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
2006
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/04/16/mod-corner-katana-max-payne-review/
Katana is an ambitious mod for the first Max Payne, introducing a world and characters that are surprisingly fleshed out. Obviously inspired by the likes of The Matrix, Ghost In The Shell, Blade Runner, and Akira, so much so that the mod uses the soundtrack from Akira directly, as well as audio from several other sources, Despite that, the mod manages to feel like it’s own world.
The story is pretty thorough, so much so that the mod comes with a PDF explaining the story and characters in depth. The mod feels like it takes place in the middle of a story already in progress, so even though the PDF isn’t necessary to enjoy the mod, it gives the mod a lot of context.
But to summarize it the best i can, you play as an unnamed character who was raised as nobility, and is a trained soldier who became an assassin. His real memories were replaced by false ones by a shady organization called “The Order”. Our main character is now on the run from “The Order”, who has it’s eyes everywhere, and is now being hunted by them. As he makes his escapes, he comes across characters who seem to know a lot more than they’re letting on. All of this story was way more than was either necessary or expected for a small project like this, but is gladly appreciated.
Since the mod is called Katana, it’s pretty obvious that one of the new weapons for this mod is a Katana. To show it off, the mod implements another mod, which is Kung Fu 3.0. This means that hand-to-hand combat features a lot of acrobatic moves, such as running up walls and leaps. The only time hand-to-hand combat is a problem is with boss battles. The first boss requires melee combat, and takes away your guns during it. I’m pretty sure it does that to show off the combat.
And when the boss hits you, he takes off huge chunks of your health. You’ll be using up your pills pretty quickly, and will probably have to reload quite a bit. Thankfully, the rest of the boss battles let you use your guns. While this does make the bosses bullet sponges and easier to defeat, I’d rather that then having to reload a thousand times, wasting hours of my life.
Graphically, the whole mod is pretty impressive for a tiny team of modders. Most of the levels have lots of smaller details scattered around them, along with the odd easter egg. Some of the set pieces in the mod stand out and are fun to experience.
For some reason, cutscenes are unskippable, which means if you have to reload, you have to re-watch it over. And if you’re having difficulty with an enemy or forgot to save in a while, it’s going to get incredibly tedious. The base game lets you skip the cutscenes, so i don’t know why this mod doesn’t give you the ability to do it.
Katana surprisingly comes with voice acting, and it’s pretty amateurish and clearly recorded on several microphones of varying quality by several people who aren’t professional voice actors. But for a mod that came out around 2003, there wasn’t much to compete with, and it makes for a nice addition, especially when other mods at the time didn’t have it.
With a mix of unique ambition and a surprisingly high quality execution, Katana is definitely worth checking out. If this mod had been picked up and was done by a professional team, it could have been something interesting. But since it remains a relatively unknown mod for Max Payne that has a “To Be Continued…” ending, it’s probably going to fade off into obscurity. Considering that Max Payne is relatively cheap on Steam and pretty easy to get working on modern systems, this mod is definitely worth checking out.
Katana is an ambitious mod for the first Max Payne, introducing a world and characters that are surprisingly fleshed out. Obviously inspired by the likes of The Matrix, Ghost In The Shell, Blade Runner, and Akira, so much so that the mod uses the soundtrack from Akira directly, as well as audio from several other sources, Despite that, the mod manages to feel like it’s own world.
The story is pretty thorough, so much so that the mod comes with a PDF explaining the story and characters in depth. The mod feels like it takes place in the middle of a story already in progress, so even though the PDF isn’t necessary to enjoy the mod, it gives the mod a lot of context.
But to summarize it the best i can, you play as an unnamed character who was raised as nobility, and is a trained soldier who became an assassin. His real memories were replaced by false ones by a shady organization called “The Order”. Our main character is now on the run from “The Order”, who has it’s eyes everywhere, and is now being hunted by them. As he makes his escapes, he comes across characters who seem to know a lot more than they’re letting on. All of this story was way more than was either necessary or expected for a small project like this, but is gladly appreciated.
Since the mod is called Katana, it’s pretty obvious that one of the new weapons for this mod is a Katana. To show it off, the mod implements another mod, which is Kung Fu 3.0. This means that hand-to-hand combat features a lot of acrobatic moves, such as running up walls and leaps. The only time hand-to-hand combat is a problem is with boss battles. The first boss requires melee combat, and takes away your guns during it. I’m pretty sure it does that to show off the combat.
And when the boss hits you, he takes off huge chunks of your health. You’ll be using up your pills pretty quickly, and will probably have to reload quite a bit. Thankfully, the rest of the boss battles let you use your guns. While this does make the bosses bullet sponges and easier to defeat, I’d rather that then having to reload a thousand times, wasting hours of my life.
Graphically, the whole mod is pretty impressive for a tiny team of modders. Most of the levels have lots of smaller details scattered around them, along with the odd easter egg. Some of the set pieces in the mod stand out and are fun to experience.
For some reason, cutscenes are unskippable, which means if you have to reload, you have to re-watch it over. And if you’re having difficulty with an enemy or forgot to save in a while, it’s going to get incredibly tedious. The base game lets you skip the cutscenes, so i don’t know why this mod doesn’t give you the ability to do it.
Katana surprisingly comes with voice acting, and it’s pretty amateurish and clearly recorded on several microphones of varying quality by several people who aren’t professional voice actors. But for a mod that came out around 2003, there wasn’t much to compete with, and it makes for a nice addition, especially when other mods at the time didn’t have it.
With a mix of unique ambition and a surprisingly high quality execution, Katana is definitely worth checking out. If this mod had been picked up and was done by a professional team, it could have been something interesting. But since it remains a relatively unknown mod for Max Payne that has a “To Be Continued…” ending, it’s probably going to fade off into obscurity. Considering that Max Payne is relatively cheap on Steam and pretty easy to get working on modern systems, this mod is definitely worth checking out.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/the-vanishing-of-ethan-carter-2014-2015-pc-xbox-one-ps4-review/
Over the years, video games that have a lot of walking around and exploring an interesting or beautiful environment with minimal gameplay were given the nickname of “walking simulators”. While a few of them might the deserve the title, quite a few of them just use exploration as a way of getting to what gameplay and story there is. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter might look like another “walking simulator” from afar, but it has a lot more going for it than just it’s nice looking environment.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a horror adventure game developed and published by The Astronauts. It was originally released in 2014 for PC on the Unreal 3 Engine, and was re-released in 2015 as the Redux version, updating the game to the Unreal 4 Engine, and was released on the PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Switch.
You play as Paul Prospero, an occult minded detective who receives a disturbing letter from a boy named Ethan Carter. Thinking that Ethan could be in trouble, Paul goes to Ethan’s hometown of Red Creek Valley to check on him only to discover that a supernatural force in the town has take over the minds of Ethan’s family, and that Ethan may be in worse danger than he first thought.
Beyond the initial premise, the game doesn’t hold your hand, making you figure out the story on your own at your own pace by giving you access to several areas in Red Creek Valley, along with a puzzle in each area to solve that gives you story and clues as to what is going on that are solvable in any order for you to solve. Which means that if you get stuck solving a puzzle in one area, you can go to another area and solve another puzzle and come back to the puzzle you were stuck on.
None of the puzzles feel unfair, and at worse, are a little tedious. Which is most pronounced in one section where you have to go through an abandoned mine collecting several things, and what you’re collecting blends into the surroundings, making it more frustrating than it should.
Graphically, the game is gorgeous. During the games development, the development team used a process called photogrammetry in to create the look of the game, a process in which several photographs are taken of a real world object and are used to make the in-game object look like the real-world counterpart. The result is that the environment looks borderline photo-realistic (pun intended), and i really feels like you’re walking through a small almost forgotten American town.
Almost every part of the game is wallpaper worthy. I don’t think there will be or has been a user that won’t take a screenshot from the game or from online, and not put it as their wallpaper after playing this game. The only thing bringing it down are the character models. While not looking bad, they do look out of place in the game environment, but they weren’t bad enough to destroy the aesthetic of the game.
On the audio side, the game is just as pleasant to listen to as to look at. Walking through Red Creek Valley’s locations is very calming, with trees and grass rustling, wind blowing, and streams flowing. The game’s soundtrack only adds to this. Apparently the developers agree, because the Xbox One and possibly PC versions are getting a “free roam” mode in which you can just walk around Red Creek Valley.
The year after the release of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, a updated version of the game called The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux came out, moving the game from Unreal Engine 3 to Unreal Engine, coming with a lot of new graphical bells and whistles that the new engine had. The content remains the same, but it comes with a better autosave feature, saving your progress after you find each clue instead of saving the game after finishing whole parts of the game, making the game much easier to jump back in to after quitting, and it also makes backtracking better late into the game, making the Redux version the version of the game to get.
There is also VR DLC, released for $10. I haven’t checked it out, but from everything I’ve seen, it seemed to get a mixed to positive response. I imagine it would be quite nice to see some of these environments up close and in detail.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is about 6 hours long, maybe a bit longer for the more experienced, but it’s definitely a highly polished game that’s beautiful visually and sound wise, has great puzzles, and a mystery that’s engaging from beginning to end. This game is highly recommended.
Over the years, video games that have a lot of walking around and exploring an interesting or beautiful environment with minimal gameplay were given the nickname of “walking simulators”. While a few of them might the deserve the title, quite a few of them just use exploration as a way of getting to what gameplay and story there is. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter might look like another “walking simulator” from afar, but it has a lot more going for it than just it’s nice looking environment.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a horror adventure game developed and published by The Astronauts. It was originally released in 2014 for PC on the Unreal 3 Engine, and was re-released in 2015 as the Redux version, updating the game to the Unreal 4 Engine, and was released on the PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Switch.
You play as Paul Prospero, an occult minded detective who receives a disturbing letter from a boy named Ethan Carter. Thinking that Ethan could be in trouble, Paul goes to Ethan’s hometown of Red Creek Valley to check on him only to discover that a supernatural force in the town has take over the minds of Ethan’s family, and that Ethan may be in worse danger than he first thought.
Beyond the initial premise, the game doesn’t hold your hand, making you figure out the story on your own at your own pace by giving you access to several areas in Red Creek Valley, along with a puzzle in each area to solve that gives you story and clues as to what is going on that are solvable in any order for you to solve. Which means that if you get stuck solving a puzzle in one area, you can go to another area and solve another puzzle and come back to the puzzle you were stuck on.
None of the puzzles feel unfair, and at worse, are a little tedious. Which is most pronounced in one section where you have to go through an abandoned mine collecting several things, and what you’re collecting blends into the surroundings, making it more frustrating than it should.
Graphically, the game is gorgeous. During the games development, the development team used a process called photogrammetry in to create the look of the game, a process in which several photographs are taken of a real world object and are used to make the in-game object look like the real-world counterpart. The result is that the environment looks borderline photo-realistic (pun intended), and i really feels like you’re walking through a small almost forgotten American town.
Almost every part of the game is wallpaper worthy. I don’t think there will be or has been a user that won’t take a screenshot from the game or from online, and not put it as their wallpaper after playing this game. The only thing bringing it down are the character models. While not looking bad, they do look out of place in the game environment, but they weren’t bad enough to destroy the aesthetic of the game.
On the audio side, the game is just as pleasant to listen to as to look at. Walking through Red Creek Valley’s locations is very calming, with trees and grass rustling, wind blowing, and streams flowing. The game’s soundtrack only adds to this. Apparently the developers agree, because the Xbox One and possibly PC versions are getting a “free roam” mode in which you can just walk around Red Creek Valley.
The year after the release of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, a updated version of the game called The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux came out, moving the game from Unreal Engine 3 to Unreal Engine, coming with a lot of new graphical bells and whistles that the new engine had. The content remains the same, but it comes with a better autosave feature, saving your progress after you find each clue instead of saving the game after finishing whole parts of the game, making the game much easier to jump back in to after quitting, and it also makes backtracking better late into the game, making the Redux version the version of the game to get.
There is also VR DLC, released for $10. I haven’t checked it out, but from everything I’ve seen, it seemed to get a mixed to positive response. I imagine it would be quite nice to see some of these environments up close and in detail.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is about 6 hours long, maybe a bit longer for the more experienced, but it’s definitely a highly polished game that’s beautiful visually and sound wise, has great puzzles, and a mystery that’s engaging from beginning to end. This game is highly recommended.
2016
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2017/06/28/mod-corner-ancient-aliens-doom-ii-hell-on-earth/
Are aliens really out there, somewhere in the universe? Do they ever visit out ancestors hundreds if not thousands of years ago? Did they influence mythology or legends? Do they keep visiting us? And why do they keep abducting cows and giving people anal probes? We may never know. But in the mean time, lets look at a mod that might give us an answer.
Ancient Aliens’ basic plot setup has you going on a very tounge-in-cheek mission to investigate if aliens do exist, and is quite obviously poking gun at how silly a lot of conspiracy theories are at trying to shove aliens into every even slightly unanswered question of history. The story is simply the through line of the mod, but it delivers some amusing fluff to a mod that would have otherwise been a themed map pack otherwise.
All of the maps are pretty solid and well designed. It uses a mix of the earth tones of Mesoamerica for Earth levels and bright purples, teals, and pinks for the the out there alien architectures. It’s all hermetically pleasing and definitely gives the visuals some variety. The only downside is that the whole mod is on the more difficult side of things, with the mod having a ton of monsters on the later levels. While it doesn’t feel unfair, there are going to be a few more deaths for more casual Doom fans.
A few of the monsters from Doom have received a visual makeover to fit the aesthetic of the mod, and their new looks do a good job of mixing the original designs with what the mod is going for. There are a few new ones too, such as a fast moving invisible guy in a robotic looking suit who only appears when he’s shooting at you, and a hexahedron looking monster with faces on each side that shoots rockets.
Another thing this mod has is an original soundtrack that fits the mood of the mod, fitting the bizarre fever dream that is this mod, and is currently on sale for only a few bucks over on the composers Bandcamp.
Amongst all of these compliments, i have only one real complaint, and that is the mod does get a tad bit hard in the second half. All in all, Ancient Aliens gets a recommendation.
Are aliens really out there, somewhere in the universe? Do they ever visit out ancestors hundreds if not thousands of years ago? Did they influence mythology or legends? Do they keep visiting us? And why do they keep abducting cows and giving people anal probes? We may never know. But in the mean time, lets look at a mod that might give us an answer.
Ancient Aliens’ basic plot setup has you going on a very tounge-in-cheek mission to investigate if aliens do exist, and is quite obviously poking gun at how silly a lot of conspiracy theories are at trying to shove aliens into every even slightly unanswered question of history. The story is simply the through line of the mod, but it delivers some amusing fluff to a mod that would have otherwise been a themed map pack otherwise.
All of the maps are pretty solid and well designed. It uses a mix of the earth tones of Mesoamerica for Earth levels and bright purples, teals, and pinks for the the out there alien architectures. It’s all hermetically pleasing and definitely gives the visuals some variety. The only downside is that the whole mod is on the more difficult side of things, with the mod having a ton of monsters on the later levels. While it doesn’t feel unfair, there are going to be a few more deaths for more casual Doom fans.
A few of the monsters from Doom have received a visual makeover to fit the aesthetic of the mod, and their new looks do a good job of mixing the original designs with what the mod is going for. There are a few new ones too, such as a fast moving invisible guy in a robotic looking suit who only appears when he’s shooting at you, and a hexahedron looking monster with faces on each side that shoots rockets.
Another thing this mod has is an original soundtrack that fits the mood of the mod, fitting the bizarre fever dream that is this mod, and is currently on sale for only a few bucks over on the composers Bandcamp.
Amongst all of these compliments, i have only one real complaint, and that is the mod does get a tad bit hard in the second half. All in all, Ancient Aliens gets a recommendation.
2007
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/06/13/a-look-back-at-the-various-ports-of-myst/
NOTE: This has been slightly edited from the original but the contents are 99% the same.
You would think out of all the consoles that would be perfect for a port of the original Myst, the Nintendo DS would in the top 5. It has touch controls, which would be perfect to walk through Myst and solve it's puzzles, and it's portable, which is a nice way to play the game, especially since the game is low stress and you can save anywhere, and it's not like the console didn't have it's fair share of point-and-click adventure games along with adjacent genres like Visual Novels and Hidden Object games. And it's top screen would be great for things like a map for whatever Age you were in, optional hints, and easily showing which page you've picked up without being intrusive on the bottom screen.
But somehow this version of the game ends up being absolutely awful and the problems begin right off the bat.
Both the audio and video have been compressed to the point that the game now looks and sounds awful. I'm fine with each screen being compressed since it was made for something as small as the DS screen, but the compressed sound really ruins the experience. The sound chip in the DS was never the best, but there have been games that have sounded fine, so I don't know how this ended up sounding this bad. And it only gets more grating as the game goes on.
And it’s not like this is a minor nitpick since having the sound be this bad actually affects the gameplay. The puzzles in the Selenitic Age are all based around sound, which means that there is no excuse as to why the game sounds this bad.
Just like the PSP version of Myst, the DS version is missing the flyby videos for each Age. While the PSP had about 1.8 gigabytes to work with, the DS was limited to 512 megabytes at the absolute biggest, so there did have to be some compromise. But considering what the development team did with that with the PSP version of Myst, that compromise didn't have to be there, but more on that later.
But for an actual nitpick, the intro movie for this version of Myst has Comic Sans for the credits. I know that Comic Sans has received a lot of hate over the years, mostly due to people misusing it, but did the developers really have to use Comic Sans of all things? Not something like New Times Roman? It doesn’t even fit with the games tone of aesthetic, which is extra bad since Myst is centered around books of all things. I know it’s kinda pointless, and it was probably chosen because it pops out on the screen, but it still irks me.
