Taking Their Act to Cyberspace : Review: Actors such as Dennis Hopper and Brian Keith are being used on CD-ROM games. Just how they will affect sales remains to be seen.

The splashy magazine ads that began appearing this summer for the CD-ROM game Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller did not mention the usual selling points for these games--combat, challenging puzzles, technical wizardry.

The creators of the game, which hit stores last week after nearly a two-month delay, felt they had built these important attributes into their product. But so had creators of dozens of games being rushed into production for this year’s holiday shopping season, the first with CD-ROMs taking a significant role.

Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller had something no other CD-ROM could claim: a movie star.

Not a star of the ascendancy of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Julia Roberts, but nonetheless a highly recognizable, name-above-the-title performer--Dennis Hopper. Joining him in the cast (and ads) for the “cyberpunk thriller” are Grace Jones, Geoffrey Holder and model Stephanie Seymour.

This is not the first CD-ROM to feature well-known actors. Patrick Stewart of “Star Trek” fame is the on-screen host of the new version of Compton’s CD-ROM encyclopedia, while his crewmate Jonathan Frakes and Morgan Fairchild are featured as celebrity players in a CD-ROM poker game disc.

But hiring actors to play dramatic roles on CD-ROM games is a new wrinkle in this fledgling field. Preceding Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller in the market by a few weeks was Under the Killing Moon, a detective adventure that features actors Brian Keith, Margot Kidder, Russell Means and the off-screen voice of James Earl Jones.

Until these two games, casting for live-action sequences in CD-ROMs was analogous to the early days of silent films when anyone who happened to be in the vicinity of the camera was recruited to play a part. The now-famous Miller Brothers, who created the hugely successful Myst CD-ROM, play all the roles on that disc’s live-action sequences. The pilots in the popular CD-ROM Rebel Assault game were staff artists at LucasArts, and the actors in the haunted mansion of the 7th Guest were recruited by the Oregon-based creators of the game at a local Shakespeare festival.

It was inevitable that with the rise in popularity and budgets for CD-ROMs, better-known actors would be included for marketing purposes, if nothing else. Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller will provide a particularly good litmus test of how much a celebrity name will contribute to the success of a CD-ROM.

That’s because as a game, Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller is simply awful.

The eagerly awaited game is set in Washington, D.C., in the year 2095, when, according to the included booklet, the capital has become “the place where Hell meets Earth.” (Supply your own wisecrack here.) The United States still exists, but is ruled by a repressive political party known as the Hand of God (led by a character played by Grace Jones), which has the power to condemn citizens to Hades.

The game (in MS-DOS platform, with Mac coming) concerns two Hand of God police officers, Gideon and Rachel, who suddenly, and for reasons unknown to them, become targets of the political regime. On the run from their former colleagues, they have to solve numerous puzzles and fight a variety of opponents both in hell and on Earth in order to survive. One of the major heavies they meet along the way is Mr. Beautiful, played by Hopper. Sort of.

Although you wouldn’t know it by the ads, Hopper is never actually on screen. He only supplied a voice for a character who is played, like almost everyone in the game, by a computer-animated action figure who moves about in jerky, highly repetitive motions. Although a lot of technical prowess obviously went into the rendering of these characters, the overall effect is like watching a low-budget production of “Gumby Goes to Hell.”

The puzzles that must be solved to enable Gideon and Rachel to progress are challenging, but it takes far too many long, static dialogue scenes to get to them.

The humor is juvenile and the personal interactions between the characters are trite. (Rachel and a former girlfriend of Gideon played by Seymour continually fight over the guy, although he doesn’t seem so much a prize, anyway.)

Under the Killing Moon (MS-DOS only) is far more imaginative, both technically and in its storytelling.

Spread over four CD-ROM discs, this game is also set in a dismal future and is also a mystery. A down-on-his-luck detective, played by the game’s director, Chris Jones, starts investigating what seems to be a simple robbery and stumbles upon an evil conspiracy.

On these discs, the celebrities are used to full advantage, with Keith especially seeming to have a good time in his small role as a grumpy, about-to-retire private investigator. The game itself--while neither as satisfying as Myst nor addictive as the fast-action Doom--is intriguing and the freedom of movement it allows around a cityscape (it’s supposed to be San Francisco in 2042) as you look for clues is astonishing.

Sticking a few name actors into a CD-ROM might get a game a bit of extra notice, but in a medium far more expensive for the consumer than heading out to the movies (Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller retails for about $45, Under a Killing Moon costs about $60) the game-play is far more important.