Make Your Own Music Video: Kriss Kross

Genre: FMV Developer: Digital Pictures Publisher: Sega of America Players: 1 Released: 1992

Well fellow Sega-16 gamers, here is the celebration – or culmination, if you will – of my time here at Sega-16. Make My Video: Kris Kross is my thirtieth review for the site, and in figuring that I’d do something fun and having you vote on what that review would be I didn’t realize how much I’d be doing myself a disservice by including this game in the poll. Go figure that you readers would vote for the dregs of the Sega CD library and decide to submit me to such mindless torture of having to sit through a few playthroughs of this poor-quality game and series, but here it is for better or worse. Well, let’s just say it was for the worse.

You’ve probably all already read the reviews for the other two games for the series that are already posted on the site. If you have, then this review will be familiar territory since all the games are literally the same, except for the reason you have to make the video edits and the fact that each game has a different cover band.

How many of you remember Kris Kross’ music from the ’90s? They were a popular but corny duo of kid rappers who had a few hits before fading away when bubble gum rap lost its allure. Needless to say, I didn’t remember much of them aside from the name. With that in mind, it made the game (we’ll call it a game) all the worse since I was trying to make videos from songs I’ve barely ever heard.

You have a video playing in the center of the screen and A, B, and C each select a video from the bottom, B being the actual video, A and C being just lame filler added for the game’s sake. On the side are about a dozen editing buttons and every time you press the button it adds that effect to the current video that’s playing. You have everything from mirroring, flipping, streaking, to coloring and blurring effects. The game really doesn’t give you much as to how it wants the video to be made, and you would have to spend hours reediting the same three videos before you finally got an acceptable one. The question is why would you want to spend that long listening to the same three outdated rap videos from a forgotten band and making video edits that the game wants when the final acceptable thing looks worse than the original hit music video? Got me, I watched a few playthroughs of this series on YouTube, and if the band used the final acceptable video edit that this game wanted then I guarantee you that it never would’ve gotten off the ground to start.

The video quality is poor. It is reduced to a five or six-inch box even on a large TV, and the video quality is blurry and grainy, making the video all the less exciting to watch. What’s worse, each time you edit a video you have to listen to the entire song and then go back and listen to the edited version before the game will give you a grade. You get to do this over and over ad nauseam. The audio is clear enough to understand, which it should be, since it’s on CD, but it’s muffled and in mono, and that works backwards for the game.

If it all seems really simple it’s because it is. There’s not much to this game other than three songs and a few ways to edit each one and a way to save your videos to watch later (I’d want to do this why?). There’s an annoying dorkfest of a DJ in the beginning, and before each video you can choose a caller to call him and talk about some mindless Kris Kross stuff and that’s it.

Make My Video as a whole series is a monumental failure on the Sega CD, and I don’t know what I hate more, this series or Digital Pictures’ other pit of a game Supreme Warrior. Both are equally bad and unplayable in my book. Isn’t it amusing that the bowels of the Sega CD all came from Digital Pictures? Honestly, the best parts of these games are the cover art on the cardboard boxes, go check them out because they’re absolutely hilarious to look by with today’s standards!

SCORE: 1 out of 10