Ugh... Bad news about the PC version of Pax Corpus.
I had to download this game from 2 different sites (that apparently are the ONLY ONES that have the cd image of this game), and BOTH come with their set of problems. The first I downloaded from a russian site, and when I mounted it in a virtual drive it opened the instalation menu just fine, BUT the game refused to install saying that there wasn't enough space on the hard drive despite having (obviously) more than enough. Then I downloaded from another site (I think it's german, but I'm not sure), and this one installed. BUUUUUUUT the game had NO music (and worse, the tracks are on the image, but I'll get to that), and it crashed after the battle with Dr. Ellys (that one you can see in video I posted) and didn't played the cutscene that supposed to play after that. Then, I decided to check the game files and I think I noticed why that happened: THERE ARE CUTSCENES MISSING IN THE FILES!
And before you guys ask, the first image that I downloaded also has the same problem. The cutscenes are simple .avi files that can even play outside the game, and I noticed that only some .avis are present: The Cryo logo when you launch the game, the intro cutscene (3 times because this game is in 3 different languages), and the 2 endings. But nothing that happens in between. Addimitely, I wasn't running the game in the ideal operational system (I was running on Windows 7, this game was released for Windows 95-98), so I could've faced other problems in the long run, but that would be a matter of me learning how to emulate a older system. But when the cutscenes are missing it means that the game crashed because it couldn't play them, meaning that this game is unplayable due to missing files.
I'm afraid to say that we have another Bip Bop I & III here, and I have a theory of why this happened.
This game came at 1997, a time where many people didn't had a at least decent internet connection. So, to facilitate downloads, pirates would chop files to reduce the size of the game. I'm sure of that because I've played Day of the Tentacle and The Dig through pirate copies back in the day, and some things I still remember from them: DotT had only voice acting at the begining of the game, but after they split into the different time periods, the rest of the audio after that was only sound effects and music. And The Dig had ZERO voice acting and ZERO animated cutscenes, but everything else worked fine. What I think happened here with Pax Corpus is that the pirates removed the cutscene files, but did a sloopy job on that (The Dig worked even without it's cutscenes), but because this game was received poorly back them (and because it faded in obscurity), nobody cared, and as a result the only digital "copies" we have now where those botched ones. If someone here knows a digital pirate from that time (or WAS one, who knows?), please confirm if my theory is true. Either way, this is a true tragedy to gaming preservation.
There are some good news however. The first one is that I salvaged the soundtrack.
Yeah, for some odd reason the game have no music but I managed to extract the soundtrack files with the help of PowerISO, which shows that this game has music but it can't play because... My head hurts... Anyway, it's not special, but I think it has some neat tracks in it. If Ross is interested, I can send to him via e-mail. I wanted to actually put the tracks on Youtube, and then post on the soundtrack session of the forum, but I don't know any decent free video editor for that. I downloaded the free trial of Filmora, and while it's good, it leaves a ugly watermark. I know that I just want to share the OST, but I will not pay an video editor just for that.
The other good news is that there still are some physical copies of the PC version around: (it's illegal to post amazon/ebay links? Just asking because I didn't saw anything regarding that in the forum rules, but if that's the case you guys can delete these)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cryo-Pax-Corpus/dp/B00006YYBN
Dunno if these are legit regarding the good condition of the games, but unfortunately, I'm not buying these. Don't get me wrong, but I'm not a retro game collector, even if I had the money for that I would even do it. But maybe Ross can tell Clint from Lazy Games Reviews about these, especially since the second link is also packed with another obscure game.
Sorry everyone.