manutinez
21 reviews liked by manutinez
Dead Space
2023
An excellent remake of one of the best games of all time.
They really nailed everything they could, fixing the small issues of the original and bringing the experience up to current standards. The addition of small side quests (which are just excuses to back track certain sections) coupled with the redeveloped maps and rooms help make the Ishimura feel like an actual ship, filled with enemies, surprises and loot.
Enemy design and combat is top notch, imo better than in the original game. In the remake it feels much more fluid and snappy, while in the original Isaac felt clunkier, which helped make the player feel more helpless. For some people that might be a bad thing, as this game feels a bit more "actiony" in a sense, but it's still very challenging and the survival horror elements are stronger than ever.
It looks and sounds amazing, while also running quite well, so props to the dev team for releasing a great PC version.
One can always debate if DS really needed a remake, but I think the end result is amazing and will hopefully bring the series back into life.
They really nailed everything they could, fixing the small issues of the original and bringing the experience up to current standards. The addition of small side quests (which are just excuses to back track certain sections) coupled with the redeveloped maps and rooms help make the Ishimura feel like an actual ship, filled with enemies, surprises and loot.
Enemy design and combat is top notch, imo better than in the original game. In the remake it feels much more fluid and snappy, while in the original Isaac felt clunkier, which helped make the player feel more helpless. For some people that might be a bad thing, as this game feels a bit more "actiony" in a sense, but it's still very challenging and the survival horror elements are stronger than ever.
It looks and sounds amazing, while also running quite well, so props to the dev team for releasing a great PC version.
One can always debate if DS really needed a remake, but I think the end result is amazing and will hopefully bring the series back into life.
The whole story of the DLC is predictable from the start. They basically left the game on a cliff hanger and used this DLC to finish it, which is utter bullshit.
Adds a new melee weapon (yay) that basically works like the old one. It also adds a new enemy type, but it's still extremely repetitive.
Adds a new melee weapon (yay) that basically works like the old one. It also adds a new enemy type, but it's still extremely repetitive.
Weird to think that this game came from the mind of the original creator of Dead Space. It clearly draws a lot from that game, but it also fails at everything that made it great, which begs the question of what was Glen Schofield thinking when he directed this one.
Story is generic and predictable (experiment gone wrong at a prison? who would have thought) Characters are not memorable. The performances of the main actors are great, but it isn't enough to save how generic they feel.
Enemy variety is laughable, I can only think about 4 or 5, one of them being confined to the final chapters. Combat is definitely worse than in Dead Space, putting a lot of emphasis into melee which feels very repetitive. It's also extremely easy, and the over reliance on melee means ammo is never a problem so a big part of the difficulty is simply gone.
It's also not scary, relying A LOT in jump scares which become predictable after the first hour (oh look, a grabbing enemy. Oh look, a bug hidden in a chest. Oh look, an enemy appearing out of a vent)
It looks very good, but honestly I wouldn't recommend it, specially with Dead Space Remake being out. A shame, because I would have loved to like it, as DS is one of my favorite games and a proper revival could have been amazing.
Story is generic and predictable (experiment gone wrong at a prison? who would have thought) Characters are not memorable. The performances of the main actors are great, but it isn't enough to save how generic they feel.
Enemy variety is laughable, I can only think about 4 or 5, one of them being confined to the final chapters. Combat is definitely worse than in Dead Space, putting a lot of emphasis into melee which feels very repetitive. It's also extremely easy, and the over reliance on melee means ammo is never a problem so a big part of the difficulty is simply gone.
It's also not scary, relying A LOT in jump scares which become predictable after the first hour (oh look, a grabbing enemy. Oh look, a bug hidden in a chest. Oh look, an enemy appearing out of a vent)
It looks very good, but honestly I wouldn't recommend it, specially with Dead Space Remake being out. A shame, because I would have loved to like it, as DS is one of my favorite games and a proper revival could have been amazing.
DROD: The Second Sky
2014
A fantastic end to the adventures of Beethro also the hardest and longest game.
Games like MGS2 are the reason why I love Videogames.
See, this is why I love playing and replaying these licensed games. There's a deceptive amount of stuff to analyze if you know what to ask about or look into.
