt that the murders of Carno's wives were way over the top.

Susan

Frankly, I thought Amber was way spookier - and no cat-killing either. It would have made better sense to me if the cat had just run off and found a new owner. It seemed restless, like it knew something was up, earlier on. Was there actually a scene where the cat got killed? I saw the scene where Adrienne found the body.

But it does, forever, tell us how to enter a room with a newspaper, a key and a toothpick or an equivalent tool.

You did tell Diane that we could be found lurking in these environs. Perhaps she will appear soon.

Tim

Hi, Tim!

I told Diane about GAMEBOOMERS a couple of weeks ago, and she said that she joined. She finished "The Black Mirror" and is on the hunt for "Jack The Ripper". Wendy ordered his online and expects it early next week. I tried to wait for them, but I picked my copy up last Monday and my lack of willpower got the better of me <G>! At least I'll be able to help them if they get stuck.

Do you remember the first game you played that used the old "newspaper/toothpick-in-the-keyhole" trick <G>? I thought it was "Phantasmagoria", but there may have been one before that. I've played a few since.

Susan

My recollection is that Phas was the first. But I vaguely recall a similar incident in Aman-Ra.

Hard to tell.

Tim

Hi, Tim!

I think "Post Mortem" used it, as well as "The Black Mirror". Now I chuckle when I realize what's coming because that's the one puzzle I've got down pat <VBG>!

Susan