Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/12/14/christmas-shopper-simulator-2-black-friday/
Christmas Shopper Simulator seemed to be a success though, as it got a sequel on November 20 of the following year, called Christmas Shopper Simulator 2: Black Christmas. I would say that because they had several months to improve their idea since they’ve got the foundation set with the first game, but it seemed to end up as a mixed bag more than anything.
Instead of just getting a mission from a payphone and then completing said mission by buying a present for someone, you now have to earn money by doing random tasks to buy your Christmas gifts. These can range from abusing the games physics to launch yourself as far as you possibly can, find a taser and use it on people, and take random selfies. And if you want easy money, find a fire extinguisher and knock a lot of people over in a row to get hundreds of dollars.
There are even a few new characters to choose from besides the Female and Male shoppers, including two unlockables. A guy in an Ice Cream Sandwich costume is the third option, and the two unlockables are a Fly and an Ant. Both are unlockable just by typing Ant and Fly into the code menu.
While Christmas Shopper Simulator 2 is an improvement in a lot of ways over the first game, it just seems like it’s way more buggy. Right off the get go, for me personally, the framerate was pretty bad. It’s not entirely unplayable, but it was definitely impacting my enjoyment game. Between the framerate and the clunky movement, I’ve been struggling to even get around certain parts of the mall. I’ve even had a crash or two on Windows 7, and the game won’t even work on Windows 10. I feel like it’s because the physics objects piling up and nobody bothered to optimize for it because it needed to be out for Black Friday. I doubt any of these bugs will be fixed since the company behind this game got shut down.
The fake stores in the game such as “Snake’s Solid Boxes”, “Gnocchi on Heaven’s Door”, and “TV & Curry”, as well poking fun at the way video game companies shove out expensive DLC with effort and try to make every game a franchise by trying to sell you figures and real world collectables with the Shopper Simulator website are mildly amusing, but the jokes get really old really fast.
Black Friday, along with the first game, should only take 30 minutes at most combined, offer very little in the way of content, and were only made as Youtuber fodder to help promote the storefront that it was made to promote. The only upsides to this are that it's short and free.
Christmas Shopper Simulator seemed to be a success though, as it got a sequel on November 20 of the following year, called Christmas Shopper Simulator 2: Black Christmas. I would say that because they had several months to improve their idea since they’ve got the foundation set with the first game, but it seemed to end up as a mixed bag more than anything.
Instead of just getting a mission from a payphone and then completing said mission by buying a present for someone, you now have to earn money by doing random tasks to buy your Christmas gifts. These can range from abusing the games physics to launch yourself as far as you possibly can, find a taser and use it on people, and take random selfies. And if you want easy money, find a fire extinguisher and knock a lot of people over in a row to get hundreds of dollars.
There are even a few new characters to choose from besides the Female and Male shoppers, including two unlockables. A guy in an Ice Cream Sandwich costume is the third option, and the two unlockables are a Fly and an Ant. Both are unlockable just by typing Ant and Fly into the code menu.
While Christmas Shopper Simulator 2 is an improvement in a lot of ways over the first game, it just seems like it’s way more buggy. Right off the get go, for me personally, the framerate was pretty bad. It’s not entirely unplayable, but it was definitely impacting my enjoyment game. Between the framerate and the clunky movement, I’ve been struggling to even get around certain parts of the mall. I’ve even had a crash or two on Windows 7, and the game won’t even work on Windows 10. I feel like it’s because the physics objects piling up and nobody bothered to optimize for it because it needed to be out for Black Friday. I doubt any of these bugs will be fixed since the company behind this game got shut down.
The fake stores in the game such as “Snake’s Solid Boxes”, “Gnocchi on Heaven’s Door”, and “TV & Curry”, as well poking fun at the way video game companies shove out expensive DLC with effort and try to make every game a franchise by trying to sell you figures and real world collectables with the Shopper Simulator website are mildly amusing, but the jokes get really old really fast.
Black Friday, along with the first game, should only take 30 minutes at most combined, offer very little in the way of content, and were only made as Youtuber fodder to help promote the storefront that it was made to promote. The only upsides to this are that it's short and free.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/mod-corner-7th-serpent-crossfire-genesis-max-payne-2-the-fall-of-max-payne-review/
The Max Payne games might have a smaller modding community than most games, but they are definitely a dedicated bunch, still releasing some pretty good stuff every now and again. One of the best mods for Max Payne 2 is 7th Serpent: Crossfire.
The story for both mods are actually fairly lengthy, since there is a bit of backstory going on. I’ll try to summarize whats necessary to understand for both mods, but if you want to go check it out, it does come in the manual for both mods.
In Crossfire, you play Damon, the first prototype of the Serpent Industries serpent agent program, and your first assignment was the assassination of the CEO of a company called Hryfter Armament Technologies. The mod begins right after the assassination, right when you are making your escape. The rest of the mod is you escaping through the city, trying to get to the extraction point, as a city-wide emergency alert has been issued and the local authorities have promptly deployed.
Crossfire is a good looking mod considering that the team behind it was pretty small, definitely pushing what the mod tools were possible of. Most of the game is going through the streets of a futuristic sci-fi city, but the mod does have a larger scale to it, making the fact that it’s fairly detailed more impressive.
Gameplay wise, it’s pretty much the base game from Max Payne 2, nothing has really changed. But when the gameplay is as solid as Max Payne 2’s was, there isn’t really a need to change it.
The mod is on the shorter side, being about 45 minutes long, but that isn’t really a complaint since it’s free and has a lot of effort put into it. My only real complaint is that it’s a tad too hard, which might cause some people to struggle with it, but it’s not unreasonable, and it’s nothing that a bit of quicksaving couldn’t help.
At some point after Crossfire’s development, the team meant to release a second episode for Seventh Serpent, but life got in the way and people got busy, and what the team was working on couldn’t be finished. So the series was giving to another team, and just over 2 years later, that team released the second mod, Genesis. But that's for another review.
7th Serpent: Crossfire is a great time and is well worth checking out if you're into playing mods.
The Max Payne games might have a smaller modding community than most games, but they are definitely a dedicated bunch, still releasing some pretty good stuff every now and again. One of the best mods for Max Payne 2 is 7th Serpent: Crossfire.
The story for both mods are actually fairly lengthy, since there is a bit of backstory going on. I’ll try to summarize whats necessary to understand for both mods, but if you want to go check it out, it does come in the manual for both mods.
In Crossfire, you play Damon, the first prototype of the Serpent Industries serpent agent program, and your first assignment was the assassination of the CEO of a company called Hryfter Armament Technologies. The mod begins right after the assassination, right when you are making your escape. The rest of the mod is you escaping through the city, trying to get to the extraction point, as a city-wide emergency alert has been issued and the local authorities have promptly deployed.
Crossfire is a good looking mod considering that the team behind it was pretty small, definitely pushing what the mod tools were possible of. Most of the game is going through the streets of a futuristic sci-fi city, but the mod does have a larger scale to it, making the fact that it’s fairly detailed more impressive.
Gameplay wise, it’s pretty much the base game from Max Payne 2, nothing has really changed. But when the gameplay is as solid as Max Payne 2’s was, there isn’t really a need to change it.
The mod is on the shorter side, being about 45 minutes long, but that isn’t really a complaint since it’s free and has a lot of effort put into it. My only real complaint is that it’s a tad too hard, which might cause some people to struggle with it, but it’s not unreasonable, and it’s nothing that a bit of quicksaving couldn’t help.
At some point after Crossfire’s development, the team meant to release a second episode for Seventh Serpent, but life got in the way and people got busy, and what the team was working on couldn’t be finished. So the series was giving to another team, and just over 2 years later, that team released the second mod, Genesis. But that's for another review.
7th Serpent: Crossfire is a great time and is well worth checking out if you're into playing mods.
2001
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/mod-corner-poke646-half-life-2001-review/
Note: I’m Reviewing the Anniversary Edition.
Back before Half-Life 2 was was even close to being released to the general public and adoring Half-Life fans (curse you Valve Time), there were several mods made over the years that tried to continue the story of the first Half-Life, showing just how desperate the fans were for a continuation for their favorite video game franchise. One of these mods was Poke646.
Set 13 months after the incident at Black Mesa, The Black Mesa Research Facility has been shut down. The rest of the nation (along with the rest of the world) never knew of the experiments that happened there. As a result of the accident, the government founded a new organization to handle another incident. It was called Poke646.
A few days ago, the scientists noticed alarming signals coming from the Xen home world, and it looks like the aliens are planning to invade by opening a massive amount of portals in a certain city. Thankfully, the Poke646 Tech Labs were prepared, as they have developed a huge generator that is able to close hundreds of portals at once with an energy beam. Four of these generators are about to be installed at the edges of the city.
You play the role of Damien Reeves, the technical assistant of Dr. Fuller, who gets accidentally knocked out during the construction of one of these generators. When you wake up a couple of hours later, you soon find out that aliens are appearing all around the city, and through communications with Dr. Fuller, you soon find out that you’re the only one left and the only one who can close the portals.