Like, so, this game. Pretty basic 3D platformer. Three worlds, four levels per world, three medals per level, each medal requires spooping robot childrens or collecting coins. Some racing stages to break things up. Movie clips as a reward. Simple-simple, no great levels but some fun enough biomes and the occasional annoying-as-hell gimmick (that one dumb Nerve in "The Oasis" suuuuuuuuucks). GREAT animation - easily the highlight of the whole thing - and some decent vocal impersonators. I swear Mike Wazowski's "Not bad for a guy with ONE EYE!!!!" is a line I always forget wasn't delivered by Billy Crystal. Weirdly Mike Wazowski is way more fun to control due to getting a bounce, a roll, and a hover on top of Sulley's moveset. Otherwise pretty disposable title.
...this would be all I'd have to say if I wasn't curious about this game. But I am. Part of that's because I got the game new (for PC), and I've been thinking about the game for over 20 years. Part of that's how much I loved Monster's Inc., easily a runaway early favorite Pixar movie for me. But there are things that you think about, as a consequence of all that.
The premise, to begin with. The setup is decidedly not a direct adaptation, instead showing Sulley and Mike Wazowski training to become Scarers as a pseudo-prequel. Fine enough; contradicted by Monsters University, of course, but that was years later. However! If you've seen the movie, you'll remember that Mike Wazowski was not a Scarer, so logically, he shouldn't be out on the field scaring.
Then you start to think about other stuff. Like how the receptionist is the teacher character from the movie's opening rather than the expected Celia. Or how the worlds don't have much of anything to do with the movie's theming (why is there a Waternoose Sphinx???). Or how, in a game where you constantly unlock video clips, the game opens by showing the movie's teaser trailer, released a year before the movie came out...
So we don't get as many of these movie tie-in games any more, but for this era, it was common for these games to be developed in concert with the source material. So goes for all tie-in media, naturally; part of marketing a big release is getting in that multimedia marketing blitz. Part of THAT is coordinating different individuals and teams to work on different cross-media content, which means sharing details ahead of time to people.
In something like a movie with multimedia tie-ins, it comes down to the movie's production team on how and when they inform the other creative teams on what they need to know. This is why we sometimes see discrepancies with tie-in media. My go-to example for this is the novelization for the movie Alien. When Alan Dean Foster was hired to pen the novelization, he was given a working film script, three weeks, and no description of the Xenomorph's appearance. Foster did a great job working with what he was given, but this is why the novelization includes the deleted scene of Dallas being cocooned as well as a reference to the alien's "tentacle". Things Foster couldn't anticipate wouldn't exist in the final product, simply because he did not have access to the same information/creative direction that the film team had.
I mention all this because this appears to be transparently the case with Scream Team/Scare Island. The game came out before the movie, so Behaviour Interactive had to be working with prerelease info. The game's setup doesn't make sense with the tone of the movie, but it is in-line with the teaser trailer, which presents a proof-of-concept scenario where Mike and Sulley are in the human world. Part of the movie would need to be known, to explain the presence of Waternoose, the teacher character, Roz, and Randall - so it's likely the team had access to a press kit and that prologue scene from the final movie, involving a monster training in a simulation with a robot child. Completely obvious when you think about it.
But remember that there are film clips you unlock as you play the game. These jump around the movie, mostly focusing on the opening. But it gets into the plot beats of the movie, with Boo showing up in the monster world; the chase to put that thing back where it came from, or so help me; and... oh yes, Waternoose's reveal as the twist villain. Immediately contrasted by Waternoose being a non-ironic support character throughout the game, congratulating and rewarding you for your hard work.
I have a conspiracy theory about Scream Team that goes like this. Behaviour developed their game, based on the teaser and what limited press kit they had access to. They developed a scenario that made sense: a prequel to the movie, where Waternoose guides Mike and Sulley into becoming top scarers. They got this on lock, leaving space for movie clips when Pixar finally had it developed far enough along to share with them. They finally got access to the movie, watched it, and went, "Oh no. Oh no." In a huff, they decided to sequence in the film clips in the most vitriolic way they could. They front-loaded it with clips from early in the movie. When they ran out of material, they sequenced out-of-context bits from the tail end of the movie, culminating in the very end of the climax. They deliberately chose NOT to show a scene wrapping up the movie out of spite.
