2010
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/02/14/dinner-date-pc-review/
Dinner Date was developed and distributed by Stout Games, and was developed by a single person, Jeroen D. Stout, who also voices the protagonist’s subconscious. The only other person involved was Than van Nispen tot Pannerden, which is a mouthful, who specifically did the music for this game.
Dinner Date is an experimental video game told entirely from the protagonists point-of-view, as a man named Julian Luxemburg, as we hear his inner thoughts during a date as he slowly realizes that he’s been stoop up. The only control that the game gives you is interacting with what Julian has set up for his date and the dining room of his apartment. Essentially being in control of his subconsciousness.
You interact with these items by looking around the room and pressing whatever button the item corresponds with. The keys are laid out the same way one of your hands fingers rests on the keyboard, meaning that there isn’t much interactivity. The game lasts about 25 minutes total. There is some reputability in what you pick, but the majority of the content is limited to one playthrough.
Julian is a very unlikable character. I don’t know if that’s supposed to be intentional or not, but it makes playing through the game annoying. All he does is complain about work, thinks about how he wants to get laid, and how he wants to do more cycling. He comes off as incredibly shallow and selfish. If you’ve consoled a friend after they’ve been dumped or stood up, you’re pretty much experienced this game.
The game has a pleasant presentation. Graphically, the game looks pretty nice. Which is surprisingly nice since it was all done by one guy. The soundtrack is nice to listen to and sets the mood.
I can’t recommend Dinner Date. It’s short, has little replayability, and it doesn’t have much depth. Plus the main character is unappealing and I wouldn’t want to spend any time with him. Maybe that was the point, and I could see that argument, but no one outside of a few people wanting to analyze something like this, there’s no reason to go play this.
Dinner Date was developed and distributed by Stout Games, and was developed by a single person, Jeroen D. Stout, who also voices the protagonist’s subconscious. The only other person involved was Than van Nispen tot Pannerden, which is a mouthful, who specifically did the music for this game.
Dinner Date is an experimental video game told entirely from the protagonists point-of-view, as a man named Julian Luxemburg, as we hear his inner thoughts during a date as he slowly realizes that he’s been stoop up. The only control that the game gives you is interacting with what Julian has set up for his date and the dining room of his apartment. Essentially being in control of his subconsciousness.
You interact with these items by looking around the room and pressing whatever button the item corresponds with. The keys are laid out the same way one of your hands fingers rests on the keyboard, meaning that there isn’t much interactivity. The game lasts about 25 minutes total. There is some reputability in what you pick, but the majority of the content is limited to one playthrough.
Julian is a very unlikable character. I don’t know if that’s supposed to be intentional or not, but it makes playing through the game annoying. All he does is complain about work, thinks about how he wants to get laid, and how he wants to do more cycling. He comes off as incredibly shallow and selfish. If you’ve consoled a friend after they’ve been dumped or stood up, you’re pretty much experienced this game.
The game has a pleasant presentation. Graphically, the game looks pretty nice. Which is surprisingly nice since it was all done by one guy. The soundtrack is nice to listen to and sets the mood.
I can’t recommend Dinner Date. It’s short, has little replayability, and it doesn’t have much depth. Plus the main character is unappealing and I wouldn’t want to spend any time with him. Maybe that was the point, and I could see that argument, but no one outside of a few people wanting to analyze something like this, there’s no reason to go play this.
2008
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/mod-corner-7th-serpent-crossfire-genesis-max-payne-2-the-fall-of-max-payne-review/
Two years after the release of 7th Serpent: Crossfire got released for Max Payne, 7th Serpent: Genesis came out.
In Genesis, you play as Vincent Pretro, the 7th prototype of the Serpent Industries serpent agent program, on a mission with Abraham O’Conner, the 3rd prototype, as they infiltrate the H.A.B.I.T. Conference center to assassinate the Chairman of the H.A.B.I.T. Organization at their meeting, after destroying the security server to make sure you’re not identified.
Like the first mod, Genesis is pretty short. It doesn’t have the larger scale of the first game or the length, being only about 30 minutes long, but what’s there is still pretty solid highly polished level design. There isn’t much to elaborate on since it’s so short and talking about anything would spoil it, but it is worth checking out like the first mod.
And just like the first one, the second team couldn’t get everything they wanted into the mod, so they just released what they had. It seems a bit unfortunate, since the team behind the 7th Serpent mods clearly had a universe in mind, but just couldn’t fully realize it, considering how much backstory there was in the manuals.
Both mods are great glimpse into what could have been, and you can complete both of them in an afternoon too. 7th Serpent and 7th Serpent: Genesis are both worth checking out.
Two years after the release of 7th Serpent: Crossfire got released for Max Payne, 7th Serpent: Genesis came out.
In Genesis, you play as Vincent Pretro, the 7th prototype of the Serpent Industries serpent agent program, on a mission with Abraham O’Conner, the 3rd prototype, as they infiltrate the H.A.B.I.T. Conference center to assassinate the Chairman of the H.A.B.I.T. Organization at their meeting, after destroying the security server to make sure you’re not identified.
Like the first mod, Genesis is pretty short. It doesn’t have the larger scale of the first game or the length, being only about 30 minutes long, but what’s there is still pretty solid highly polished level design. There isn’t much to elaborate on since it’s so short and talking about anything would spoil it, but it is worth checking out like the first mod.
And just like the first one, the second team couldn’t get everything they wanted into the mod, so they just released what they had. It seems a bit unfortunate, since the team behind the 7th Serpent mods clearly had a universe in mind, but just couldn’t fully realize it, considering how much backstory there was in the manuals.
Both mods are great glimpse into what could have been, and you can complete both of them in an afternoon too. 7th Serpent and 7th Serpent: Genesis are both worth checking out.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/mod-corner-mi-new-dawn-2005-max-payne-2-the-fall-of-max-payne-review/
Throughout the history of video games, there have been a metric fuckton of video games based on films. From infamous companies like LJN flooding the market on the NES/SNES, to the terrible budget games you’d see on the Wii and PC, and numerous cheaply made ad-filled “games” taking up the Android and Apple online stores. There are hundreds of them, and 90% of them are trash pumped out either in time to meet the movies release date or just to have a brands name slapped onto a product. So the 2005 Max Payne 2 mod, M:I – New Dawn, being one of the better ones despite being a fan made project is depressing.
Mission: Impossible – New Dawn, or M:I – New Dawn for short, is a mod for Max Payne 2, that was released in 2005. M:I – New dawn tells it’s own story, but it’s pretty obviously based on the Mission: Impossible films starring Tom Cruise that were incredibly popular at the time.
After an F-16 crashed over Utah, everything looks like an accident at first, but as the wreck is recovered, it is discovered that the pilot is gone, and the new generation of warhead that was on the F-16 is gone with him. Ethan Hunt is sent in to figure out where the man and warhead have disappeared to, and prevent said warhead from getting into the wrong hands. Soon, Ethan finds himself in the middle of something bigger than he first thought and has no one he can trust or turn to. The plot is pretty much a generic early 2000’s action movie, but it’s good enough to get the mod going and keep you paying attention.
For the most part, the gameplay is the same as Max Payne 2, but the character does have an ability called Gun Kata. Take from another mod called House of Mirrors, based on the film Equilibrium, which is where the ability comes from, and is that movies excuse to have slick action scenes by combining guns and martial arts. You have to go out of you way to select it and it only work on the dual MP5Ks, so there really isn’t a reason to use it.
My only real complaint is some of the level design, such as one area in a level having you run towards enemies shooting at you so you can get to a subway station, which comes across as counter-intuitive. This only happens once in the entire mod, so it’s not that big of a problem. Also, for some reason, sometimes the dialogue of a cutscene will play even though you skipped the cutscene. It seems like it happens when you skip a cutscene too quickly, but it happens at random.
M:I – New Dawn is about 2 hours at most, depending on player skill and difficulty, so it won’t take much longer than an afternoon. Plus it’s a free quality mod, so it’s not going to cost you anything other than your time.
Throughout the history of video games, there have been a metric fuckton of video games based on films. From infamous companies like LJN flooding the market on the NES/SNES, to the terrible budget games you’d see on the Wii and PC, and numerous cheaply made ad-filled “games” taking up the Android and Apple online stores. There are hundreds of them, and 90% of them are trash pumped out either in time to meet the movies release date or just to have a brands name slapped onto a product. So the 2005 Max Payne 2 mod, M:I – New Dawn, being one of the better ones despite being a fan made project is depressing.
Mission: Impossible – New Dawn, or M:I – New Dawn for short, is a mod for Max Payne 2, that was released in 2005. M:I – New dawn tells it’s own story, but it’s pretty obviously based on the Mission: Impossible films starring Tom Cruise that were incredibly popular at the time.
After an F-16 crashed over Utah, everything looks like an accident at first, but as the wreck is recovered, it is discovered that the pilot is gone, and the new generation of warhead that was on the F-16 is gone with him. Ethan Hunt is sent in to figure out where the man and warhead have disappeared to, and prevent said warhead from getting into the wrong hands. Soon, Ethan finds himself in the middle of something bigger than he first thought and has no one he can trust or turn to. The plot is pretty much a generic early 2000’s action movie, but it’s good enough to get the mod going and keep you paying attention.
For the most part, the gameplay is the same as Max Payne 2, but the character does have an ability called Gun Kata. Take from another mod called House of Mirrors, based on the film Equilibrium, which is where the ability comes from, and is that movies excuse to have slick action scenes by combining guns and martial arts. You have to go out of you way to select it and it only work on the dual MP5Ks, so there really isn’t a reason to use it.
My only real complaint is some of the level design, such as one area in a level having you run towards enemies shooting at you so you can get to a subway station, which comes across as counter-intuitive. This only happens once in the entire mod, so it’s not that big of a problem. Also, for some reason, sometimes the dialogue of a cutscene will play even though you skipped the cutscene. It seems like it happens when you skip a cutscene too quickly, but it happens at random.
M:I – New Dawn is about 2 hours at most, depending on player skill and difficulty, so it won’t take much longer than an afternoon. Plus it’s a free quality mod, so it’s not going to cost you anything other than your time.
2002
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/01/06/antz-extreme-racing-2002-ps2-xbox-pc-review/
Someone out there thought it was a good idea to release an Antz game in 2002, a whopping 4 years after the movie came out.
If it isn’t obvious from the title and box art, Antz Extreme Racing is a kart racing game based on the film Antz. Original idea, I know. Now you might be asking yourself, “Why are you reviewing a shitty 18 year old video game based on a movie that people only talk about when someone goes ‘Hey, do you remember Antz?'” I have a lot of free time, and very little in the way of dignity.
And to make matters worse, it doesn’t even take advantage of the large time span between the films theatrical release and the game’s release date by having a more polished game. If this was rushed out to come out as the same time as the theatrical or even VHS release for the film, the game being a kart racer would make a lot more sense, or at least a more more excusable as to how and why it ended up the way it did, but somehow this game ended up on the XBOX and PS2, 4 years and a whole console generation later.
It’s not the worst looking game that I’ve seen on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox and the characters do look like their movie counterparts, despite their faces having the exact same facial expression the whole game. Plus it carries of the art style of the movie well enough. But that feels like I’m reaching for compliments when I’m talking about the graphics, which I am.
I’m going to make a comparison to another obvious cash grab, “Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding”, to make a point. That game is literally just the gameplay from Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 but with a Disney and Pixar coat of paint to promote the movies that were big at the time. But the team that developed the game clearly knew that they were making a game that was just a promotional tool, so they jumped on the back on the gameplay of another game to do the heavy work for them, and it ended up being a competent game despite the fact that it was obviously an advertisement. Antz Extreme Racing doesn’t even do that and ends up being a lazily put together cash grab that’s somehow late to promoting it’s own film.
Antz Extreme racing doesn’t even have voice clips from the movie for it’s characters. Not even sound-alikes, something which even Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding did. When you’re getting one-upped by Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding, it’s time to call it quits.
And unlike the game that it’s trying to ape off of, Mario Kart, Antz didn’t exactly have a lot of characters to pick from, and it’s pretty obvious from the fact that the game has 6 total characters to pick from, with 4 of them being unlockables. And what’s annoying is that the game doesn’t even have the two wasp characters from the movie, which could have added some more variety and visual flair, and at least would have padded out the roster to an acceptable amount, despite the fact that one of them is even on the cover of the game. As a result, the game is filled with samey looking characters. And to bring up Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding again, that game has characters with a variety of visually different looking characters, even the ones from the same movie. I would have even loved to see someone like Barbados as an unlockable character.
And to top it all off, the driving is pretty bad. The one thing that had to be good, and it ended up being awful. Everything feels so slippery. It’s unnecessarily difficult to turn corners. And if you collide with something, it can accidentally turn you around, and the slippery controls make it hard to get back in the right direction. Half the time I had to restart a race because I got so turned around. To compound the problem, some of the tracks have incredibly tight turns, meaning that you’re either going to find yourself driving off the track or hitting a wall and finding yourself a few positions behind where you were.
And yes, I know it’s the game and not me because even the AI has trouble with the driving at times. I know this is a game aimed at kids, and they don’t have high expectations, but I feel like something as simple as a kart racer shouldn’t have controls this bad.
The game at least tries to have some variety in it’s gameplay by having multiple different types of races. But for some reason, the game changes the controls depending of the type of race you pick. The first type of race is using the standard kart vehicle. The second type of race has you running on foot. The final type of race, which is a time trial where you have to make it through flag gates without missing them five times, with every time you miss them, the game adds time to your total time at the end of the race.
But for some reason, the developers thought it was a good idea to completely switch up the controls depending on the race. If you’re driving a vehicle, you use the right trigger to accelerate, but if you’re running on foot, or “snowboarding”, you have to use up on the D-Pad to accelerate. I have absolutely no idea why the developers decided to do this. Why not just make the controls the same across the board. It’s not like each race is so drastically different from each other that it needed to be changed.
Which is annoying, because there are some neat course designs, such as a course where a giant kid is stomping around and you having to avoid his feet. If I didn’t have to worry about constantly crashing due to the slippery controls, I could have enjoyed this game at least to some degree, even if only for it being a Mario Kart knockoff.
Each racer has their own career, which is being generous to call it a career. While there is a lot of overlap with the tracks in between the racers, but the tracks usually try to have something different going on, such as different weather like sunshine or fog, or reverse it. While it does it’s best to try and break up the monotony, it all still feels very samey. Even the racers cars show some level of creativity, such as either a kart being made out of rubbish left on the ground by people or is a bug that they ride.