And that’s not even the last of it, as the gameplay of Myst, what little it had, also gets a downgrade. Literally the only interactivity that Myst has was clicking on a still image to interact with something, clicking on a still image to move around, or clicking on a still image to pick something up.
In the DS version it took me a couple of taps on the screen to figure out what what exact pixel that I was supposed to click on the be able to do anything. Imagine trying to now only solve the sound puzzles of the Selenitic Age with audio that makes it hard to do so, but having to try and get through the maze twice with these controls is unbearable, even just by thinking about it. The Selenitic Age is borderline unplayable.
But it’s not like this version of Myst is completely without merit. This version does come with a Map that you can easily bring up by tapping the map icon that displays on the top screen showing off whatever location that you’re currently in. I don’t know why it’s not there permanently, but whatever. Whatever page you’ve picked up and are now holding onto are shown in a square instead of just changing the cursor to a hand holding a colored piece of paper, which would have been awful on the DS screen.
The game even come with a camera feature that lets you takes a picture of whatever screen that you’re currently on and displays it on the top screen. It’s limited to one shot at a time, but it’s still nice that it’s in here and can be helpful for puzzles. It comes with the ‘Zip Mode’ that lets you get through areas that you’ve already explored more quickly, and it even comes with a notepad that you can write notes in. You have to type thing out on an onscreen typewriter, which fits aesthetically, but so would have being able to use the stylus to write in a diary or journal. It’s still a good feature.
But just as I was able to say something good about this port of the game, the problems show up again and are even worse.
Just like the PSP port, this also comes with Rime, which was introduced in the original realMyst from the year 2000. It looks just as out of place in this version too, since it's from a game with a completely different engine and aesthetic. And just like the PSP port, it's not only introduced in the same way, with the game just plopping you into the new content without the context that realMyst gave it, but it's done way worse. Not only is it just as awkward to make your way through the Age due to it not being designed to be played as still images like the original was, but now it has the awful controls of the DS version.
Plus the DS version looks much worse that the PSP, since I can barely see anything with just how dark and grey the new area is. And if I wasn't sure if the puzzle introduced in the PSP version was broken, I didn't even try in this version. This whole section could have easily been cut, and should have. I would much rather have the fly-by videos from the original and maybe some better sounds.
It also doesn't help that the homebrew community has ScummVM, which not only would allow you to play Myst: Masterpiece Edition on the DS with some handywork, but is significantly better in every single way.
But the port of Myst to the DS wasn’t the worst port of Myst. In fact, it wasn’t even the worst version of Myst on the DS. The 3DS port holds the distinction of being the single worst port of Myst in existence.
NOTE: This has been slightly edited from the original but the contents are 99% the same.
You would think out of all the consoles that would be perfect for a port of the original Myst, the Nintendo DS would in the top 5. It has touch controls, which would be perfect to walk through Myst and solve it's puzzles, and it's portable, which is a nice way to play the game, especially since the game is low stress and you can save anywhere, and it's not like the console didn't have it's fair share of point-and-click adventure games along with adjacent genres like Visual Novels and Hidden Object games. And it's top screen would be great for things like a map for whatever Age you were in, optional hints, and easily showing which page you've picked up without being intrusive on the bottom screen.
But somehow this version of the game ends up being absolutely awful and the problems begin right off the bat.
Both the audio and video have been compressed to the point that the game now looks and sounds awful. I'm fine with each screen being compressed since it was made for something as small as the DS screen, but the compressed sound really ruins the experience. The sound chip in the DS was never the best, but there have been games that have sounded fine, so I don't know how this ended up sounding this bad. And it only gets more grating as the game goes on.
And it’s not like this is a minor nitpick since having the sound be this bad actually affects the gameplay. The puzzles in the Selenitic Age are all based around sound, which means that there is no excuse as to why the game sounds this bad.
Just like the PSP version of Myst, the DS version is missing the flyby videos for each Age. While the PSP had about 1.8 gigabytes to work with, the DS was limited to 512 megabytes at the absolute biggest, so there did have to be some compromise. But considering what the development team did with that with the PSP version of Myst, that compromise didn't have to be there, but more on that later.
But for an actual nitpick, the intro movie for this version of Myst has Comic Sans for the credits. I know that Comic Sans has received a lot of hate over the years, mostly due to people misusing it, but did the developers really have to use Comic Sans of all things? Not something like New Times Roman? It doesn’t even fit with the games tone of aesthetic, which is extra bad since Myst is centered around books of all things. I know it’s kinda pointless, and it was probably chosen because it pops out on the screen, but it still irks me.
And that’s not even the last of it, as the gameplay of Myst, what little it had, also gets a downgrade. Literally the only interactivity that Myst has was clicking on a still image to interact with something, clicking on a still image to move around, or clicking on a still image to pick something up.
In the DS version it took me a couple of taps on the screen to figure out what what exact pixel that I was supposed to click on the be able to do anything. Imagine trying to now only solve the sound puzzles of the Selenitic Age with audio that makes it hard to do so, but having to try and get through the maze twice with these controls is unbearable, even just by thinking about it. The Selenitic Age is borderline unplayable.
But it’s not like this version of Myst is completely without merit. This version does come with a Map that you can easily bring up by tapping the map icon that displays on the top screen showing off whatever location that you’re currently in. I don’t know why it’s not there permanently, but whatever. Whatever page you’ve picked up and are now holding onto are shown in a square instead of just changing the cursor to a hand holding a colored piece of paper, which would have been awful on the DS screen.
The game even come with a camera feature that lets you takes a picture of whatever screen that you’re currently on and displays it on the top screen. It’s limited to one shot at a time, but it’s still nice that it’s in here and can be helpful for puzzles. It comes with the ‘Zip Mode’ that lets you get through areas that you’ve already explored more quickly, and it even comes with a notepad that you can write notes in. You have to type thing out on an onscreen typewriter, which fits aesthetically, but so would have being able to use the stylus to write in a diary or journal. It’s still a good feature.
But just as I was able to say something good about this port of the game, the problems show up again and are even worse.
Just like the PSP port, this also comes with Rime, which was introduced in the original realMyst from the year 2000. It looks just as out of place in this version too, since it's from a game with a completely different engine and aesthetic. And just like the PSP port, it's not only introduced in the same way, with the game just plopping you into the new content without the context that realMyst gave it, but it's done way worse. Not only is it just as awkward to make your way through the Age due to it not being designed to be played as still images like the original was, but now it has the awful controls of the DS version.
Plus the DS version looks much worse that the PSP, since I can barely see anything with just how dark and grey the new area is. And if I wasn't sure if the puzzle introduced in the PSP version was broken, I didn't even try in this version. This whole section could have easily been cut, and should have. I would much rather have the fly-by videos from the original and maybe some better sounds.
It also doesn't help that the homebrew community has ScummVM, which not only would allow you to play Myst: Masterpiece Edition on the DS with some handywork, but is significantly better in every single way.
But the port of Myst to the DS wasn’t the worst port of Myst. In fact, it wasn’t even the worst version of Myst on the DS. The 3DS port holds the distinction of being the single worst port of Myst in existence.
2000
https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/01/23/a-look-back-at-realmyst-2000/
The tech behind video games during the 90s and into the early 2000s was rapidly evolving. Games had moved from 2D pixel art and still images for it’s graphics with limited beeps and boops for sound to being fully 3D and seen in real time with proper high quality audio that allowed for voice acting, sounds, and music along with other features such as being able to play videos, all of which became available through dedicated video and sound cards along with the CD being the hot new format and able to hold all of this brand new technology easily.
And Myst was released right at the beginning of these advancements, only really seeing the beginnings of these new strides. So a remake of Myst wasn’t too absurd, and 7 years later, in 2000, realMyst was released, a fully 3D version of Myst where you could see it from every angle and not just the ones the developers had to provide.
It was developed by Cyan with some help with Sunsoft, realMyst was developed on the PLASMA engine as a way to test it out for the upcoming and then unnamed Uru, which was released 3 years later in 2003.
But when realMyst was released, it was released to a lukewarm reception at best from reviewers and a less than warm welcome even from it’s own creators. Billed as the version of the game that the creators (Rand and Robyn Miller) would have made if the technology at the time was available, Robyn Miller later went on record to explicitly deny that this version of Myst was what they would have made, calling it a pointless remake and saying “I only saw realMyst after it was released. As a remake, it was a lapse of reason and directionless; overt merchandising of the original Myst. It definitely wasn’t how we originally envisioned Myst, as was promoted.” [SOURCE: Retro GAMER Collection Volume Five].
Even the original version of realMyst is no longer considered to be canon and has been delisted from every available digital storefront, being replaced with realMyst: Masterpiece Edition, released 14 years after the original realMyst. Thankfully I managed to get my version of the original realMyst from GOG before it got delisted, but the only way to find that version now is second hand or to sail the high seas of the internet. Since it’s probably never going to go on sale ever again and Cyan is not going to get a cent from it ever again, just buy the Masterpiece Edition and get the original realMyst through other means.
But was it really all that bad? Let’s jump right into it.
Since there’s not much of a difference between the plot of realMyst and the plot from the original Myst, you can find a plot summary as well as a more in-depth look at the original Myst here.
Right off the bat, the original version of realMyst is buggy, even when it was released. Even the version that I luckily got from GOG, which is know for getting older games to work properly on more modern computers, or at least as best they can, still has bugs. I did have to some slight fiddling with the game to get it running smoothly, and even then it did crash on me once and when you alt-tab out of the game it crashes. It’s nowhere near the worst experience I’ve had getting an older game to work, but just be cautious about playing it. You kinda have to dedicate yourself to it without being distracted by stuff in the background of your computer.
The controls for the original realMyst are a little weird too. The default controls are W for forward and S for walking backwards, and shift lets you run, but no A or D for strafing. The left and right mouse buttons also move you back and forward too. There is also a dead zone in the middle of the screen where you can move your cursor around to interact with the world and if you try to move your cursor out of this dead zone you can move the screen. These controls are a little unconventional to say the least. It’s like the developers were trying to create a mix of first person controls and the point-and-click controls from the original.
These are changeable in the settings. You can increase the area in which your cursor can move, ranging from taking up the entire screen and only moving the camera around when the cursor hits the edge of the screen, which is pointless since you’re interaction with objects is still limited by the dead zone in the middle of the screen, to having the area that the cursor can move in effectively be so small that it’s closer to what standard mouse controls were at the time in that it moves the screen when moving the mouse at all, which is much more preferable method since you can still point and click on whatever you want without having to worry about the cursor dead zone.
The other option in the settings is the ‘Advanced Mappings’, which adds in strafing, so using both the ‘Advanced Mappings’ and no dead zone gets you the standard controls of every first person game. You can also change the settings of the walking, strafing, and cursor speeds too. Apparently the ‘Advanced Mappings’ were patched in after the games release too, which seems baffling in retrospective considering that it had be a few years since the release of Quake at this point and that was one of the biggest and most famous games on the PC at this point.
Weirdly enough, they’re not the worst controls that I’ve encountered throughout the years, both from games before and since, it’s still weird that they’re presented like this considering that a lot of games had made their way into 3D at this point. It could have been entirely a limitation of the engine or the developers didn’t quite get how to work a 3D engine yet.
But there are a few times where you’re walking up some stairs and the game takes some of the control away from them. Like the spiral staircase in the Stoneship Age. You don’t have to turn your camera to climb them, you can just hold forward and the game will turn you in the direction of whatever way the staircase is going. Turning around with the mouse on the staircase can get you a bit disoriented when the game tries to correct the direction you’re going up and down stairs. The same thing happens in the Channelwood Age when you’re going up and down the spiral staircases their too. Maybe there was a bug that interfere with the game where you couldn’t get get close to the edge specifically with the stairs without some weird glitch, or maybe it’s an aesthetic choice that mixes first person controls with point-and-click controls like I mentioned earlier. Again, it could either be a weird limitation of the engine this was the best thing that the developers could do.
Just like the original game, you can only carry one page at a time. I know it’s a hold over from the original game, but it does feel a little tedious, and only goes to show the limitations of the original game. But then again, if you could carry both pages, the time it would take to complete the game would be significantly cut down and the whole game would be over pretty quickly, so it’s a damned if you do damned if you don’t situation.
Even the odd puzzle got an update. The elevation rotation puzzle has removed it’s drift from the original and stops when you remove your cursor from the lever. I know this is going to annoy some hardcore fan, and spending years playing Myst only for one of the puzzles to be made easier in an updated version of the game could make you feel like you’ve been wasting your time for years, but I’m more indifferent towards this change.
But realMyst is not completely without new content. Aside from the overhaul in graphics, which we’ll get to later on, realMyst comes with a brand new age for Myst fans to explore called Rime. If you’ve already familiar with Myst, you can easily get to it pretty quickly.
There are no new real puzzles to speak of since much like the rest of realMyst it’s was made more of a tech demo, but it’s still worth checking out since it still provides something for older fans. Since the original Myst, Riven had come out in 1997 and Myst III: Exile was still in development and wasn’t going to be released until the next year, so Rime was made as an attempt to connect the original game with the rest of the series, specifically Riven, by adding new lore.
I like the atmosphere of this new age. Unlike a lot of the other Ages, Rime is permanently stuck at night in a perpetual snowstorm, and even has whales that circle the island. It has a nice serenity to it. It actually tries to add something to the game instead of just being a 1-to-1 remake of the original with updated graphics. It might just be a selling point for the back of the box, but I still liked it.
But since one of the selling point of this remake are the real time 3D graphics, let’s dive into that. The moment you boot up the game the changes are almost immediate. Even the intro cutscene is in real time 3D, and there is a smooth transition picking up and opening the Myst book.
One you actually arrive on Myst Island, everything is now running in real time as opposed to the limited still images from the original game. They water actually has waves that crash into the store, and you can can see things moving in real time, such as the hands on the clock face of the clock tower moving when you turn the valves to solve the clock tower puzzle, and seeing the boat rising out of the water when you solve the connecting puzzle.
Even seeing the wildlife in real time is neat, seeing the birds fly around Myst Island outside of a compressed video is nice, and even Channelwood has newly added wildlife in the form of a frog that jumps into the water. The Ages still have that liminal feel, but just not quite as pronounced.
But the biggest selling point of realMyst’s graphics are the newly added day-night cycle and weather effects. If you spend any extended amount of time on Myst Island, the sun will actually go down and the game moves from daytime to nighttime. It actually looks quite nice when it happens, moving from a blue sky to an orange sunset to a purple night sky. And there are even small details when it moves over to night, such as the steps leading down to the dock having lights on them that turn off when the sun begins to set.
It varies from age to age, with the sunset in the Selenitic Age being more of a darker orange. The Mechanical Age has more of a lighter blue. The Stoneship Age now has a permanent storm, complete with lightening, thunder, and rain. I know that the ship being part of the rocks has a lore reason in that the Age was written when the author wasn’t quite use to writing Ages yet, but it does help explain why the ship couldn’t see the rocks or broken lighthouse.
Channelwood unfortunately doesn’t have a day/night cycle. Maybe it’s because the age has a bigger draw distance and the developers either didn’t have the time or couldn’t figure out to have a bigger draw distance and day/night cycle at the same time. All of these weather effects and changing of the time of day gives each age it’s own distinct feeling. It’s one of those details that the developers didn’t need to add, but it’s a much welcome one.
But aside from the obvious transition to real time graphics, realMyst includes other changes, specifically on Myst Island, that also connect with the lore of the series, not only the games but the books to, and I’m not going to spoil what for those unfamiliar to the series, but it’s another nice addition. It actually makes you feel like your making progress throughout the game. Or make you feel like your wasting your time if your not good at these types of games.
I know that a lot of Myst purists are going to hate me for saying this, and I don’t necessarily disagree with them, but I do like some of the graphical updates and changes in realMyst. I’m not saying they’re better by any means, but I do appreciate putting a little effort into the remake instead of just making a 1-to-1 remake just to leech money off of fans, which, considering the backlash even from it’s own creator, it probably still was that to some extent.
But that’s where the positives that I can say about the game end, and a lot of problems rear their ugly head.
The draw distance is awful in a lot of places. On Myst Island, you have to practically be on top of the trees for them to move from their low quality versions to their high quality versions. Plus the whole island has a fog on it, along with the other Ages. Games usually have the low quality versions of objects and parts of the map off in the distance and transition between them and the high quality versions smoothly enough when the player gets close enough to them that the player doesn’t notice.
This is done to have a game run a lot smoother since if all the high quality stuff was running constantly, it wouldn’t run smoothly on most computers. Which is extra bizarre here since Myst Island is quite a small area. Channelwood has a bigger draw distance, but it leaves Channelwood looking a little bit empty as a result.
And to make things worse, it ran poorly on computers at the time, even the high end ones, which was not exactly selling the game to many people outside of fans, since 4 years before Quake had came out, and many other games running in real time 3D had come out since then that ran smoothly on the same computers that realMyst would have had trouble running on. Plus, for some reason, the anti-aliasing doesn’t even seem to work, it won’t even let me enable it.
The game also includes the video clips from the original, the ones that featured actual people in front of a camera. They largely remain the same from the original game sans one. I’m assuming that the re-recorded it to make it more cannonical with the rest of the series like they’ve made certain changes elsewhere.
But since the release of the original game, there have been numerous games that used FMV footage of real actors actually appearing in front of the camera in the 7 years since the release of the original Myst. Maybe the developers didn’t have the money to properly update these videos, and the do look out of place, especially since better hardware and more space had become more plentiful in those 7 years, with even Riven having better looking videos 3 years before this, so going back to those videos was a little rough.
But on the upside, the audio quality, for all of the sound effects and music has been upped in quality, making the whole game sound much nicer. Maybe you could sit down in your favorite age and close your eyes and listen to the atmosphere while relaxing with a nice tea.