The majority of the mod is running around the city trying to activate the four generators trying to survive the alien invasion. You get your objects throughout the mod from Dr. Fuller by using IU Devices that you find througout the mods. You’ll usually know when you’re nearby one of these things because a message pops up telling you to connect to one of these things.
Where you have to go is not always clear, and I know that’s a result of most video mods of the time, but it feels slightly more difficult the know where you’re going than some of the mods around the same time. It wasn’t necessarily the biggest problem, but I thought it was worth making a note of.
There are notes you come across around the environment that can tell you were keys or 4 digit codes are to help you unlock doors. They aren’t exactly highlighted for you, but once you know what you’re looking for, they’re easy to spot.
Poke464 comes with a new range of variants on the standard First Person Shooter firing range. The Melee weapon is a pipe, and whenever you swing it, your character gets tired. It’s easy to get around this by simply switching weapons, but after a while of trying to get through smashing a couple of crates to get ammo and weapons, it can be a little tedious. I don’t know why you would add stamina to what is supposed to be your last line of defense.
Other weapons include 2 different nailguns, one with a slow firing rate, and a second one with a higher firing rate that can hold more nails. There’s also the Pipebomb, which takes some getting used to when you’re trying to use to it, a Double Barreled Shotgun, and a CM-LW Bow Rifle for long range combat.
And the most unique one out of all of them is the Xen Squasher, a small alien creature that must be fed a certain brand of candy so it can shoot acid. The thing is pretty adorable depending on the way you look at it. The mod comes with a Training Course to get you all up to speed on the weapons and mechanics so you don’t end up getting killed a thousand times over in the same spot early on.
The mod got released as an “Anniversary Edition”, essentially updated to work on the modern version of Half-Life along with a bunch of bugfixes. I only seemed to have one major mod breaking glitch near the end of the mod, but it seem to be fine when i simply reloaded the mod.
Poke646 is surprisingly good, and lasts for a good 4 hours at most depending on the difficulty and how well you know the most. And it’s free, so it costs nothing but a free afternoon.
Note: I’m Reviewing the Anniversary Edition.
Back before Half-Life 2 was was even close to being released to the general public and adoring Half-Life fans (curse you Valve Time), there were several mods made over the years that tried to continue the story of the first Half-Life, showing just how desperate the fans were for a continuation for their favorite video game franchise. One of these mods was Poke646.
Set 13 months after the incident at Black Mesa, The Black Mesa Research Facility has been shut down. The rest of the nation (along with the rest of the world) never knew of the experiments that happened there. As a result of the accident, the government founded a new organization to handle another incident. It was called Poke646.
A few days ago, the scientists noticed alarming signals coming from the Xen home world, and it looks like the aliens are planning to invade by opening a massive amount of portals in a certain city. Thankfully, the Poke646 Tech Labs were prepared, as they have developed a huge generator that is able to close hundreds of portals at once with an energy beam. Four of these generators are about to be installed at the edges of the city.
You play the role of Damien Reeves, the technical assistant of Dr. Fuller, who gets accidentally knocked out during the construction of one of these generators. When you wake up a couple of hours later, you soon find out that aliens are appearing all around the city, and through communications with Dr. Fuller, you soon find out that you’re the only one left and the only one who can close the portals.
The majority of the mod is running around the city trying to activate the four generators trying to survive the alien invasion. You get your objects throughout the mod from Dr. Fuller by using IU Devices that you find througout the mods. You’ll usually know when you’re nearby one of these things because a message pops up telling you to connect to one of these things.
Where you have to go is not always clear, and I know that’s a result of most video mods of the time, but it feels slightly more difficult the know where you’re going than some of the mods around the same time. It wasn’t necessarily the biggest problem, but I thought it was worth making a note of.
There are notes you come across around the environment that can tell you were keys or 4 digit codes are to help you unlock doors. They aren’t exactly highlighted for you, but once you know what you’re looking for, they’re easy to spot.
Poke464 comes with a new range of variants on the standard First Person Shooter firing range. The Melee weapon is a pipe, and whenever you swing it, your character gets tired. It’s easy to get around this by simply switching weapons, but after a while of trying to get through smashing a couple of crates to get ammo and weapons, it can be a little tedious. I don’t know why you would add stamina to what is supposed to be your last line of defense.
Other weapons include 2 different nailguns, one with a slow firing rate, and a second one with a higher firing rate that can hold more nails. There’s also the Pipebomb, which takes some getting used to when you’re trying to use to it, a Double Barreled Shotgun, and a CM-LW Bow Rifle for long range combat.
And the most unique one out of all of them is the Xen Squasher, a small alien creature that must be fed a certain brand of candy so it can shoot acid. The thing is pretty adorable depending on the way you look at it. The mod comes with a Training Course to get you all up to speed on the weapons and mechanics so you don’t end up getting killed a thousand times over in the same spot early on.
The mod got released as an “Anniversary Edition”, essentially updated to work on the modern version of Half-Life along with a bunch of bugfixes. I only seemed to have one major mod breaking glitch near the end of the mod, but it seem to be fine when i simply reloaded the mod.
Poke646 is surprisingly good, and lasts for a good 4 hours at most depending on the difficulty and how well you know the most. And it’s free, so it costs nothing but a free afternoon.
2019
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/07/24/american-fugitive-2019-ps4-pc-switch-xbone-review/
Will Riley has been framed for the murder of his father and has been falsely imprisoned because of it. Will might not be an angel, but he’s no killer. He soon breaks out of prison to clear his name. As he does this he must make his way across Redrock County, a sleepy American town with a booming criminal underbelly, as he tries to prove his innocence, all while evading the police who want to take him back to prison and the criminals who want to put him 6 feet under.
American Fugitive is a top down open world crime game this is obviously heavily inspired by the early Grand Theft Auto games, but with more of an 80’s action movie vibe.
While the presentation is a nice throwback to older games and movies, the whole game does come across as very shallow. Every character is the bare bones stereotype of a character, and while it’s not a bad thing to have a character be bare bones, it has to be made up for with great presentation to carry it through to the end, but the presentation here just comes up short.
You barely get to know each character as your character only gets to briefly to talk to them before a mission in only a few lines of dialogue, leaving very little wiggle room to get even the most menial character development. The entire paragraph you could use to summarize any character is their entire character. I was not expecting much, but I wish there was enough time to at least develop the main characters.
And the plot is just as shallow, finishing of a very unfulfilling note at the end that just feels rushed. It also doesn’t help that the mission variety for the story missions is very small. Steal a car, steal something from someone’s house, beat someone up and take them somewhere, or just outright kill them. By the second area of the game it’s already become tiresome busywork.
What compounds this is that even the side content has more variety, such as finding hidden stashes, stealing items to resell, timed races, making jumps, and even getting to drive a tank around and destroying as much property as you can within a time limit. I don’t know why some of this couldn’t have been sprinkled throughout the story to not make it feel so repetitive. It could have even been used to get a few players to play a few of the side missions if they like a type of mission.
Not much would have needed to be changed when it comes to the game world to incorporate these missions into the story and it could have easily been used to give each character more depth. Maybe the developers ran out of time, budget, or both.
The game also comes with basic skills you can level up, such as the usual health or inventory space increase, but also more helpful things such as metal detector to let you know how close a hidden stash is or making it easier to know if a building is occupied before you rob it. The side content also gives you points to help level your character up too, which I imagine could easily be help a player who is having trouble with a mission, but I only found out by playing one of the side missions out of curiosity.
If you’re looking for a throwback to the old Grand Theft Auto games, there probably isn’t going to be much in American Fugitive to throw down the money for it. It’s probably worth it on a sale, but with just how little variety in content there is, it’s a lukewarm recommend at best.
Will Riley has been framed for the murder of his father and has been falsely imprisoned because of it. Will might not be an angel, but he’s no killer. He soon breaks out of prison to clear his name. As he does this he must make his way across Redrock County, a sleepy American town with a booming criminal underbelly, as he tries to prove his innocence, all while evading the police who want to take him back to prison and the criminals who want to put him 6 feet under.
American Fugitive is a top down open world crime game this is obviously heavily inspired by the early Grand Theft Auto games, but with more of an 80’s action movie vibe.
While the presentation is a nice throwback to older games and movies, the whole game does come across as very shallow. Every character is the bare bones stereotype of a character, and while it’s not a bad thing to have a character be bare bones, it has to be made up for with great presentation to carry it through to the end, but the presentation here just comes up short.
You barely get to know each character as your character only gets to briefly to talk to them before a mission in only a few lines of dialogue, leaving very little wiggle room to get even the most menial character development. The entire paragraph you could use to summarize any character is their entire character. I was not expecting much, but I wish there was enough time to at least develop the main characters.
And the plot is just as shallow, finishing of a very unfulfilling note at the end that just feels rushed. It also doesn’t help that the mission variety for the story missions is very small. Steal a car, steal something from someone’s house, beat someone up and take them somewhere, or just outright kill them. By the second area of the game it’s already become tiresome busywork.