Yeah, maybe that's a little far-fetched. But how else do you explain the game's 100% completion reward? There's a cutscene award ceremony featuring Waternoose giving Mike and Sulley their Gold Medals. Then we get the movie scene where Waternoose gets caught and arrested, ending with him telling Sulley that he's just doomed Monstropolis. Then there's a hard cut to the game's credits, and the game's over.
Like I said - this is why I love to analyze this stuff. Not a great game, but fun to think about.
Like, so, this game. Pretty basic 3D platformer. Three worlds, four levels per world, three medals per level, each medal requires spooping robot childrens or collecting coins. Some racing stages to break things up. Movie clips as a reward. Simple-simple, no great levels but some fun enough biomes and the occasional annoying-as-hell gimmick (that one dumb Nerve in "The Oasis" suuuuuuuuucks). GREAT animation - easily the highlight of the whole thing - and some decent vocal impersonators. I swear Mike Wazowski's "Not bad for a guy with ONE EYE!!!!" is a line I always forget wasn't delivered by Billy Crystal. Weirdly Mike Wazowski is way more fun to control due to getting a bounce, a roll, and a hover on top of Sulley's moveset. Otherwise pretty disposable title.
...this would be all I'd have to say if I wasn't curious about this game. But I am. Part of that's because I got the game new (for PC), and I've been thinking about the game for over 20 years. Part of that's how much I loved Monster's Inc., easily a runaway early favorite Pixar movie for me. But there are things that you think about, as a consequence of all that.
The premise, to begin with. The setup is decidedly not a direct adaptation, instead showing Sulley and Mike Wazowski training to become Scarers as a pseudo-prequel. Fine enough; contradicted by Monsters University, of course, but that was years later. However! If you've seen the movie, you'll remember that Mike Wazowski was not a Scarer, so logically, he shouldn't be out on the field scaring.
Then you start to think about other stuff. Like how the receptionist is the teacher character from the movie's opening rather than the expected Celia. Or how the worlds don't have much of anything to do with the movie's theming (why is there a Waternoose Sphinx???). Or how, in a game where you constantly unlock video clips, the game opens by showing the movie's teaser trailer, released a year before the movie came out...
So we don't get as many of these movie tie-in games any more, but for this era, it was common for these games to be developed in concert with the source material. So goes for all tie-in media, naturally; part of marketing a big release is getting in that multimedia marketing blitz. Part of THAT is coordinating different individuals and teams to work on different cross-media content, which means sharing details ahead of time to people.
In something like a movie with multimedia tie-ins, it comes down to the movie's production team on how and when they inform the other creative teams on what they need to know. This is why we sometimes see discrepancies with tie-in media. My go-to example for this is the novelization for the movie Alien. When Alan Dean Foster was hired to pen the novelization, he was given a working film script, three weeks, and no description of the Xenomorph's appearance. Foster did a great job working with what he was given, but this is why the novelization includes the deleted scene of Dallas being cocooned as well as a reference to the alien's "tentacle". Things Foster couldn't anticipate wouldn't exist in the final product, simply because he did not have access to the same information/creative direction that the film team had.
I mention all this because this appears to be transparently the case with Scream Team/Scare Island. The game came out before the movie, so Behaviour Interactive had to be working with prerelease info. The game's setup doesn't make sense with the tone of the movie, but it is in-line with the teaser trailer, which presents a proof-of-concept scenario where Mike and Sulley are in the human world. Part of the movie would need to be known, to explain the presence of Waternoose, the teacher character, Roz, and Randall - so it's likely the team had access to a press kit and that prologue scene from the final movie, involving a monster training in a simulation with a robot child. Completely obvious when you think about it.
But remember that there are film clips you unlock as you play the game. These jump around the movie, mostly focusing on the opening. But it gets into the plot beats of the movie, with Boo showing up in the monster world; the chase to put that thing back where it came from, or so help me; and... oh yes, Waternoose's reveal as the twist villain. Immediately contrasted by Waternoose being a non-ironic support character throughout the game, congratulating and rewarding you for your hard work.