Even being optimistic, realMyst is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s less of a remake of a game and more like a failed experiment that was more concerned about being a tech demo and beta test for a new engine than a proper remake of a beloved classic point-and-click game. But it’s not completely without it’s merits. It’s neat seeing the whole game in 3D, and a fully 3D version of Myst could work, even if it’s just the original game over again.
Would I recommend the original realMyst? Not unless you’re nostalgic for it, want to seek it out for the sake of curiosity, or a completionist. Especially since other remakes have come out since the release of the original realMyst and the casual fan probably would just gravitate to the remake that’s going to cause the least amount of issues to play.
I can see why it was disowned, but I can’t hate it no matter what the reception to it is.
The tech behind video games during the 90s and into the early 2000s was rapidly evolving. Games had moved from 2D pixel art and still images for it’s graphics with limited beeps and boops for sound to being fully 3D and seen in real time with proper high quality audio that allowed for voice acting, sounds, and music along with other features such as being able to play videos, all of which became available through dedicated video and sound cards along with the CD being the hot new format and able to hold all of this brand new technology easily.
And Myst was released right at the beginning of these advancements, only really seeing the beginnings of these new strides. So a remake of Myst wasn’t too absurd, and 7 years later, in 2000, realMyst was released, a fully 3D version of Myst where you could see it from every angle and not just the ones the developers had to provide.
It was developed by Cyan with some help with Sunsoft, realMyst was developed on the PLASMA engine as a way to test it out for the upcoming and then unnamed Uru, which was released 3 years later in 2003.
But when realMyst was released, it was released to a lukewarm reception at best from reviewers and a less than warm welcome even from it’s own creators. Billed as the version of the game that the creators (Rand and Robyn Miller) would have made if the technology at the time was available, Robyn Miller later went on record to explicitly deny that this version of Myst was what they would have made, calling it a pointless remake and saying “I only saw realMyst after it was released. As a remake, it was a lapse of reason and directionless; overt merchandising of the original Myst. It definitely wasn’t how we originally envisioned Myst, as was promoted.” [SOURCE: Retro GAMER Collection Volume Five].
Even the original version of realMyst is no longer considered to be canon and has been delisted from every available digital storefront, being replaced with realMyst: Masterpiece Edition, released 14 years after the original realMyst. Thankfully I managed to get my version of the original realMyst from GOG before it got delisted, but the only way to find that version now is second hand or to sail the high seas of the internet. Since it’s probably never going to go on sale ever again and Cyan is not going to get a cent from it ever again, just buy the Masterpiece Edition and get the original realMyst through other means.
But was it really all that bad? Let’s jump right into it.
Since there’s not much of a difference between the plot of realMyst and the plot from the original Myst, you can find a plot summary as well as a more in-depth look at the original Myst here.
Right off the bat, the original version of realMyst is buggy, even when it was released. Even the version that I luckily got from GOG, which is know for getting older games to work properly on more modern computers, or at least as best they can, still has bugs. I did have to some slight fiddling with the game to get it running smoothly, and even then it did crash on me once and when you alt-tab out of the game it crashes. It’s nowhere near the worst experience I’ve had getting an older game to work, but just be cautious about playing it. You kinda have to dedicate yourself to it without being distracted by stuff in the background of your computer.
The controls for the original realMyst are a little weird too. The default controls are W for forward and S for walking backwards, and shift lets you run, but no A or D for strafing. The left and right mouse buttons also move you back and forward too. There is also a dead zone in the middle of the screen where you can move your cursor around to interact with the world and if you try to move your cursor out of this dead zone you can move the screen. These controls are a little unconventional to say the least. It’s like the developers were trying to create a mix of first person controls and the point-and-click controls from the original.
These are changeable in the settings. You can increase the area in which your cursor can move, ranging from taking up the entire screen and only moving the camera around when the cursor hits the edge of the screen, which is pointless since you’re interaction with objects is still limited by the dead zone in the middle of the screen, to having the area that the cursor can move in effectively be so small that it’s closer to what standard mouse controls were at the time in that it moves the screen when moving the mouse at all, which is much more preferable method since you can still point and click on whatever you want without having to worry about the cursor dead zone.
The other option in the settings is the ‘Advanced Mappings’, which adds in strafing, so using both the ‘Advanced Mappings’ and no dead zone gets you the standard controls of every first person game. You can also change the settings of the walking, strafing, and cursor speeds too. Apparently the ‘Advanced Mappings’ were patched in after the games release too, which seems baffling in retrospective considering that it had be a few years since the release of Quake at this point and that was one of the biggest and most famous games on the PC at this point.
Weirdly enough, they’re not the worst controls that I’ve encountered throughout the years, both from games before and since, it’s still weird that they’re presented like this considering that a lot of games had made their way into 3D at this point. It could have been entirely a limitation of the engine or the developers didn’t quite get how to work a 3D engine yet.
But there are a few times where you’re walking up some stairs and the game takes some of the control away from them. Like the spiral staircase in the Stoneship Age. You don’t have to turn your camera to climb them, you can just hold forward and the game will turn you in the direction of whatever way the staircase is going. Turning around with the mouse on the staircase can get you a bit disoriented when the game tries to correct the direction you’re going up and down stairs. The same thing happens in the Channelwood Age when you’re going up and down the spiral staircases their too. Maybe there was a bug that interfere with the game where you couldn’t get get close to the edge specifically with the stairs without some weird glitch, or maybe it’s an aesthetic choice that mixes first person controls with point-and-click controls like I mentioned earlier. Again, it could either be a weird limitation of the engine this was the best thing that the developers could do.
Just like the original game, you can only carry one page at a time. I know it’s a hold over from the original game, but it does feel a little tedious, and only goes to show the limitations of the original game. But then again, if you could carry both pages, the time it would take to complete the game would be significantly cut down and the whole game would be over pretty quickly, so it’s a damned if you do damned if you don’t situation.
Even the odd puzzle got an update. The elevation rotation puzzle has removed it’s drift from the original and stops when you remove your cursor from the lever. I know this is going to annoy some hardcore fan, and spending years playing Myst only for one of the puzzles to be made easier in an updated version of the game could make you feel like you’ve been wasting your time for years, but I’m more indifferent towards this change.
But realMyst is not completely without new content. Aside from the overhaul in graphics, which we’ll get to later on, realMyst comes with a brand new age for Myst fans to explore called Rime. If you’ve already familiar with Myst, you can easily get to it pretty quickly.
There are no new real puzzles to speak of since much like the rest of realMyst it’s was made more of a tech demo, but it’s still worth checking out since it still provides something for older fans. Since the original Myst, Riven had come out in 1997 and Myst III: Exile was still in development and wasn’t going to be released until the next year, so Rime was made as an attempt to connect the original game with the rest of the series, specifically Riven, by adding new lore.
I like the atmosphere of this new age. Unlike a lot of the other Ages, Rime is permanently stuck at night in a perpetual snowstorm, and even has whales that circle the island. It has a nice serenity to it. It actually tries to add something to the game instead of just being a 1-to-1 remake of the original with updated graphics. It might just be a selling point for the back of the box, but I still liked it.
But since one of the selling point of this remake are the real time 3D graphics, let’s dive into that. The moment you boot up the game the changes are almost immediate. Even the intro cutscene is in real time 3D, and there is a smooth transition picking up and opening the Myst book.
One you actually arrive on Myst Island, everything is now running in real time as opposed to the limited still images from the original game. They water actually has waves that crash into the store, and you can can see things moving in real time, such as the hands on the clock face of the clock tower moving when you turn the valves to solve the clock tower puzzle, and seeing the boat rising out of the water when you solve the connecting puzzle.
Even seeing the wildlife in real time is neat, seeing the birds fly around Myst Island outside of a compressed video is nice, and even Channelwood has newly added wildlife in the form of a frog that jumps into the water. The Ages still have that liminal feel, but just not quite as pronounced.
But the biggest selling point of realMyst’s graphics are the newly added day-night cycle and weather effects. If you spend any extended amount of time on Myst Island, the sun will actually go down and the game moves from daytime to nighttime. It actually looks quite nice when it happens, moving from a blue sky to an orange sunset to a purple night sky. And there are even small details when it moves over to night, such as the steps leading down to the dock having lights on them that turn off when the sun begins to set.
It varies from age to age, with the sunset in the Selenitic Age being more of a darker orange. The Mechanical Age has more of a lighter blue. The Stoneship Age now has a permanent storm, complete with lightening, thunder, and rain. I know that the ship being part of the rocks has a lore reason in that the Age was written when the author wasn’t quite use to writing Ages yet, but it does help explain why the ship couldn’t see the rocks or broken lighthouse.
Channelwood unfortunately doesn’t have a day/night cycle. Maybe it’s because the age has a bigger draw distance and the developers either didn’t have the time or couldn’t figure out to have a bigger draw distance and day/night cycle at the same time. All of these weather effects and changing of the time of day gives each age it’s own distinct feeling. It’s one of those details that the developers didn’t need to add, but it’s a much welcome one.
But aside from the obvious transition to real time graphics, realMyst includes other changes, specifically on Myst Island, that also connect with the lore of the series, not only the games but the books to, and I’m not going to spoil what for those unfamiliar to the series, but it’s another nice addition. It actually makes you feel like your making progress throughout the game. Or make you feel like your wasting your time if your not good at these types of games.
I know that a lot of Myst purists are going to hate me for saying this, and I don’t necessarily disagree with them, but I do like some of the graphical updates and changes in realMyst. I’m not saying they’re better by any means, but I do appreciate putting a little effort into the remake instead of just making a 1-to-1 remake just to leech money off of fans, which, considering the backlash even from it’s own creator, it probably still was that to some extent.
But that’s where the positives that I can say about the game end, and a lot of problems rear their ugly head.
The draw distance is awful in a lot of places. On Myst Island, you have to practically be on top of the trees for them to move from their low quality versions to their high quality versions. Plus the whole island has a fog on it, along with the other Ages. Games usually have the low quality versions of objects and parts of the map off in the distance and transition between them and the high quality versions smoothly enough when the player gets close enough to them that the player doesn’t notice.
This is done to have a game run a lot smoother since if all the high quality stuff was running constantly, it wouldn’t run smoothly on most computers. Which is extra bizarre here since Myst Island is quite a small area. Channelwood has a bigger draw distance, but it leaves Channelwood looking a little bit empty as a result.
And to make things worse, it ran poorly on computers at the time, even the high end ones, which was not exactly selling the game to many people outside of fans, since 4 years before Quake had came out, and many other games running in real time 3D had come out since then that ran smoothly on the same computers that realMyst would have had trouble running on. Plus, for some reason, the anti-aliasing doesn’t even seem to work, it won’t even let me enable it.
The game also includes the video clips from the original, the ones that featured actual people in front of a camera. They largely remain the same from the original game sans one. I’m assuming that the re-recorded it to make it more cannonical with the rest of the series like they’ve made certain changes elsewhere.
But since the release of the original game, there have been numerous games that used FMV footage of real actors actually appearing in front of the camera in the 7 years since the release of the original Myst. Maybe the developers didn’t have the money to properly update these videos, and the do look out of place, especially since better hardware and more space had become more plentiful in those 7 years, with even Riven having better looking videos 3 years before this, so going back to those videos was a little rough.
But on the upside, the audio quality, for all of the sound effects and music has been upped in quality, making the whole game sound much nicer. Maybe you could sit down in your favorite age and close your eyes and listen to the atmosphere while relaxing with a nice tea.
Even being optimistic, realMyst is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s less of a remake of a game and more like a failed experiment that was more concerned about being a tech demo and beta test for a new engine than a proper remake of a beloved classic point-and-click game. But it’s not completely without it’s merits. It’s neat seeing the whole game in 3D, and a fully 3D version of Myst could work, even if it’s just the original game over again.
Would I recommend the original realMyst? Not unless you’re nostalgic for it, want to seek it out for the sake of curiosity, or a completionist. Especially since other remakes have come out since the release of the original realMyst and the casual fan probably would just gravitate to the remake that’s going to cause the least amount of issues to play.
I can see why it was disowned, but I can’t hate it no matter what the reception to it is.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2017/06/28/touring-car-champions-ms-dos-review/
Touring Car Champions might be one of the most annoying racing games that I’ve ever played. Maybe not the worst, but definitely one of the most annoying. Right now I’d be willing to bet that a few of you might thinking to yourself “Hey, I remember that game, and it wasn’t that annoying. What the heck are you talking about?” The game you’re remembering is TOCA: Touring Car Championship, a game that came out the same year as Touring Car Champions, and was an actual, fully fledged racing game. And good too.
And considering that 1997, the year this game came out, was also the year of other better racing games such as Need for Speed II, Gran Turismo, Moto Racer, and NASCAR ’98, it’s no wonder this game was forgotten to time. And to top it all off, this racing game decided to jump on the FMV bandwagon. Yep, it’s an FMV rgame.
Touring Car Champions was released in 1997 for MS-DOS. It was developed by Torus Games, an Australian company only known for various ports of other games to the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance as well as a few licensed games, and are surprisingly have been around since 1994 and are still going. To this day, they’re still releasing cheap licensed games and ports, and it’s quite amazing that they’ve lasted this long. They even have this game listed on their website. It was also published by Virtual Sports Interactive, who as far as i can tell, only published this game, which is a bad sign.
This game has the distinction of being the first game based on the Australian Car Touring Championship and Bathurst 1000, so it does have something going for it. But the only people who want to know an obscure face like that are motorsports fans and fans of obscure video games.
The game only has only one track, and that is the Mount Panorama Circuit, which is used in the Bathurst 1000. But instead of recreating the entire track in either 3D or 2D, the developers decided to use a looping recording of the track. I imagine it would have been neat to see a recording of the track from the perspective of the driver, but they could have saved money, time, and effort and easily released it on VHS at the time in a higher quality and without having to play an awful game to see it. And not only that, there is a bunch of stuff cluttering your view of it, so even enjoying it for the fact that you get to see some video from the sport you you enjoy, it’s pretty much worthless.
At least if the single track that they had was recreated, you could have messed around in it by driving in the wrong direction or at least seeing parts of the track from the tarmac itself. The game doesn’t even have that going for it.
Something actually interesting about the game is that it was fully endorsed by the Holden Racing Team, Holden Special Vehicles, Mount Panorama Consortium, and Mt Panorama Motor Racing Hall of Fame. The game even claims that has both Ford and Holden in there so, so i guess it has the infamous Holden and Ford competitive vibe going for it? This is probably not the best way to duke it out between the two companies.
If the track is FMV of the actual track, then you’re probably asking how the driving handles. The developers thought it was a good idea to put the vehicle you’re driving on top of the video. So what you’re left with is a visual mess that has no consistency. It’s so bad that the game has to tell you which car is yours before the race starts with giant bold letters “THIS IS YOU.”
To make matters worse, half of the screen is taken up by the dashboard of the car. So you left with two-thirds of track left to try and race on. It makes it confusing, because one part of your brain is trying to focus on your car, but another part is so used to seeing the dashboard when you’re trying to emulate actually driving the game. You won’t ever get used to it.
Either have the video full screen with minimal HUD elements, or have the whole game from the drivers perspective, with the video being full screen being the preferable since having the dashboard there doesn’t make you feel like you’re actually driving a car. But considering that the whole game is looping video with zero visual difference, the former would have be the only viable option.
Even the sound is annoying. The cars engine’s are overpowering and are incredibly loud. So much so that I permanently turned the sound off. There isn’t any music either, so it’s either the sound of the car’s engines boring themselves into your hear or silence. If you haven’t turned the game off at this point, I’d say turn the sound off and play some AC/DC in the background.
Once you get passed the eyesore that are the graphics, there is a very basic game here. There is the practice mode, where you can spend your time trying to get used to the game to see if you’ll end up playing the rest of it. There is Quickrace, where you can pick from a few basic options, such as the amount of laps you want, the amount of opponents, and the difficulty setting before jumping into a single race. And there is a “Round”, which is the tournament mode of the game, which spans several seasons of the Bathurst 1000.
“Round” is where most of the game is. You can select from a few real life drivers, such as Craig Lowndes, Peter Brock, Tomas Mezera, and Greg Murphy, as well as a generic girl or guy (the games description, not mine), as well as being able to select a team, manager, and pit crew, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t affect the game at all, so you could pick them at random and still get the same results. That also goes with the car upgrades, which include everything from the brakes, to the engine, to the exhaust.
There are only two real things that matter when it comes to the gameplay. The first is going off the track onto the dirt. Considering there isn’t any real feedback other than you slowing down, it’s hard to figure out what part of the screen is dirt and which part is the track. Something that would have been solved if the game had actual graphics instead of incredibly limited video.
The second is trying to get passed the other cars. At the beginning of a race, all of the cars are close to each other, and the perspective is atrocious, which makes trying to pass them difficult. And not in a way that realistically fits racing, but in a way that is only present in broken video games. When you hit another car, you comically spin around, confirming that the game wasn’t intended to be realistic or even good, but simply to show off the product, which are the cars and the Bathurst 1000.
The game is very basic, and because of it’s limited tracks, awful visuals, and annoyingly loud engine noises, it can’t even achieve being a simple fun racing game. The only people who would have played this are fans of the Bathurst race. And even then, there are better racing games out there featuring the track, such as the Forza and V8 Supercars/TOCA franchises. Even if you just like racing games in general, this came out the same year as the original Gran Turismo and TOCA Touring Car Championship, and even more arcade style games such as Need For Speed II and Moto Racer.
Torus Games still has this game on their website with pictures and text written like they’re still proud of it. The only good thing I can say is that getting this game up and running is fairly easy in this modern age of gaming with the advent of Dosbox. While it’s not the worst racing game that I’ve played, there’s a reason that this game has been almost completely forgotten by time, and you should definitely avoid this game, especially since there have been better games since.