What compounds this is that even the side content has more variety, such as finding hidden stashes, stealing items to resell, timed races, making jumps, and even getting to drive a tank around and destroying as much property as you can within a time limit. I don’t know why some of this couldn’t have been sprinkled throughout the story to not make it feel so repetitive. It could have even been used to get a few players to play a few of the side missions if they like a type of mission.
Not much would have needed to be changed when it comes to the game world to incorporate these missions into the story and it could have easily been used to give each character more depth. Maybe the developers ran out of time, budget, or both.
The game also comes with basic skills you can level up, such as the usual health or inventory space increase, but also more helpful things such as metal detector to let you know how close a hidden stash is or making it easier to know if a building is occupied before you rob it. The side content also gives you points to help level your character up too, which I imagine could easily be help a player who is having trouble with a mission, but I only found out by playing one of the side missions out of curiosity.
If you’re looking for a throwback to the old Grand Theft Auto games, there probably isn’t going to be much in American Fugitive to throw down the money for it. It’s probably worth it on a sale, but with just how little variety in content there is, it’s a lukewarm recommend at best.
2016
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/07/24/virginia-2016-pc-mac-ps4-xbone-review/
You are investigating the case of a missing person investigation in the small idyllic town of Kingdom in the Burgess County of Virginia through the eyes of graduate FBI agent Anne Tarver. Together with your partner, seasoned investigator Maria Halperin, the two of you investigate the disappearance of a young boy who nobody seems to know how or why they vanished.
Before long Anne finds herself negotiating competing interests, uncovering hidden agendas, and testing the patience of a community unaccustomed to uninvited scrutiny. Throughout this journey you will have to make decisions which will shaped the course of Anne’s and Maria’s lives all while investigating a town that seems to have a dark secret.
From the outset Virginia is fantastically paced. Unlike other games in the so called “Walking Simulator genre” there is no meandering about or spending minutes or even hours wandering around the games location looking for either an object, character, or just the next location to be in for the next event to happen.
If anything it’s paced more like a movie with cuts from one location to another much like how a movie cuts from one scene to another, leaving the implication of characters moving from one area to another instead of just having the game force you to wander around it’s beautifully crafted location at the speed of someone who sprained their ankle.
And the game does all of this without any character saying a word, doing a fantastic job of showing instead of telling.
That being instead, while the first half of the game comes out swinging, having no fat and leaving me interested in what the game had to offer, the second half of the game completely lost me when a lot happened all at once that made little sense due to how much was unexplained.
It just comes across as the game doing too much too fast when the game suddenly goes from subtlety getting it’s characters intentions across to cranking it up to 11 and numerous things started happening that really needed some context. I know that the game is wearing it’s influences on it’s sleeve, but the things that it takes it’s influences from, namely Twin Peaks, were paced out more slowly and let the audience take things in as the show went on.
Maybe if Virginia was presented more episodically in nature and expanded things out with the same lean pacing it wouldn’t have been so jarring when the second half of the game started introducing several twists and turns to it’s more grounded story.
There is something here in Virginia, and I wish that I could say that it lives up to the potential of that something, but unfortunately it never gets to see it.
You are investigating the case of a missing person investigation in the small idyllic town of Kingdom in the Burgess County of Virginia through the eyes of graduate FBI agent Anne Tarver. Together with your partner, seasoned investigator Maria Halperin, the two of you investigate the disappearance of a young boy who nobody seems to know how or why they vanished.
Before long Anne finds herself negotiating competing interests, uncovering hidden agendas, and testing the patience of a community unaccustomed to uninvited scrutiny. Throughout this journey you will have to make decisions which will shaped the course of Anne’s and Maria’s lives all while investigating a town that seems to have a dark secret.
From the outset Virginia is fantastically paced. Unlike other games in the so called “Walking Simulator genre” there is no meandering about or spending minutes or even hours wandering around the games location looking for either an object, character, or just the next location to be in for the next event to happen.
If anything it’s paced more like a movie with cuts from one location to another much like how a movie cuts from one scene to another, leaving the implication of characters moving from one area to another instead of just having the game force you to wander around it’s beautifully crafted location at the speed of someone who sprained their ankle.
And the game does all of this without any character saying a word, doing a fantastic job of showing instead of telling.
That being instead, while the first half of the game comes out swinging, having no fat and leaving me interested in what the game had to offer, the second half of the game completely lost me when a lot happened all at once that made little sense due to how much was unexplained.
It just comes across as the game doing too much too fast when the game suddenly goes from subtlety getting it’s characters intentions across to cranking it up to 11 and numerous things started happening that really needed some context. I know that the game is wearing it’s influences on it’s sleeve, but the things that it takes it’s influences from, namely Twin Peaks, were paced out more slowly and let the audience take things in as the show went on.
Maybe if Virginia was presented more episodically in nature and expanded things out with the same lean pacing it wouldn’t have been so jarring when the second half of the game started introducing several twists and turns to it’s more grounded story.
There is something here in Virginia, and I wish that I could say that it lives up to the potential of that something, but unfortunately it never gets to see it.
2013
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/race-the-sun-pcmaclinuxps2ps4psvitaios-review/
Endless runners exploded when the iPhone’s App Store was introduced. They all have an easy to understand concept, easy to use controls, and low barrier of entry for both developer and user, so It’s easy to see why. Trying to get the onscreen character as far as possible through an environment as far as possible without hitting any of the obstacles makes for a pretty good and addictive time waster. But due to the low barrier of entry when developing for this genre, endless runners are a dime a dozen. But every now and again, a game breaks through and really grabs your attention.
In Race The Sun, you control a solar-powered spacecraft through a pseudo-procedurally-generated landscape, and your objective is to get as far as possible before the sun sets and your spacecraft runs out of power or you accidentally crash into one of the obstacles. The landscape is broken up into regions, each region increasing in difficulty and having a new and increasing difficult variety of geometry to avoid.
Visually, the game foes for a simplistic style that is effective in it’s simplicity, keeping everything in grey-scale, leaving the few colors that the game does use for power-ups and collectibles, making them stand out from the landscape. The game foes for flat-shaded polygons and keeps everything low-poly to match it’s art style. Mixed with some nice shadowing, the game does looks quite nice. Overall, the game graphics do come across as a prettier version of Cube Runner.
To keep the game play interesting, a newly generated level appears every 24 hours, so if you enjoy memorizing a level and love getting through a lever through memorization alone, you’d probably be a bit disappointed by this. The leader boards also reset every 24 hours, so if you like having the top spot on the leader boards, you have your work cut out for you. There is however a feature that allows users to create their own levels and upload them, so that might be a feature worth checking out for both people who like level memorization or creating their own levels.
The goal of the game is to get the highest score you can and to try and get on the leader board, or to just try and beat your personal best. To get a high score, you fly your spacecraft as far as possible as well as collecting Tri’s. The Tri’s add to a score multiplayer as well as add to the overall score. Collect 5 Tri’s and the score multiplayer increases by 1. Accidentally knock against any of the obstacles, your score multiplayer loses a few multipliers and you have to build it up again.
Another game play feature is keeping your solar-powered spacecraft out of the shadows of both obstacles and clouds. Flying through shadows for too long and your spacecraft slows down as it’s battery is drained. Being in the shadows for too long or or crashing into geometry head on and your spaceship explodes and it’s game over for you.
Being something a bit more advanced than the average endless runner, Race The Sun’s game play is a bit more complicated than usual. The game has power-ups which are unlocked by completing challenges while racing. They range from something as easy and simple as completing a region without colliding with obstacles or collecting a certain amount of Tri’s to something a lot more difficult like getting a 25x multiplayer in one run.
The more the difficult the challenge, the more points the challenge is worth. Each challenge is worth 1, 2 or 3 points depending on it’s difficulty. Get 6 points and you level up. After leveling up, you get an upgrade. You don’t really pick your upgrades so much as they’re given to you. You’ll start out with attachment for upgrades, so you’ll have to carefully pick and choose which upgrade to put on your ship and make a strategy around it.
There are two types of upgrades, unlockable items and ship upgrades. Items include Energy/Speed Boost, which gives you a temporary speed boost, Jump, which allows your spacecraft to jump, and Emergency Portals, which activate when you collide with an obstacle that would have normally kill you, and re-positions your spacecraft over where you crashed into and you glide back down to the planet. Both Jump and Emergency Portals don’t trigger when you fly over them. Instead you pick them up and use them whenever you see fit.
The ship upgrades include a Magnet, which allows your ship to collect Tri’s from further away, the Battery, which increases your battery capacity and allows you to fly through shadows for longer, and the Turning Jets, which increase your spacecrafts turning speed, allowing you to avoid obstacles a whole lot faster. Other ship upgrades include increased Jump and Emergence Portal storage, up to 3 slots, making the more difficult regions a bit easier.