I have a conspiracy theory about Scream Team that goes like this. Behaviour developed their game, based on the teaser and what limited press kit they had access to. They developed a scenario that made sense: a prequel to the movie, where Waternoose guides Mike and Sulley into becoming top scarers. They got this on lock, leaving space for movie clips when Pixar finally had it developed far enough along to share with them. They finally got access to the movie, watched it, and went, "Oh no. Oh no." In a huff, they decided to sequence in the film clips in the most vitriolic way they could. They front-loaded it with clips from early in the movie. When they ran out of material, they sequenced out-of-context bits from the tail end of the movie, culminating in the very end of the climax. They deliberately chose NOT to show a scene wrapping up the movie out of spite.
Yeah, maybe that's a little far-fetched. But how else do you explain the game's 100% completion reward? There's a cutscene award ceremony featuring Waternoose giving Mike and Sulley their Gold Medals. Then we get the movie scene where Waternoose gets caught and arrested, ending with him telling Sulley that he's just doomed Monstropolis. Then there's a hard cut to the game's credits, and the game's over.
Like I said - this is why I love to analyze this stuff. Not a great game, but fun to think about.
Rogue Trooper
2006
when you talk shit about smurfs this guy comes and beats you up
Another random GBA game I had as a kid and it's utter shite mostly for the absolutely abysmal port of Marble Madness.
Not only are the controls some of the worst I've seen for a GBA game, it then has the actual audacity to remove levels as well meaning that there's actually only three in the entire game (the tutorial level counts as well) and if you're somehow skilled at it, then you'll have seen everything in seconds.
Talk about an ultimate con job eh?
Klax on the other hand is a pretty decent puzzle game and the port of it is pretty good but it still doesn't make up for the fact that Marble Madness is meant to be the star of the show of this collection.
And calling this crappy port a star is like saying that being eaten by a shark is better than drowning.
Awful stuff.
Not only are the controls some of the worst I've seen for a GBA game, it then has the actual audacity to remove levels as well meaning that there's actually only three in the entire game (the tutorial level counts as well) and if you're somehow skilled at it, then you'll have seen everything in seconds.
Talk about an ultimate con job eh?
Klax on the other hand is a pretty decent puzzle game and the port of it is pretty good but it still doesn't make up for the fact that Marble Madness is meant to be the star of the show of this collection.
And calling this crappy port a star is like saying that being eaten by a shark is better than drowning.
Awful stuff.
The tryhard edgy Arkanoid clone that I loved and spent so many hours on as a kid when I discovered it through Miniclip. The fun I had making stupid crap on the level editor is one I'll never forget.
Blasphemous
2019
ESTE JUEGO HIZO QUE INVESTIGARA MUCHAS REFERENCIAS CATÓLICAS.
Hace años que no juego un buen juego 2D (concretamente desde Metroid Zero Mission) me rememoro a esa bella época con sus dinamicas y sus jefes.
su dinamica de saltos en ocasiones se siente injusto, pero todo es parte de la desesperación de llegar a X lugar y creer conocer el entorno. Se percibe injusto pero en realidad es culpa del jugador.
La música es increíble y el el detalle de que existan voces en español iberico le da ese toque de inmersión que en su primera vuelta no pudo atraparme.
Pregúntale a tu abuelita o a tu tia la católica ortodoxa todas las referencias, porque en éste juego abundan y preocupa un poco el contexto histórico del cual esta basado.
Hace años que no juego un buen juego 2D (concretamente desde Metroid Zero Mission) me rememoro a esa bella época con sus dinamicas y sus jefes.
su dinamica de saltos en ocasiones se siente injusto, pero todo es parte de la desesperación de llegar a X lugar y creer conocer el entorno. Se percibe injusto pero en realidad es culpa del jugador.
La música es increíble y el el detalle de que existan voces en español iberico le da ese toque de inmersión que en su primera vuelta no pudo atraparme.
Pregúntale a tu abuelita o a tu tia la católica ortodoxa todas las referencias, porque en éste juego abundan y preocupa un poco el contexto histórico del cual esta basado.