Touring Car Champions might be one of the most annoying racing games that I’ve ever played. Maybe not the worst, but definitely one of the most annoying. Right now I’d be willing to bet that a few of you might thinking to yourself “Hey, I remember that game, and it wasn’t that annoying. What the heck are you talking about?” The game you’re remembering is TOCA: Touring Car Championship, a game that came out the same year as Touring Car Champions, and was an actual, fully fledged racing game. And good too.
And considering that 1997, the year this game came out, was also the year of other better racing games such as Need for Speed II, Gran Turismo, Moto Racer, and NASCAR ’98, it’s no wonder this game was forgotten to time. And to top it all off, this racing game decided to jump on the FMV bandwagon. Yep, it’s an FMV rgame.
Touring Car Champions was released in 1997 for MS-DOS. It was developed by Torus Games, an Australian company only known for various ports of other games to the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance as well as a few licensed games, and are surprisingly have been around since 1994 and are still going. To this day, they’re still releasing cheap licensed games and ports, and it’s quite amazing that they’ve lasted this long. They even have this game listed on their website. It was also published by Virtual Sports Interactive, who as far as i can tell, only published this game, which is a bad sign.
This game has the distinction of being the first game based on the Australian Car Touring Championship and Bathurst 1000, so it does have something going for it. But the only people who want to know an obscure face like that are motorsports fans and fans of obscure video games.
The game only has only one track, and that is the Mount Panorama Circuit, which is used in the Bathurst 1000. But instead of recreating the entire track in either 3D or 2D, the developers decided to use a looping recording of the track. I imagine it would have been neat to see a recording of the track from the perspective of the driver, but they could have saved money, time, and effort and easily released it on VHS at the time in a higher quality and without having to play an awful game to see it. And not only that, there is a bunch of stuff cluttering your view of it, so even enjoying it for the fact that you get to see some video from the sport you you enjoy, it’s pretty much worthless.
At least if the single track that they had was recreated, you could have messed around in it by driving in the wrong direction or at least seeing parts of the track from the tarmac itself. The game doesn’t even have that going for it.
Something actually interesting about the game is that it was fully endorsed by the Holden Racing Team, Holden Special Vehicles, Mount Panorama Consortium, and Mt Panorama Motor Racing Hall of Fame. The game even claims that has both Ford and Holden in there so, so i guess it has the infamous Holden and Ford competitive vibe going for it? This is probably not the best way to duke it out between the two companies.
If the track is FMV of the actual track, then you’re probably asking how the driving handles. The developers thought it was a good idea to put the vehicle you’re driving on top of the video. So what you’re left with is a visual mess that has no consistency. It’s so bad that the game has to tell you which car is yours before the race starts with giant bold letters “THIS IS YOU.”
To make matters worse, half of the screen is taken up by the dashboard of the car. So you left with two-thirds of track left to try and race on. It makes it confusing, because one part of your brain is trying to focus on your car, but another part is so used to seeing the dashboard when you’re trying to emulate actually driving the game. You won’t ever get used to it.
Either have the video full screen with minimal HUD elements, or have the whole game from the drivers perspective, with the video being full screen being the preferable since having the dashboard there doesn’t make you feel like you’re actually driving a car. But considering that the whole game is looping video with zero visual difference, the former would have be the only viable option.
Even the sound is annoying. The cars engine’s are overpowering and are incredibly loud. So much so that I permanently turned the sound off. There isn’t any music either, so it’s either the sound of the car’s engines boring themselves into your hear or silence. If you haven’t turned the game off at this point, I’d say turn the sound off and play some AC/DC in the background.
Once you get passed the eyesore that are the graphics, there is a very basic game here. There is the practice mode, where you can spend your time trying to get used to the game to see if you’ll end up playing the rest of it. There is Quickrace, where you can pick from a few basic options, such as the amount of laps you want, the amount of opponents, and the difficulty setting before jumping into a single race. And there is a “Round”, which is the tournament mode of the game, which spans several seasons of the Bathurst 1000.
“Round” is where most of the game is. You can select from a few real life drivers, such as Craig Lowndes, Peter Brock, Tomas Mezera, and Greg Murphy, as well as a generic girl or guy (the games description, not mine), as well as being able to select a team, manager, and pit crew, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t affect the game at all, so you could pick them at random and still get the same results. That also goes with the car upgrades, which include everything from the brakes, to the engine, to the exhaust.
There are only two real things that matter when it comes to the gameplay. The first is going off the track onto the dirt. Considering there isn’t any real feedback other than you slowing down, it’s hard to figure out what part of the screen is dirt and which part is the track. Something that would have been solved if the game had actual graphics instead of incredibly limited video.
The second is trying to get passed the other cars. At the beginning of a race, all of the cars are close to each other, and the perspective is atrocious, which makes trying to pass them difficult. And not in a way that realistically fits racing, but in a way that is only present in broken video games. When you hit another car, you comically spin around, confirming that the game wasn’t intended to be realistic or even good, but simply to show off the product, which are the cars and the Bathurst 1000.
The game is very basic, and because of it’s limited tracks, awful visuals, and annoyingly loud engine noises, it can’t even achieve being a simple fun racing game. The only people who would have played this are fans of the Bathurst race. And even then, there are better racing games out there featuring the track, such as the Forza and V8 Supercars/TOCA franchises. Even if you just like racing games in general, this came out the same year as the original Gran Turismo and TOCA Touring Car Championship, and even more arcade style games such as Need For Speed II and Moto Racer.
Torus Games still has this game on their website with pictures and text written like they’re still proud of it. The only good thing I can say is that getting this game up and running is fairly easy in this modern age of gaming with the advent of Dosbox. While it’s not the worst racing game that I’ve played, there’s a reason that this game has been almost completely forgotten by time, and you should definitely avoid this game, especially since there have been better games since.
2000
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/05/11/soldier-of-fortune-2000-pc-ps2-dreamcast/
It was the year 2000, and it was a fantastic year in First Person Shooters. It was the year of The Operative: No One Lives Forever, Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force, Perfect Dark, Timesplitters, Medal of Honor: Underground, and Counter-Strike got it’s first boxed release to the public. Among these classics is Raven Software’s Soldier of Fortune.
Developed by Raven Software and published by Activision, Soldier of Fortune was released on February 29th, 2000 on the PC, and was later released for the PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast, as well as being ported to Linux by Loki Software. The game was named after the magazine with the same name, which was aimed at actual mercenaries, with it’s last issue being released on April, 2016. Leading up to it’s demise, it was but a shell of it’s former self due to several controversies, including multiple people placing “GUN FOR HIRE” ads in the magazine for the actual assassinations and murders of people. How multiple people managed to get multiple personal ads for actual real world assassination through, let alone one to begin with, I still have no idea. You would have thought the wording would have triggered a closer inspection of the ad. But I digress.
The main character of Soldier of Fortune is John Mullins, based on the real life John Mullins, who is a Vietnam vet and former mercenary, and was brought in as a consultant to make the game more authentic. Although I don’t know what parts of the game were made authentic, because it goes with an over-the-top 80s and 90s action movie style instead of being a more realistic game like SWAT 3/4 or Rainbow Six. Although, in a video interview that came with the Platinum Edition of the game, John Mullins said that there are small parts of the story that mirror his real life, which makes me hope that he fought a psychopath in a highly advanced cyber suit at some point his life.
In the game, Mullins gets his contracts from a cloak & dagger anti-terrorism outfit called “The Shop”. The current contract that “The Shop” has given to Mullins involves the theft of four nuclear weapons stolen by a Afrikaner Neo-Nazi group based in Germany, led by a man called Sergei Dekker. They plan to sell the four nuclear weapons to various nations, and you’re the guy entrusted to stop them.
Helping you with your contract is your partner Aaron “Hawk” Parsons, who also works for “The Shop”, joins you in a few of your missions on the ground. Sam Gladstone, the other other person who works for “The Shop and is another friend, helps you by debriefing you on your contracts before you leave on your mission.
Surprisingly, Soldier of Fortune has a pretty famous voice cast behind it, including Michael Clarke Duncun (The Green Mile), Earl Boen (The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day), Brian Thompson (The Terminator, Cobra), Michael De Santo (The English dub of the 1995 Ghost in the Shell movie), and John Mullins himself is played by Tod Sussman (The Taking of Pellam 123, Beverly Hills Cop II). At lot of the voice acting is pretty cheesy, but it’s definitely on the entertaining side of being cheesy, and is pretty solid and fun.
The plot takes you all over the world, from NYC, Iraq and Japan to Germany, Sudan and Siberia, which means that the areas you visit are diverse to say the least, ranging from snowy mountains to jungles to deserts to the high tech city of Japan, meaning that you won’t just get the generic browns and grey of the modern shooters. Its pretty refreshing compared to the Call of Duty’s and Battlefield’s of today. There is even one level taking place in a slaughter house and is one of the highlights of the game.
Graphically, the game holds up fairly well for a game from it’s era, running on a modified Quake II engine. It does help that the game features a variety of locations so nothing gets visually stale. But the highlight of the game is the GHOUL damage model for the enemies which was made for this game, which is appropriately title for being a bit ghoulish, since it allows you allows you to blow the arms, legs, and hands off of your enemies with your shotgun, or blow them into small gibs with your rocket launcher.
Enemies react to where you shoot them. Shoot someone in the hand or leg, and they’ll clutch onto it out of pain. All of this adds a layer to the game that I guess makes it more realistic. It certainly makes the game stand out at least. There was one instance of a funny glitch where I blew the legs off of a guy and he still fell over like he still had them. The weapons also have some good sound design it, with the shotgun standing out, having some kick to it.
This GHOUL damage engine was what brought the previously mentioned controversy to the game. After the game was released, it received a complaint from a member of the public about the extreme violence to the British Columbia Film Classification Office, who then investigated the game. The BCFCO decided that the acts of violence and gore were not suitable for persons under the age of 18. In a controversial decision, the game was labeled as an “adult motion picture” and was rated as a pornographic film. In Germany, the game was placed on the Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons index. As you can tell, it got quite the extreme reaction.
If you look at the game today, the game doesn’t seem as violent compared to some of the games released these days games, such as Mortal Kombat 11 and Doom: Eternal, or even something like Manhunt which came out 3 years after this game, especially when games have been getting more realistic in the 14 years since the game came out. On the other hand, I wouldn’t exactly call it tame either, since it’s still pretty extreme in the violence department.
But the game does come with an option to disable all of the gore and password protect the option from younger people. There even was a version of the game with the gore permanently locked-out, titled “Soldier of Fortune: Tactical Low-Violence Version”, specifically made for Wal-Mart. You can pretty much buy the game uncensored these days through places like Steam and GOG, so it’s not much of an issue these days.
Gameplay wise, the game plays pretty much like your standard First Person Shooter. You run and gun your way through a series of corridors, gunning down the bad guys as you go. However, there are a few other things on top of this.
There is an inventory, but it isn’t all that great. You get your standard grenades and explosives with C4 Explosives and M24 Frag Grenades.They work exactly the same away and you have to go through the inventory to select each one, so there is no point to having the C4 Explosives. There are also Flashbangs, which you can use to blind your enemies, which i never used outside of just the once just to see how effective it was.
There are also First Aid Pack’s that you can pick up, which are frustrating to use because you have to use it the same way you use other items in your inventory. I don’t know why you couldn’t just pick it up to replenish your health the same way you pick up Bulletproof Vests to replenish your armor. Finally, there are Night Vision Goggles, which I’ve never had to use. Ever. So really, the inventory is completely useless since items could have been left our and whatever is left could have just been associated with a key, like G for grenades or N for Night Vision.
The weapons are what you’d expect for a FPS for the most part. You have two handguns, the 9mm Handgun and .44 Magnum, a Combat Shotgun, a Sniper Rifle, a sub-machine Gun, a Silenced SMG, a Heavy Machine Gun, and a Rocket Launcher. There’s also the Combat Knife, which you can throw at enemies but are limited. You can pick up off the floor or pull them out of your enemies when they’re dead. Finally there is the H-24 Slugthrower, which can take out almost everyone immediately, and a Flamethrower that I also never used but works well.
The one gun that stands out however is the Microwave Pulse Gun, which i guess is one of the liberties that Raven Software took when John Mullins was consulting for them. Before you go on your mission, you can select what weapons and equipment you want to take with you. By default, i took the Bulletproof Vest and Health Kits because a few of the enemies are a little difficult to get past. I also take the Heavy Machine Gun because enemies drop the most amount of ammo for it and its generally the most effective against enemies.
The enemies are on the more difficult side but aren’t too bad. My only major complaint with the difficulty is about the final boss of the game. He’s not only a complete bullet sponge, but he has an overpowered gun that can pretty much kill you in one shot. There are also automated turrets during the boss battle that can kill you within seconds.
You pretty much have to get in a place he can’t reach, strafe left and right to avoid his one shot kills, and continually hit him with your most powerful gun, the Microwave Pulse Gun. It feels like such a cheap way to end the game.
The game also comes with a multiplayer component that a lot of other FPS games at the time. It comes with your standard fare, like Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag, but it has some good variety in it’s other game modes. Realistic Deathmatch is more difficult, and has you carry only one weapon, increased weapon damage, and a fatigue meter.
Arsenal is another variant of Deathmatch, but you get all of the weapons, and you get one kill with each of them to win the match. Assassin has you chasing after a specific target, whom you have to kill, all while someone is trying to assassinate you. You can only kill these two people, or you will lose points. Finally, there is Conquer the Bunker, in which there are capture points all around the map but touching easily identifiable by flags. The longer you hold down these capture points, the more points you get. The more capture points you have, the quicker you get those points. It’s pretty much Domination from Unreal Tournament.
The game is very easy to get working on modem systems. If you own a physical copy, there is a mod out there called SoFplus for people who already own the game, and it helps a lot. Not only does it get it running on modern systems, but it comes with a bundle of other features, including widescreen support, FOV, fixes, a multitude of new graphical features that made it easier on the eyes, and the ability to play online without GameSpy.
Unfortunately, the company who now owns the rights to the game seems to have taken down the website for SoFPlus, but it is included in the “Community Edition” mod, which adds significant improvements to Soldier of Fortune along with adding community maps for the multiplayer.
Looking back at Soldier of Fortune, it does hold up fairly well and there is certainly a lot of fun to be had here if you’re a die hard retro First Person Shooter fan.
It was the year 2000, and it was a fantastic year in First Person Shooters. It was the year of The Operative: No One Lives Forever, Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force, Perfect Dark, Timesplitters, Medal of Honor: Underground, and Counter-Strike got it’s first boxed release to the public. Among these classics is Raven Software’s Soldier of Fortune.
Developed by Raven Software and published by Activision, Soldier of Fortune was released on February 29th, 2000 on the PC, and was later released for the PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast, as well as being ported to Linux by Loki Software. The game was named after the magazine with the same name, which was aimed at actual mercenaries, with it’s last issue being released on April, 2016. Leading up to it’s demise, it was but a shell of it’s former self due to several controversies, including multiple people placing “GUN FOR HIRE” ads in the magazine for the actual assassinations and murders of people. How multiple people managed to get multiple personal ads for actual real world assassination through, let alone one to begin with, I still have no idea. You would have thought the wording would have triggered a closer inspection of the ad. But I digress.
The main character of Soldier of Fortune is John Mullins, based on the real life John Mullins, who is a Vietnam vet and former mercenary, and was brought in as a consultant to make the game more authentic. Although I don’t know what parts of the game were made authentic, because it goes with an over-the-top 80s and 90s action movie style instead of being a more realistic game like SWAT 3/4 or Rainbow Six. Although, in a video interview that came with the Platinum Edition of the game, John Mullins said that there are small parts of the story that mirror his real life, which makes me hope that he fought a psychopath in a highly advanced cyber suit at some point his life.
In the game, Mullins gets his contracts from a cloak & dagger anti-terrorism outfit called “The Shop”. The current contract that “The Shop” has given to Mullins involves the theft of four nuclear weapons stolen by a Afrikaner Neo-Nazi group based in Germany, led by a man called Sergei Dekker. They plan to sell the four nuclear weapons to various nations, and you’re the guy entrusted to stop them.
Helping you with your contract is your partner Aaron “Hawk” Parsons, who also works for “The Shop”, joins you in a few of your missions on the ground. Sam Gladstone, the other other person who works for “The Shop and is another friend, helps you by debriefing you on your contracts before you leave on your mission.
Surprisingly, Soldier of Fortune has a pretty famous voice cast behind it, including Michael Clarke Duncun (The Green Mile), Earl Boen (The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day), Brian Thompson (The Terminator, Cobra), Michael De Santo (The English dub of the 1995 Ghost in the Shell movie), and John Mullins himself is played by Tod Sussman (The Taking of Pellam 123, Beverly Hills Cop II). At lot of the voice acting is pretty cheesy, but it’s definitely on the entertaining side of being cheesy, and is pretty solid and fun.
The plot takes you all over the world, from NYC, Iraq and Japan to Germany, Sudan and Siberia, which means that the areas you visit are diverse to say the least, ranging from snowy mountains to jungles to deserts to the high tech city of Japan, meaning that you won’t just get the generic browns and grey of the modern shooters. Its pretty refreshing compared to the Call of Duty’s and Battlefield’s of today. There is even one level taking place in a slaughter house and is one of the highlights of the game.
Graphically, the game holds up fairly well for a game from it’s era, running on a modified Quake II engine. It does help that the game features a variety of locations so nothing gets visually stale. But the highlight of the game is the GHOUL damage model for the enemies which was made for this game, which is appropriately title for being a bit ghoulish, since it allows you allows you to blow the arms, legs, and hands off of your enemies with your shotgun, or blow them into small gibs with your rocket launcher.