The final unlockable is another mode called Apocalypse Mode, where the difficulty is cranked up to 11. Good reflexes even with the Turning Jets upgrade are need here, since there are non-stop obstacles popping up.
Another gameplay feature of Race The Sun are Portals that appear randomly throughout the regions that’ll warp you into different user created worlds as a sort of replacement for the current region. The game does come with a default region to show off how the Portals work. So your user created levels are bound to be seen someone.
Since the games release, it has been updated with a first person view, showing what its like from the ships view. If the game ever gets VR support, i can see people easily getting nauseous very easily, but it still would be pretty fun to try out once.
Race The Sun is a simple but effective game that i would definitely recommend. At USD$10, it is a tad expensive, but on sale i can definitely recommend it. There is piece of DLC called “Sunrise” that has a new mode that lets you fly through a level without having to worry about leader boards or the sun setting, creating a xen-like experience. The DLC goes for a purple color instead of the regular games grey scale. It’s nice, but at USD$2, i don’t know if i can recommend it. I wish it would have been an update to the base game instead of DLC. A definite pick up when on sale.
Endless runners exploded when the iPhone’s App Store was introduced. They all have an easy to understand concept, easy to use controls, and low barrier of entry for both developer and user, so It’s easy to see why. Trying to get the onscreen character as far as possible through an environment as far as possible without hitting any of the obstacles makes for a pretty good and addictive time waster. But due to the low barrier of entry when developing for this genre, endless runners are a dime a dozen. But every now and again, a game breaks through and really grabs your attention.
In Race The Sun, you control a solar-powered spacecraft through a pseudo-procedurally-generated landscape, and your objective is to get as far as possible before the sun sets and your spacecraft runs out of power or you accidentally crash into one of the obstacles. The landscape is broken up into regions, each region increasing in difficulty and having a new and increasing difficult variety of geometry to avoid.
Visually, the game foes for a simplistic style that is effective in it’s simplicity, keeping everything in grey-scale, leaving the few colors that the game does use for power-ups and collectibles, making them stand out from the landscape. The game foes for flat-shaded polygons and keeps everything low-poly to match it’s art style. Mixed with some nice shadowing, the game does looks quite nice. Overall, the game graphics do come across as a prettier version of Cube Runner.
To keep the game play interesting, a newly generated level appears every 24 hours, so if you enjoy memorizing a level and love getting through a lever through memorization alone, you’d probably be a bit disappointed by this. The leader boards also reset every 24 hours, so if you like having the top spot on the leader boards, you have your work cut out for you. There is however a feature that allows users to create their own levels and upload them, so that might be a feature worth checking out for both people who like level memorization or creating their own levels.
The goal of the game is to get the highest score you can and to try and get on the leader board, or to just try and beat your personal best. To get a high score, you fly your spacecraft as far as possible as well as collecting Tri’s. The Tri’s add to a score multiplayer as well as add to the overall score. Collect 5 Tri’s and the score multiplayer increases by 1. Accidentally knock against any of the obstacles, your score multiplayer loses a few multipliers and you have to build it up again.
Another game play feature is keeping your solar-powered spacecraft out of the shadows of both obstacles and clouds. Flying through shadows for too long and your spacecraft slows down as it’s battery is drained. Being in the shadows for too long or or crashing into geometry head on and your spaceship explodes and it’s game over for you.
Being something a bit more advanced than the average endless runner, Race The Sun’s game play is a bit more complicated than usual. The game has power-ups which are unlocked by completing challenges while racing. They range from something as easy and simple as completing a region without colliding with obstacles or collecting a certain amount of Tri’s to something a lot more difficult like getting a 25x multiplayer in one run.
The more the difficult the challenge, the more points the challenge is worth. Each challenge is worth 1, 2 or 3 points depending on it’s difficulty. Get 6 points and you level up. After leveling up, you get an upgrade. You don’t really pick your upgrades so much as they’re given to you. You’ll start out with attachment for upgrades, so you’ll have to carefully pick and choose which upgrade to put on your ship and make a strategy around it.
There are two types of upgrades, unlockable items and ship upgrades. Items include Energy/Speed Boost, which gives you a temporary speed boost, Jump, which allows your spacecraft to jump, and Emergency Portals, which activate when you collide with an obstacle that would have normally kill you, and re-positions your spacecraft over where you crashed into and you glide back down to the planet. Both Jump and Emergency Portals don’t trigger when you fly over them. Instead you pick them up and use them whenever you see fit.
The ship upgrades include a Magnet, which allows your ship to collect Tri’s from further away, the Battery, which increases your battery capacity and allows you to fly through shadows for longer, and the Turning Jets, which increase your spacecrafts turning speed, allowing you to avoid obstacles a whole lot faster. Other ship upgrades include increased Jump and Emergence Portal storage, up to 3 slots, making the more difficult regions a bit easier.
The final unlockable is another mode called Apocalypse Mode, where the difficulty is cranked up to 11. Good reflexes even with the Turning Jets upgrade are need here, since there are non-stop obstacles popping up.
Another gameplay feature of Race The Sun are Portals that appear randomly throughout the regions that’ll warp you into different user created worlds as a sort of replacement for the current region. The game does come with a default region to show off how the Portals work. So your user created levels are bound to be seen someone.
Since the games release, it has been updated with a first person view, showing what its like from the ships view. If the game ever gets VR support, i can see people easily getting nauseous very easily, but it still would be pretty fun to try out once.
Race The Sun is a simple but effective game that i would definitely recommend. At USD$10, it is a tad expensive, but on sale i can definitely recommend it. There is piece of DLC called “Sunrise” that has a new mode that lets you fly through a level without having to worry about leader boards or the sun setting, creating a xen-like experience. The DLC goes for a purple color instead of the regular games grey scale. It’s nice, but at USD$2, i don’t know if i can recommend it. I wish it would have been an update to the base game instead of DLC. A definite pick up when on sale.
2005
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/04/22/darkwatch-2005-review/
When I think of the PlayStation 2, First Person Shooters aren’t the first thing that comes to mind, but despite that, the system did have it’s fair share of really decent FPS games. One of those First Person Shooter’s is Darkwatch, a game developed by Blue Moon Studios (formerly Sammy Studios), and weirdly enough, published by Capcom of all companies in 2005 for the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox.
The game starts with Jericho Cross, an outlaw gunfighter in the late 19th-century American Frontier, doing one last job by robbing a train. Unbeknownst to him, the train belongs to the Darkwatch, an ancient organization committed to destroying supernatural evils. The train is not carrying gold or money, but a vampire lord that he accidentally releases named Lazarus Malkoth, resulting in Jericho getting bitten in the process, slowing turning into a vampire for the rest of the game.
Soon, Jericho is conscripted into the Darkwatch despite the uneasiness of the fellow elite operatives having a vampire join their ranks, and he has to defeat Malkoth with the help of his fellow Darkwatch agent Cassidy Sharp, who was murdered shortly after meeting Jericho, and now guides him as a spiritual voice. From there on, it’s pretty much what you’d expect.
The game has a moral system, or at least tries to have one. Throughout the game, you’re often given a choice to save someone in two different ways. The first are hidden damned souls located around every level, and you can choose to either to damn their soul to eternal torment or save their soul from suffering. The other type of moral choice is several times throughout the game, you’re given the choice to save someone from dying or turning into a zombie or ghoul, or turn them yourself. It doesn’t really add up to much. The only appeal of the moral system is that the choices lead to power ups, with both evil and good having their own exclusive powers, all of which you can use for a short period of time when a meter is fully charged. The only real choice that matters is towards the end of the game, and it’s a pretty obvious one.
Good powers include the “Silver Bullet”, which increases damage from firing your guns, “Fear”, causing enemies to run off, “Mystic Armor”, which adds an extra layer to your shields, and “Vindicator”, which causes all enemies in the vicinity to be struck with lightening. Bad powers include “Blood Frenzy”, causing your melee powers to increase their damage, “Turn”, which makes your enemies slaves, “Black Shroud”, causing enemies damage whenever they hit you, and “Soul Stealer”, which sucks out your enemies souls from a distance.
Playing through the game, it was pretty obvious that this was one of the first games that was clearly influenced by the first two Halo games that had come out at that point with a few of their design choices. Your character has a Blood Shield that regenerates when you hide behind cover, just like the shield from Halo. There are also Blood Canteens located around levels that act like Health Packs. But these are few and far between, since getting your health back is mostly done through picking up an enemies energy when they die. The energy you pick up from enemies can also be used to power up the energy bar for your special abilities.
The most annoying enemies are the ones holding barrels of TNT that can sneak up on you every now and again and kill you. At least with something like the Headless Kamikaze enemies in the Serious Sam franchise are screaming at the top of their lungs while running at you, making them easy to spot.
If you ever get a little lost, there is a handy feature called “Blood Vision”, that when you click in the right analog stick, your vision changes to red, and enemies, weapons, and other key elements to glow white, all while zooming in a bit so it makes those things easier to spot.