However, the game’s final race is the the exact same with every single racer, where you race another one of the racers up a mound in the middle of the ant hill. This final track even has platforming, which is made doubly worse with the fact that you’re constantly doing tight turns, on top of the slippery driving. Surprisingly, it’s one of the easier races, and I always beat it on the second or third try at most.
And just like every other Mario Kart clone, there are several power ups that you can collect during a race. There are the usual power-ups where you can leave something on the track for a racer to accidentally hit, or something to fire at another racer. The worst power-up is the speed power-up, which is just completely useless. Not because it doesn’t give you a decent boost, but because just how poorly the driving is. By the time you could have used it, you’ve probably accidentally picked up another power-up that’s more useful.
The game does come with some unlockables, all of which are located under the “Secrets” menu.
The best one is “Infinite Missiles”. Which at least makes the races slightly more fun, but just barely. Another one is “Time Change”, which just turns the current track that you’re playing from day to night. I don't know why this isn't just an option when picking tracks outside of the "campaign".
There’s also “Wobble Cam”, which turns the camera 360 degrees in the direction that you’re turning, “Freaky Vision”, which just makes the screen blurrier, and “Speedy Play”, which makes the race faster, making it more difficult to turn. All three make the game more unplayable. But hey, it's neat that they're here.
And finally, there is “Select-a-car”. This one has to be the most confusingly implemented extra. Instead of bringing up a menu where you can select a car like any other racer with cars that you can unlock during the Career Mode, you have to unlock the “Select-a-car” mode. And instead of letting you pick a car like any other racer, when you pick one of the races in the Single Player mode, you have to hit up or down on the D-Pad to select the vehicle race order, which instead of just changing the car, you get switched to whichever place the other racer was.
This is so poorly implemented that I had no idea what I was doing the first time I tried it.
Surprisingly, the game came out on the PC, PlayStation 2, and XBOX, but not the Gamecube. Maybe the developers knew that it couldn’t compete with the Mario Kart franchise, so they didn’t even try. But it still came out on the same consoles that several Crash Team Racing games came out on, so there were still better kart games that came out on those platforms. But it still got a Gameboy Advance port, and that version was alright, so there’s that.
Hilariously, the game can be played in four-player split-screen multiplayer. I want to know what kid tried to convince their friends to play Antz Extreme Racing over literally any other racing or party game. There has to be that one kid, right?
Antz Extreme Racing might not be the worst licensed video game, as low as that bar is, but that doesn’t stop it from being yet another bad licensed video game in the every growing pile of bad licenced video games. This wasn’t even the best licensed kart game at the time, with Mickey’s Speedway USA being released on the Nintendo 64 the year before, and Shrek: Swamp Kart Speedway coming out the same year on the Gameboy Advance. Even the GBA got a version of this game which was at least a step up over this game.
Imagine being third place to a Mickey Mouse and Shrek.
If there’s a moral to this review, it’s don’t waste your time playing awful video games that no one has heard of. You only have so much time to live, go out and do something with your life.
Someone out there thought it was a good idea to release an Antz game in 2002, a whopping 4 years after the movie came out.
If it isn’t obvious from the title and box art, Antz Extreme Racing is a kart racing game based on the film Antz. Original idea, I know. Now you might be asking yourself, “Why are you reviewing a shitty 18 year old video game based on a movie that people only talk about when someone goes ‘Hey, do you remember Antz?'” I have a lot of free time, and very little in the way of dignity.
And to make matters worse, it doesn’t even take advantage of the large time span between the films theatrical release and the game’s release date by having a more polished game. If this was rushed out to come out as the same time as the theatrical or even VHS release for the film, the game being a kart racer would make a lot more sense, or at least a more more excusable as to how and why it ended up the way it did, but somehow this game ended up on the XBOX and PS2, 4 years and a whole console generation later.
It’s not the worst looking game that I’ve seen on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox and the characters do look like their movie counterparts, despite their faces having the exact same facial expression the whole game. Plus it carries of the art style of the movie well enough. But that feels like I’m reaching for compliments when I’m talking about the graphics, which I am.
I’m going to make a comparison to another obvious cash grab, “Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding”, to make a point. That game is literally just the gameplay from Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 but with a Disney and Pixar coat of paint to promote the movies that were big at the time. But the team that developed the game clearly knew that they were making a game that was just a promotional tool, so they jumped on the back on the gameplay of another game to do the heavy work for them, and it ended up being a competent game despite the fact that it was obviously an advertisement. Antz Extreme Racing doesn’t even do that and ends up being a lazily put together cash grab that’s somehow late to promoting it’s own film.
Antz Extreme racing doesn’t even have voice clips from the movie for it’s characters. Not even sound-alikes, something which even Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding did. When you’re getting one-upped by Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding, it’s time to call it quits.
And unlike the game that it’s trying to ape off of, Mario Kart, Antz didn’t exactly have a lot of characters to pick from, and it’s pretty obvious from the fact that the game has 6 total characters to pick from, with 4 of them being unlockables. And what’s annoying is that the game doesn’t even have the two wasp characters from the movie, which could have added some more variety and visual flair, and at least would have padded out the roster to an acceptable amount, despite the fact that one of them is even on the cover of the game. As a result, the game is filled with samey looking characters. And to bring up Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding again, that game has characters with a variety of visually different looking characters, even the ones from the same movie. I would have even loved to see someone like Barbados as an unlockable character.
And to top it all off, the driving is pretty bad. The one thing that had to be good, and it ended up being awful. Everything feels so slippery. It’s unnecessarily difficult to turn corners. And if you collide with something, it can accidentally turn you around, and the slippery controls make it hard to get back in the right direction. Half the time I had to restart a race because I got so turned around. To compound the problem, some of the tracks have incredibly tight turns, meaning that you’re either going to find yourself driving off the track or hitting a wall and finding yourself a few positions behind where you were.
And yes, I know it’s the game and not me because even the AI has trouble with the driving at times. I know this is a game aimed at kids, and they don’t have high expectations, but I feel like something as simple as a kart racer shouldn’t have controls this bad.
The game at least tries to have some variety in it’s gameplay by having multiple different types of races. But for some reason, the game changes the controls depending of the type of race you pick. The first type of race is using the standard kart vehicle. The second type of race has you running on foot. The final type of race, which is a time trial where you have to make it through flag gates without missing them five times, with every time you miss them, the game adds time to your total time at the end of the race.
But for some reason, the developers thought it was a good idea to completely switch up the controls depending on the race. If you’re driving a vehicle, you use the right trigger to accelerate, but if you’re running on foot, or “snowboarding”, you have to use up on the D-Pad to accelerate. I have absolutely no idea why the developers decided to do this. Why not just make the controls the same across the board. It’s not like each race is so drastically different from each other that it needed to be changed.
Which is annoying, because there are some neat course designs, such as a course where a giant kid is stomping around and you having to avoid his feet. If I didn’t have to worry about constantly crashing due to the slippery controls, I could have enjoyed this game at least to some degree, even if only for it being a Mario Kart knockoff.
Each racer has their own career, which is being generous to call it a career. While there is a lot of overlap with the tracks in between the racers, but the tracks usually try to have something different going on, such as different weather like sunshine or fog, or reverse it. While it does it’s best to try and break up the monotony, it all still feels very samey. Even the racers cars show some level of creativity, such as either a kart being made out of rubbish left on the ground by people or is a bug that they ride.
However, the game’s final race is the the exact same with every single racer, where you race another one of the racers up a mound in the middle of the ant hill. This final track even has platforming, which is made doubly worse with the fact that you’re constantly doing tight turns, on top of the slippery driving. Surprisingly, it’s one of the easier races, and I always beat it on the second or third try at most.
And just like every other Mario Kart clone, there are several power ups that you can collect during a race. There are the usual power-ups where you can leave something on the track for a racer to accidentally hit, or something to fire at another racer. The worst power-up is the speed power-up, which is just completely useless. Not because it doesn’t give you a decent boost, but because just how poorly the driving is. By the time you could have used it, you’ve probably accidentally picked up another power-up that’s more useful.
The game does come with some unlockables, all of which are located under the “Secrets” menu.
The best one is “Infinite Missiles”. Which at least makes the races slightly more fun, but just barely. Another one is “Time Change”, which just turns the current track that you’re playing from day to night. I don't know why this isn't just an option when picking tracks outside of the "campaign".
There’s also “Wobble Cam”, which turns the camera 360 degrees in the direction that you’re turning, “Freaky Vision”, which just makes the screen blurrier, and “Speedy Play”, which makes the race faster, making it more difficult to turn. All three make the game more unplayable. But hey, it's neat that they're here.
And finally, there is “Select-a-car”. This one has to be the most confusingly implemented extra. Instead of bringing up a menu where you can select a car like any other racer with cars that you can unlock during the Career Mode, you have to unlock the “Select-a-car” mode. And instead of letting you pick a car like any other racer, when you pick one of the races in the Single Player mode, you have to hit up or down on the D-Pad to select the vehicle race order, which instead of just changing the car, you get switched to whichever place the other racer was.
This is so poorly implemented that I had no idea what I was doing the first time I tried it.
Surprisingly, the game came out on the PC, PlayStation 2, and XBOX, but not the Gamecube. Maybe the developers knew that it couldn’t compete with the Mario Kart franchise, so they didn’t even try. But it still came out on the same consoles that several Crash Team Racing games came out on, so there were still better kart games that came out on those platforms. But it still got a Gameboy Advance port, and that version was alright, so there’s that.
Hilariously, the game can be played in four-player split-screen multiplayer. I want to know what kid tried to convince their friends to play Antz Extreme Racing over literally any other racing or party game. There has to be that one kid, right?
Antz Extreme Racing might not be the worst licensed video game, as low as that bar is, but that doesn’t stop it from being yet another bad licensed video game in the every growing pile of bad licenced video games. This wasn’t even the best licensed kart game at the time, with Mickey’s Speedway USA being released on the Nintendo 64 the year before, and Shrek: Swamp Kart Speedway coming out the same year on the Gameboy Advance. Even the GBA got a version of this game which was at least a step up over this game.
Imagine being third place to a Mickey Mouse and Shrek.
If there’s a moral to this review, it’s don’t waste your time playing awful video games that no one has heard of. You only have so much time to live, go out and do something with your life.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/11/17/soldier-of-fortune-payback-pc-ps3-360-review/
If you’re one of the few who has ever wondered what ever happened to the Soldier of Fortune franchise, your question has been answered in the most disappointing way possible. It’s sad to see a series go from reasonably high profile for time it was released to bargain bin trash in 5 years. The previous entries I reviewed here and here.
Soldier of Fortune: Payback was developed by Cauldron LTD, which put out the mediocre and forgettable game Chaser, which I previously reviewed, as well as going on to make a bunch of Cabela hunting games and a couple of games for the History Channel, and was published by Activision Value, which was the Activision subsidiary that put out budget title games, which is already a great sign for Payback’s quality.
Payback’s story has very little to do with the previous installments other than the fact that you play as a gun for hire. John Mullins, both the character and real life person, are nowhere to be found in the game itself or the development of the game. Instead, Payback’s main character is freelance mercenary Thomas Mason, a name so forgettable that I had to copy and paste it just so I wouldn’t forget it in the 3 seconds I had to look up from the plot description to type it in.
When the game starts, we find Mason on a routine escort mission shortly before it goes tits up, as the other freelancer who you were on the mission with suddenly kills the person you were sent in to extract, and also turns on you. I also forgot this other characters name, as I did with every other character in the game.
None of the characters have much of a personality, all of them being incredibly cliched, and all of which you’ve seen done a million times in a million other things and done a million times better. The only other character you spend a decent amount of time with other than the one you play as is Cassandra Dekker, which is only slightly less generic than Thomas Mason. She briefs you between missions, updating you on your mission goals.
The story is completely forgettable. I don’t know if I would say that it rips off Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but both were published by Activision, with Payback coming out a little over a week after Modern Warfare, so I have to assume that when Modern Warfare was being made, Payback was rushed out the door as a budget title to ape off Call of Duty, but for those who couldn’t afford it but still wanted to play something like it.
It’s so much like the modern military era of games that plagued the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 generaion of consoles that when I search for Soldier of Fortune: Payback, it just recommends those games to me when I search for Soldier of Fortune: Payback in Google. I know this is technically a spoiler, but the game ends on a terrible cliched plot twist and cliffhanger. I don’t know if someone behind the scenes was expecting this game to do well, but I do wish I had that optimism.
The series defining series returns, being able to blow limbs and heads off of the enemies. This feature is mildly amusing, especially in the sea of games that were starting to become lazily cinematic and linear at this time. I guess it would be enough to sell a budget game, but at this point in video games, it’s not really impressive. And it doesn’t really help that the last two games from 5 or more years ago did it better.
This was apparently enough to get the game censored in Australia and banned in Germany. Which is extra hilarious in retrospect, because Australia got an R18+ rating a few years later in 2013 and the game would have totally passed with that rating, and the fact that it’s not even that realistic to begin with, which begs the question of how it even got banned to begin with. But I doubt that Activision would be bothered to re-release it in Australia, but it can be bought on GOG.
However, the series second (unofficial) feature makes a return, with the enemies that are unfairly accurate. Apparently, this is a series staple. But unlike the first two games, I’m assuming that this has to do with the fact that this game cost nothing to make and had to be rushed out the door rather than a group of people allegedly (by me) hating their audience.
It also doesn’t help that the game features several boss fights where the boss is just a bullet sponge, and the boss just looks like one of the regular bad guys. When mixed with the unfair difficulty, these fights just come across as way to difficult. On top of that, the game spawns in enemies when your fighting said bosses. Prepare to trial and error your way through these sections for about 45 minutes to an hour per boss battle. Who knows, you might luck out and manage to get the boss stuck and kill them in a minute or two.
Also, like every FPS from this time period, it comes with regenerating health, so health packs and armor are no longer needed. I can’t really complain since I never really liked the health packs and armor from the last games. It helps streamline the game, making it quicker. Also, they finally made the G key throw grenades. It took a while for that to finally happen, but better late than never.
For some reason, enemies can grab you and turn you around to face them. The only thing that this did the first time this happened was confuse the fuck out of me when it happened. I guess it was to confused the player for a moment and add extra difficulty, but since the rest of the game is unfairly difficult, and this was just annoying, this really feels like an unnecessary gameplay feature.
Another good feature that this game has is the option to choose your load out of weapons before going into a mission. There’s a pretty decent selection guns, including several smaller firearms that can be dual wielded except for two. A couple of them come with an optional silencer, which are pretty useless. There a bunch of SMGs, two of which can be dual wielded, and they all come with optional scopes and silencers.