Enemies react to where you shoot them. Shoot someone in the hand or leg, and they’ll clutch onto it out of pain. All of this adds a layer to the game that I guess makes it more realistic. It certainly makes the game stand out at least. There was one instance of a funny glitch where I blew the legs off of a guy and he still fell over like he still had them. The weapons also have some good sound design it, with the shotgun standing out, having some kick to it.
This GHOUL damage engine was what brought the previously mentioned controversy to the game. After the game was released, it received a complaint from a member of the public about the extreme violence to the British Columbia Film Classification Office, who then investigated the game. The BCFCO decided that the acts of violence and gore were not suitable for persons under the age of 18. In a controversial decision, the game was labeled as an “adult motion picture” and was rated as a pornographic film. In Germany, the game was placed on the Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons index. As you can tell, it got quite the extreme reaction.
If you look at the game today, the game doesn’t seem as violent compared to some of the games released these days games, such as Mortal Kombat 11 and Doom: Eternal, or even something like Manhunt which came out 3 years after this game, especially when games have been getting more realistic in the 14 years since the game came out. On the other hand, I wouldn’t exactly call it tame either, since it’s still pretty extreme in the violence department.
But the game does come with an option to disable all of the gore and password protect the option from younger people. There even was a version of the game with the gore permanently locked-out, titled “Soldier of Fortune: Tactical Low-Violence Version”, specifically made for Wal-Mart. You can pretty much buy the game uncensored these days through places like Steam and GOG, so it’s not much of an issue these days.
Gameplay wise, the game plays pretty much like your standard First Person Shooter. You run and gun your way through a series of corridors, gunning down the bad guys as you go. However, there are a few other things on top of this.
There is an inventory, but it isn’t all that great. You get your standard grenades and explosives with C4 Explosives and M24 Frag Grenades.They work exactly the same away and you have to go through the inventory to select each one, so there is no point to having the C4 Explosives. There are also Flashbangs, which you can use to blind your enemies, which i never used outside of just the once just to see how effective it was.
There are also First Aid Pack’s that you can pick up, which are frustrating to use because you have to use it the same way you use other items in your inventory. I don’t know why you couldn’t just pick it up to replenish your health the same way you pick up Bulletproof Vests to replenish your armor. Finally, there are Night Vision Goggles, which I’ve never had to use. Ever. So really, the inventory is completely useless since items could have been left our and whatever is left could have just been associated with a key, like G for grenades or N for Night Vision.
The weapons are what you’d expect for a FPS for the most part. You have two handguns, the 9mm Handgun and .44 Magnum, a Combat Shotgun, a Sniper Rifle, a sub-machine Gun, a Silenced SMG, a Heavy Machine Gun, and a Rocket Launcher. There’s also the Combat Knife, which you can throw at enemies but are limited. You can pick up off the floor or pull them out of your enemies when they’re dead. Finally there is the H-24 Slugthrower, which can take out almost everyone immediately, and a Flamethrower that I also never used but works well.
The one gun that stands out however is the Microwave Pulse Gun, which i guess is one of the liberties that Raven Software took when John Mullins was consulting for them. Before you go on your mission, you can select what weapons and equipment you want to take with you. By default, i took the Bulletproof Vest and Health Kits because a few of the enemies are a little difficult to get past. I also take the Heavy Machine Gun because enemies drop the most amount of ammo for it and its generally the most effective against enemies.
The enemies are on the more difficult side but aren’t too bad. My only major complaint with the difficulty is about the final boss of the game. He’s not only a complete bullet sponge, but he has an overpowered gun that can pretty much kill you in one shot. There are also automated turrets during the boss battle that can kill you within seconds.
You pretty much have to get in a place he can’t reach, strafe left and right to avoid his one shot kills, and continually hit him with your most powerful gun, the Microwave Pulse Gun. It feels like such a cheap way to end the game.
The game also comes with a multiplayer component that a lot of other FPS games at the time. It comes with your standard fare, like Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag, but it has some good variety in it’s other game modes. Realistic Deathmatch is more difficult, and has you carry only one weapon, increased weapon damage, and a fatigue meter.
Arsenal is another variant of Deathmatch, but you get all of the weapons, and you get one kill with each of them to win the match. Assassin has you chasing after a specific target, whom you have to kill, all while someone is trying to assassinate you. You can only kill these two people, or you will lose points. Finally, there is Conquer the Bunker, in which there are capture points all around the map but touching easily identifiable by flags. The longer you hold down these capture points, the more points you get. The more capture points you have, the quicker you get those points. It’s pretty much Domination from Unreal Tournament.
The game is very easy to get working on modem systems. If you own a physical copy, there is a mod out there called SoFplus for people who already own the game, and it helps a lot. Not only does it get it running on modern systems, but it comes with a bundle of other features, including widescreen support, FOV, fixes, a multitude of new graphical features that made it easier on the eyes, and the ability to play online without GameSpy.
Unfortunately, the company who now owns the rights to the game seems to have taken down the website for SoFPlus, but it is included in the “Community Edition” mod, which adds significant improvements to Soldier of Fortune along with adding community maps for the multiplayer.
Looking back at Soldier of Fortune, it does hold up fairly well and there is certainly a lot of fun to be had here if you’re a die hard retro First Person Shooter fan.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2020/03/09/soldier-of-fortune-ii-double-helix-review-pc-xbox/
Due to the success of Soldier of Fortune, Raven Software soon started working on a sequel, and a mere 2 years later, Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix was released on May 20th, 2002. It was later ported to the original Xbox by Gratioutous Games. Considering how I feel about the PC version, I don’t know how SoFII would have done in the limitations of the original Xbox.
John Mullins returns, both the fictionalized character from the first game, and the real life John Mullins who was the main inspiration for said character who was brought on to consult and help have the game have a certain amount of accuracy. Considering that the second game is a lot more down to Earth and realistic, I’d say that a tad more of his advice and experience was used for this game than the last one.
The story starts in Prague in a prologue that takes place during the early years in John’s career. He is sent to Prague to get Dr. Piotr Ivanovich, one of the Soviet Union’s top biopreparat scientists who wants to defect in fear of his life and is willing to give up information in exchange for protection from the Soviet Union. After leaving the hotel they met in and escaping in an exciting car chase, the manage to get out of the country. 10 years later, and Mullins is now working for “The Shop” much like the last game.
With the information from Dr. Ivanovich, who now also works with “The Shop”, you are sent on a mission to prevent the usage of bio-chemical weapons that Dr. Ivanovich had been working on before he defected. The rest of the story is written like a pulpy Tom Clancy novel, filled with all of the clichés and plot points that you’d expect. You probably won’t remember a whole lot of it after you’ve finished, but is entertaining in the same way a so good it’s bad ’90s action film is as you’re watching it.
This time around the voice acting is not as enjoyably cheesy as the first games, with everyone being incredibly wooden and forgettable. However, a lot of the same actors have returned, which is nice.
The game runs of “ID Tech 3”, which is the Quake 3 engine, and the whole thing looks a bit like a mixed bag. Levels range from OK to decent at times. It doesn’t quite have something as appealing to look at like the giant castle which had a secret laboratory or the Tokyo skyline, but it still looks good for the most part. A lot of the levels have some pretty weather effect, such as rain, and levels do take place all over the world, so there is some great variety. Yet again Raven Software has taken an ID Software engine and made something alright for the most part. Except for one thing, the character models
Character models look a bit weird, but especially with their faces. When the characters are talking, their faces go into weird shapes that look like they’re going to tear apart at the seam. Half-Life did something similar back in 1998, fours years before SoF II. Maybe it’s because it looked simpler, but after the HD pack was released with Half-Life: Blue Shift the year before SoF II, which had better facial animation, SoF II just ends up looking weird.
Much like the first game, SoF II does come with the GHOUL damage system, but now upgraded to GHOUL 2.0, in which you can shoot the heads, arms, and legs off of enemies. Like the first game, I did come across a glitch in which after a bad guy got his head blown to pieces, but the guy was still running around trying to kill me. It was an unintentional piece of black humor.
The game also tries to flesh out the stealth sections by including mechanics where you can unlock doors with a lock-pick or cut tripwires, but it boils down to just pressing and holding E for a random amount of time that the game just decides on however it feels at that point in the game.
Some of the things that I complained about the first game have been improved. You can pick up health kits and it automatically replenishes your health just like the armor. Instead of an inventory, you can select certain items you are holding with the number keys. I’d still rather have specific keys for certain items that you;re holding, like G for grenades and N for the night vision. Overall, it’s better, which is nice. Speaking of items, you have Binoculars, Night Vision, and Thermal Vision.
SoF II comes with a stealth mechanic, although it’s borderline pointless. If you alert someone, an alarm goes off, and it stays on the entire section of the game that it’s used in, which means the enemies are constantly on alert for you. Since it’s incredibly easy to trip the alarm, the stealth is rendered completely pointless. There was only one level that it worked, and that in the prologue where you have to sneak Ivanovich out of the country.
Probably the biggest new feature is the Random Mission Generator, which generates a randomly generated map. Obvious, I know. The mode does come with a good variety of options to choose on, including the type of mission (escape, infiltration, assassination, and demolition), time of day, type of terrain (hills, snow, jungle, or desert), difficulty, and the ability to choose what items you want, or get whatever the mode decides to give you. The randomness is based on a random seed generator, so if you just so happened to like a level, you can save it for later. The levels end up looking a little bland, but that’s just because they’re randomly included.
SoF II comes with your standard arsenal for a First Person Shooter. You have your melee weapon with the Combat Knight. They can be thrown at enemies if you’re trying to stealth your way through a level, or are running low on ammo for your other weapons. They can be picked back up so you don’t have to run out of them. I’ve never really had low ammo, but then again I was playing on the lower difficulties because of how insanely difficult this game is. There are two handguns, two SMGs, three assault rifles, a grenade launcher, a rocket launcher, and 2 machine guns, one of which can also be found mounted in some levels.
Rounding out the arsenal are the grenades, which include the flashbang, smoke grenade, an incendiary grenade, and your regular grenades. A lot of the weapons come with add-ons that include things like laser sights and bayonets. It’s a nice, varied, and quite extensive selection of weapons. Sure, there are tons of inaccuracies that would send a gun nut up the wall, such as the way the grenade launcher reloads, but Soldier of Fortune was never really about being realistic, it was only about putting up the appearance of being realistic. The last game had a cyber ninja for fucks sake.
But by far, bot the most interesting and the most annoying weapon in the entire game is the “XM 29 SABR OICN”, which is supposed to be a long range weapon with an airburst grenade launcher with integrated night vision. Trying to switch between it being a grande launcher and automatic rifle is frustrating and is now worth using since you can just use the M4A1 with the night vision in your inventory.
Now comes the games major problems. Some of the earlier levels in the Single Player take place in Columbia, and they’re borderline impossible. The level is filled with foliage, and it’s difficult to see a lot of the enemies when they’re standing, and impossible when they’re crouching. The enemies are incredibly accurate with their aim, even if you’re trying to hide behind the same foliage that they are. The only way to hide is behind something solid, like a tree or a wall.
The enemies also frequently throw grenades, and the don’t seem to run out of them. This is also the only level with tripwires, so you have to deal with those taking off big chunks of your health, or even killing you if you’re low on health if you accidentally activate them. You could either cut them, or just jump over them. Just memorizing where they are and jumping over them is much quicker.
If the level wasn’t hard enough, there is also a helicopter that follows you around the level too, firing on you in scripted evens, and the only way to destroy it is at the end of one point during this section of the game. The entire section is having to deal with getting killed from every direction. The was one of the levels in the demo, and I wouldn’t have blamed people for this level putting them off from buying this game completely. If you can get passed this level without breaking your keyboard in frustration, then you deserve a medal. And some therapy.
The second half of the Columbia section has you meeting up with a team of marines, which brings up a whole new slew of problems. If you get too far away from them, either too far ahead or behind them, one of them yells “Execute him!”, and you die instantly. Sometimes, you don’t even hear a gunshot. I guess the in-universe reason is that the terrorists aren’t alerted to their and your presence, but it’s still obnoxious. The friendly characters aren’t very smart, but if you sit behind something and let them take out the enemies, it makes the level easier, but it also makes the level incredibly tedious.
There is another mission where you have to fight a helicopter, much like the first game, but only with the difficult cranked up to 11. You have to shoot the panels on the sides of the winds, exposing the engine in side. The helicopter can do tons of damage, so you’ll be constantly dying and quick loading. The team behind this game must have thought it was amazing, or had run out of time or budget, because the last level is also a helicopter fight, yet even more balls to the wall difficult.
Finally, there is the airport level. Years before Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s infamous airport scene, there was Soldier of Fortune 2. On this level, terrorists have taken over an airport in Switzerland, and because of this, there are civilians running around the level. If one of the civilians dies, game over, and you have to either start the level over again, or start from your last save.
That doesn’t sound so bad until you find out that when your enemies try and kill you, their AI is so bad that they will accidentally shoot through the civilians to try and kill you, resulting a game over. And the civilian AI is the worst of the bunch, as they keep getting in the way of the terrorists.
Couldn’t Raven Software come up with a reason to not have the civilians running around like chickens with their heads cut off? The game could have had the civilians locked in a room at the end of the level with the terrorists protecting the room, threatening to kill them, they could be hiding somewhere around the level, out of the way of both you and the enemies.
A Gold Edition of this game came out, and along with the typical bug fixes, it includes new content for the multiplayer, which is always a nice bonus.
This is going to be a lukewarm recommendation from me. While the fact that it’s a pretty good game, it’s insanely unfair difficulty makes it off-putting in a lot of ways. They didn’t even change the AI when patching the game. If there was one thing that I would change with this game, it would be the bullshit AI.
Due to the success of Soldier of Fortune, Raven Software soon started working on a sequel, and a mere 2 years later, Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix was released on May 20th, 2002. It was later ported to the original Xbox by Gratioutous Games. Considering how I feel about the PC version, I don’t know how SoFII would have done in the limitations of the original Xbox.
John Mullins returns, both the fictionalized character from the first game, and the real life John Mullins who was the main inspiration for said character who was brought on to consult and help have the game have a certain amount of accuracy. Considering that the second game is a lot more down to Earth and realistic, I’d say that a tad more of his advice and experience was used for this game than the last one.
The story starts in Prague in a prologue that takes place during the early years in John’s career. He is sent to Prague to get Dr. Piotr Ivanovich, one of the Soviet Union’s top biopreparat scientists who wants to defect in fear of his life and is willing to give up information in exchange for protection from the Soviet Union. After leaving the hotel they met in and escaping in an exciting car chase, the manage to get out of the country. 10 years later, and Mullins is now working for “The Shop” much like the last game.
With the information from Dr. Ivanovich, who now also works with “The Shop”, you are sent on a mission to prevent the usage of bio-chemical weapons that Dr. Ivanovich had been working on before he defected. The rest of the story is written like a pulpy Tom Clancy novel, filled with all of the clichés and plot points that you’d expect. You probably won’t remember a whole lot of it after you’ve finished, but is entertaining in the same way a so good it’s bad ’90s action film is as you’re watching it.
This time around the voice acting is not as enjoyably cheesy as the first games, with everyone being incredibly wooden and forgettable. However, a lot of the same actors have returned, which is nice.
The game runs of “ID Tech 3”, which is the Quake 3 engine, and the whole thing looks a bit like a mixed bag. Levels range from OK to decent at times. It doesn’t quite have something as appealing to look at like the giant castle which had a secret laboratory or the Tokyo skyline, but it still looks good for the most part. A lot of the levels have some pretty weather effect, such as rain, and levels do take place all over the world, so there is some great variety. Yet again Raven Software has taken an ID Software engine and made something alright for the most part. Except for one thing, the character models
Character models look a bit weird, but especially with their faces. When the characters are talking, their faces go into weird shapes that look like they’re going to tear apart at the seam. Half-Life did something similar back in 1998, fours years before SoF II. Maybe it’s because it looked simpler, but after the HD pack was released with Half-Life: Blue Shift the year before SoF II, which had better facial animation, SoF II just ends up looking weird.
Much like the first game, SoF II does come with the GHOUL damage system, but now upgraded to GHOUL 2.0, in which you can shoot the heads, arms, and legs off of enemies. Like the first game, I did come across a glitch in which after a bad guy got his head blown to pieces, but the guy was still running around trying to kill me. It was an unintentional piece of black humor.
The game also tries to flesh out the stealth sections by including mechanics where you can unlock doors with a lock-pick or cut tripwires, but it boils down to just pressing and holding E for a random amount of time that the game just decides on however it feels at that point in the game.
Some of the things that I complained about the first game have been improved. You can pick up health kits and it automatically replenishes your health just like the armor. Instead of an inventory, you can select certain items you are holding with the number keys. I’d still rather have specific keys for certain items that you;re holding, like G for grenades and N for the night vision. Overall, it’s better, which is nice. Speaking of items, you have Binoculars, Night Vision, and Thermal Vision.
SoF II comes with a stealth mechanic, although it’s borderline pointless. If you alert someone, an alarm goes off, and it stays on the entire section of the game that it’s used in, which means the enemies are constantly on alert for you. Since it’s incredibly easy to trip the alarm, the stealth is rendered completely pointless. There was only one level that it worked, and that in the prologue where you have to sneak Ivanovich out of the country.
Probably the biggest new feature is the Random Mission Generator, which generates a randomly generated map. Obvious, I know. The mode does come with a good variety of options to choose on, including the type of mission (escape, infiltration, assassination, and demolition), time of day, type of terrain (hills, snow, jungle, or desert), difficulty, and the ability to choose what items you want, or get whatever the mode decides to give you. The randomness is based on a random seed generator, so if you just so happened to like a level, you can save it for later. The levels end up looking a little bland, but that’s just because they’re randomly included.