Thankfully the shooting sections are often broken up by a few other types of gameplay. A couple of times you ride a horse throughout the desert. You’re not really riding a horse through an area so much as you’re just shooting enemies as you’re either getting to your destination or catching up to a train in one of those sections. There is also a turret sections. It’s just OK, which is the best you could hope for with a turret section.
At a certain point in the game, you get to choose which mission you’d like to do next out of a list of missions, which is pointless, since you have to do all of them anyway. Maybe there was a section initially planned where you could walk around the Darkwatch base but it was cut out, but who knows. It also doesn’t let you know that much outside of a brief description of what to do, so picking a weapon for said mission is made more difficult, and you have to guess what to use if you’ve never played the mission before.
There is even a small driving section of the game, and it’s features the smoothest gameplay out of the whole game. The vehicle, named the Darkwatch Coyote (“coincidentally” named like an animal, like Halo’s warthog), also comes with a turret that you use to shoot nearby enemies, or you can run them over if you get bored. It’s a shame that it’s only one part of the game.
The game still looks pretty good for a PlayStation 2 and Xbox game. Nothing amazing, but the games artstyle has a really nice aesthetic, combining horror, western, and steampunk, on top the whole game generally looking pretty decent, especially the weapons.
Checkpoints are plentiful throughout the game, so when you die, you’re never sent back too far. And when you die, you don’t have to reload the entire level. The game thankfully just drops you back to the last checkpoint, which makes the game flow much better.
Probably the biggest downside of this game are the controls. The controls have those stiff feeling controls that a lot of PS2 and Xbox games had. It’s not awful, but I can see it turning a lot of people away who are more used to more modern gaming sensibilities. Despite that, all of the guns sound powerful and feel good to use.
You can also shoot off parts of an enemy, including their arms and heads, adding another satisfying layer to the shooting, as well as giving some indication that you’re damaging your enemies. There is also dynamite and a PlayStation 2 exclusive Splitter Grenade that explodes on impact, both sending enemies flying with ragdoll physics.
There are some unlockables that allow for some replayability. The best unlockable is the Gunslinger Mod, in which you can go back and play any of the chapters of the story mode that you’ve unlocked and play as either good or evil Jericho, and try to get high scores, such as the amount of enemies killed and weapon percentage accuracy. Getting good scores will unlock other things such as movies and concept art.
Like a lot of First Person Shooters of the time, Darkwatch came with a multiplayer component. It comes with some standard stuff, like Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag, but it does have a somewhat unique mode called “Soul Hunter” in which you fight to collect Blood Clouds and be the first to to fill your Blood Bar, and “Team Soul Hunter”, which is similar, but you have to fill your teams Blood Bar.
Weirdly enough, each version of the game has a few differences. The Xbox version let you play the game over Xbox live. Unfortunately, the PlayStation 2 version is a bit more limited, only letting you play splitscreen or co-op mode. This was probably because the multiplayer component of the PlayStation 2 was an optional part of the console where as the multiplayer of the Xbox version was already integrated into the console, and was probably easier to develop for.
Back when the game was being released, it had a pretty big promotional campaign and was planned to be the first installment of a new media franchise, but unfortunately its sequel got canceled in 2007, the only thing left is a phone recording of a brief concept trailer, and the planned film adaptation never got released. Which is a shame, because another game on a more modern system could have been neat to see.
I wish that Darkwatch could get a re-release on modern consoles and PC. It’s a really solid First Person Shooter stuck under a few limitations as a result of the time it was released, and smoothing out some of those issues, such as the controls and the multiplayer not being around any more, could really help this game.
When I think of the PlayStation 2, First Person Shooters aren’t the first thing that comes to mind, but despite that, the system did have it’s fair share of really decent FPS games. One of those First Person Shooter’s is Darkwatch, a game developed by Blue Moon Studios (formerly Sammy Studios), and weirdly enough, published by Capcom of all companies in 2005 for the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox.
The game starts with Jericho Cross, an outlaw gunfighter in the late 19th-century American Frontier, doing one last job by robbing a train. Unbeknownst to him, the train belongs to the Darkwatch, an ancient organization committed to destroying supernatural evils. The train is not carrying gold or money, but a vampire lord that he accidentally releases named Lazarus Malkoth, resulting in Jericho getting bitten in the process, slowing turning into a vampire for the rest of the game.
Soon, Jericho is conscripted into the Darkwatch despite the uneasiness of the fellow elite operatives having a vampire join their ranks, and he has to defeat Malkoth with the help of his fellow Darkwatch agent Cassidy Sharp, who was murdered shortly after meeting Jericho, and now guides him as a spiritual voice. From there on, it’s pretty much what you’d expect.
The game has a moral system, or at least tries to have one. Throughout the game, you’re often given a choice to save someone in two different ways. The first are hidden damned souls located around every level, and you can choose to either to damn their soul to eternal torment or save their soul from suffering. The other type of moral choice is several times throughout the game, you’re given the choice to save someone from dying or turning into a zombie or ghoul, or turn them yourself. It doesn’t really add up to much. The only appeal of the moral system is that the choices lead to power ups, with both evil and good having their own exclusive powers, all of which you can use for a short period of time when a meter is fully charged. The only real choice that matters is towards the end of the game, and it’s a pretty obvious one.
Good powers include the “Silver Bullet”, which increases damage from firing your guns, “Fear”, causing enemies to run off, “Mystic Armor”, which adds an extra layer to your shields, and “Vindicator”, which causes all enemies in the vicinity to be struck with lightening. Bad powers include “Blood Frenzy”, causing your melee powers to increase their damage, “Turn”, which makes your enemies slaves, “Black Shroud”, causing enemies damage whenever they hit you, and “Soul Stealer”, which sucks out your enemies souls from a distance.
Playing through the game, it was pretty obvious that this was one of the first games that was clearly influenced by the first two Halo games that had come out at that point with a few of their design choices. Your character has a Blood Shield that regenerates when you hide behind cover, just like the shield from Halo. There are also Blood Canteens located around levels that act like Health Packs. But these are few and far between, since getting your health back is mostly done through picking up an enemies energy when they die. The energy you pick up from enemies can also be used to power up the energy bar for your special abilities.
The most annoying enemies are the ones holding barrels of TNT that can sneak up on you every now and again and kill you. At least with something like the Headless Kamikaze enemies in the Serious Sam franchise are screaming at the top of their lungs while running at you, making them easy to spot.
If you ever get a little lost, there is a handy feature called “Blood Vision”, that when you click in the right analog stick, your vision changes to red, and enemies, weapons, and other key elements to glow white, all while zooming in a bit so it makes those things easier to spot.
Thankfully the shooting sections are often broken up by a few other types of gameplay. A couple of times you ride a horse throughout the desert. You’re not really riding a horse through an area so much as you’re just shooting enemies as you’re either getting to your destination or catching up to a train in one of those sections. There is also a turret sections. It’s just OK, which is the best you could hope for with a turret section.
At a certain point in the game, you get to choose which mission you’d like to do next out of a list of missions, which is pointless, since you have to do all of them anyway. Maybe there was a section initially planned where you could walk around the Darkwatch base but it was cut out, but who knows. It also doesn’t let you know that much outside of a brief description of what to do, so picking a weapon for said mission is made more difficult, and you have to guess what to use if you’ve never played the mission before.
There is even a small driving section of the game, and it’s features the smoothest gameplay out of the whole game. The vehicle, named the Darkwatch Coyote (“coincidentally” named like an animal, like Halo’s warthog), also comes with a turret that you use to shoot nearby enemies, or you can run them over if you get bored. It’s a shame that it’s only one part of the game.
The game still looks pretty good for a PlayStation 2 and Xbox game. Nothing amazing, but the games artstyle has a really nice aesthetic, combining horror, western, and steampunk, on top the whole game generally looking pretty decent, especially the weapons.
Checkpoints are plentiful throughout the game, so when you die, you’re never sent back too far. And when you die, you don’t have to reload the entire level. The game thankfully just drops you back to the last checkpoint, which makes the game flow much better.
Probably the biggest downside of this game are the controls. The controls have those stiff feeling controls that a lot of PS2 and Xbox games had. It’s not awful, but I can see it turning a lot of people away who are more used to more modern gaming sensibilities. Despite that, all of the guns sound powerful and feel good to use.
You can also shoot off parts of an enemy, including their arms and heads, adding another satisfying layer to the shooting, as well as giving some indication that you’re damaging your enemies. There is also dynamite and a PlayStation 2 exclusive Splitter Grenade that explodes on impact, both sending enemies flying with ragdoll physics.
There are some unlockables that allow for some replayability. The best unlockable is the Gunslinger Mod, in which you can go back and play any of the chapters of the story mode that you’ve unlocked and play as either good or evil Jericho, and try to get high scores, such as the amount of enemies killed and weapon percentage accuracy. Getting good scores will unlock other things such as movies and concept art.