There are several assault rifles, and these guns come with the most optional add-ons, including various scopes, one having an optional silencer, another having a hand grip, and even one that has an attachable grenade launcher, which not only makes it the best and most effective addition, but it’s incredibly fun firing it into a group of people and watching their bodies, body parts, and blood fly around a room as the physics do their thing. There are also 4 shotguns, and one comes with an optional scope. I don’t know why a shotgun needs a scope, but OK.
On the more destructive side, there is a grenade launcher and rocket launcher. And just like the attachable grenade launcher for one of the assault rifles, running into a room and having random arms, legs, and torso shaped pieces strewn across the room is pretty fun.
Most of these guns feel exactly the same. They don’t have much recoil, but at least their as accurate as the enemy guns are. Finally, there is the selection of grenades, which include a hand grenade, a smoke grenade, and the Phosphorous Grenade, which is exclusive to the multiplayer. Since nobody is playing the multiplayer anymore, you’re probably never going to use this.
But for some bizarre unknown reason, a lot of these guns are exclusive to the console versions of Payback, and are only accessible on the PC through mods for the game. I don’t know why this is the case. I assume that the PC version was an afterthought and these guns had to be cut due to not being able to be finished in time. But thankfully they’re still in the game’s files.
Graphically, the game is OK look, but lacking in some areas. It has the browns you’d come to expect from “realistic” FPS games from that era. The game was actually developed on Cauldron’s in-house engine, much like Chaser, called the CloakNT engine.
Like the previous games, the game goes globe hopping, but this time all of the locations look a lot more samey because it the overuse of the brown filter. You have the deserts of Al Qa’im and Eshkashem, and the jungles of Mogaung, to not so interesting locations, like a brothel, a garage, and a night club. Aside from the mostly browns and muted greens, there are lots of samey looking building interiors. It really is a step down from the last two games.
Surprisingly, the game came with multiplayer, and on launch, it was actually mildly active. it came with the standard game modes that you would expect, such as Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag, but there were two other game modes, such as Demolition, which was a lot like Counter-Strike in that one team tries to plant a bomb, and the other team tries to prevent them from doing that, and Infiltration, in which one team has to get into the other team’s base to steal a briefcase and leave without the other team stopping them.
Soldier of Fortune: Payback is actually OK for a $5 – $10 bargain bin game, but I can’t recommend this to a whole lot of people, yet again, for it’s bullshit difficulty, now made worse by the fact it’s nowhere near as polished as the last two games. And the only ones who would be interested in this are fans of the Soldier of Fortune franchise and more obscure First Person Shooter fans who are morbidly curious.
If you’re one of the few who has ever wondered what ever happened to the Soldier of Fortune franchise, your question has been answered in the most disappointing way possible. It’s sad to see a series go from reasonably high profile for time it was released to bargain bin trash in 5 years. The previous entries I reviewed here and here.
Soldier of Fortune: Payback was developed by Cauldron LTD, which put out the mediocre and forgettable game Chaser, which I previously reviewed, as well as going on to make a bunch of Cabela hunting games and a couple of games for the History Channel, and was published by Activision Value, which was the Activision subsidiary that put out budget title games, which is already a great sign for Payback’s quality.
Payback’s story has very little to do with the previous installments other than the fact that you play as a gun for hire. John Mullins, both the character and real life person, are nowhere to be found in the game itself or the development of the game. Instead, Payback’s main character is freelance mercenary Thomas Mason, a name so forgettable that I had to copy and paste it just so I wouldn’t forget it in the 3 seconds I had to look up from the plot description to type it in.
When the game starts, we find Mason on a routine escort mission shortly before it goes tits up, as the other freelancer who you were on the mission with suddenly kills the person you were sent in to extract, and also turns on you. I also forgot this other characters name, as I did with every other character in the game.
None of the characters have much of a personality, all of them being incredibly cliched, and all of which you’ve seen done a million times in a million other things and done a million times better. The only other character you spend a decent amount of time with other than the one you play as is Cassandra Dekker, which is only slightly less generic than Thomas Mason. She briefs you between missions, updating you on your mission goals.
The story is completely forgettable. I don’t know if I would say that it rips off Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but both were published by Activision, with Payback coming out a little over a week after Modern Warfare, so I have to assume that when Modern Warfare was being made, Payback was rushed out the door as a budget title to ape off Call of Duty, but for those who couldn’t afford it but still wanted to play something like it.
It’s so much like the modern military era of games that plagued the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 generaion of consoles that when I search for Soldier of Fortune: Payback, it just recommends those games to me when I search for Soldier of Fortune: Payback in Google. I know this is technically a spoiler, but the game ends on a terrible cliched plot twist and cliffhanger. I don’t know if someone behind the scenes was expecting this game to do well, but I do wish I had that optimism.
The series defining series returns, being able to blow limbs and heads off of the enemies. This feature is mildly amusing, especially in the sea of games that were starting to become lazily cinematic and linear at this time. I guess it would be enough to sell a budget game, but at this point in video games, it’s not really impressive. And it doesn’t really help that the last two games from 5 or more years ago did it better.
This was apparently enough to get the game censored in Australia and banned in Germany. Which is extra hilarious in retrospect, because Australia got an R18+ rating a few years later in 2013 and the game would have totally passed with that rating, and the fact that it’s not even that realistic to begin with, which begs the question of how it even got banned to begin with. But I doubt that Activision would be bothered to re-release it in Australia, but it can be bought on GOG.
However, the series second (unofficial) feature makes a return, with the enemies that are unfairly accurate. Apparently, this is a series staple. But unlike the first two games, I’m assuming that this has to do with the fact that this game cost nothing to make and had to be rushed out the door rather than a group of people allegedly (by me) hating their audience.
It also doesn’t help that the game features several boss fights where the boss is just a bullet sponge, and the boss just looks like one of the regular bad guys. When mixed with the unfair difficulty, these fights just come across as way to difficult. On top of that, the game spawns in enemies when your fighting said bosses. Prepare to trial and error your way through these sections for about 45 minutes to an hour per boss battle. Who knows, you might luck out and manage to get the boss stuck and kill them in a minute or two.
Also, like every FPS from this time period, it comes with regenerating health, so health packs and armor are no longer needed. I can’t really complain since I never really liked the health packs and armor from the last games. It helps streamline the game, making it quicker. Also, they finally made the G key throw grenades. It took a while for that to finally happen, but better late than never.
For some reason, enemies can grab you and turn you around to face them. The only thing that this did the first time this happened was confuse the fuck out of me when it happened. I guess it was to confused the player for a moment and add extra difficulty, but since the rest of the game is unfairly difficult, and this was just annoying, this really feels like an unnecessary gameplay feature.
Another good feature that this game has is the option to choose your load out of weapons before going into a mission. There’s a pretty decent selection guns, including several smaller firearms that can be dual wielded except for two. A couple of them come with an optional silencer, which are pretty useless. There a bunch of SMGs, two of which can be dual wielded, and they all come with optional scopes and silencers.
There are several assault rifles, and these guns come with the most optional add-ons, including various scopes, one having an optional silencer, another having a hand grip, and even one that has an attachable grenade launcher, which not only makes it the best and most effective addition, but it’s incredibly fun firing it into a group of people and watching their bodies, body parts, and blood fly around a room as the physics do their thing. There are also 4 shotguns, and one comes with an optional scope. I don’t know why a shotgun needs a scope, but OK.
On the more destructive side, there is a grenade launcher and rocket launcher. And just like the attachable grenade launcher for one of the assault rifles, running into a room and having random arms, legs, and torso shaped pieces strewn across the room is pretty fun.
Most of these guns feel exactly the same. They don’t have much recoil, but at least their as accurate as the enemy guns are. Finally, there is the selection of grenades, which include a hand grenade, a smoke grenade, and the Phosphorous Grenade, which is exclusive to the multiplayer. Since nobody is playing the multiplayer anymore, you’re probably never going to use this.
But for some bizarre unknown reason, a lot of these guns are exclusive to the console versions of Payback, and are only accessible on the PC through mods for the game. I don’t know why this is the case. I assume that the PC version was an afterthought and these guns had to be cut due to not being able to be finished in time. But thankfully they’re still in the game’s files.
Graphically, the game is OK look, but lacking in some areas. It has the browns you’d come to expect from “realistic” FPS games from that era. The game was actually developed on Cauldron’s in-house engine, much like Chaser, called the CloakNT engine.
Like the previous games, the game goes globe hopping, but this time all of the locations look a lot more samey because it the overuse of the brown filter. You have the deserts of Al Qa’im and Eshkashem, and the jungles of Mogaung, to not so interesting locations, like a brothel, a garage, and a night club. Aside from the mostly browns and muted greens, there are lots of samey looking building interiors. It really is a step down from the last two games.
Surprisingly, the game came with multiplayer, and on launch, it was actually mildly active. it came with the standard game modes that you would expect, such as Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag, but there were two other game modes, such as Demolition, which was a lot like Counter-Strike in that one team tries to plant a bomb, and the other team tries to prevent them from doing that, and Infiltration, in which one team has to get into the other team’s base to steal a briefcase and leave without the other team stopping them.
Soldier of Fortune: Payback is actually OK for a $5 – $10 bargain bin game, but I can’t recommend this to a whole lot of people, yet again, for it’s bullshit difficulty, now made worse by the fact it’s nowhere near as polished as the last two games. And the only ones who would be interested in this are fans of the Soldier of Fortune franchise and more obscure First Person Shooter fans who are morbidly curious.
2018
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/01/26/stone-2018-pc-review/
Self-described as an “Hip-Hop Stoner Noir”, the story begins with the titular character Stone, a hungover koala detective, finding out that his lover, Alex, has been kidnapped. Stone then spends the next few days desperately looking for Alex, trying to make sure nothing bad has happened to him.
STONE is pretty short, taking roughly 90 minutes to play, and no more than 2 hours at the absolute most. It’s hard to talk about anything in depth without spoiling the game due to how short it is, but I’ll try.
For most of the game, you go around town and ask everyone you know if they know anything about Alex’s whereabouts. This is done through using a map screen made up of roughly 4 or 5 locations at most, but the game ends up being pretty linear for the most part, being pretty obvious where you have to go next, making it kinda redundant. If you’re even confused as to where you should go, there are only three locations that you’ll ever end up going to anyway and you end up talking to the same three characters over and over until you’ve found a clue about where Alex might be, only for you to repeat the whole process the next day.
However, the when you’re interacting with people, you do get a few dialogue options that allow for some minor replayablity, but it’s very basic.
And for some reason, there is no run button, or even to speed up the character at all. I know that there are only 4 locations in the whole game, they’re all small, and the game is pretty short, but a run button would have been nice to have it.
The game is not without it’s merits. It’s art style is nice. While it is a bit simple, but it is relatively nice to look at. The game also has a cinema you can go to on the map screen where you can watch old black-and-white Australian shorts from the early days of cinema, but point stuff like this out feels like I’m grasping for straws to say something positive about the game.
Unfortunately, Stone is an underwhelming game in a lot of aspects, and I hate to say that because it’s rare to have a decent Australian themed game where Australia is the main focus. With the underwhelming plot and incredibly slow pace, it’s hard to recommend this to anyone.
Sure, it might gain a cult status down the line for a few people who like the Australian aesthetic or the game’s odd and unique characters and plot, but it’s a lukewarm recommend from me even with the most optimistic outlook.
Self-described as an “Hip-Hop Stoner Noir”, the story begins with the titular character Stone, a hungover koala detective, finding out that his lover, Alex, has been kidnapped. Stone then spends the next few days desperately looking for Alex, trying to make sure nothing bad has happened to him.
STONE is pretty short, taking roughly 90 minutes to play, and no more than 2 hours at the absolute most. It’s hard to talk about anything in depth without spoiling the game due to how short it is, but I’ll try.
For most of the game, you go around town and ask everyone you know if they know anything about Alex’s whereabouts. This is done through using a map screen made up of roughly 4 or 5 locations at most, but the game ends up being pretty linear for the most part, being pretty obvious where you have to go next, making it kinda redundant. If you’re even confused as to where you should go, there are only three locations that you’ll ever end up going to anyway and you end up talking to the same three characters over and over until you’ve found a clue about where Alex might be, only for you to repeat the whole process the next day.
However, the when you’re interacting with people, you do get a few dialogue options that allow for some minor replayablity, but it’s very basic.
And for some reason, there is no run button, or even to speed up the character at all. I know that there are only 4 locations in the whole game, they’re all small, and the game is pretty short, but a run button would have been nice to have it.
The game is not without it’s merits. It’s art style is nice. While it is a bit simple, but it is relatively nice to look at. The game also has a cinema you can go to on the map screen where you can watch old black-and-white Australian shorts from the early days of cinema, but point stuff like this out feels like I’m grasping for straws to say something positive about the game.
Unfortunately, Stone is an underwhelming game in a lot of aspects, and I hate to say that because it’s rare to have a decent Australian themed game where Australia is the main focus. With the underwhelming plot and incredibly slow pace, it’s hard to recommend this to anyone.
Sure, it might gain a cult status down the line for a few people who like the Australian aesthetic or the game’s odd and unique characters and plot, but it’s a lukewarm recommend from me even with the most optimistic outlook.
2017
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/01/12/late-shift-2016-review/
You would think that in the age of high definition quality video and more money to spend developing games, that the few FMV (Full Motion Video) games that show up would have the same level of bizarre creativity that they did in the 90’s when CD’s became the hot new item. But it feels like that each and every FMV game is just taking advantage of the fact that they could copy movies and television to create something that just feels like anything else you could stream or rent online, which is a shame.
Our main protagonist is Matt, a college student who is working as a parking lot attendant as one night, he finds himself dragged into the criminal world of London when he is forced to work with a group of armed robbers looking to steal a valuable item that has gone up for auction. He ends up befriending one of the members of the group, a woman named May-Ling.
As a movie, Late Shift looks like your standard film. It doesn’t look terrible, but there’s nothing amazing to look at. It’s all well shot for what it is. The plot is bare bones, and it kinda has to be so the “choose-your-own-adventure” style choice system wouldn’t get too complicated. There isn’t any real gameplay to speak of. Every now and again a choice will pop up giving you 2 to 3 options to choose from that progress the game. Depending on your choices, this will lead to one of several endings.
Let’s face it, if this was just released as a movie, it wouldn’t do too well. It’s too by the numbers in terms of acting, plot, and everything else. It would be that film that would appear every now and again in someones “Recommended For You” feed on their streaming service of choice but not a lot of people would click on.