SoF II comes with your standard arsenal for a First Person Shooter. You have your melee weapon with the Combat Knight. They can be thrown at enemies if you’re trying to stealth your way through a level, or are running low on ammo for your other weapons. They can be picked back up so you don’t have to run out of them. I’ve never really had low ammo, but then again I was playing on the lower difficulties because of how insanely difficult this game is. There are two handguns, two SMGs, three assault rifles, a grenade launcher, a rocket launcher, and 2 machine guns, one of which can also be found mounted in some levels.
Rounding out the arsenal are the grenades, which include the flashbang, smoke grenade, an incendiary grenade, and your regular grenades. A lot of the weapons come with add-ons that include things like laser sights and bayonets. It’s a nice, varied, and quite extensive selection of weapons. Sure, there are tons of inaccuracies that would send a gun nut up the wall, such as the way the grenade launcher reloads, but Soldier of Fortune was never really about being realistic, it was only about putting up the appearance of being realistic. The last game had a cyber ninja for fucks sake.
But by far, bot the most interesting and the most annoying weapon in the entire game is the “XM 29 SABR OICN”, which is supposed to be a long range weapon with an airburst grenade launcher with integrated night vision. Trying to switch between it being a grande launcher and automatic rifle is frustrating and is now worth using since you can just use the M4A1 with the night vision in your inventory.
Now comes the games major problems. Some of the earlier levels in the Single Player take place in Columbia, and they’re borderline impossible. The level is filled with foliage, and it’s difficult to see a lot of the enemies when they’re standing, and impossible when they’re crouching. The enemies are incredibly accurate with their aim, even if you’re trying to hide behind the same foliage that they are. The only way to hide is behind something solid, like a tree or a wall.
The enemies also frequently throw grenades, and the don’t seem to run out of them. This is also the only level with tripwires, so you have to deal with those taking off big chunks of your health, or even killing you if you’re low on health if you accidentally activate them. You could either cut them, or just jump over them. Just memorizing where they are and jumping over them is much quicker.
If the level wasn’t hard enough, there is also a helicopter that follows you around the level too, firing on you in scripted evens, and the only way to destroy it is at the end of one point during this section of the game. The entire section is having to deal with getting killed from every direction. The was one of the levels in the demo, and I wouldn’t have blamed people for this level putting them off from buying this game completely. If you can get passed this level without breaking your keyboard in frustration, then you deserve a medal. And some therapy.
The second half of the Columbia section has you meeting up with a team of marines, which brings up a whole new slew of problems. If you get too far away from them, either too far ahead or behind them, one of them yells “Execute him!”, and you die instantly. Sometimes, you don’t even hear a gunshot. I guess the in-universe reason is that the terrorists aren’t alerted to their and your presence, but it’s still obnoxious. The friendly characters aren’t very smart, but if you sit behind something and let them take out the enemies, it makes the level easier, but it also makes the level incredibly tedious.
There is another mission where you have to fight a helicopter, much like the first game, but only with the difficult cranked up to 11. You have to shoot the panels on the sides of the winds, exposing the engine in side. The helicopter can do tons of damage, so you’ll be constantly dying and quick loading. The team behind this game must have thought it was amazing, or had run out of time or budget, because the last level is also a helicopter fight, yet even more balls to the wall difficult.
Finally, there is the airport level. Years before Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s infamous airport scene, there was Soldier of Fortune 2. On this level, terrorists have taken over an airport in Switzerland, and because of this, there are civilians running around the level. If one of the civilians dies, game over, and you have to either start the level over again, or start from your last save.
That doesn’t sound so bad until you find out that when your enemies try and kill you, their AI is so bad that they will accidentally shoot through the civilians to try and kill you, resulting a game over. And the civilian AI is the worst of the bunch, as they keep getting in the way of the terrorists.
Couldn’t Raven Software come up with a reason to not have the civilians running around like chickens with their heads cut off? The game could have had the civilians locked in a room at the end of the level with the terrorists protecting the room, threatening to kill them, they could be hiding somewhere around the level, out of the way of both you and the enemies.
A Gold Edition of this game came out, and along with the typical bug fixes, it includes new content for the multiplayer, which is always a nice bonus.
This is going to be a lukewarm recommendation from me. While the fact that it’s a pretty good game, it’s insanely unfair difficulty makes it off-putting in a lot of ways. They didn’t even change the AI when patching the game. If there was one thing that I would change with this game, it would be the bullshit AI.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/11/21/double-s-t-e-a-l-the-second-clash-2005-xbox-review/
The plot description contains slight spoilers for the first game (ENG: “Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions”, JP: “Double S.T.E.A.L.”), but they are minor.
After arresting Tiger Takagi and loosening the grip of the Yakuza on Hong Kong, the Dragons of the Hong Kong Police Force fly to America to hand off Tiget Takagi to the CIA. But not even 5 minutes after landing in Chicago, the Yakuza gang working in the USA break Tiger Takagi out of police custody, allowing Tiger Takagi to wreak chaos throughout the city of Chicago. It’s up to the Dragons to reign in Tiger Takagi and the Yakuza before it’s too late.
I don’t think there is even 5 minutes of cutscene total throughout the game. But it’s not like it matters much since the gameplay is the thing holding this game together.
I guess that the first game didn’t do too well outside of Japan, because ‘The Second Clash’ stayed in it’s home country of Japan. And on top of that, this game remained an exclusive to the original Xbox unlike the first game. And considering that the original Xbox wasn’t flying of the shelves like the PlayStation 2 and GameCube were in Japan unlike it was in the Western countries, I guess it was doomed to obscurity, even in it’s own country.
But despite the fact that it’s a game exclusive to Japan the game is entirely in English. And I don’t just mean the game has English menus and subtitles, but the whole thing is dubbed in English, which means that anyone from an English speaking country could play though this game with ease. Maybe the original game sold well enough in English speaking countries that the company developing or it publishing it thought that it could sell just as well enough in those countries, but pulled out at the last minute because it didn’t sell quite enough to justify the release. I didn’t even know that this game existed until I was doing some research on the first game for my review. And if you were a fan of the original outside of Japan, you probably wouldn’t have know that a sequel would have even came out because of the different name. Also, that cover isn’t exactly an eye catcher.
The most amusing thing about the English voice acting is that Tiger Takagi, the bad guy, is voiced by someone from the UK, in a game set entirely in Chicago, playing a member of the Yakuza, who was previously working in Hong Kong. It’s the most mismatched accent and I wouldn’t change it because of just how perfectly silly it is.
But the most obvious, and best, change to the game is that it automatically saves all of your progress the moment that you complete a mission. I still don’t know why this wasn’t a feature in the Xbox version of the first game. I didn’t expect it in the PlayStation 2 and GameCube ports because those use Memory Cards, but the original version was developed for a console with a permanent hard drive, which means you could save any time.
The driving feels much better this time around. While the cars can still feel a little too ‘bouncy’, for a lack of a better word, for my liking, it feels like it was refined from the fist one, making it feel much better. It also help that the roads are wider, allowing the cars to make wide turns without making you feel like you’re about to hit into a wall every time you make a turn around a corner. Although, there was still the odd moment when I crash and my cars still ended up bouncing around like a pinball, which is still annoying, but it didn’t happen often, and was still be amusing in it’s own way. There are still a few times where you have to drive on tighter spaces, and while it isn’t as tedious as it was in the previous entry in the series, it’s probably still the worst part of the game.
Most of the cars now have a turbo boost that lets you catch up to your objective if you’re falling behind. You can earn extra turbo boosts by destroying propery and traffic, most of which get knocked around as you’re car is the unstoppable force looking for an immovable object. It’s pretty fun watching a tiny car make a giant bus, or even a train, fly off into the distance. But when the booster bar is maxed out however, then it will be expelled out all at once and time stops briefly.
‘Second Clash’ also toned back some of the graphical effects from the original Xbox version of the game, which is good because that version of the game, despite still being the best looking out of all the versions of the game, went wild with the bloom and particle effects. It’s still pretty good looking ang gets across the look and feel of Chicago, even if it’s not the most accurate portrayal of the city. A couple of the areas feel a little barren, but I’d still prefer that than the developers feeling the need to shove as much stuff as they can into the game. And to top it all off the game can run in 720p at 60 fps, which is pretty nice considering just how good the game looks.
Just like the first game, you’re tasked with completing a series of missions where you stop the Yakuza from causing chaos across the city, but instead of Hong Kong, it’s Chicago. Objectives can range from destroying cars, such as Yakuza members chasing someone or a group of people performing an illegal street race, or you having to get something from ‘Point A’ to ‘Point B’ without being hit too many times. It does feel varied enough that it doesn’t get too tedious or repetitive.
Missions have fare more generous time limits compared to the first game, but almost to compensate for that, each mission now has a rating, and earning a high rating on a mission can unlock extra mission in the free roam mod and extra cars. The game even came with leaderboards so you can see how well you did compared to other people. They don’t work any more, obviously, but it’s a neat feature to see in the game.
And surprisingly, the free roam mode from the PS2 and CGN versions make a return for sequel on the Xbox, which is nice to see. But instead of just being able to drive around the city having to make up your own fun or just to admire the look of the game, you can now do extra missions that are unlocked when you get a good enough rating in a Story Mission. These extra missions can include racing in a dirt race, reaching all of the checkpoints as quickly as possible, or as something simple as delivering a pizza.
Plus there are hidden car parts scattered around the city in free roam that you can find, and for every 5 car parts you collect, you unlock a car. There’s no way to choose which car that you want to unlock first, they just unlock in a specific order. You can also unlock cars by completing the story missions.
Some of these unlockable cars include various sports cars, muscle cars, a monster truck, a toy car, and even a tank that lets you fire the barrel, which is not only fun to use in the free roam mode, but cut down the time of a few missions where you have to take out Yakuza cars from roughly 2 and a 1/2 minutes to about 10 seconds.
Is Double S.T.E.A.L.: The Second Clash worth tracking down and buying? Only if you’re an avid collector of retro video games. While I did have a lot of fun with it, it would be hard to justify to someone to not only drop the money on both buying and importing the game but having to import a Japanese Xbox. There are other means to get it, but that's a whole other level of being able to play the game. I would still recommend it, even if it's to a select few who would actually go out of there way to play it.
The plot description contains slight spoilers for the first game (ENG: “Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions”, JP: “Double S.T.E.A.L.”), but they are minor.
After arresting Tiger Takagi and loosening the grip of the Yakuza on Hong Kong, the Dragons of the Hong Kong Police Force fly to America to hand off Tiget Takagi to the CIA. But not even 5 minutes after landing in Chicago, the Yakuza gang working in the USA break Tiger Takagi out of police custody, allowing Tiger Takagi to wreak chaos throughout the city of Chicago. It’s up to the Dragons to reign in Tiger Takagi and the Yakuza before it’s too late.
I don’t think there is even 5 minutes of cutscene total throughout the game. But it’s not like it matters much since the gameplay is the thing holding this game together.
I guess that the first game didn’t do too well outside of Japan, because ‘The Second Clash’ stayed in it’s home country of Japan. And on top of that, this game remained an exclusive to the original Xbox unlike the first game. And considering that the original Xbox wasn’t flying of the shelves like the PlayStation 2 and GameCube were in Japan unlike it was in the Western countries, I guess it was doomed to obscurity, even in it’s own country.
But despite the fact that it’s a game exclusive to Japan the game is entirely in English. And I don’t just mean the game has English menus and subtitles, but the whole thing is dubbed in English, which means that anyone from an English speaking country could play though this game with ease. Maybe the original game sold well enough in English speaking countries that the company developing or it publishing it thought that it could sell just as well enough in those countries, but pulled out at the last minute because it didn’t sell quite enough to justify the release. I didn’t even know that this game existed until I was doing some research on the first game for my review. And if you were a fan of the original outside of Japan, you probably wouldn’t have know that a sequel would have even came out because of the different name. Also, that cover isn’t exactly an eye catcher.
The most amusing thing about the English voice acting is that Tiger Takagi, the bad guy, is voiced by someone from the UK, in a game set entirely in Chicago, playing a member of the Yakuza, who was previously working in Hong Kong. It’s the most mismatched accent and I wouldn’t change it because of just how perfectly silly it is.
But the most obvious, and best, change to the game is that it automatically saves all of your progress the moment that you complete a mission. I still don’t know why this wasn’t a feature in the Xbox version of the first game. I didn’t expect it in the PlayStation 2 and GameCube ports because those use Memory Cards, but the original version was developed for a console with a permanent hard drive, which means you could save any time.
The driving feels much better this time around. While the cars can still feel a little too ‘bouncy’, for a lack of a better word, for my liking, it feels like it was refined from the fist one, making it feel much better. It also help that the roads are wider, allowing the cars to make wide turns without making you feel like you’re about to hit into a wall every time you make a turn around a corner. Although, there was still the odd moment when I crash and my cars still ended up bouncing around like a pinball, which is still annoying, but it didn’t happen often, and was still be amusing in it’s own way. There are still a few times where you have to drive on tighter spaces, and while it isn’t as tedious as it was in the previous entry in the series, it’s probably still the worst part of the game.
Most of the cars now have a turbo boost that lets you catch up to your objective if you’re falling behind. You can earn extra turbo boosts by destroying propery and traffic, most of which get knocked around as you’re car is the unstoppable force looking for an immovable object. It’s pretty fun watching a tiny car make a giant bus, or even a train, fly off into the distance. But when the booster bar is maxed out however, then it will be expelled out all at once and time stops briefly.
‘Second Clash’ also toned back some of the graphical effects from the original Xbox version of the game, which is good because that version of the game, despite still being the best looking out of all the versions of the game, went wild with the bloom and particle effects. It’s still pretty good looking ang gets across the look and feel of Chicago, even if it’s not the most accurate portrayal of the city. A couple of the areas feel a little barren, but I’d still prefer that than the developers feeling the need to shove as much stuff as they can into the game. And to top it all off the game can run in 720p at 60 fps, which is pretty nice considering just how good the game looks.
Just like the first game, you’re tasked with completing a series of missions where you stop the Yakuza from causing chaos across the city, but instead of Hong Kong, it’s Chicago. Objectives can range from destroying cars, such as Yakuza members chasing someone or a group of people performing an illegal street race, or you having to get something from ‘Point A’ to ‘Point B’ without being hit too many times. It does feel varied enough that it doesn’t get too tedious or repetitive.
Missions have fare more generous time limits compared to the first game, but almost to compensate for that, each mission now has a rating, and earning a high rating on a mission can unlock extra mission in the free roam mod and extra cars. The game even came with leaderboards so you can see how well you did compared to other people. They don’t work any more, obviously, but it’s a neat feature to see in the game.
And surprisingly, the free roam mode from the PS2 and CGN versions make a return for sequel on the Xbox, which is nice to see. But instead of just being able to drive around the city having to make up your own fun or just to admire the look of the game, you can now do extra missions that are unlocked when you get a good enough rating in a Story Mission. These extra missions can include racing in a dirt race, reaching all of the checkpoints as quickly as possible, or as something simple as delivering a pizza.
Plus there are hidden car parts scattered around the city in free roam that you can find, and for every 5 car parts you collect, you unlock a car. There’s no way to choose which car that you want to unlock first, they just unlock in a specific order. You can also unlock cars by completing the story missions.
Some of these unlockable cars include various sports cars, muscle cars, a monster truck, a toy car, and even a tank that lets you fire the barrel, which is not only fun to use in the free roam mode, but cut down the time of a few missions where you have to take out Yakuza cars from roughly 2 and a 1/2 minutes to about 10 seconds.
Is Double S.T.E.A.L.: The Second Clash worth tracking down and buying? Only if you’re an avid collector of retro video games. While I did have a lot of fun with it, it would be hard to justify to someone to not only drop the money on both buying and importing the game but having to import a Japanese Xbox. There are other means to get it, but that's a whole other level of being able to play the game. I would still recommend it, even if it's to a select few who would actually go out of there way to play it.
1996
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/03/14/alien-incident-1996-review/
It’s nice coming across a lesser known adventure game. People always talk about the heavyweights such as Sierra’s and Lucas Art’s library of games, or even Telltale Games, along with stuff like 7th Guest, Myst, Zork, and Broken Sword. But every now and again when I’m looking through websites hosting obscure games, I come across a hidden gem not a lot of people seem to know about. One of these games is Alien Incident.
Released in 1996 after 2 years of delays, and originally known as Muukalaisten Yö (Finnish for “Night of the Aliens”), Alien Incident was developed by a small team called Bloodhouse before they merged with Housemarque, and was published by GameTek for MS-DOS in 1996, which was getting a little late for MS-DOS games to still be released. There was going to be an Amiga 1200 version, but that got cancelled.
The game takes place on Halloween, and Benjamin Richards is at his uncle’s mansion to bear witness to his newest invention, the “Worm Hole Spawner.” But at the moment it’s turned on, it is hit by lightening, accidentally creating a wormhole in space that brings an alien spaceship who happens to be chasing another alien species through into our solar system. The aliens kidnap Benjamin’s uncle to know why they were brought here, while Benjamin, you, have to rescue as well as stopping the alien threat.
Getting this game to work isn’t too bad, since it’s a DOS game. Just the usual mild fiddling with DOSBox, nothing too difficult. However the game did crash one me once or twice, and that lead me to discovering a great little unique feature that the game has when it crashes. When you re-open the game, it loads right back to just before when it crashed, preventing a major loss in progress.
This might initially sound annoying, but the game is actually pretty stable and rarely ever crashes. It’s like the original (anti-crash) checkpoint before checkpoints became a gaming staple, and it’s a nice addition to have for an adventure game. It certainly prevents the save scumming that a lot of old point-and-click adventure games needed just to be tolerable.
Even if the game didn’t have this feature, the games world isn’t that big, so backtracking to find something or just to explore isn’t that much of a problem. Thankfully the game isn’t Sierra hard, and every puzzle makes sense or can be easily be solved with a bit of thought and exploration. Which makes this good for a younger audience.