Like a lot of First Person Shooters of the time, Darkwatch came with a multiplayer component. It comes with some standard stuff, like Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag, but it does have a somewhat unique mode called “Soul Hunter” in which you fight to collect Blood Clouds and be the first to to fill your Blood Bar, and “Team Soul Hunter”, which is similar, but you have to fill your teams Blood Bar.
Weirdly enough, each version of the game has a few differences. The Xbox version let you play the game over Xbox live. Unfortunately, the PlayStation 2 version is a bit more limited, only letting you play splitscreen or co-op mode. This was probably because the multiplayer component of the PlayStation 2 was an optional part of the console where as the multiplayer of the Xbox version was already integrated into the console, and was probably easier to develop for.
Back when the game was being released, it had a pretty big promotional campaign and was planned to be the first installment of a new media franchise, but unfortunately its sequel got canceled in 2007, the only thing left is a phone recording of a brief concept trailer, and the planned film adaptation never got released. Which is a shame, because another game on a more modern system could have been neat to see.
I wish that Darkwatch could get a re-release on modern consoles and PC. It’s a really solid First Person Shooter stuck under a few limitations as a result of the time it was released, and smoothing out some of those issues, such as the controls and the multiplayer not being around any more, could really help this game.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/10/03/magrunner-dark-pulse-pc-ps3-360-review/
The Lovecraft mythos aren’t a highly represented concept in video games. Sure, there have been plenty of video games heavily influenced by the works of Lovecraft, but not a lot taken from Lovecraft’s work itself. While it’s not a direct adaptation of any of Lovecraft’s work, it’s still nice seeing the iconic creatures in video game form.
Magrunner: Dark Pulse is a first person puzzle game developed by Frogwares and published by Focus Home Interactive, and was released for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 in 2013.
The game takes place a couple of decades into the future, when the Gruckezber Corporation has risen to a position of world dominance. By 2035, their LifeNET Total Existence Network has connected billions of people across the world, and is big enough to have influence over both public and private services, as well as social, environmental, and governmental areas. By 2050, the company had built a training facility for deep space exploration, with a selection process for their astronouts using the LifeNET service.
You play as Dax C. Ward, one of the finalists to get to go through the training facilities along with several others, along with the help of his lifelong family friend Gamaji. But soon, a major malfunction takes the facility offline, locking the whole place down, all while the facility starts to change in appearance to something more creepy and inhuman.
Right off the bat, it’s pretty obvious that the game took it’s presentation and gameplay influence from the Portal franchise, but instead of robots and portals, it has Cthulhu and magnets. Once you get past the obvious initial comparison, Magrunner does do enough to differentiate itself from the Portal games, going for horror instead of comedy. The game isn’t all that scary, since it does still go with the cheesy science experiments gone wrong, but you’re definitely not going to get the two games confused.
In between puzzle solving chambers, there are elevators that take you from one puzzle room to the next. The whole point of these elevator rides is get exposition out through interviews and conversations between the main character and other characters. These kinda kill any momentum the game might have if it went from one puzzle straight to another, and the conversations could have easily been trimmed slightly and been had during puzzle sections.
Plus the game has quite a few loading screens, which is only compounded by the fact that you need to load both the elevator ride when you get on and off it, making the game a touch tedious to play, making the idea of replaying the game a tad unappealing. If the game used this time with the elevators to load each level as it gave you exposition, it wouldn’t be as bad, but you’re stuck looking at loading screens. Levels are often so short that often times it feels like there are more loading screens than there are.
Magrunner uses the whole magnet concept fairly well. Your character has a glove that lets you control an objects magnetism. Left click can make object attract and right click makes them repel. Levels come with several things that use magnets, such as small platforms that are used to get to different parts of each level, and both small and large cubes that are used several ways, such as to help power some of the platforms throughout a level, put on buttons, and are used to smash through breakable glass. Although the cube doesn’t come with as much of a personality as the Companion Cube from Portal.
Later in the game, you do get an add-on for your glove in the form of Newton, a robotic dog made by the protagonist, and he’s used to help with attracting objects that are just out reach from other means. Puzzles do get to the point where you can get stuck for ~30-45 minutes in a room, but none of them feel completely unfair. There are a few puzzles that don’t quite communicate what you need to do immediately, but it’s never gets to be a problem.
However, the game does come with the option in the menu to see how far an objects magnetic reach can go, making the puzzles a bit more manageable, not leaving you to guess how far away something is from a magnets reach.
Probably the most frustrating part of the game is that in later levels, there are creatures that you have to either kill or avoid, which is definitely the biggest difference between Magrunner and Portal. To kill them, you have to fire off explosive cubes from a cube ‘launcher’. If you miss, you have to get the enemy to circle around to a position the be able to hit them, all while get another explosive cube to hit them with.
If the game was a bit smarter, it would have tried skipping combat at all and figured out a way to let you either outrun every encounter with a creature, or let you get rid of it in another manner, such as trapping them, distracting them, or fooling them to run off of a platform and killing themselves. While you’re faster than them, there isn’t a sprint button.
Graphically, the game is a bit of a mixed bag at times. Early on, the game looks quite nice, with levels and character models looking polished. But when it gets to later parts of the game where you come across underground puzzle chambers that are falling apart, some of the caverns featured in puzzle rooms that are falling apart look a little rough around the edges (in more ways than one). Nothing terrible, but a bit of a dip in quality.
Magrunner: Dark Pulse might not be to everyone’s taste, but for those who loved the puzzle solving of at least the first Portal game, and are OK with Magrunner’s lesser parts, it might be worth checking out for anyone looking for more first person puzzle solving.
The Lovecraft mythos aren’t a highly represented concept in video games. Sure, there have been plenty of video games heavily influenced by the works of Lovecraft, but not a lot taken from Lovecraft’s work itself. While it’s not a direct adaptation of any of Lovecraft’s work, it’s still nice seeing the iconic creatures in video game form.
Magrunner: Dark Pulse is a first person puzzle game developed by Frogwares and published by Focus Home Interactive, and was released for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 in 2013.
The game takes place a couple of decades into the future, when the Gruckezber Corporation has risen to a position of world dominance. By 2035, their LifeNET Total Existence Network has connected billions of people across the world, and is big enough to have influence over both public and private services, as well as social, environmental, and governmental areas. By 2050, the company had built a training facility for deep space exploration, with a selection process for their astronouts using the LifeNET service.
You play as Dax C. Ward, one of the finalists to get to go through the training facilities along with several others, along with the help of his lifelong family friend Gamaji. But soon, a major malfunction takes the facility offline, locking the whole place down, all while the facility starts to change in appearance to something more creepy and inhuman.
Right off the bat, it’s pretty obvious that the game took it’s presentation and gameplay influence from the Portal franchise, but instead of robots and portals, it has Cthulhu and magnets. Once you get past the obvious initial comparison, Magrunner does do enough to differentiate itself from the Portal games, going for horror instead of comedy. The game isn’t all that scary, since it does still go with the cheesy science experiments gone wrong, but you’re definitely not going to get the two games confused.
In between puzzle solving chambers, there are elevators that take you from one puzzle room to the next. The whole point of these elevator rides is get exposition out through interviews and conversations between the main character and other characters. These kinda kill any momentum the game might have if it went from one puzzle straight to another, and the conversations could have easily been trimmed slightly and been had during puzzle sections.
Plus the game has quite a few loading screens, which is only compounded by the fact that you need to load both the elevator ride when you get on and off it, making the game a touch tedious to play, making the idea of replaying the game a tad unappealing. If the game used this time with the elevators to load each level as it gave you exposition, it wouldn’t be as bad, but you’re stuck looking at loading screens. Levels are often so short that often times it feels like there are more loading screens than there are.
Magrunner uses the whole magnet concept fairly well. Your character has a glove that lets you control an objects magnetism. Left click can make object attract and right click makes them repel. Levels come with several things that use magnets, such as small platforms that are used to get to different parts of each level, and both small and large cubes that are used several ways, such as to help power some of the platforms throughout a level, put on buttons, and are used to smash through breakable glass. Although the cube doesn’t come with as much of a personality as the Companion Cube from Portal.
Later in the game, you do get an add-on for your glove in the form of Newton, a robotic dog made by the protagonist, and he’s used to help with attracting objects that are just out reach from other means. Puzzles do get to the point where you can get stuck for ~30-45 minutes in a room, but none of them feel completely unfair. There are a few puzzles that don’t quite communicate what you need to do immediately, but it’s never gets to be a problem.
However, the game does come with the option in the menu to see how far an objects magnetic reach can go, making the puzzles a bit more manageable, not leaving you to guess how far away something is from a magnets reach.
Probably the most frustrating part of the game is that in later levels, there are creatures that you have to either kill or avoid, which is definitely the biggest difference between Magrunner and Portal. To kill them, you have to fire off explosive cubes from a cube ‘launcher’. If you miss, you have to get the enemy to circle around to a position the be able to hit them, all while get another explosive cube to hit them with.
If the game was a bit smarter, it would have tried skipping combat at all and figured out a way to let you either outrun every encounter with a creature, or let you get rid of it in another manner, such as trapping them, distracting them, or fooling them to run off of a platform and killing themselves. While you’re faster than them, there isn’t a sprint button.