I don’t hate Late Shift. But when I can go back to the gold era of FMV’s and get something crazy, weird, and out there even if it’s a so-bad-it’s-good. And considering that some of those games even had other things, like actual gameplay in between the FMV, such as puzzles and action, the FMV felt more like a neat bonus, or hindrance on who you ask, rather than the focus of the game. And considering that the TV series Black Mirror has come out with it’s own choose-your-own-adventure with “Bandersnatch”, Late Shift can’t really hold a candle. Unfortunately, all this game does is fall into mediocrity, only to be forgotten hours after playing it.
You would think that in the age of high definition quality video and more money to spend developing games, that the few FMV (Full Motion Video) games that show up would have the same level of bizarre creativity that they did in the 90’s when CD’s became the hot new item. But it feels like that each and every FMV game is just taking advantage of the fact that they could copy movies and television to create something that just feels like anything else you could stream or rent online, which is a shame.
Our main protagonist is Matt, a college student who is working as a parking lot attendant as one night, he finds himself dragged into the criminal world of London when he is forced to work with a group of armed robbers looking to steal a valuable item that has gone up for auction. He ends up befriending one of the members of the group, a woman named May-Ling.
As a movie, Late Shift looks like your standard film. It doesn’t look terrible, but there’s nothing amazing to look at. It’s all well shot for what it is. The plot is bare bones, and it kinda has to be so the “choose-your-own-adventure” style choice system wouldn’t get too complicated. There isn’t any real gameplay to speak of. Every now and again a choice will pop up giving you 2 to 3 options to choose from that progress the game. Depending on your choices, this will lead to one of several endings.
Let’s face it, if this was just released as a movie, it wouldn’t do too well. It’s too by the numbers in terms of acting, plot, and everything else. It would be that film that would appear every now and again in someones “Recommended For You” feed on their streaming service of choice but not a lot of people would click on.
I don’t hate Late Shift. But when I can go back to the gold era of FMV’s and get something crazy, weird, and out there even if it’s a so-bad-it’s-good. And considering that some of those games even had other things, like actual gameplay in between the FMV, such as puzzles and action, the FMV felt more like a neat bonus, or hindrance on who you ask, rather than the focus of the game. And considering that the TV series Black Mirror has come out with it’s own choose-your-own-adventure with “Bandersnatch”, Late Shift can’t really hold a candle. Unfortunately, all this game does is fall into mediocrity, only to be forgotten hours after playing it.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/10/01/the-7th-guest-25th-anniversary-edition-2019-review/
While it might not be as well known 25 years after it’s release as it was when it was first released as it has been overshadow by two and a half decades of games that are either just as influential or have become significantly more popular, but ‘The 7th Guest’ and definitely left it’s impact on the industry by helping push it forward as I have discussed in my original review. It certainly has left enough of an impact to gain a cult following and be respected enough to get a remaster in the form of ‘The 7th Guest: 25th Anniversary Edition’.
I’m just going to go over the differences between the original and the remaster, since otherwise most of this review is just going to be an almost exact copy of the original.
Since the plot is the exact same as the original game due to the ’25th Anniversary Edition’ being a simple update, I’ll just copy and paste the plot synopsis here since there’s no point it re-summarizing it.
The lengthy intro flashes back to the year 1935, showing a drifter by the name of Henry Stauf, who steals whatever he can from small business that he comes across going from town to town., as he is in the middle of killing a woman just to steal her purse. Soon, he finds himself having a beautiful doll, and the next day he begins carving it.
He trades the doll to the owner of a local tavern for food, drink, and a place to stay. He soon has more dreams of toys, each more elegant than the last, and he soon starts making a lot more money, eventually becoming a successful toymaker. He uses his fortune to build a mansion at the edge of town. However, the children who had his toys begin to contract a mysterious illens and slowly die one by one. Apon hearing the news, Stauf disappears into his mansion and is never seen again.
In the present time, the character “Ego”, who is a stand in for the character, wakes up in the Stauf Mansion without knowing how he got there. As you explore, you soon discover that the mansion is deserted of people, but has ghostly visions of the past, of six guests who were invited to the Stauf mansion, all of which have a wish that they want granted, and who have to solve puzzles that are far more dangerous than they seem to get their prize.
There was a booklet that came with the original game that came with a lot more detail about the history of Henry Stauf, the mansion, and each of the characters that you come across when exploring the mansion. Thankfully this comes with the 25th Anniversary Edition, which also comes with the original game too
The graphics largely remain the same as the original version of the game. The full motion video remains in all of it’s pixelated and interlaced glory. It’s much more noticeable since it’s now being shown on higher resolution screens, but hey, what are you going to do? The developers couldn’t really do much without going back to the original 3D renders of the mansion and original video files and completely re-rendering them to look much better on more modern screens, and unfortunately they didn’t get archived properly due to budget constraints on the original game, so this is the best that we’re going to get.
The game is now in proper widescreen. For the purists, you don’t have to worry about things getting cut off since the original game was presented in widescreen formatted for the square monitors at the time, so all the game had to do was zoom in. There is an option to toggle between a widescreen mode that has the game touching all sides of the monitor or the game having narrow black bars at the top and bottom, making it slightly thinner than 16×9, but showing everything from the image. It’s a tiny difference, but if a purist wants those extra pixels, the option is there.
There is an optional filter that you can turn on to smooth out the graphics to try and make them look a little less pixelated, but it just looks like a smudged mess to me, especially since the resolution of the original images and videos is pretty low compared to the more modern games released 25 years since the original release of ‘The 7th Guest’. There’s no real reason to apply a filter to a game so low res and pixelated. I’m pretty sure the graphics snobs weren’t going to play this anyway, but it is nice that it was included as an option.
All of the animations that play when you’re going from one area of the mansion to another are now sped up, making the process of exploring new areas along with revisiting the puzzles that you took a break from have become less tedious. This is the most significant and all around best update to the game, for me at least, since having to move around or backtrack in the original game was such a pain.
Also, the cutscenes in this game now can easily be skipped. Well, technically sped up like the transitional animations, but being able to skip through that intro cutscene on another playthrough is fantastic.
A small part of me misses the slower animations. It was as if the character was slowly creeping throughout the mansion scared of what might jump out at them, not wanting to draw attention to themselves, like the developers were taking advantage of the limited speed of CDs when the game was first released. But if I had to pick between faster animation or the atmoshere, I would pick the faster animation ever time just because of how tedious the original was. It would have been nice to have a toggle to choose between them to appeal to the purists, but I’m fine with the faster animations.
Also, is it just me of is the spinning icon on the loading screen look like it’s spinning the wrong way?
The sound and music pretty much remains the same as the original game. There is an option to switch between a re-mastered version of the score or go back to the high quality Midi or Adlib, which is nice. You do have to load a game or start a new one to change it in the game though. This version does add in voice acting for German, French, and Russian, along with subtitles for those new languages long with subtitles for several other languages. I can’t speak those languages, but I hope that they’re equally as cheesy as the original acting.
Since the ’25 Anniversary Edition’ is almost exactly the same as the original, pretty much all of my complaints about the original carry over. From puzzles ranging from tedious but solvable to practically needing a walkthrough to complete, it’s not exactly the most warm welcome, but it’s entirely presented as it originally was, warts and all, so fans should be happy.
The ’25th Anniversary Edition’ mobile port, which has a HTML front end while the game is running on ScummVM, made obvious by the game’s credits. My only real complaint about this is that a few of the hotspots used to move around the mansion are a bit awkward to use. There is a way of highlighting which areas of the screen allow you to move around the mansion, but it took a while for me to get used to clicking on the right hotspots, taking me to a wrong part of the room or changing my view. It’s not egregious but it does take some getting used to.
It even comes with a bonus mode called “Open House Mode” as an unlockable. It doesn’t allow you to actually wander around the house and do whatever you want, it only allows you to solve any puzzle from the game again without having to wander around the house.
The one thing that I have to point out is that this is based on the mobile port of the game. Not the original mobile port, since several puzzles were removed in that version because of the size of mobile devices at the time, with the infamous microscope puzzle getting it’s own version on mobile devices. So if you’re reading any reviews talking about missing content, you can ignore those parts of the review.
But is the ’25th Anniversary Edition’ of ‘The 7th Guest’ worth playing? If you’re into old adventure games and are fine with dealing with some of the frustrating quirks of old adventure games, then yes. Is it worth playing over the original? Also yes. The ’25th Anniversary Edition’ is enough of an improvement in my opinion that I would recommend playing it over the original, since it removes a few of the frustrations of the original game.
And if you’re a purist, the ’25th Anniversary Edition’ comes with the original game as a free bonus anyway, even if it’s weirdly hidden away as DLC in the Steam release.
But because of the flaws inherent to the original game, I can’t exactly recommend this to a lot of people outside of the people who are already fans of the original or people who are fans of 90s adventure games and all of the hair pulling puzzles that was part of the genre back in the early 90s. There are way too many puzzles that either rely on luck or aren’t clear with their logic that make it a hard game to recommend to a lot of people.
Maybe watch a retrospective or playthrough if you’re curious but don’t want to put up with the puzzles.
While it might not be as well known 25 years after it’s release as it was when it was first released as it has been overshadow by two and a half decades of games that are either just as influential or have become significantly more popular, but ‘The 7th Guest’ and definitely left it’s impact on the industry by helping push it forward as I have discussed in my original review. It certainly has left enough of an impact to gain a cult following and be respected enough to get a remaster in the form of ‘The 7th Guest: 25th Anniversary Edition’.
I’m just going to go over the differences between the original and the remaster, since otherwise most of this review is just going to be an almost exact copy of the original.
Since the plot is the exact same as the original game due to the ’25th Anniversary Edition’ being a simple update, I’ll just copy and paste the plot synopsis here since there’s no point it re-summarizing it.
The lengthy intro flashes back to the year 1935, showing a drifter by the name of Henry Stauf, who steals whatever he can from small business that he comes across going from town to town., as he is in the middle of killing a woman just to steal her purse. Soon, he finds himself having a beautiful doll, and the next day he begins carving it.
He trades the doll to the owner of a local tavern for food, drink, and a place to stay. He soon has more dreams of toys, each more elegant than the last, and he soon starts making a lot more money, eventually becoming a successful toymaker. He uses his fortune to build a mansion at the edge of town. However, the children who had his toys begin to contract a mysterious illens and slowly die one by one. Apon hearing the news, Stauf disappears into his mansion and is never seen again.
In the present time, the character “Ego”, who is a stand in for the character, wakes up in the Stauf Mansion without knowing how he got there. As you explore, you soon discover that the mansion is deserted of people, but has ghostly visions of the past, of six guests who were invited to the Stauf mansion, all of which have a wish that they want granted, and who have to solve puzzles that are far more dangerous than they seem to get their prize.
There was a booklet that came with the original game that came with a lot more detail about the history of Henry Stauf, the mansion, and each of the characters that you come across when exploring the mansion. Thankfully this comes with the 25th Anniversary Edition, which also comes with the original game too
The graphics largely remain the same as the original version of the game. The full motion video remains in all of it’s pixelated and interlaced glory. It’s much more noticeable since it’s now being shown on higher resolution screens, but hey, what are you going to do? The developers couldn’t really do much without going back to the original 3D renders of the mansion and original video files and completely re-rendering them to look much better on more modern screens, and unfortunately they didn’t get archived properly due to budget constraints on the original game, so this is the best that we’re going to get.
The game is now in proper widescreen. For the purists, you don’t have to worry about things getting cut off since the original game was presented in widescreen formatted for the square monitors at the time, so all the game had to do was zoom in. There is an option to toggle between a widescreen mode that has the game touching all sides of the monitor or the game having narrow black bars at the top and bottom, making it slightly thinner than 16×9, but showing everything from the image. It’s a tiny difference, but if a purist wants those extra pixels, the option is there.
There is an optional filter that you can turn on to smooth out the graphics to try and make them look a little less pixelated, but it just looks like a smudged mess to me, especially since the resolution of the original images and videos is pretty low compared to the more modern games released 25 years since the original release of ‘The 7th Guest’. There’s no real reason to apply a filter to a game so low res and pixelated. I’m pretty sure the graphics snobs weren’t going to play this anyway, but it is nice that it was included as an option.
All of the animations that play when you’re going from one area of the mansion to another are now sped up, making the process of exploring new areas along with revisiting the puzzles that you took a break from have become less tedious. This is the most significant and all around best update to the game, for me at least, since having to move around or backtrack in the original game was such a pain.
Also, the cutscenes in this game now can easily be skipped. Well, technically sped up like the transitional animations, but being able to skip through that intro cutscene on another playthrough is fantastic.
A small part of me misses the slower animations. It was as if the character was slowly creeping throughout the mansion scared of what might jump out at them, not wanting to draw attention to themselves, like the developers were taking advantage of the limited speed of CDs when the game was first released. But if I had to pick between faster animation or the atmoshere, I would pick the faster animation ever time just because of how tedious the original was. It would have been nice to have a toggle to choose between them to appeal to the purists, but I’m fine with the faster animations.
Also, is it just me of is the spinning icon on the loading screen look like it’s spinning the wrong way?
The sound and music pretty much remains the same as the original game. There is an option to switch between a re-mastered version of the score or go back to the high quality Midi or Adlib, which is nice. You do have to load a game or start a new one to change it in the game though. This version does add in voice acting for German, French, and Russian, along with subtitles for those new languages long with subtitles for several other languages. I can’t speak those languages, but I hope that they’re equally as cheesy as the original acting.
Since the ’25 Anniversary Edition’ is almost exactly the same as the original, pretty much all of my complaints about the original carry over. From puzzles ranging from tedious but solvable to practically needing a walkthrough to complete, it’s not exactly the most warm welcome, but it’s entirely presented as it originally was, warts and all, so fans should be happy.
The ’25th Anniversary Edition’ mobile port, which has a HTML front end while the game is running on ScummVM, made obvious by the game’s credits. My only real complaint about this is that a few of the hotspots used to move around the mansion are a bit awkward to use. There is a way of highlighting which areas of the screen allow you to move around the mansion, but it took a while for me to get used to clicking on the right hotspots, taking me to a wrong part of the room or changing my view. It’s not egregious but it does take some getting used to.
It even comes with a bonus mode called “Open House Mode” as an unlockable. It doesn’t allow you to actually wander around the house and do whatever you want, it only allows you to solve any puzzle from the game again without having to wander around the house.
The one thing that I have to point out is that this is based on the mobile port of the game. Not the original mobile port, since several puzzles were removed in that version because of the size of mobile devices at the time, with the infamous microscope puzzle getting it’s own version on mobile devices. So if you’re reading any reviews talking about missing content, you can ignore those parts of the review.