I have two gripes with this game. They’re not major, but they still stand out. The first gripe is that there is one part of the game that can screw you over, and you don’t see it coming and it can set you back to however long ago your last save was. It doesn’t require going back and replaying most of the game, so it shouldn’t take you too long to catch up to this section if you’ve remembered the adventure game mantra “Save Early, Save Often.”
The second gripe I have is that another part of the game has a short maze. It’s not the worst maze I’ve seen in an adventure game in that once you’ve memorized the route, you can get through it faster on multiple playthroughs, but it’s still annoying when you do it for the first time and incredibly tedious on multiple playthroughs.
I’ll never why some adventure games decided to have mazes in their games. Mazes are annoying in the best of games. Thankfully, when you reach the end of the maze, you don’t have to backtrack through it, with the game kindly teleporting you back to the beginning of it. Even the developers knew how annoying that would have been, which begs the question of why they even put it here in the first place.
Pretty much everything else is minor nitpicks, such as there being one or two things that you need to interact with that blend into the background. Thankfully the game has some text when you highlight an object, so it’s not too hard to find something, you just to sometimes sweep the mouse cursor across the screen.
The pathfinding for the main character is a bit wonky, but it’s a minor gripe. There will be a time where he’s walking or you click to going in a direction, only for him to be briefly turned around before going where you want him to go. I don’t know if that’s a bug with the game or the way I’ve got the game setup, but it isn’t a major issue, just a mildly annoying glitch.
Alien Incident isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely worth checking out for fans of adventure games who haven’t yet played this game yet and are looking for something to fulfill that adventure game shaped hole in their heart, of adventure game veterans who want to go back and play it for the first time in years.
On top of that, the game’s humor is actually pretty amusing. It’s pretty obvious that English wasn’t the developers first language, but most of the jokes land despite that.
It’s nice coming across a lesser known adventure game. People always talk about the heavyweights such as Sierra’s and Lucas Art’s library of games, or even Telltale Games, along with stuff like 7th Guest, Myst, Zork, and Broken Sword. But every now and again when I’m looking through websites hosting obscure games, I come across a hidden gem not a lot of people seem to know about. One of these games is Alien Incident.
Released in 1996 after 2 years of delays, and originally known as Muukalaisten Yö (Finnish for “Night of the Aliens”), Alien Incident was developed by a small team called Bloodhouse before they merged with Housemarque, and was published by GameTek for MS-DOS in 1996, which was getting a little late for MS-DOS games to still be released. There was going to be an Amiga 1200 version, but that got cancelled.
The game takes place on Halloween, and Benjamin Richards is at his uncle’s mansion to bear witness to his newest invention, the “Worm Hole Spawner.” But at the moment it’s turned on, it is hit by lightening, accidentally creating a wormhole in space that brings an alien spaceship who happens to be chasing another alien species through into our solar system. The aliens kidnap Benjamin’s uncle to know why they were brought here, while Benjamin, you, have to rescue as well as stopping the alien threat.
Getting this game to work isn’t too bad, since it’s a DOS game. Just the usual mild fiddling with DOSBox, nothing too difficult. However the game did crash one me once or twice, and that lead me to discovering a great little unique feature that the game has when it crashes. When you re-open the game, it loads right back to just before when it crashed, preventing a major loss in progress.
This might initially sound annoying, but the game is actually pretty stable and rarely ever crashes. It’s like the original (anti-crash) checkpoint before checkpoints became a gaming staple, and it’s a nice addition to have for an adventure game. It certainly prevents the save scumming that a lot of old point-and-click adventure games needed just to be tolerable.
Even if the game didn’t have this feature, the games world isn’t that big, so backtracking to find something or just to explore isn’t that much of a problem. Thankfully the game isn’t Sierra hard, and every puzzle makes sense or can be easily be solved with a bit of thought and exploration. Which makes this good for a younger audience.
I have two gripes with this game. They’re not major, but they still stand out. The first gripe is that there is one part of the game that can screw you over, and you don’t see it coming and it can set you back to however long ago your last save was. It doesn’t require going back and replaying most of the game, so it shouldn’t take you too long to catch up to this section if you’ve remembered the adventure game mantra “Save Early, Save Often.”
The second gripe I have is that another part of the game has a short maze. It’s not the worst maze I’ve seen in an adventure game in that once you’ve memorized the route, you can get through it faster on multiple playthroughs, but it’s still annoying when you do it for the first time and incredibly tedious on multiple playthroughs.
I’ll never why some adventure games decided to have mazes in their games. Mazes are annoying in the best of games. Thankfully, when you reach the end of the maze, you don’t have to backtrack through it, with the game kindly teleporting you back to the beginning of it. Even the developers knew how annoying that would have been, which begs the question of why they even put it here in the first place.
Pretty much everything else is minor nitpicks, such as there being one or two things that you need to interact with that blend into the background. Thankfully the game has some text when you highlight an object, so it’s not too hard to find something, you just to sometimes sweep the mouse cursor across the screen.
The pathfinding for the main character is a bit wonky, but it’s a minor gripe. There will be a time where he’s walking or you click to going in a direction, only for him to be briefly turned around before going where you want him to go. I don’t know if that’s a bug with the game or the way I’ve got the game setup, but it isn’t a major issue, just a mildly annoying glitch.
Alien Incident isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely worth checking out for fans of adventure games who haven’t yet played this game yet and are looking for something to fulfill that adventure game shaped hole in their heart, of adventure game veterans who want to go back and play it for the first time in years.
On top of that, the game’s humor is actually pretty amusing. It’s pretty obvious that English wasn’t the developers first language, but most of the jokes land despite that.
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/2021/06/05/stop-stress-a-day-of-fury-wii-wiiware-2009-review/
Jack is having a bad day. From the ever annoying alarm waking him up for yet another day of work to the inevitable traffic jam and having to put up with your obnoxious boss, Jack has had it with his daily life. So what does Jack do? Jack picks up the nearest object and turns it into a weapon, taking his fury out on everything and everyone around him.
Basically the plot of “Stop Stress: A Day of Fury” is like the movie Falling Down was told in a more comical over-the-top way.
And if anything, this game has made me feel even more stressed after playing it. The entire game might only be half an hour long, 45 minutes at most, but you’re going to be swinging your Wiimote and Nunchuck around the entire time, which can be tiring. If anything, you might get a small work out from this game with just how much swinging around of the Wiimote and Nunchuck you do.
The controls work pretty well, but the controls aren’t trying to be accurate like some other Wii games, instead using a simple motion for the characters actions, like using a a quick swing off the Wiimote to swing at an enemy.
To move around, you move the Wiimote to turn your character around like other first person games on the wii, but instead of using the analog stick to move your character forward or back, you move to one of the nearby highlighted spots by pressing one of the directional keys on the Wiimote.
This also removes an of the awkward First Person controls that most First Person games on the console had. It’s not great, but I would rather these controls than another game on the Wii with awkward First Person controls
There is some mild replayability to the game, but only to the extent of topping your own score either on the same difficulty or on a higher difficulty, and I don’t see a lot of people doing that once they’ve experience the little content that this game has.
And while the concept for the game was enough of an excuse to justify the game, it wore pretty thin by the end of it, which I’m pretty sure the developers knew because like I said earlier, it’s only half an hour to 45 minutes at most and is a small downloadable title.
I don’t know if I would recommend this game, even as a curiosity. While it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome, it’s still kinda annoying and the comedy doesn’t really make up for it’s other shortcomings, making the whole thing mediocre. And to top it all off, it was a whopping $8 when it was initially released. There’s no way I would have paid that much for it back when it came out.
Jack is having a bad day. From the ever annoying alarm waking him up for yet another day of work to the inevitable traffic jam and having to put up with your obnoxious boss, Jack has had it with his daily life. So what does Jack do? Jack picks up the nearest object and turns it into a weapon, taking his fury out on everything and everyone around him.
Basically the plot of “Stop Stress: A Day of Fury” is like the movie Falling Down was told in a more comical over-the-top way.
And if anything, this game has made me feel even more stressed after playing it. The entire game might only be half an hour long, 45 minutes at most, but you’re going to be swinging your Wiimote and Nunchuck around the entire time, which can be tiring. If anything, you might get a small work out from this game with just how much swinging around of the Wiimote and Nunchuck you do.
The controls work pretty well, but the controls aren’t trying to be accurate like some other Wii games, instead using a simple motion for the characters actions, like using a a quick swing off the Wiimote to swing at an enemy.
To move around, you move the Wiimote to turn your character around like other first person games on the wii, but instead of using the analog stick to move your character forward or back, you move to one of the nearby highlighted spots by pressing one of the directional keys on the Wiimote.
This also removes an of the awkward First Person controls that most First Person games on the console had. It’s not great, but I would rather these controls than another game on the Wii with awkward First Person controls
There is some mild replayability to the game, but only to the extent of topping your own score either on the same difficulty or on a higher difficulty, and I don’t see a lot of people doing that once they’ve experience the little content that this game has.
And while the concept for the game was enough of an excuse to justify the game, it wore pretty thin by the end of it, which I’m pretty sure the developers knew because like I said earlier, it’s only half an hour to 45 minutes at most and is a small downloadable title.
I don’t know if I would recommend this game, even as a curiosity. While it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome, it’s still kinda annoying and the comedy doesn’t really make up for it’s other shortcomings, making the whole thing mediocre. And to top it all off, it was a whopping $8 when it was initially released. There’s no way I would have paid that much for it back when it came out.
NOTE: This is a review for the Arcade version of the game
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/25/michael-jacksons-moonwalker-review-part-1-arcade/
Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker is a pretty weird film to say the least. For those not in the know, it was an anthology film, several of which were just Michael Jackson’s music vidoes, mostly using music from the ‘Bad’ (1987). Probably the most infamous segment of the film is the “Smooth Criminal” segment in which a drug-dealing mobster called Mr. Big, played by Joe Pesci, kidnaps all of the worlds children to get them addicted to drugs, so Michael Jackson comes to their rescue and defeats Mr. Big by turning into a giant robot. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie.
And then along comes the video game based on the film that the 80s and 90s seemed to be filled with. While Moonwalker seems like it wouldn’t make sense as a video game, it actually makes sense with some contect. Michael Jackson was a giant fan of video games, having a giant arcade in his masnion filled to the brim with both arcade machines and the lastest video game consoles alone with a large video game collection.
He also secretly composed music for some of Sega’s games, including the Sonic series, along with making cameos in Space Channel 5, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2, and he was even the focus for a cencelled MMO called Planet Michael. He even designed the video games based on the Moonwalker movie. Which finally brings us back to Michael Jackson’s Moonwaker for the arcade.
Of course the best version of the game is the version that came out in the arcades. Developed and put out by Sega, Moonwalker is an isometric Beat-Em-Up. You play as Michael Jackson’s character from the previously mentioned “Smooth Criminal” segment from the movie, cut up into 5 different stages. Each stage is filled with Mr. Bigs’s thugs, along with characters exclusive to each stage, and then a boss battle at the finale of each stage.
As you’re going through each stage, you can save the children that have been kidnapped by the thugs. When you save the kids, they often have extra health for you, or give you a dance power-up. That’s right, you get a dance power-up. This power-up, called “Dance Magic”, makes every enemy currently on screen dance in sync with Michael Jaskson before Michael unleashes a wave of green energy, defeating all of the thugs.
The best part of this power-up is that not only does it works with the attack dogs that the thugs, causing them to dance along too, but the thugs controlling giant robots (yes, they have giant robots) to make the robot also dance along with Michael. It’s just as awesome as it sounds.
The second power-up turns Michael Jackson into a robot just like the movie, which results in you being able to run around shooting thugs with powerful lasers. To collect this power-up, you have to collect Bubbles the chimpanzee, based on Michael Jackson’s real life pet of the same name, who appears once per level.
Of course, the soundtrack is made up entirely of Michael Jackson’s music, and is fun listening to midi renditions of Michael’s music. My only problem with the soundtrack is that in the graveyard area, Thriller doesn’t play Not even when you use the dance power-up. How do you have a graveyard level in a Michael Jackson video game and not have the iconic Thriller play. Especially when Michael Jackson himself is working on it and he’s the biggest star at the time.
The game also lets you play the game with up to three players at the same time, and watching 3 Michael Jacksons in three diferrent colored suits fight of thugs, dogs, and robots, all while dancing in unison and themselves becoming robots that fire lasers is a fun thing to witness. The entire thing is onl 30 minutes long, but it was released at a time when arcade games wucked quarters out of people, so this was probably taking at last a couple of dollars out of people for the whole experience.
The arcade version of Moonwalker is easily recommendable for anyone who loves arcade games and Michael Jackson, but there isn’t a lot of places you can find it, especially since arcades don’t really exist any more in a lot of countries. And finding one to buy for yourself is borderline impossible because it would cost an arm and a leg and take up a ton of space, both of which most people don’t have.
And since there is no way to buy this game digitally, probably due to a mix of rights issues for both the music and game, as well as Michael Jackson’s unfortunate history, there is not going to be a way for you to play this unless you download it and emulate it.
But still, it comes highly recommended.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/25/michael-jacksons-moonwalker-review-part-1-arcade/
Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker is a pretty weird film to say the least. For those not in the know, it was an anthology film, several of which were just Michael Jackson’s music vidoes, mostly using music from the ‘Bad’ (1987). Probably the most infamous segment of the film is the “Smooth Criminal” segment in which a drug-dealing mobster called Mr. Big, played by Joe Pesci, kidnaps all of the worlds children to get them addicted to drugs, so Michael Jackson comes to their rescue and defeats Mr. Big by turning into a giant robot. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie.
And then along comes the video game based on the film that the 80s and 90s seemed to be filled with. While Moonwalker seems like it wouldn’t make sense as a video game, it actually makes sense with some contect. Michael Jackson was a giant fan of video games, having a giant arcade in his masnion filled to the brim with both arcade machines and the lastest video game consoles alone with a large video game collection.
He also secretly composed music for some of Sega’s games, including the Sonic series, along with making cameos in Space Channel 5, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2, and he was even the focus for a cencelled MMO called Planet Michael. He even designed the video games based on the Moonwalker movie. Which finally brings us back to Michael Jackson’s Moonwaker for the arcade.
Of course the best version of the game is the version that came out in the arcades. Developed and put out by Sega, Moonwalker is an isometric Beat-Em-Up. You play as Michael Jackson’s character from the previously mentioned “Smooth Criminal” segment from the movie, cut up into 5 different stages. Each stage is filled with Mr. Bigs’s thugs, along with characters exclusive to each stage, and then a boss battle at the finale of each stage.
As you’re going through each stage, you can save the children that have been kidnapped by the thugs. When you save the kids, they often have extra health for you, or give you a dance power-up. That’s right, you get a dance power-up. This power-up, called “Dance Magic”, makes every enemy currently on screen dance in sync with Michael Jaskson before Michael unleashes a wave of green energy, defeating all of the thugs.
The best part of this power-up is that not only does it works with the attack dogs that the thugs, causing them to dance along too, but the thugs controlling giant robots (yes, they have giant robots) to make the robot also dance along with Michael. It’s just as awesome as it sounds.
The second power-up turns Michael Jackson into a robot just like the movie, which results in you being able to run around shooting thugs with powerful lasers. To collect this power-up, you have to collect Bubbles the chimpanzee, based on Michael Jackson’s real life pet of the same name, who appears once per level.
Of course, the soundtrack is made up entirely of Michael Jackson’s music, and is fun listening to midi renditions of Michael’s music. My only problem with the soundtrack is that in the graveyard area, Thriller doesn’t play Not even when you use the dance power-up. How do you have a graveyard level in a Michael Jackson video game and not have the iconic Thriller play. Especially when Michael Jackson himself is working on it and he’s the biggest star at the time.
The game also lets you play the game with up to three players at the same time, and watching 3 Michael Jacksons in three diferrent colored suits fight of thugs, dogs, and robots, all while dancing in unison and themselves becoming robots that fire lasers is a fun thing to witness. The entire thing is onl 30 minutes long, but it was released at a time when arcade games wucked quarters out of people, so this was probably taking at last a couple of dollars out of people for the whole experience.
The arcade version of Moonwalker is easily recommendable for anyone who loves arcade games and Michael Jackson, but there isn’t a lot of places you can find it, especially since arcades don’t really exist any more in a lot of countries. And finding one to buy for yourself is borderline impossible because it would cost an arm and a leg and take up a ton of space, both of which most people don’t have.
And since there is no way to buy this game digitally, probably due to a mix of rights issues for both the music and game, as well as Michael Jackson’s unfortunate history, there is not going to be a way for you to play this unless you download it and emulate it.
But still, it comes highly recommended.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/10/27/disneys-extreme-skate-adventure-2003-gcn-ps2-xbox/
I imagine that not a lot of people have actually played this back when it was first released when they were the right age to play it when growing to have played in the first place. It doesn’t exactly have the most interesting of covers, with an awful looking cartoony character on the front surrounded by mediocre 3D renditions of Disney and Pixar characters, and from the look of both the front and back cover, it was pretty obvious that this was more of a tie-in for multiple popular Disney movies that had come out in the decade before this games release.
I’d be willing to bet that more people have probably heard about this game through the mod for PC version of Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 called T.H.U.G. PRO that takes all levels and characters from every other game that ran on the same game engine that came out on the sixth generation of consoles, which included Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure. Yep, this runs on that same engine as those sixth gen Tony Hawk games, but more about that later.
There is no plot to Skate Adventure, nor is there even an attempt at one. Since the game entirely exists to promote multiple Disney and Pixar movies as easily as possible, along with the product placement that they could shove into the game, as it just gives you a choice between several characters from three different Disney and Pixar characters and lets you ride around in three locations from the movie that they’re from.