Graphically, the game is a bit of a mixed bag at times. Early on, the game looks quite nice, with levels and character models looking polished. But when it gets to later parts of the game where you come across underground puzzle chambers that are falling apart, some of the caverns featured in puzzle rooms that are falling apart look a little rough around the edges (in more ways than one). Nothing terrible, but a bit of a dip in quality.
Magrunner: Dark Pulse might not be to everyone’s taste, but for those who loved the puzzle solving of at least the first Portal game, and are OK with Magrunner’s lesser parts, it might be worth checking out for anyone looking for more first person puzzle solving.
2007
20 Questions: INFINITE REMIX EDITION
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/01/23/a-look-back-at-realmyst-masterpiece-edition-2014/
I was originally going to look at both the original realMyst and realMyst: Masterpiece Edition in the same article, but my look at the original realMyst was getting a bit wordy, so I split it up into two reviews.
Just like how the original Myst got an updated version with Myst: Masterpiece Edition, realMyst got an updated version of it’s own called realMyst: Masterpiece Edition, that came out in 2014, 14 years after realMyst. Unlike how Myst: Masterpiece Edition was just the original but remastered, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition is a remake of realMyst in the Unity Engine, so it’s technically the second remake of Myst so far along with being a remake of a remake. Plus it was made on the Unity Engine instead of a proprietary engine, so it ends up being less of a beta test for a whole new engine and more of a proper remake.
This time around there’s not much new to say about realMyst, so this is going to be shorter than my looks at the original Myst and the original RealMyst.
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 and my look at the original realMyst can be found here. The game pretty much contains all of the new content that the original realMyst introduced, including a whole new Age called Rime and better connections to the new Myst games along with the books, so it’s not like you’re missing out on content if you skip over realMyst.
This time around, the controls for realMyst: Masterpiece Edition are more in line with what you would expect from a first person game. The WASD keys are use to walk and mouse to look around. This time around the game forgoes a dead zone in the middle of the screen for the cursor and you just point and click at what you want to interact with. There’s still a little bit of a quirk to it’s design though. To interact with with objects, you right click to freeze the camera to move around the cursor around the area of whatever you’re looking at, and then right click again to go back to moving the camera.
It feels like this is what the original realMyst was trying to do with it’s controls but the developers just couldn’t execute due to their unfamiliarity with first person controls. I still feel like being able to interact with objects without freezing the screen should have been an option, but considering that it runs a lot smoother than the controls in the original realMyst, I can’t really complain too much, since they work fine.
But realMyst: Masterpiece Edition adds in a new gameplay option called ‘Classic Mode’, in which you can navigate the game the same way as the original, but instead of using still images to get around, the game instead mimics the still images by recreating their angle and position in the newer engine. Moving around in this mode can cause a little bit of whiplash when moving around since the game it clearly wasn’t designed with it in mind as the optimal way of moving around, but it’s still a neat little retro throwback. Plus if you’re using the ‘Classic Mode’, holding down shift brings up the still image of wherever you are from the original Myst, allowing you directly compare both the original and the remake, showing off what 21 years of advancement in games looks like.
This time around, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition is a lot more polished than the original realMyst. It wasn’t always quite so polished though, as the original release of realMyst: Masterpiece Edition was known to crash quite often, but since then the game received a 2.0 update that fixed pretty much all of the bugs and added a bunch of graphical features and updates.
This version of realMyst keeps the day-night cycle that the original realMyst introduced, but with a few changes. The day-night cycle doesn’t happen as quickly as it does in the original realMyst, making it feel like you’re actually spending days in the world of Myst instead of the game just showing off a fancy new graphical feature. The nights in Masterpiece Edition are much darker, way too dark. To compensate for this, the developers added a flashlight. I feel like having a flashlight doesn’t really fit with Myst’s whole aesthetic. If you had to use something, why not a lamp?
There are times when the full moon comes out and brightens up the area to some degree, but it’s still way too dark. I feel like making night not be so dark could have easily fixed this, and you still could have had slightly darker nights when the moon wasn’t out.
Various other changes have also been made across the game. The Stoneship Age is now more stormy than it was in the original realMyst, and thanks to the change to a newer engine, it actually looks more like a storm. The Selenitic Age had it’s day-night cycle removed, but the Channelwood Age now has a day-night cycle. And the moon in Channelwood is now massive.
My only complaint with the graphics is that they left out the whales in the Rime Age, which added a nice bit of atmosphere to that location.
realMyst: Masterpiece Edition does look pretty good for being a game being made by a smaller team.
But just like how the original realMyst re-uses the video files from the original Myst, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition once again uses those same files, in all of their highly compressed glory. And if they were looking a bit shabby by the year 2000, they’re definitely not looking so hot when 2014 rolled around, a whole 21 years after the release of the original Myst, especially since another game came out from another high-profile (for a game series know for having FMV) game series with live action actors, “Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure”, coming out the same year, along with a few other lesser known titles, like “Roundabout” and “Missing: An Interactive Thriller”, and “LocoCycle” coming out the year before.
The thing is that by this point, not only have video games moved on from the CD to DVDs and now digital distribution, but affordable cameras that small teams have also increased in quality, with even the iPhone 6’s recording quality being decent for a consumer grade camera for the time, so I don’t know why these videos weren’t updated for this release. Maybe the developers just didn’t have the budget to got back and update them, and I can’t really get annoyed for something that was probably out of their control.
realMyst: Masterpiece Edition overall is a much better experience than the original realMyst, with better graphics and controls, while keeping the content that realMyst introduced. While I do have a soft spot for that original version of realMyst, I have to recommend this over the original version, not only because it’s the most widely available, but it’s the best version of Myst at the time of it’s release.
I was originally going to look at both the original realMyst and realMyst: Masterpiece Edition in the same article, but my look at the original realMyst was getting a bit wordy, so I split it up into two reviews.
Just like how the original Myst got an updated version with Myst: Masterpiece Edition, realMyst got an updated version of it’s own called realMyst: Masterpiece Edition, that came out in 2014, 14 years after realMyst. Unlike how Myst: Masterpiece Edition was just the original but remastered, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition is a remake of realMyst in the Unity Engine, so it’s technically the second remake of Myst so far along with being a remake of a remake. Plus it was made on the Unity Engine instead of a proprietary engine, so it ends up being less of a beta test for a whole new engine and more of a proper remake.
This time around there’s not much new to say about realMyst, so this is going to be shorter than my looks at the original Myst and the original RealMyst.
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 and my look at the original realMyst can be found here. The game pretty much contains all of the new content that the original realMyst introduced, including a whole new Age called Rime and better connections to the new Myst games along with the books, so it’s not like you’re missing out on content if you skip over realMyst.
This time around, the controls for realMyst: Masterpiece Edition are more in line with what you would expect from a first person game. The WASD keys are use to walk and mouse to look around. This time around the game forgoes a dead zone in the middle of the screen for the cursor and you just point and click at what you want to interact with. There’s still a little bit of a quirk to it’s design though. To interact with with objects, you right click to freeze the camera to move around the cursor around the area of whatever you’re looking at, and then right click again to go back to moving the camera.
It feels like this is what the original realMyst was trying to do with it’s controls but the developers just couldn’t execute due to their unfamiliarity with first person controls. I still feel like being able to interact with objects without freezing the screen should have been an option, but considering that it runs a lot smoother than the controls in the original realMyst, I can’t really complain too much, since they work fine.
But realMyst: Masterpiece Edition adds in a new gameplay option called ‘Classic Mode’, in which you can navigate the game the same way as the original, but instead of using still images to get around, the game instead mimics the still images by recreating their angle and position in the newer engine. Moving around in this mode can cause a little bit of whiplash when moving around since the game it clearly wasn’t designed with it in mind as the optimal way of moving around, but it’s still a neat little retro throwback. Plus if you’re using the ‘Classic Mode’, holding down shift brings up the still image of wherever you are from the original Myst, allowing you directly compare both the original and the remake, showing off what 21 years of advancement in games looks like.
This time around, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition is a lot more polished than the original realMyst. It wasn’t always quite so polished though, as the original release of realMyst: Masterpiece Edition was known to crash quite often, but since then the game received a 2.0 update that fixed pretty much all of the bugs and added a bunch of graphical features and updates.
This version of realMyst keeps the day-night cycle that the original realMyst introduced, but with a few changes. The day-night cycle doesn’t happen as quickly as it does in the original realMyst, making it feel like you’re actually spending days in the world of Myst instead of the game just showing off a fancy new graphical feature. The nights in Masterpiece Edition are much darker, way too dark. To compensate for this, the developers added a flashlight. I feel like having a flashlight doesn’t really fit with Myst’s whole aesthetic. If you had to use something, why not a lamp?
There are times when the full moon comes out and brightens up the area to some degree, but it’s still way too dark. I feel like making night not be so dark could have easily fixed this, and you still could have had slightly darker nights when the moon wasn’t out.