But is the ’25th Anniversary Edition’ of ‘The 7th Guest’ worth playing? If you’re into old adventure games and are fine with dealing with some of the frustrating quirks of old adventure games, then yes. Is it worth playing over the original? Also yes. The ’25th Anniversary Edition’ is enough of an improvement in my opinion that I would recommend playing it over the original, since it removes a few of the frustrations of the original game.
And if you’re a purist, the ’25th Anniversary Edition’ comes with the original game as a free bonus anyway, even if it’s weirdly hidden away as DLC in the Steam release.
But because of the flaws inherent to the original game, I can’t exactly recommend this to a lot of people outside of the people who are already fans of the original or people who are fans of 90s adventure games and all of the hair pulling puzzles that was part of the genre back in the early 90s. There are way too many puzzles that either rely on luck or aren’t clear with their logic that make it a hard game to recommend to a lot of people.
Maybe watch a retrospective or playthrough if you’re curious but don’t want to put up with the puzzles.
2007
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/mod-corner-polar-payne-polar-paradise-max-payne-review/
Set in the chilling backdrop of the North Pole, you play the role of Dinky, a polar bear who returns to find his family mercilessly slaughtered by Eskimos, high on a new designer drug called Valkyr. Enraged and hungry for revenge, Dinky embarks on a crusade for justice against his families murderers.
Released in 2003, Polar Payne is obviously a parody of Max Payne’s film noir story, but instead of a man avenging his family, it’s a polar bear instead. The original campaign for the mod is incredibly short, only being one small map that would take 5 minutes at most to complete, making it able to be finished in a lunch break.
Graphically, Polar Payne is only OK looking, but it’s almost entirely made up of new assets, sans animations. Probably the most fun part of it are the new ways to take out enemies since it incorporates the Kung Fu mod for it’s melee combat, with combat ranging from letting you kick off the heads of enemies or hugging them to death, to a new weapons such as the flame thrower and a “Trout of Death”, which is just a grenade re-skinned as a fish. You don’t get to use half of them before the mod is over because of how short it is.
On the other hand, you are able to play through the entire story of Max Payne as Dinky, using the new weapons. It is pretty amusing watching a Polar Bear going through the same levels and story as Max Payne.
The mod even comes with it's own manual as a PDF that details how to play the mod along with including the plot. This is something that even a lot of bigger budgeted games these days don't do.
If you’re into the Christmas cheer, and you want something short to play in between hanging out with family for the holidays. Polar Payne is worth checking out, taking at most 5 minutes to play
Set in the chilling backdrop of the North Pole, you play the role of Dinky, a polar bear who returns to find his family mercilessly slaughtered by Eskimos, high on a new designer drug called Valkyr. Enraged and hungry for revenge, Dinky embarks on a crusade for justice against his families murderers.
Released in 2003, Polar Payne is obviously a parody of Max Payne’s film noir story, but instead of a man avenging his family, it’s a polar bear instead. The original campaign for the mod is incredibly short, only being one small map that would take 5 minutes at most to complete, making it able to be finished in a lunch break.
Graphically, Polar Payne is only OK looking, but it’s almost entirely made up of new assets, sans animations. Probably the most fun part of it are the new ways to take out enemies since it incorporates the Kung Fu mod for it’s melee combat, with combat ranging from letting you kick off the heads of enemies or hugging them to death, to a new weapons such as the flame thrower and a “Trout of Death”, which is just a grenade re-skinned as a fish. You don’t get to use half of them before the mod is over because of how short it is.
On the other hand, you are able to play through the entire story of Max Payne as Dinky, using the new weapons. It is pretty amusing watching a Polar Bear going through the same levels and story as Max Payne.
The mod even comes with it's own manual as a PDF that details how to play the mod along with including the plot. This is something that even a lot of bigger budgeted games these days don't do.
If you’re into the Christmas cheer, and you want something short to play in between hanging out with family for the holidays. Polar Payne is worth checking out, taking at most 5 minutes to play
2010
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2020/05/10/the-ball/
The Ball originally started out as a mod for Unreal Tournament 3, and went on to win “Best Single Player Mod for 2008” for ModDB, and came in second place in the 2008 “Make Something Unreal” competition held by Epic Games. Soon after that, it was ported over to the Unreal Development Kit, and eventually went onto be released as a stand alone game in 2010 for PC and the failed OnLive service, and in 2013, it was ported as a launch title for the failed Ouya console. Not exactly the best history for a game, but the fact that it’s still on sale on Steam and GOG is good.
But the “Make Something Unreal” competition is probably not the reason that you’ve heard of this game. The reason that you’ve heard of this game was that it was one of the 13 games contained in the Potato Sack Bundle, which was part of the Potato Sack Alternate Reality Game held by Valve leading up to the release of Portal 2, which helped in getting it released a whole 12 hours early. Unfortunately, it was almost immediately forgotten when Portal 2 eventually got released to great fan fare. But should it have been forgotten so quickly after Portal 2 came out. Let’s take a look at it shall we.
You play as an archaeologist working on the slopes of a dormant volcano in Pico del Miedo, Mexico, in 1940. While you and your team are digging, the floor gives out beneath you and you fall into an ancient cavern. After briefly exploring the cavern, you soon discover ancient ruins and a mysterious artifact, a gold and metal shelled Ball. With help from the Ball, you soon discover ancient secrets as you survive puzzles, traps, and ancient creatures that still lurk around in the darkness.
Probably the best way to describe The Ball is “It’s like Portal, but instead of Robots and Portals, it has a giant Ball, Aztec mummies, and an undead gorilla,” And when you have a description like that, it’s hard to not to perk your ears up at least a little bit.
Instead of the use of portals like Portal, The Ball has you have to control a giant artifact, the titular Ball, with another artifact, a gun like object that either attracts the Ball to you, or has you push it away with a forceful push.
Surprisingly, the puzzles of The Ball has some variety to it. Instead of just having you use the ball to hit buttons, the game has low gravity rooms, it lets you attach other objects to the ball so you can move them around, and has you destroying boarded up walls and support structures, along with the ball getting temporary powers. It gives the puzzles some much needed variety that makes it stand out.
But The Ball isn’t just puzzle solving, as you’ll have to take on enemies, such as undead Aztecs, which you kill by rolling them over with The Ball. There are even sections that I would call mini-Boss Battles, which include one with a giant gorilla, and multiple encounters with a giant worm and these giant lizard looking creatures in armor.
When you die, none of your progress is lost. If anything, dying is more of a road bump rather than a set back, since you’re respawned not too far from where you were and all of the progress that you’ve made is still there.
While the art style can be quite nice in areas, and other areas do have a sense of scale to them, unfortunately, the game does suffer from that brown tine that a lot of games had around that time. And while the rest of the game never looks bad, but it looks fine for a project done by a small team.
There a few parts where you use a minecart to go from one area, but you can’t control it, and the game doesn’t even use these sections to show off something impressive, just more caves. I know this levels were probably made to show off what the team could do, but in hindsight, they just feel pointless. But there is a large, ancient vehicle that you can drive, but unfortunately, it’s limited by the linearity of the levels.
Once you’ve completed the story campaign, the game features several Survival Levels that you can play with your newfound skills, where you have to survive multiple rounds from enemies, or solve a series of more advanced puzzles. There are two notable Survival Levels. The first is a piece of DLC that came out in 2012, made by some students from the FutureGames class of 2012.
The second piece of DLC is a series of Survival maps is a Steam exclusive set of maps set in the Aperture Labs from the Portal series, which were used in helping solve the Potato Sack ARG at the time. While it’s long passed the ARG, these levels are still incredibly fun to play, and mix the Portal and Ball gameplay sensibilities well.
Unfortunately, The Ball was quickly forgotten due to Portal 2 coming out not too long after this game, and ended up being a lot more impressive than The Ball. And when you’re dealing with something as polished as a Valve game, it’s pretty easy to see why The Ball ended up forgotten. Still, The Ball goes for USD$10 these days, and it’s worth checking out if you’re looking for some first person puzzling like the original Portal did.
The Ball originally started out as a mod for Unreal Tournament 3, and went on to win “Best Single Player Mod for 2008” for ModDB, and came in second place in the 2008 “Make Something Unreal” competition held by Epic Games. Soon after that, it was ported over to the Unreal Development Kit, and eventually went onto be released as a stand alone game in 2010 for PC and the failed OnLive service, and in 2013, it was ported as a launch title for the failed Ouya console. Not exactly the best history for a game, but the fact that it’s still on sale on Steam and GOG is good.
But the “Make Something Unreal” competition is probably not the reason that you’ve heard of this game. The reason that you’ve heard of this game was that it was one of the 13 games contained in the Potato Sack Bundle, which was part of the Potato Sack Alternate Reality Game held by Valve leading up to the release of Portal 2, which helped in getting it released a whole 12 hours early. Unfortunately, it was almost immediately forgotten when Portal 2 eventually got released to great fan fare. But should it have been forgotten so quickly after Portal 2 came out. Let’s take a look at it shall we.
You play as an archaeologist working on the slopes of a dormant volcano in Pico del Miedo, Mexico, in 1940. While you and your team are digging, the floor gives out beneath you and you fall into an ancient cavern. After briefly exploring the cavern, you soon discover ancient ruins and a mysterious artifact, a gold and metal shelled Ball. With help from the Ball, you soon discover ancient secrets as you survive puzzles, traps, and ancient creatures that still lurk around in the darkness.
Probably the best way to describe The Ball is “It’s like Portal, but instead of Robots and Portals, it has a giant Ball, Aztec mummies, and an undead gorilla,” And when you have a description like that, it’s hard to not to perk your ears up at least a little bit.
Instead of the use of portals like Portal, The Ball has you have to control a giant artifact, the titular Ball, with another artifact, a gun like object that either attracts the Ball to you, or has you push it away with a forceful push.
Surprisingly, the puzzles of The Ball has some variety to it. Instead of just having you use the ball to hit buttons, the game has low gravity rooms, it lets you attach other objects to the ball so you can move them around, and has you destroying boarded up walls and support structures, along with the ball getting temporary powers. It gives the puzzles some much needed variety that makes it stand out.
But The Ball isn’t just puzzle solving, as you’ll have to take on enemies, such as undead Aztecs, which you kill by rolling them over with The Ball. There are even sections that I would call mini-Boss Battles, which include one with a giant gorilla, and multiple encounters with a giant worm and these giant lizard looking creatures in armor.
When you die, none of your progress is lost. If anything, dying is more of a road bump rather than a set back, since you’re respawned not too far from where you were and all of the progress that you’ve made is still there.
While the art style can be quite nice in areas, and other areas do have a sense of scale to them, unfortunately, the game does suffer from that brown tine that a lot of games had around that time. And while the rest of the game never looks bad, but it looks fine for a project done by a small team.
There a few parts where you use a minecart to go from one area, but you can’t control it, and the game doesn’t even use these sections to show off something impressive, just more caves. I know this levels were probably made to show off what the team could do, but in hindsight, they just feel pointless. But there is a large, ancient vehicle that you can drive, but unfortunately, it’s limited by the linearity of the levels.
Once you’ve completed the story campaign, the game features several Survival Levels that you can play with your newfound skills, where you have to survive multiple rounds from enemies, or solve a series of more advanced puzzles. There are two notable Survival Levels. The first is a piece of DLC that came out in 2012, made by some students from the FutureGames class of 2012.
The second piece of DLC is a series of Survival maps is a Steam exclusive set of maps set in the Aperture Labs from the Portal series, which were used in helping solve the Potato Sack ARG at the time. While it’s long passed the ARG, these levels are still incredibly fun to play, and mix the Portal and Ball gameplay sensibilities well.
Unfortunately, The Ball was quickly forgotten due to Portal 2 coming out not too long after this game, and ended up being a lot more impressive than The Ball. And when you’re dealing with something as polished as a Valve game, it’s pretty easy to see why The Ball ended up forgotten. Still, The Ball goes for USD$10 these days, and it’s worth checking out if you’re looking for some first person puzzling like the original Portal did.
2006
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/10/03/monster-house-2006-gcn-ps2-review/
Three teens discover that their neighbor’s house is a living, breathing monster that eats anyone who goes near it. With none of the adults believing them, and with Halloween approaching, the trio try and find a way to stop the Monster House before it eats half the neighborhood.
Not that you would know, since the game gives you the briefest of a plot description before shoving you into the game. It just assumes that you’ve seen the film, and probably are a fan of it.
Monster House is one of the most boring games I’ve ever played. 95% of the game is walking into a small room, shooting monsters made out of furniture around the titular Monster House, and then moving into the next room. If you’re lucky, you can do the most minimal amount of exploring that the game allows you to do, you’ll find collectable clapping monkeys that will unlock concept art for the movie. If you miss any, you have to go back through the game to get the ones you didn’t find the first time.
Since the developers knew that this was aimed towards kids, every monster battle just consists of you pressing the fire button, which automatically locks onto a monster, and you shooting at it while strafing around it until it’s destroyed. There isn’t even any ammo collecting. You just hit one of the buttons over and over until your water gun pumps up until it’s full again.
I guess there are a couple of things that could be counted as a “puzzles”, but are barely puzzles. One involves you have to shoot a certain amount of targets in a carnival game to get a clowns nose to place on a giant clown’s face so you can move onto the next room. Another is pipes coming up out of the floor in certain intervals.
The game has checkpoints, but they’re so few and far between, so you’ll have to go back 15 minutes of game. While the game isn’t all that difficult, it’s definitely makes the game more tedious than it should if you you do happened to lose all of your health. There are even a couple of quicktime events that come out of nowhere, but thankfully they’re always the same every single time they happen. The only real problem I have with the quicktime events is near the end of the game, you have to press them in the order that they pop up, and if you don’t press it quick enough, you can end up replaying the same small part of the game over and over again, up to a couple of dozen of times.
Graphically, the game actually looks OK, but that’s mostly because of the movies great art style. But that’s probably the best I can say about the games graphics, because the game uses the exact same couple of rooms over and over again, leading to a lot of repetition visually. Considering that you play as all three characters, it makes it even worse.
Probably the best part of the whole game is not the game itself, but a bonus game based on a video game from the movie, a game called “Thou Art Dead”, based on a video game from the film, which one of the characters from the film plays in an arcade. It’s a homage to old NES games like Castlevania and Ghosts ‘N Goblins. It’s actually incredibly fun. The only problem is that you have to collect coins throughout the campaign, and even then the coins are limited, and if you want to keep playing, you have to replay the game to collect the coins.
There was a version of “Thou Art Dead” released on the official website as a promotion for the film, and I would just recommend that over the actual game.
I know that I should have low expectations no only going into a children’s video game, let alone a children’s video game based on a film meant for kids bothering their parents so they have something to play, but there have been so many good video games for children based on other forms of media that it’s not really an excuse.