These movies include Toy Story 1 and 2, Tarzan, and The Lion King. Why these three movies? I guess it was a mix of their popularity and that they were the easiest films to make a level based on. I have no idea is Disney or Pixar made any demands other than “get a game onto store shelves”, but this reeks of both studios not caring. The characters that are unlocked right from the start are Woody and Buzz from Toy Story, Young Tarzan and Young Terk from Tarzan, and Rafiki and Young Simba from the Lion King.
Unlockable characters include Jessie and Zurg from Toy Story 2, Young Tantor and Young Jane from Tarzan, despite the fact that Jane only ever appeared as an adult in the Tarzan film, but whatever, and Young Nala along with Timon and Pumbaa from The Lion King, with Timon and Pumbaa skating together on the same skateboard.
Locations from said movies include Pizza Planet, Andy’s Bedroom, and Zurg’s planet of Xrghthung from Toy Story 1 and 2, Tarzan’s Treehouse, The Human Camp, and Clayton’s Ship from Tarzan, and Pride Rock, The Elephant Graveyard, and Scar’s Canyon from The Lion King. The game does try to make each location visually distinct enough from every other level and it works well enough, and it’s a decent enough selection.
Although you can only play level only with the character from the movie that the levels is based on, so no Woody skating around Pride Rock or the jungle or Turk skating around any of the Toy Story levels. It’s a tad disappointing, but what are you going to do.
As I mentioned earlier, this game runs specifically on the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 engine, which actually fits with this game way more than it did with THPS 4. Tony Hawk 4 was more focused on giving the player goals than letting you just skate each level with a time limit, which works perfectly for a game like this, as having Disney and Pixar characters tell you want to do is pretty good motivation for a kid who loves those films
The Little Green Men from Toy Story do everything in the name of The Claw and Sarge from the green army men tests you on your abilities, like getting a high score or knowing how to perform a certain trick, or the Gorillas from Tarzan get you to mess up the human’s camp along with the Elephants getting help from you as their friend, or the trio of hyenas from The Lion King making bets with you or Zazu getting you to do jobs that help train you to become king, just to name a few.
Aside from the regular goals that are accessible by all characters, the game also has a few goals which are exclusive to certain characters based on plot points from the films that they’re from, such as having to defeat Zurg as Buzz Lightyear.
The least interesting goals are collecting the 25 tokens throughout a level along with one special collectable, which you have to do for every single character for every single level that they access to. It’s especially tedious and obnoxious on the confusing Elephant Graveyard level and the area in the Human Camp from Tarzan where you have to grind on some vines. It makes the game quickly go from kinda fun to tedious busywork.
Aside from the characters from the Disney and Pixar characters, there are 10 real kids that are playable known as “The Extreme Skate Crew”, and that’s because during the development of this game, Activision decided to do a nationwide casting call search in the US as a promotional tool for this game to put 10 lucky kids into this game. Kids could either show up and skate live or send in footage into the company. You can briefly see footage of the competitions in the opening credits along with a bigger montage of footage in one of the unlockable videos. The top two kids ended up being highlighted on the cover for the game and the ones who were featured the most in the game.
These kids can not only skate in Olliewood, but skate in any of the levels based on the previously mentioned movies, being able to do a few of their own goals exclusive to the level, which are just finding Olliewood tokens and the Disney Extreme Skate Adventure logo.
The game might not be technically impressive, but it does run constantly at a solid 60 FPS, and it uses the art style of multiple Disney movies from the 90s along with the Toy Story films, even if characters faces can dip into the uncanny valley, which has helped it age better than some games from the same console generation. And the lighting in a lot of areas looks good, even if some of the areas are a bit too dark, like the Elephant’s Graveyard.
The controls are pretty much the same as THPS 4 except for one difference. There is both a set of “Basic” controls aimed at children to go along with the “Pro” controls that are just from THPS 4. The “Basic” controls seem to be context based and yet they never seem to work as intended, with tricks seemingly happening when the game feels like letting them happening. Manuals would always just happen and took me by surprise every time. I don’t see how kids could learn to play the game when every time you want to do something and the game just does it with little input. I think kids could put on the “Pro” controls and use them in the more simple levels in Skate Adventure and be fine.
There’s even a split-screen multiplayer if you want to play with your friends. There is no online play for any version of this game or a system link with other consoles, which is probably for the best as I don’t see multiple kids being able to have their own consoles, or their parents allowing them to use the internet like that in 2003.
Each level plays pretty well for the most part, doing a decent enough job of adapting the locations of the movie to work in a video game like this, and I had no real problem with any of them except for one, and that was the Elephant’s Graveyard, which was a little too confusing to navigate, with tunnel entrances feeling like they go to random locations and what feels like areas just randomly shoved wherever. I did learn a large chunk of it through memorization, but if I’m having trouble learning it as an adult, I think kids might have a worse time depending on the kid. Plus some parts of the level could easily be too dark if you’re playing on the intended hardware, and was easily fixed by playing through emulation.
I’ve also noticed that the levels based around humans are a little easier to navigate than the ones centered around animals.
However, there is one brand new location that takes place in the “real world” called Olliewood, although it’s pretty much a cartoony version of the real world, and it features it’s own unique characters for this games, and goals centered around the characters one basic characteristic, like one character being a captain of a boat or a character who is conscientious of the environment.
But these characters are pretty obviously here to advertise to the kids playing these games since they can’t shove the advertising in the levels based on the films. Like how one goal has you delivering McDonald’s menu items to each of the four characters, or how you have to deliver Nokia ringtones to them since this was at a time where phones didn’t have access to the internet and you had to pay for a ringtone since you couldn’t just use whatever songs you had on your phone because the internal storage was tiny and the thing could only play midi files.
Along with the two kid skaters who won the competition, you can unlock Lil’ Romeo, the artist for one of the songs on the soundtrack. Although I have no idea who would be excited for him to even appear on the soundtrack, let along as an unlockable character, even at the time when this game came out. Even the characters made up for this game were more memorable than this real person.
Every time you complete a goal you unlock something. The unlockables range from a piece of clothing or new design for you skateboard for your user created skateboarder or a new skate trick for whatever character you happen to be playing at that time, or some sort or video, mostly music videos of the songs from the soundtrack or clips and trailers of the movies that this game features, you’re always unlocking something. It always feels like you’re making progress, as trivial as that progress might be, so you’ll always have something new to look at or use.
There are even videos to unlock when you clear all of the goals in every level for all of the skaters that have access to that level. These unlockable videos include music videos of some of the songs featured on the soundtrack of this game, a video focusing on the skate competition to get featured in the game that’s pretty much just a montage, and clips from the movies that this game has taken characters from, but they are all edited to the songs from the soundtrack of this game and all come across like AMVs from 2006 – 2009 YouTube.
This soundtrack is so 2003. I don’t know if it’s the most 2003 soundtrack, but you’re not mistaking it for anything other than something that obviously came from the early 2000s. Some songs make sense for the soundtrack like “Grown Up” by Simple Plan, but other songs don’t really fit. Were kids allowed to listen to “Where’s Your Head At?” by Basement Jaxx? It technically doesn’t have anything on the soundtrack that a kid couldn’t listen to, but I wouldn’t say the song is for kids. And this game was released at a time when music videos were still aired on TV, and the music video isn’t something aimed at kids either. It also doesn’t really belong on the same soundtrack as “Live in Stereo” by Newsboys, which is on this soundtrack for some reason.
And if you get the Xbox version, it even lets you use your own music that were ripped onto the hard drive. So you could easily play the soundtracks of the movies that were featured in this game, or maybe some better annoyingly catchy 2000s pop music, like the soundtracks to the English dubs of “Pokemon: The First Movie” or “Digimon: The Movie”. At least those were trying to capitalize on what was popular instead of trying to sell you on a soundtrack.
The best songs on the soundtrack by far, and by best I mean the only good ones, are “Pacific Coast Party” by Smash Mouth along with “Sell Out” by Reel Big Fish. Whoever put “Sell Out” on the soundtrack knew exactly what they were doing considering that this whole game is not only trying to tell kids on Disney products but has advertising for McDonald’s burgers and Nokia phones too.
Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure is mostly harmless, even if it’s entire existence is purely to advertise movies, fast food products, and now incredibly outdated phones to children. It’s competent enough, though that’s because of the engine it’s on, not because of the game itself. I doubt any kid these days is going to want this outside of whatever popular thing is going on, unless they just so happen to really love older Disney and Pixar films.
But there’s just one last thing. Have you found all of the secret Mickeys in this game?
I imagine that not a lot of people have actually played this back when it was first released when they were the right age to play it when growing to have played in the first place. It doesn’t exactly have the most interesting of covers, with an awful looking cartoony character on the front surrounded by mediocre 3D renditions of Disney and Pixar characters, and from the look of both the front and back cover, it was pretty obvious that this was more of a tie-in for multiple popular Disney movies that had come out in the decade before this games release.
I’d be willing to bet that more people have probably heard about this game through the mod for PC version of Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 called T.H.U.G. PRO that takes all levels and characters from every other game that ran on the same game engine that came out on the sixth generation of consoles, which included Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure. Yep, this runs on that same engine as those sixth gen Tony Hawk games, but more about that later.
There is no plot to Skate Adventure, nor is there even an attempt at one. Since the game entirely exists to promote multiple Disney and Pixar movies as easily as possible, along with the product placement that they could shove into the game, as it just gives you a choice between several characters from three different Disney and Pixar characters and lets you ride around in three locations from the movie that they’re from.
These movies include Toy Story 1 and 2, Tarzan, and The Lion King. Why these three movies? I guess it was a mix of their popularity and that they were the easiest films to make a level based on. I have no idea is Disney or Pixar made any demands other than “get a game onto store shelves”, but this reeks of both studios not caring. The characters that are unlocked right from the start are Woody and Buzz from Toy Story, Young Tarzan and Young Terk from Tarzan, and Rafiki and Young Simba from the Lion King.
Unlockable characters include Jessie and Zurg from Toy Story 2, Young Tantor and Young Jane from Tarzan, despite the fact that Jane only ever appeared as an adult in the Tarzan film, but whatever, and Young Nala along with Timon and Pumbaa from The Lion King, with Timon and Pumbaa skating together on the same skateboard.
Locations from said movies include Pizza Planet, Andy’s Bedroom, and Zurg’s planet of Xrghthung from Toy Story 1 and 2, Tarzan’s Treehouse, The Human Camp, and Clayton’s Ship from Tarzan, and Pride Rock, The Elephant Graveyard, and Scar’s Canyon from The Lion King. The game does try to make each location visually distinct enough from every other level and it works well enough, and it’s a decent enough selection.
Although you can only play level only with the character from the movie that the levels is based on, so no Woody skating around Pride Rock or the jungle or Turk skating around any of the Toy Story levels. It’s a tad disappointing, but what are you going to do.
As I mentioned earlier, this game runs specifically on the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 engine, which actually fits with this game way more than it did with THPS 4. Tony Hawk 4 was more focused on giving the player goals than letting you just skate each level with a time limit, which works perfectly for a game like this, as having Disney and Pixar characters tell you want to do is pretty good motivation for a kid who loves those films
The Little Green Men from Toy Story do everything in the name of The Claw and Sarge from the green army men tests you on your abilities, like getting a high score or knowing how to perform a certain trick, or the Gorillas from Tarzan get you to mess up the human’s camp along with the Elephants getting help from you as their friend, or the trio of hyenas from The Lion King making bets with you or Zazu getting you to do jobs that help train you to become king, just to name a few.
Aside from the regular goals that are accessible by all characters, the game also has a few goals which are exclusive to certain characters based on plot points from the films that they’re from, such as having to defeat Zurg as Buzz Lightyear.
The least interesting goals are collecting the 25 tokens throughout a level along with one special collectable, which you have to do for every single character for every single level that they access to. It’s especially tedious and obnoxious on the confusing Elephant Graveyard level and the area in the Human Camp from Tarzan where you have to grind on some vines. It makes the game quickly go from kinda fun to tedious busywork.
Aside from the characters from the Disney and Pixar characters, there are 10 real kids that are playable known as “The Extreme Skate Crew”, and that’s because during the development of this game, Activision decided to do a nationwide casting call search in the US as a promotional tool for this game to put 10 lucky kids into this game. Kids could either show up and skate live or send in footage into the company. You can briefly see footage of the competitions in the opening credits along with a bigger montage of footage in one of the unlockable videos. The top two kids ended up being highlighted on the cover for the game and the ones who were featured the most in the game.
These kids can not only skate in Olliewood, but skate in any of the levels based on the previously mentioned movies, being able to do a few of their own goals exclusive to the level, which are just finding Olliewood tokens and the Disney Extreme Skate Adventure logo.
The game might not be technically impressive, but it does run constantly at a solid 60 FPS, and it uses the art style of multiple Disney movies from the 90s along with the Toy Story films, even if characters faces can dip into the uncanny valley, which has helped it age better than some games from the same console generation. And the lighting in a lot of areas looks good, even if some of the areas are a bit too dark, like the Elephant’s Graveyard.
The controls are pretty much the same as THPS 4 except for one difference. There is both a set of “Basic” controls aimed at children to go along with the “Pro” controls that are just from THPS 4. The “Basic” controls seem to be context based and yet they never seem to work as intended, with tricks seemingly happening when the game feels like letting them happening. Manuals would always just happen and took me by surprise every time. I don’t see how kids could learn to play the game when every time you want to do something and the game just does it with little input. I think kids could put on the “Pro” controls and use them in the more simple levels in Skate Adventure and be fine.
There’s even a split-screen multiplayer if you want to play with your friends. There is no online play for any version of this game or a system link with other consoles, which is probably for the best as I don’t see multiple kids being able to have their own consoles, or their parents allowing them to use the internet like that in 2003.
Each level plays pretty well for the most part, doing a decent enough job of adapting the locations of the movie to work in a video game like this, and I had no real problem with any of them except for one, and that was the Elephant’s Graveyard, which was a little too confusing to navigate, with tunnel entrances feeling like they go to random locations and what feels like areas just randomly shoved wherever. I did learn a large chunk of it through memorization, but if I’m having trouble learning it as an adult, I think kids might have a worse time depending on the kid. Plus some parts of the level could easily be too dark if you’re playing on the intended hardware, and was easily fixed by playing through emulation.
I’ve also noticed that the levels based around humans are a little easier to navigate than the ones centered around animals.
However, there is one brand new location that takes place in the “real world” called Olliewood, although it’s pretty much a cartoony version of the real world, and it features it’s own unique characters for this games, and goals centered around the characters one basic characteristic, like one character being a captain of a boat or a character who is conscientious of the environment.
But these characters are pretty obviously here to advertise to the kids playing these games since they can’t shove the advertising in the levels based on the films. Like how one goal has you delivering McDonald’s menu items to each of the four characters, or how you have to deliver Nokia ringtones to them since this was at a time where phones didn’t have access to the internet and you had to pay for a ringtone since you couldn’t just use whatever songs you had on your phone because the internal storage was tiny and the thing could only play midi files.
Along with the two kid skaters who won the competition, you can unlock Lil’ Romeo, the artist for one of the songs on the soundtrack. Although I have no idea who would be excited for him to even appear on the soundtrack, let along as an unlockable character, even at the time when this game came out. Even the characters made up for this game were more memorable than this real person.
Every time you complete a goal you unlock something. The unlockables range from a piece of clothing or new design for you skateboard for your user created skateboarder or a new skate trick for whatever character you happen to be playing at that time, or some sort or video, mostly music videos of the songs from the soundtrack or clips and trailers of the movies that this game features, you’re always unlocking something. It always feels like you’re making progress, as trivial as that progress might be, so you’ll always have something new to look at or use.
There are even videos to unlock when you clear all of the goals in every level for all of the skaters that have access to that level. These unlockable videos include music videos of some of the songs featured on the soundtrack of this game, a video focusing on the skate competition to get featured in the game that’s pretty much just a montage, and clips from the movies that this game has taken characters from, but they are all edited to the songs from the soundtrack of this game and all come across like AMVs from 2006 – 2009 YouTube.
This soundtrack is so 2003. I don’t know if it’s the most 2003 soundtrack, but you’re not mistaking it for anything other than something that obviously came from the early 2000s. Some songs make sense for the soundtrack like “Grown Up” by Simple Plan, but other songs don’t really fit. Were kids allowed to listen to “Where’s Your Head At?” by Basement Jaxx? It technically doesn’t have anything on the soundtrack that a kid couldn’t listen to, but I wouldn’t say the song is for kids. And this game was released at a time when music videos were still aired on TV, and the music video isn’t something aimed at kids either. It also doesn’t really belong on the same soundtrack as “Live in Stereo” by Newsboys, which is on this soundtrack for some reason.
And if you get the Xbox version, it even lets you use your own music that were ripped onto the hard drive. So you could easily play the soundtracks of the movies that were featured in this game, or maybe some better annoyingly catchy 2000s pop music, like the soundtracks to the English dubs of “Pokemon: The First Movie” or “Digimon: The Movie”. At least those were trying to capitalize on what was popular instead of trying to sell you on a soundtrack.
The best songs on the soundtrack by far, and by best I mean the only good ones, are “Pacific Coast Party” by Smash Mouth along with “Sell Out” by Reel Big Fish. Whoever put “Sell Out” on the soundtrack knew exactly what they were doing considering that this whole game is not only trying to tell kids on Disney products but has advertising for McDonald’s burgers and Nokia phones too.
Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure is mostly harmless, even if it’s entire existence is purely to advertise movies, fast food products, and now incredibly outdated phones to children. It’s competent enough, though that’s because of the engine it’s on, not because of the game itself. I doubt any kid these days is going to want this outside of whatever popular thing is going on, unless they just so happen to really love older Disney and Pixar films.
But there’s just one last thing. Have you found all of the secret Mickeys in this game?