Dohi64: not really an excuse, but some much more recent fmv (and not fmv) games don't let you skip scenes either (late shift, for instance), so it's a bit more acceptable from something this old, plus even a second playthrough will (or should) have mostly new scenes. I don't replay games but check alternate choices in fmvs if I can and even late shift was just about tolerable the second time around, and even with scene skip I wouldn't have bothered to unlock 7(?) endings.
mdqp: I think that's truly terrible. I don't even like it when games don't allow me to skip individual lines, if they have a lot of dialogues (RPGs and point-and-click adventures come to mind), but in a game where it's all choices and videos? Pure pain.
This is also one of those games with LOTS of mini-choices where if you get it wrong you die, so it's just unbearable to me. I tried one path. The first choice you get after you start it can be lethal, the second choice is a repeat of the first one (more or less), but you can't be 100% sure without trying (and also, if you like exploring options, you might be tempted to pick the one which is more obviously dangerous, just to see if there are differences), and there is another choice right after, which is rather bizarre (as in, you can't really tell without trying which one would be good, maybe both are good, who knows).
This without counting the possible third choice of not picking a choice (which I have yet to check for any of these). Anytime I want to try again, it's at least one minute if I go back to the menu and from there to the checkpoint to skip the death sequence and restart the unskippable video, that's way too much downtime.
P.S.
By the way, the game is old, but they completely re-built the logic, no? I mean, I doubt this is emulating an Atari Jaguar, I think they just didn't see the feature as worthwhile to add. I can't imagine another reason as to why there isn't at least a "skip to the next choice" option, if not a skip for the individual videos.
skipping lines in adventure games (and all sorts of everything everywhere, like cutscenes, travel animations, etc.) is an absolute must for me too, and if there's lots of dying here that leads to watching the same scenes in the very same playthrough, that's pretty bad, I agree. late shift doesn't have fail states, just different story branches, but even though the dev's games that came after all have scene-skipping (from what I've read, haven't played them yet as they're the same price as american hero), they never bothered to patch it into late shift, which is sad. gonna wait for a much bigger discount now (especially since it's the censored version, apparently, 90% off please), and will look into replacing video files with blank ones, like in the good old days of no-intro fixes.