I don’t know why you would give this to your kid over just showing them the film, especially when you need to have seen the film in the first place to get what’s going on. Plus the film is much more entertaining, much shorter, and much better than this game. I honestly have no idea why I even played this game to begin with. Maybe it’s because I liked the movie and I was curious as to what the game was like. I probably should have just watched a couple of YouTube videos to satiate my curiosity.
Three teens discover that their neighbor’s house is a living, breathing monster that eats anyone who goes near it. With none of the adults believing them, and with Halloween approaching, the trio try and find a way to stop the Monster House before it eats half the neighborhood.
Not that you would know, since the game gives you the briefest of a plot description before shoving you into the game. It just assumes that you’ve seen the film, and probably are a fan of it.
Monster House is one of the most boring games I’ve ever played. 95% of the game is walking into a small room, shooting monsters made out of furniture around the titular Monster House, and then moving into the next room. If you’re lucky, you can do the most minimal amount of exploring that the game allows you to do, you’ll find collectable clapping monkeys that will unlock concept art for the movie. If you miss any, you have to go back through the game to get the ones you didn’t find the first time.
Since the developers knew that this was aimed towards kids, every monster battle just consists of you pressing the fire button, which automatically locks onto a monster, and you shooting at it while strafing around it until it’s destroyed. There isn’t even any ammo collecting. You just hit one of the buttons over and over until your water gun pumps up until it’s full again.
I guess there are a couple of things that could be counted as a “puzzles”, but are barely puzzles. One involves you have to shoot a certain amount of targets in a carnival game to get a clowns nose to place on a giant clown’s face so you can move onto the next room. Another is pipes coming up out of the floor in certain intervals.
The game has checkpoints, but they’re so few and far between, so you’ll have to go back 15 minutes of game. While the game isn’t all that difficult, it’s definitely makes the game more tedious than it should if you you do happened to lose all of your health. There are even a couple of quicktime events that come out of nowhere, but thankfully they’re always the same every single time they happen. The only real problem I have with the quicktime events is near the end of the game, you have to press them in the order that they pop up, and if you don’t press it quick enough, you can end up replaying the same small part of the game over and over again, up to a couple of dozen of times.
Graphically, the game actually looks OK, but that’s mostly because of the movies great art style. But that’s probably the best I can say about the games graphics, because the game uses the exact same couple of rooms over and over again, leading to a lot of repetition visually. Considering that you play as all three characters, it makes it even worse.
Probably the best part of the whole game is not the game itself, but a bonus game based on a video game from the movie, a game called “Thou Art Dead”, based on a video game from the film, which one of the characters from the film plays in an arcade. It’s a homage to old NES games like Castlevania and Ghosts ‘N Goblins. It’s actually incredibly fun. The only problem is that you have to collect coins throughout the campaign, and even then the coins are limited, and if you want to keep playing, you have to replay the game to collect the coins.
There was a version of “Thou Art Dead” released on the official website as a promotion for the film, and I would just recommend that over the actual game.
I know that I should have low expectations no only going into a children’s video game, let alone a children’s video game based on a film meant for kids bothering their parents so they have something to play, but there have been so many good video games for children based on other forms of media that it’s not really an excuse.
I don’t know why you would give this to your kid over just showing them the film, especially when you need to have seen the film in the first place to get what’s going on. Plus the film is much more entertaining, much shorter, and much better than this game. I honestly have no idea why I even played this game to begin with. Maybe it’s because I liked the movie and I was curious as to what the game was like. I probably should have just watched a couple of YouTube videos to satiate my curiosity.
2005
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/04/22/swat-4-2005-game-review/
SWAT 4 is both one of the best games that I’ve ever played and one of the most infuriating monitor smashing, keyboard snapping, stroke inducing games that I’ve played at the same time. How can a game be both of those things? Well, lets have a look, shall we.
There isn’t much of a story in the usual sense. Some of the mission briefings with have a few minor plot threads through out the game, but most of the the story that the game has is unique to each mission. Unlike previous installments of the franchise, where you followed the L.A.P.D. Branch of SWAT, SWAT 4 takes places in Los Angeles, California, the single player campaign taking place in the fictional East Coast city of Fairview (an amalgamation of New York City, Boston, a few other eastern cities). Taking place in the then far off future of 2008/2009. You can practice at the Riverside Training Facility, under the guidance of police Lieutenant Sunny Bonds, or jump right into the action.
Before every mission, you’re given the option to check your Objectives screen. This gives you a very throughout and detailed overlook of the situation, such as a briefing catching you up on the details, being able to listen to any related 911 calls, a map showing all of the entrances of the location and possibly the layout of the building that you can bring up in the pause menu, any known info on the supects, any civilians in the building, and a timeline of events. You can even choose which way you want to enter a building.
At the Equipment menu, you can choose the loadouts for yourself and your whole squad. The game comes with several loadouts included, but if you want to make your own personalized loadout, you can, and you save it. And you can copy any of the loadouts you’ve selected to the rest of your squad.
Your primary weapons include the Colt M4A1 Carbine, .45 SMG, Suppressed 9mm SMG, 9mm SMG, Nova Pump, M4 Super 90, GB36s Assault Rifle, AK-47, and Gal Sub machine Gun. And if you want to go in with a less lethal option, which is recommended in a few mission, are the Pepper-ball Gun, and Less-Lethal Shotgun, which fires sandbags.
Your secondary weapons include your standard guns such as M1911 Handgun, Colt Python Revolver, and 9mm Handgun. Less aggressive options include the Taser Stun Gun and Pepper Spray for the people who are refusing to be handcuffed or need some convincing to put down their weapon. Explosives include the Stinger Grenade cause quite a punch to anyone close to it, Flashbang, which blinds your enemies, and CS Gas, which can blind enemies with smoke and cause anyone close enough to it to go into a coughing fit.
If you come across locked doors, you have the Breaching Equipment, which includes a Shotgun that can breach locked doors by firing at the door handle or C2, which you can apply to the door around the same area, blowing the doors lock off.
Finally there is the Door Wedge, which you can used to prevent people from opening doors, essentially preventing them from escaping a certain way as you move around to another opening to a room, and the Optiwand, which lets you see under a door to check if there are any enemies in the room you want to enter.
To order your squad members around, there is a drop down menu that you can get to by holding down your right mouse button. You can order your team to follow you, move to wherever you’ve happened to aim at, to stack up at a door to check if it’s locked and to prepare to enter to room, or have them enter the room straight away. You can even separate your team, which is called “Gold” team, or “Element”, into two smaller teams, “Red” team and “Blue” team. This can help in certain strategies, such as them entering two doors of the same room, and taking on enemies from two different angles and having the element of surprise.
There are also few mode besides the campaign that you can try if you want some variety. There is Instant Action, in which you drop into the most recent mission that you’ve complete with the default gear. You can also create and play your own missions based off of the missions from the Single Player part of the game. There are a ton of options to choose from in this mode, including difficulty, whether or not you want the missions from the Single Player version of the level or a mix of objectives from a list, which entry point you want to start at and a time limit, and which load out you want to take in.
You can even choose to be a lone wolf or have a smaller amount of SWAT members on your team, and the amount of civilians there are in a level and the amount of and types of guns terrorists are holding. You can make any level as easy or insanely impossibly as you want, and is probably the most fun part of the single player experience.
One of the best features of SWAT 4 is the multiplayer. The multiplayer features several game modes, all of which are team-based. These include Barricaded Suspects, in which Teams gain points by arresting or neutralizing members of the other team, and whoever hits the score limit first or has the highest score when the round ends win, VIP Escort, in which a random member of the SWAT team is selected to be the VIP. The suspects must arrest the VIP and hold him for two minutes before they can execute him. SWAT must escort the VIP to the extraction point in the mission area while preventing suspects from arresting him.
Rapid Deployment, in which three to five bombs are placed throughout the map, and the SWAT team must locate and disable all of the within the time limit, and if they fail to do so, the suspects win. And Co-op, in you can play through all of the single-player missions with up to four other people taking place of the computer-controller SWAT officers.
Graphically, the game still holds up fairly well. Every location looks exactly like what it’s real world counterpoint would look like (I.E. Restaurant, Convenience Store, Medical Center, Jewelry Store, Run Down Apartments, etc.). Some levels even have a fantastic and creepy atmosphere that really drive home the point that you’re dealing with some pretty disturbed people, such as a level where a man has a kidnapped woman in his basement, and a level in an run down apartment building that has a cult in it.
What really stands out are the small details around each level that make the game world feel like the events in the game are actually happening, such as news reports on the radio of current and previous missions, and even in one mission, there is a live news report happening, giving away your SWAT team’s presence to the terrorists. The other squad members even comment on the situation as it’s unfolding along with occasionally commenting on certain things located around a location, and even give a few sarcastic remarks about the situation, location, and even about each other.
There’s even a few missions that have new objectives pop up as the mission goes on, giving the feeling as if the situation is unfolding before you. It’s small details like these that you wouldn’t even notice that make it seem like the developers were actually putting a lot of effort and love into each location.
The only minor complaint I have with the graphics are the mirrors, which look hilariously stretched and weird. But they do actually serve a purpose in the game, as a few spots in a few levels, you can use the mirror to spot enemies around corners.
SWAT 4 is also pretty impressive on the audio side too. At certain points, the game will appear like there is distant gunfire off in another part of the level, adding to the whole situation unfolding in front of you vibe the game is trying to give off, using what limitations the game has to make it seem like more is going on than possible. The soundtrack is dynamic to whatever situation is going on at the time. Whenever your team is breaching a room or coming into contact with enemies around the map, the music goes from the usual ambient music that plays when you’re exploring the area to a tense music that puts you on edge, really making it seem like a situation could go south any second.
Speaking of going south, the biggest flaw of SWAT 4 rears it’s ugly head. The thing that really brings the game down is it’s bullshit inconsistent enemy AI and absurd difficulty spikes. The first two levels are tutorial levels to ease you into the games concepts, but by the third or forth level, for some insane reason, the enemy difficulty spikes incredibly high, and a mere thug can take out your entire squad of 4 members with a 9mm handgun right as their going through a door, sometimes literally the first door of a map, simply by firing said handgun at them as they’re piling through the doorway. And it doesn’t help that every now and again a fellow SWAT member can be hung up on the side of some part of the level because the path finding got confused for half a second.
This can happen several times in a row, and then for no reason, you’re able to get through a mission with little to no difficulty. There can be 4 missions in a row that are incredibly difficult, and suddenly one is incredibly easy. And vice versa, where 4 mission are incredibly easy, and then for no reason, one mission is insanely hard. This is where another feature of the game, which is that the civilians and terrorists are randomly placed around the level, giving each level some level of replayability, becomes a curse. You’ll never know what happens next, making it even more difficult to predict where everyone is, making the difficulty spikes especially bad.
I’ve even failed a mission because a SWAT member was firing at a terrorist and killed a civilian. This happened multiple times. And that’s not even mentioning the infrequent cases of an enemy happening to clip through a wall and firing on me and killing me. Its like the game was 95% done, and all that was left was simply testing out the AI to make sure the game was balanced for players, only for the published to go “Lol, nope, we’ve got to publish this right now!”, making the game way too unbalanced. Either that, or the developers knew the game had too few levels or content and though that punishing AI was a way to combat that.
It doesn’t seem to help that changing the difficulty doesn’t seem to do much other than change the amount of points that you’re supposed to get by the end of the level. There are 4 difficulty levels. Easy is 0 points, meaning you can just run into every situation and fire off into every direction, and as long as you complete your mission goals, you can complete the level. Other difficulty levels include Normal, which is 50 points, Hard, which is 75 points, and Elite, which is 95 points. This is great is want to try and get through a level as close to procedure as you can, but I just wish there was an extra difficulty tab for enemy AI, maybe making the enemies more aggressive or strategic or something. As is, it feels like I have to abuse the games logic and rules to get through some of the levels.
While going through a level, you can also receive injuries from terrorists gunfire. I guess the point of this was realism, but it can make certain longer missions tedious, making it take an extra ~15 to ~30 minutes at least, and some missions literally impossible to complete without restarting them. There is one mission where you have to disarm bombs within a time limit, but you’d better not have one or both of your legs injured, because you have to restart the entire mission unless you’re somehow lucky enough to not get injured or injured with just enough time left, which I doubt.
Since you don’t want to lose a ton of points because you didn’t scream “Get Down!” at a terrorist before you had to fire upon him in a kill-or-get-killed situation, or get your legs injured and tediously spend ~45 minutes tediously walking throughout a level, you have to send in your fellow SWAT members so they can take the brunt of the situation. And when your fellow SWAT members can be taken out in half a second because enemy AI has instantaneous reflexes and eagle like sight, is not what you want to do, despite being something you have to do.
Because of the shitty AI, a lot of the small nitpicks become significantly worse. Sometimes, an enemy is sitting in the corner of some part of the map you might not know about or haven’t double checked. And if you’ve walked around a level for ~45 minutes only for an enemy to kill you, meaning you have to restart a mission for the umpteenth time, that minor problem suddenly becomes a massive rage inducing problem.
While you can order your squad members to handcuff people, you still have to report the person in, along with collecting dropped weapons as evidence and anyone who was either killed during the mission or killed or injured before you got there. And if you’re trying to reach the point threshold to properly complete a mission, all while your legs are injured, you’re now spending the next half hour slowly limping around any given mission.
Also, if I’m playing a professional SWAT member, why am I reacting this badly to gun recoil? I can even tap the mouse button without the gun suddenly finding itself aimed at the roof. And the spread for the guns seems way too far apart when I’m just firing off in short bursts.
Every now and again, one of your SWAT members can get caught up on the edge of a doorway or the side of a way when turning into certain hallways. You’ll inevitably notice this when you order your SWAT members to line up against a door, ready to enter on your command, and you sit there waiting for 10 minutes wondering why the rest of your SWAT team aren’t entering a room only to realize that one of them is somewhere in the map, stuck somewhere.
There are even SWAT snipers on a few levels that can give you info on certain people located in certain levels. You can even take control of one of these snipers and take out one of the enemies from a distance. These don’t deduct from your overall score, so I would recommend using the snipers as often as possible. It might be gaming the system, but when it comes to this games bullshit AI, you kinda have to.
I know this seems weird saying that SWAT 4 is still worth playing despite the fact that I ranted about it being atrociously unfair with it’s AI and the small accumulating problems that seem to just pile up, but SWAT 4 is worth playing to some degree. Just be aware of some of the bullshit problems this game has. If you can deal with the infuriating difficultly spikes and inconsistent friendly and enemy AI at the best of times, or have friends that think that playing as a member of SWAT is a fantastic idea and can overlook the games flaws to spend a couple of hours with friends to have a blast playing one of the better co-op games out there, SWAT 4 can be a lot of fun. Ironically, this is probably the most polished and mature game in the series up to this point.
SWAT 4 is both one of the best games that I’ve ever played and one of the most infuriating monitor smashing, keyboard snapping, stroke inducing games that I’ve played at the same time. How can a game be both of those things? Well, lets have a look, shall we.
There isn’t much of a story in the usual sense. Some of the mission briefings with have a few minor plot threads through out the game, but most of the the story that the game has is unique to each mission. Unlike previous installments of the franchise, where you followed the L.A.P.D. Branch of SWAT, SWAT 4 takes places in Los Angeles, California, the single player campaign taking place in the fictional East Coast city of Fairview (an amalgamation of New York City, Boston, a few other eastern cities). Taking place in the then far off future of 2008/2009. You can practice at the Riverside Training Facility, under the guidance of police Lieutenant Sunny Bonds, or jump right into the action.
Before every mission, you’re given the option to check your Objectives screen. This gives you a very throughout and detailed overlook of the situation, such as a briefing catching you up on the details, being able to listen to any related 911 calls, a map showing all of the entrances of the location and possibly the layout of the building that you can bring up in the pause menu, any known info on the supects, any civilians in the building, and a timeline of events. You can even choose which way you want to enter a building.
At the Equipment menu, you can choose the loadouts for yourself and your whole squad. The game comes with several loadouts included, but if you want to make your own personalized loadout, you can, and you save it. And you can copy any of the loadouts you’ve selected to the rest of your squad.
Your primary weapons include the Colt M4A1 Carbine, .45 SMG, Suppressed 9mm SMG, 9mm SMG, Nova Pump, M4 Super 90, GB36s Assault Rifle, AK-47, and Gal Sub machine Gun. And if you want to go in with a less lethal option, which is recommended in a few mission, are the Pepper-ball Gun, and Less-Lethal Shotgun, which fires sandbags.
Your secondary weapons include your standard guns such as M1911 Handgun, Colt Python Revolver, and 9mm Handgun. Less aggressive options include the Taser Stun Gun and Pepper Spray for the people who are refusing to be handcuffed or need some convincing to put down their weapon. Explosives include the Stinger Grenade cause quite a punch to anyone close to it, Flashbang, which blinds your enemies, and CS Gas, which can blind enemies with smoke and cause anyone close enough to it to go into a coughing fit.
If you come across locked doors, you have the Breaching Equipment, which includes a Shotgun that can breach locked doors by firing at the door handle or C2, which you can apply to the door around the same area, blowing the doors lock off.
Finally there is the Door Wedge, which you can used to prevent people from opening doors, essentially preventing them from escaping a certain way as you move around to another opening to a room, and the Optiwand, which lets you see under a door to check if there are any enemies in the room you want to enter.
To order your squad members around, there is a drop down menu that you can get to by holding down your right mouse button. You can order your team to follow you, move to wherever you’ve happened to aim at, to stack up at a door to check if it’s locked and to prepare to enter to room, or have them enter the room straight away. You can even separate your team, which is called “Gold” team, or “Element”, into two smaller teams, “Red” team and “Blue” team. This can help in certain strategies, such as them entering two doors of the same room, and taking on enemies from two different angles and having the element of surprise.
There are also few mode besides the campaign that you can try if you want some variety. There is Instant Action, in which you drop into the most recent mission that you’ve complete with the default gear. You can also create and play your own missions based off of the missions from the Single Player part of the game. There are a ton of options to choose from in this mode, including difficulty, whether or not you want the missions from the Single Player version of the level or a mix of objectives from a list, which entry point you want to start at and a time limit, and which load out you want to take in.
You can even choose to be a lone wolf or have a smaller amount of SWAT members on your team, and the amount of civilians there are in a level and the amount of and types of guns terrorists are holding. You can make any level as easy or insanely impossibly as you want, and is probably the most fun part of the single player experience.
One of the best features of SWAT 4 is the multiplayer. The multiplayer features several game modes, all of which are team-based. These include Barricaded Suspects, in which Teams gain points by arresting or neutralizing members of the other team, and whoever hits the score limit first or has the highest score when the round ends win, VIP Escort, in which a random member of the SWAT team is selected to be the VIP. The suspects must arrest the VIP and hold him for two minutes before they can execute him. SWAT must escort the VIP to the extraction point in the mission area while preventing suspects from arresting him.
Rapid Deployment, in which three to five bombs are placed throughout the map, and the SWAT team must locate and disable all of the within the time limit, and if they fail to do so, the suspects win. And Co-op, in you can play through all of the single-player missions with up to four other people taking place of the computer-controller SWAT officers.
Graphically, the game still holds up fairly well. Every location looks exactly like what it’s real world counterpoint would look like (I.E. Restaurant, Convenience Store, Medical Center, Jewelry Store, Run Down Apartments, etc.). Some levels even have a fantastic and creepy atmosphere that really drive home the point that you’re dealing with some pretty disturbed people, such as a level where a man has a kidnapped woman in his basement, and a level in an run down apartment building that has a cult in it.
What really stands out are the small details around each level that make the game world feel like the events in the game are actually happening, such as news reports on the radio of current and previous missions, and even in one mission, there is a live news report happening, giving away your SWAT team’s presence to the terrorists. The other squad members even comment on the situation as it’s unfolding along with occasionally commenting on certain things located around a location, and even give a few sarcastic remarks about the situation, location, and even about each other.
There’s even a few missions that have new objectives pop up as the mission goes on, giving the feeling as if the situation is unfolding before you. It’s small details like these that you wouldn’t even notice that make it seem like the developers were actually putting a lot of effort and love into each location.
The only minor complaint I have with the graphics are the mirrors, which look hilariously stretched and weird. But they do actually serve a purpose in the game, as a few spots in a few levels, you can use the mirror to spot enemies around corners.
SWAT 4 is also pretty impressive on the audio side too. At certain points, the game will appear like there is distant gunfire off in another part of the level, adding to the whole situation unfolding in front of you vibe the game is trying to give off, using what limitations the game has to make it seem like more is going on than possible. The soundtrack is dynamic to whatever situation is going on at the time. Whenever your team is breaching a room or coming into contact with enemies around the map, the music goes from the usual ambient music that plays when you’re exploring the area to a tense music that puts you on edge, really making it seem like a situation could go south any second.
Speaking of going south, the biggest flaw of SWAT 4 rears it’s ugly head. The thing that really brings the game down is it’s bullshit inconsistent enemy AI and absurd difficulty spikes. The first two levels are tutorial levels to ease you into the games concepts, but by the third or forth level, for some insane reason, the enemy difficulty spikes incredibly high, and a mere thug can take out your entire squad of 4 members with a 9mm handgun right as their going through a door, sometimes literally the first door of a map, simply by firing said handgun at them as they’re piling through the doorway. And it doesn’t help that every now and again a fellow SWAT member can be hung up on the side of some part of the level because the path finding got confused for half a second.
This can happen several times in a row, and then for no reason, you’re able to get through a mission with little to no difficulty. There can be 4 missions in a row that are incredibly difficult, and suddenly one is incredibly easy. And vice versa, where 4 mission are incredibly easy, and then for no reason, one mission is insanely hard. This is where another feature of the game, which is that the civilians and terrorists are randomly placed around the level, giving each level some level of replayability, becomes a curse. You’ll never know what happens next, making it even more difficult to predict where everyone is, making the difficulty spikes especially bad.
I’ve even failed a mission because a SWAT member was firing at a terrorist and killed a civilian. This happened multiple times. And that’s not even mentioning the infrequent cases of an enemy happening to clip through a wall and firing on me and killing me. Its like the game was 95% done, and all that was left was simply testing out the AI to make sure the game was balanced for players, only for the published to go “Lol, nope, we’ve got to publish this right now!”, making the game way too unbalanced. Either that, or the developers knew the game had too few levels or content and though that punishing AI was a way to combat that.
It doesn’t seem to help that changing the difficulty doesn’t seem to do much other than change the amount of points that you’re supposed to get by the end of the level. There are 4 difficulty levels. Easy is 0 points, meaning you can just run into every situation and fire off into every direction, and as long as you complete your mission goals, you can complete the level. Other difficulty levels include Normal, which is 50 points, Hard, which is 75 points, and Elite, which is 95 points. This is great is want to try and get through a level as close to procedure as you can, but I just wish there was an extra difficulty tab for enemy AI, maybe making the enemies more aggressive or strategic or something. As is, it feels like I have to abuse the games logic and rules to get through some of the levels.
While going through a level, you can also receive injuries from terrorists gunfire. I guess the point of this was realism, but it can make certain longer missions tedious, making it take an extra ~15 to ~30 minutes at least, and some missions literally impossible to complete without restarting them. There is one mission where you have to disarm bombs within a time limit, but you’d better not have one or both of your legs injured, because you have to restart the entire mission unless you’re somehow lucky enough to not get injured or injured with just enough time left, which I doubt.
Since you don’t want to lose a ton of points because you didn’t scream “Get Down!” at a terrorist before you had to fire upon him in a kill-or-get-killed situation, or get your legs injured and tediously spend ~45 minutes tediously walking throughout a level, you have to send in your fellow SWAT members so they can take the brunt of the situation. And when your fellow SWAT members can be taken out in half a second because enemy AI has instantaneous reflexes and eagle like sight, is not what you want to do, despite being something you have to do.
Because of the shitty AI, a lot of the small nitpicks become significantly worse. Sometimes, an enemy is sitting in the corner of some part of the map you might not know about or haven’t double checked. And if you’ve walked around a level for ~45 minutes only for an enemy to kill you, meaning you have to restart a mission for the umpteenth time, that minor problem suddenly becomes a massive rage inducing problem.
While you can order your squad members to handcuff people, you still have to report the person in, along with collecting dropped weapons as evidence and anyone who was either killed during the mission or killed or injured before you got there. And if you’re trying to reach the point threshold to properly complete a mission, all while your legs are injured, you’re now spending the next half hour slowly limping around any given mission.
Also, if I’m playing a professional SWAT member, why am I reacting this badly to gun recoil? I can even tap the mouse button without the gun suddenly finding itself aimed at the roof. And the spread for the guns seems way too far apart when I’m just firing off in short bursts.
Every now and again, one of your SWAT members can get caught up on the edge of a doorway or the side of a way when turning into certain hallways. You’ll inevitably notice this when you order your SWAT members to line up against a door, ready to enter on your command, and you sit there waiting for 10 minutes wondering why the rest of your SWAT team aren’t entering a room only to realize that one of them is somewhere in the map, stuck somewhere.
There are even SWAT snipers on a few levels that can give you info on certain people located in certain levels. You can even take control of one of these snipers and take out one of the enemies from a distance. These don’t deduct from your overall score, so I would recommend using the snipers as often as possible. It might be gaming the system, but when it comes to this games bullshit AI, you kinda have to.
I know this seems weird saying that SWAT 4 is still worth playing despite the fact that I ranted about it being atrociously unfair with it’s AI and the small accumulating problems that seem to just pile up, but SWAT 4 is worth playing to some degree. Just be aware of some of the bullshit problems this game has. If you can deal with the infuriating difficultly spikes and inconsistent friendly and enemy AI at the best of times, or have friends that think that playing as a member of SWAT is a fantastic idea and can overlook the games flaws to spend a couple of hours with friends to have a blast playing one of the better co-op games out there, SWAT 4 can be a lot of fun. Ironically, this is probably the most polished and mature game in the series up to this point.
2008
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/mod-corner-polar-payne-polar-paradise-max-payne-review/
The manual for the first mod (a pdf that comes in the zip file) joking refers to a sequel in the form of a parody of Max Payne 2’s title, which was coming out around the same time as the first mod. But lo and behold, 5 years later in 2008, a sequel did materialize, called Polar Paradise. Well, it’s not really a sequel so much as it’s a fleshed out reboot that goes for the more over-the-top comical style.
Polar Paradise is yet again set at the North Pole, with you playing Dinky once more, who has returned home on Christmas Eve to find that his family was kidnapped by Santa Claus and forced to work in his evil Toy Factory. With nothing to lose, Dinky sets out for vengeance.
There is a plethora of new enemies, penguins with bombs on their back that explode on contact, angry Elves with guns, and penguins flying small aircraft shooting you with snowballs. It also features new weapons, ranging from Kung Fu, to throwing snowballs, a flame thrower, a bomb launcher, a sniper rifle and an assault rifle that shoots candy. The guns act close to the actual weapons in Max Payne so much that they have he same icons. You could easily figure out which is which.
This time, instead of having one small level, Polar Paradise has a few larger levels, making it closer to 10-15 minutes long. The mod starts you out in an Elf village before moving on to Santa’s workshop, which used some of the Santa’s Workshop cliches you’d expect you see from a parody of the holidays.
There’s even a bonus level where you snowboard to escape Santa’s Workshop. It’s obviously a bit clunky since Max Payne wasn’t designed for it, but it’s playable (kinda), and the fact that it exists amuses me to no end.
If you’re into the Christmas cheer, and you want something short to play in between hanging out with family for the holidays. Polar Paradise is worth checking out, taking at most 20 minutes to play
The manual for the first mod (a pdf that comes in the zip file) joking refers to a sequel in the form of a parody of Max Payne 2’s title, which was coming out around the same time as the first mod. But lo and behold, 5 years later in 2008, a sequel did materialize, called Polar Paradise. Well, it’s not really a sequel so much as it’s a fleshed out reboot that goes for the more over-the-top comical style.
Polar Paradise is yet again set at the North Pole, with you playing Dinky once more, who has returned home on Christmas Eve to find that his family was kidnapped by Santa Claus and forced to work in his evil Toy Factory. With nothing to lose, Dinky sets out for vengeance.
There is a plethora of new enemies, penguins with bombs on their back that explode on contact, angry Elves with guns, and penguins flying small aircraft shooting you with snowballs. It also features new weapons, ranging from Kung Fu, to throwing snowballs, a flame thrower, a bomb launcher, a sniper rifle and an assault rifle that shoots candy. The guns act close to the actual weapons in Max Payne so much that they have he same icons. You could easily figure out which is which.
This time, instead of having one small level, Polar Paradise has a few larger levels, making it closer to 10-15 minutes long. The mod starts you out in an Elf village before moving on to Santa’s workshop, which used some of the Santa’s Workshop cliches you’d expect you see from a parody of the holidays.
There’s even a bonus level where you snowboard to escape Santa’s Workshop. It’s obviously a bit clunky since Max Payne wasn’t designed for it, but it’s playable (kinda), and the fact that it exists amuses me to no end.
If you’re into the Christmas cheer, and you want something short to play in between hanging out with family for the holidays. Polar Paradise is worth checking out, taking at most 20 minutes to play
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/12/11/daze-before-christmas-review/
Much like there is a lot of Christmas themed media, such as movies, books, music, there was bound to be some Christmas themed video game to try and make bank off of the holiday. And one of those games was Daze before Christmas. And already I have a complaint. Why isn’t is called “The Daze Before Christmas”? Because I just naturally call it that anyway and it just sounds nicer. But I digress, let’s jump into the game.
Our story follows Santa Claus, right as December rolls around, and Louse the Mouse has dastardly plans to prevent Christmas from happening. So Louse the Mouse gets help from his motley crew of creatures, which features Mr. Weather, The TimeKeeper, and the Evil Snowman (amazingly original names, I know), as they execute their plans when Santa is asleep. The Evil Snowman scared the all of the elves away, and The TimeKeeper stole parts from all of Santa’s machines. But that wasn’t enough for Louse the Mouse, as he stole all of the kids presents, and curse them all with a spell. When Santa wakes up, he finds that everything is not right, and has to spend the next 24 days before Christmas making everything right.
The manual puts it a little more eloquently as a rhyming poem.
Bizarrely, the Mega Drive/Genesis version was exclusive to Australia of all countries, and the SNES version had exactly one person porting it over to that console to get it released on time, and that version was exclusive to both Australia and Europe. You would think that something as specific and niche as a Christmas themed platformer would be released in more countries so it could recoup the cost the development of something so specific, but alas, only Australia and Europe were blessed with the release of Daze Before Christmas. From what I hear, America was going to get the SNES version, but the U.S. Division of Sunsoft was shut down before they could release it.
The whole game is pretty short. Sure, there might be 24 levels to represent the 24 days that it takes for Santa to save Christmas, but each is only 2 or 3 minutes at most, and that’s if you don’t screw up, which is rare. Screwing up is kinda difficult to do in this game since the whole game is pretty easy. The boss battles are a little more difficult, since it requires memorizing a pattern unique to easy boss, but those are pretty easy too. The harder difficulties aren’t too hard in terms of difficulty either. That’s probably because it’s aimed at children, so I can’t really complain about the difficulty.
The game comes with all of your standard sidescroller elements from the time. You have a health bar, represented by 5 Santa hats, lives, represented by Santa’s Face, and points, which you can get by picking up Blue Presents, throwing presents into children’s chimneys (I’ll be talking about this specifically later on), and defeating enemies.
There are some power-ups that you can collect too. The Lightning Bolt that let’s you throw fire, which can be used in snow filled levels to help your reindeer escape. However, the most noteworthy powerup is the Tea, which lets you transform into the Anti-Claus. I’ve also seen it referred to as a “potion” in the manual along with it being called a tea, as well as a coffee, so I’ll be using those interchangeably.
Apparently you can destroy all of the presents that Santa created when you’re the Anti-Claus, preventing you from getting more points, and the children from getting their presents. Although I never really used the Anti-Claus that much since regular Santa has a more useful (albeit short) ranged attack.
The camera feels way too zoomed in, and I’ve accidentally jumped on something in the level that hurts you or into a void that straight up kills you and takes a life away, or accidentally getting in the way of an enemies attack or running into an enemy because I couldn’t see where I was jumping or running.
There is a two-player option, although isn’t not all that fun. It’s kind of similar to that of the original Super Mario Bros for the NES. Each player takes over every other level, or if you die. Unless you had no other games at the time, I don’t see anyone playing this mode. And since it’s incredibly easy to find a lot of the classic sidescrollers from the time with a 2-player mode, I imagine it’s very hard to convince anyone that they should play Daze Before Christmas over anything else.
The game comes with infinite continues, making dying a bit pointless. The only thing it effects are the points, resetting it to zero when you lose all of your lives, so unless you’re the type of person who wants to try and get the highest score possible, it shouldn’t matter too much.
There are a few mildly amusing things found throughout the game, such as a present wrapping machine that you go through that wraps Santa in a box and wrapping, and a few of the loading for screens have some nice and funny pixel art. It adds some nice flourish to the game, but it doesn’t really save the rest of the game from being underwhelming.
The music ranges from forgettable and mediocre to actually kinda catchy, but you’re not going to remember it outside of playing the game. Probably the best music is when you play as Anti-Claus. It’s all upbeat and jazzy.
Weirdly enough, every couple of levels are broken up by a section where you have to drop presents that you’ve collected in the last couple of levels into the chimneys of all the good boys and girls, all while having to avoid whatever happens to flying through the air. While it’s not weird that Santa does this, it’s weird that this is not near the end of the game where, you know, it would be Christmas Eve, and an appropriate time for Santa to be doing this. It just make it seem like he’s dropping off presents all through December instead of just on Christmas Eve. It’s a fun section to play, and the developers were probably just using it to break up the levels, but I feel like that’s what the boss levels should be for.
The best part of the game is that some of the sprite work can be quite nice, and the best of it can be seen as the intro screen to each of the levels.
Daze Before Christmas might have some decent ideas and a nice sense of humor, but it can’t escape the fact that it’s just an average sidescroller. Considering how few good Christmas games there are, there’s not much choice for something to play around the holidays, with most games just having a Christmas coat of paint that only appear when it actually gets close Christmas, and that’s if you’re lucky. So if you’re in the mood to play something jolly and festive for the holidays, then you could a lot worse than Daze Before Christmas.
Much like there is a lot of Christmas themed media, such as movies, books, music, there was bound to be some Christmas themed video game to try and make bank off of the holiday. And one of those games was Daze before Christmas. And already I have a complaint. Why isn’t is called “The Daze Before Christmas”? Because I just naturally call it that anyway and it just sounds nicer. But I digress, let’s jump into the game.
Our story follows Santa Claus, right as December rolls around, and Louse the Mouse has dastardly plans to prevent Christmas from happening. So Louse the Mouse gets help from his motley crew of creatures, which features Mr. Weather, The TimeKeeper, and the Evil Snowman (amazingly original names, I know), as they execute their plans when Santa is asleep. The Evil Snowman scared the all of the elves away, and The TimeKeeper stole parts from all of Santa’s machines. But that wasn’t enough for Louse the Mouse, as he stole all of the kids presents, and curse them all with a spell. When Santa wakes up, he finds that everything is not right, and has to spend the next 24 days before Christmas making everything right.
The manual puts it a little more eloquently as a rhyming poem.
Bizarrely, the Mega Drive/Genesis version was exclusive to Australia of all countries, and the SNES version had exactly one person porting it over to that console to get it released on time, and that version was exclusive to both Australia and Europe. You would think that something as specific and niche as a Christmas themed platformer would be released in more countries so it could recoup the cost the development of something so specific, but alas, only Australia and Europe were blessed with the release of Daze Before Christmas. From what I hear, America was going to get the SNES version, but the U.S. Division of Sunsoft was shut down before they could release it.
The whole game is pretty short. Sure, there might be 24 levels to represent the 24 days that it takes for Santa to save Christmas, but each is only 2 or 3 minutes at most, and that’s if you don’t screw up, which is rare. Screwing up is kinda difficult to do in this game since the whole game is pretty easy. The boss battles are a little more difficult, since it requires memorizing a pattern unique to easy boss, but those are pretty easy too. The harder difficulties aren’t too hard in terms of difficulty either. That’s probably because it’s aimed at children, so I can’t really complain about the difficulty.
The game comes with all of your standard sidescroller elements from the time. You have a health bar, represented by 5 Santa hats, lives, represented by Santa’s Face, and points, which you can get by picking up Blue Presents, throwing presents into children’s chimneys (I’ll be talking about this specifically later on), and defeating enemies.
There are some power-ups that you can collect too. The Lightning Bolt that let’s you throw fire, which can be used in snow filled levels to help your reindeer escape. However, the most noteworthy powerup is the Tea, which lets you transform into the Anti-Claus. I’ve also seen it referred to as a “potion” in the manual along with it being called a tea, as well as a coffee, so I’ll be using those interchangeably.
Apparently you can destroy all of the presents that Santa created when you’re the Anti-Claus, preventing you from getting more points, and the children from getting their presents. Although I never really used the Anti-Claus that much since regular Santa has a more useful (albeit short) ranged attack.
The camera feels way too zoomed in, and I’ve accidentally jumped on something in the level that hurts you or into a void that straight up kills you and takes a life away, or accidentally getting in the way of an enemies attack or running into an enemy because I couldn’t see where I was jumping or running.
There is a two-player option, although isn’t not all that fun. It’s kind of similar to that of the original Super Mario Bros for the NES. Each player takes over every other level, or if you die. Unless you had no other games at the time, I don’t see anyone playing this mode. And since it’s incredibly easy to find a lot of the classic sidescrollers from the time with a 2-player mode, I imagine it’s very hard to convince anyone that they should play Daze Before Christmas over anything else.
The game comes with infinite continues, making dying a bit pointless. The only thing it effects are the points, resetting it to zero when you lose all of your lives, so unless you’re the type of person who wants to try and get the highest score possible, it shouldn’t matter too much.
There are a few mildly amusing things found throughout the game, such as a present wrapping machine that you go through that wraps Santa in a box and wrapping, and a few of the loading for screens have some nice and funny pixel art. It adds some nice flourish to the game, but it doesn’t really save the rest of the game from being underwhelming.
The music ranges from forgettable and mediocre to actually kinda catchy, but you’re not going to remember it outside of playing the game. Probably the best music is when you play as Anti-Claus. It’s all upbeat and jazzy.
Weirdly enough, every couple of levels are broken up by a section where you have to drop presents that you’ve collected in the last couple of levels into the chimneys of all the good boys and girls, all while having to avoid whatever happens to flying through the air. While it’s not weird that Santa does this, it’s weird that this is not near the end of the game where, you know, it would be Christmas Eve, and an appropriate time for Santa to be doing this. It just make it seem like he’s dropping off presents all through December instead of just on Christmas Eve. It’s a fun section to play, and the developers were probably just using it to break up the levels, but I feel like that’s what the boss levels should be for.
The best part of the game is that some of the sprite work can be quite nice, and the best of it can be seen as the intro screen to each of the levels.
Daze Before Christmas might have some decent ideas and a nice sense of humor, but it can’t escape the fact that it’s just an average sidescroller. Considering how few good Christmas games there are, there’s not much choice for something to play around the holidays, with most games just having a Christmas coat of paint that only appear when it actually gets close Christmas, and that’s if you’re lucky. So if you’re in the mood to play something jolly and festive for the holidays, then you could a lot worse than Daze Before Christmas.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/a-story-about-my-uncle-2014-review/
Every now and again I come across a great game that focuses on it’s story instead of combat, such as A Story About My Uncle, which is a game that has no combat, and instead has the player leaping from platform to platform and experiencing the world it has developed.
Told through a father recounting a story told by a father to his daughter, the game follows a young boy who goes to look from his missing uncle Fred. After finding a a mysterious suit that lets you jump incredibly high and far, the main character soon finds himself in another world filled with a strange frog people that he becomes friendly with, along with encountering a few dangers along with the way.
Most of the gameplay involves the grappling hook mechanic, which feels incredibly smooth and satisfying. It’s like a smaller scale first person Spider-Man game. Along with the grappling hook, you can occasionally leap from platform to platform with the help of your suit, and half way through the game, you can get rocky boots that add a rocket jump, giving you some extra help with certain platforms.
Near the end of the game, it can go up in difficulty, and the young audience that this is aimed at might have some trouble getting through it. But the whole game is never unreasonably hard with it’s puzzles.
The game art stands out, and makes up for the games obvious lower budget. It starts out looking nice, but half way through the game, it really shines and shows how gorgeous the game can be. I can definitely see myself using a screenshot or two, or some of the art for this game as the background on my computer. I should also not that the soundtrack is also pretty nice, and compliments the rest of the game really well, really adding to the whole experience.
Every now and again I don’t quite know where to go due to some of the floating rocks you have to swing across not being immediately obvious, taking a moment or two to for me to find them. Sometimes, one of the rocks can be hard to determine how far away they are, leading to a few leaps of faith before getting it right.
There is some replayability in the game, with a few some unlockables both in the form of Time Trials you get after completing the game and collectables tucked throughout the game that give you stuff, including being able to change the color of your grappling hook, an Acrobatic and Adidas mode, along with something called Goat Mode (which is almost to be expected since this game is from the same guys as Goat Simulator after all).
A Story About My Uncle is a fun and pleasant experience the whole way through, and I found myself going back and playing it a second time a while after finishing it. I’d easily recommend this game.
Every now and again I come across a great game that focuses on it’s story instead of combat, such as A Story About My Uncle, which is a game that has no combat, and instead has the player leaping from platform to platform and experiencing the world it has developed.
Told through a father recounting a story told by a father to his daughter, the game follows a young boy who goes to look from his missing uncle Fred. After finding a a mysterious suit that lets you jump incredibly high and far, the main character soon finds himself in another world filled with a strange frog people that he becomes friendly with, along with encountering a few dangers along with the way.
Most of the gameplay involves the grappling hook mechanic, which feels incredibly smooth and satisfying. It’s like a smaller scale first person Spider-Man game. Along with the grappling hook, you can occasionally leap from platform to platform with the help of your suit, and half way through the game, you can get rocky boots that add a rocket jump, giving you some extra help with certain platforms.
Near the end of the game, it can go up in difficulty, and the young audience that this is aimed at might have some trouble getting through it. But the whole game is never unreasonably hard with it’s puzzles.
The game art stands out, and makes up for the games obvious lower budget. It starts out looking nice, but half way through the game, it really shines and shows how gorgeous the game can be. I can definitely see myself using a screenshot or two, or some of the art for this game as the background on my computer. I should also not that the soundtrack is also pretty nice, and compliments the rest of the game really well, really adding to the whole experience.
Every now and again I don’t quite know where to go due to some of the floating rocks you have to swing across not being immediately obvious, taking a moment or two to for me to find them. Sometimes, one of the rocks can be hard to determine how far away they are, leading to a few leaps of faith before getting it right.
There is some replayability in the game, with a few some unlockables both in the form of Time Trials you get after completing the game and collectables tucked throughout the game that give you stuff, including being able to change the color of your grappling hook, an Acrobatic and Adidas mode, along with something called Goat Mode (which is almost to be expected since this game is from the same guys as Goat Simulator after all).
A Story About My Uncle is a fun and pleasant experience the whole way through, and I found myself going back and playing it a second time a while after finishing it. I’d easily recommend this game.