Various other changes have also been made across the game. The Stoneship Age is now more stormy than it was in the original realMyst, and thanks to the change to a newer engine, it actually looks more like a storm. The Selenitic Age had it’s day-night cycle removed, but the Channelwood Age now has a day-night cycle. And the moon in Channelwood is now massive.
My only complaint with the graphics is that they left out the whales in the Rime Age, which added a nice bit of atmosphere to that location.
realMyst: Masterpiece Edition does look pretty good for being a game being made by a smaller team.
But just like how the original realMyst re-uses the video files from the original Myst, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition once again uses those same files, in all of their highly compressed glory. And if they were looking a bit shabby by the year 2000, they’re definitely not looking so hot when 2014 rolled around, a whole 21 years after the release of the original Myst, especially since another game came out from another high-profile (for a game series know for having FMV) game series with live action actors, “Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure”, coming out the same year, along with a few other lesser known titles, like “Roundabout” and “Missing: An Interactive Thriller”, and “LocoCycle” coming out the year before.
The thing is that by this point, not only have video games moved on from the CD to DVDs and now digital distribution, but affordable cameras that small teams have also increased in quality, with even the iPhone 6’s recording quality being decent for a consumer grade camera for the time, so I don’t know why these videos weren’t updated for this release. Maybe the developers just didn’t have the budget to got back and update them, and I can’t really get annoyed for something that was probably out of their control.
realMyst: Masterpiece Edition overall is a much better experience than the original realMyst, with better graphics and controls, while keeping the content that realMyst introduced. While I do have a soft spot for that original version of realMyst, I have to recommend this over the original version, not only because it’s the most widely available, but it’s the best version of Myst at the time of it’s release.
2007
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/10/16/nsfw-manhunt-2-2007-wii-psp-ps2-pc-review/
After the controversy of the first Manhunt, you would think that Rockstar wouldn’t put the money and effort into making a sequel. Maybe a few ports of the first game to other consoles to help recoup some of it’s costs on the down low, but not a fully fledged sequel. But surprisingly, 4 years later, Manhunt 2 was announced and released to the public.
The PC and PS2 versions were developed by Rockstar London, the PSP version was developed by Rockstar Leeds, and the Wii version was developed by Rockstar Toronto, with the WII, PSP, and PS2 versions being released in 2007, an the PC version being released in an uncensored form in 2009.
Instead of being a direct sequel of the first game’s plot, Manhunt 2 instead goes in a different direction. Focusing on two inmates at the Dixmor Asylum for the criminally insane, Daniel and Leo, as a severe thunderstorm causes the security system to go offline, opening all of the cell doors in the facility, letting the people locked inside out to roam around.
In the chaos, Daniel, who is a partial amnesiac, unable to remember how he got into the asylum, with the help of Leo, escape. After this escape. Daniel tries it figure out why he can’t remember his past and how he got into the asylum in the first place. While you’re following the clues, a group of people called the Watchmen are hunting you down, trying to prevent you from finding the truth.
Manhunt 2 tries to do something slightly different with it’s main character in that it tries to make you feel at least some sympathy for the main character. Daniel seems to be just as disgusted with his actions as a lot of the people playing would be. He does get desensitized to it as the game goes along, but when you’re brutally killing people in the dozens like Daniel is, I’m pretty sure most people would get desensitized to it.
While the first game had a great 80’s horror movie vibe going, with a John Carpenter-esque synth soundtrack, and slasher style, Manhunt 2 goes for more of a conspiracy thriller vibe with it’s plot. It isn’t bad by any means, it just doesn’t have the same vibe the first game did, and just doesn’t capture the same vibe as the first game.
The first noticeable difference between this game and the first is that Manhunt 2 definitely cranks it’s mature content up to 11, where the first Manhunt only got the ESRB rating “Mature”, this one got an “Adults Only” rating, meaning it would be refused sale on store shelves for major chains in the US. The difference is that Manhunt 2 adds some sexual content and use of drugs on top of it’s high impact violence and strong language. I earlier asked why Rockstar would want to release a sequel to probably it’s most controversial game, but if you were going to release a sequel to Manhunt, upping everything that made people disgusted to the first one seems like you’re just making it worse.
As a result, the PSP, PlayStation 2, and WII version of the games were censored, with all of the executions having a filter applied to them, to the point of not being able to see whats going on in some of these versions of the game, with the WII version getting the worst of it. But strangely, a lot of the sexual content seems to be intact in these versions. And the Wii version seems to have the best quality video with the cutscenes. Weird.
The core gameplay is the same as the first one. You’ll be hiding in shadows, running from enemies if any of them see you, and be performing executions. Executions have more variety this time around. The instruments of violence you can pick up have a wider variety than the first game, making executions a little less tedious having to sit through the same animations over and over again.
A new addition to the execution system is that you can also use parts of the environment to perform executions, similar to the earlier Punisher game from 2005, which also had to get censored on consoles. You’d think that people would learn. These include electrocuting someone to death with a fuse box, freezing someones head in liquid nitrogen and smashing it to pieces, and even trapping someone in an iron maiden with spikes on the inside. Quite a few of these are level specific, so it never gets old as there is always something new to see.
The gun combat has significantly improved. It’s still not amazing by any stretch, but it’s now a viable option, especially since gun combat has a heavier focus than the last game. If actually running and gunning in this game isn’t your cup of tea, guns can now also be used for executions too, making them actually worth your time. The Melee combat is also better, but is still only viable as a last resort.
Surprisingly, the WII and even the PC version has motion based movements for it’s executions, requiring you you to use the Wiimote and nunchuck to re-enact the executions on screen to execute enemies, while the Wiimote even has noises coming out of it’s speaker when you perform these executions, adding another layer to the already disturbing nature of the game.
The PC version has a slightly gimped version that has you simply moving the mouse in a certain direction to complete the execution. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t feel as smooth as the Wii version, because you’re limited to the mouse. If you are annoyed by it, you can turn it off in the PC version. Because of this feature, both the PC and Wii versions come with a tutorial to show how these move based executions work.
Probably the most annoying part of Manhunt 2, for me at least, is that in the Wii and PC versions of the game, while you’re hiding in the shadows, someone hunting you can come over to the area that you’re hiding, and while they’re inspecting your hiding area, a circle pops up, and you have to hold your mouse/Wiimote in that circle as it moves around. It just feels like an unnecessary addition ontop of the motion controls. I get that it’s supposed to make the stealth part of the game more tense, but it just feels like an annoyance the further you get into the game.
Also, like the fist game, the PlayStation 2 version takes advantage of the PS2 headset, and in a similar fashion, you can hear Leo through the earpiece along with using your voice to attract nearby enemies.
Another feature that the PC and Wii versions also come with is an alternate ending that you can unlock if you do well enough during the game and get a high enough star rating in each level.
While Manhunt 2 isn’t a bad game, and in a lot of ways is much better than the first, it still feels like a step down from the first game purely because it cranks up the shocking content, going for violence and sexual content over the sense of atmosphere the original one. If you liked the first Manhunt, you would probably enjoy the second one, but for the people who don’t like extreme content in their video games, this game is a skip.
After the controversy of the first Manhunt, you would think that Rockstar wouldn’t put the money and effort into making a sequel. Maybe a few ports of the first game to other consoles to help recoup some of it’s costs on the down low, but not a fully fledged sequel. But surprisingly, 4 years later, Manhunt 2 was announced and released to the public.
The PC and PS2 versions were developed by Rockstar London, the PSP version was developed by Rockstar Leeds, and the Wii version was developed by Rockstar Toronto, with the WII, PSP, and PS2 versions being released in 2007, an the PC version being released in an uncensored form in 2009.
Instead of being a direct sequel of the first game’s plot, Manhunt 2 instead goes in a different direction. Focusing on two inmates at the Dixmor Asylum for the criminally insane, Daniel and Leo, as a severe thunderstorm causes the security system to go offline, opening all of the cell doors in the facility, letting the people locked inside out to roam around.
In the chaos, Daniel, who is a partial amnesiac, unable to remember how he got into the asylum, with the help of Leo, escape. After this escape. Daniel tries it figure out why he can’t remember his past and how he got into the asylum in the first place. While you’re following the clues, a group of people called the Watchmen are hunting you down, trying to prevent you from finding the truth.
Manhunt 2 tries to do something slightly different with it’s main character in that it tries to make you feel at least some sympathy for the main character. Daniel seems to be just as disgusted with his actions as a lot of the people playing would be. He does get desensitized to it as the game goes along, but when you’re brutally killing people in the dozens like Daniel is, I’m pretty sure most people would get desensitized to it.
While the first game had a great 80’s horror movie vibe going, with a John Carpenter-esque synth soundtrack, and slasher style, Manhunt 2 goes for more of a conspiracy thriller vibe with it’s plot. It isn’t bad by any means, it just doesn’t have the same vibe the first game did, and just doesn’t capture the same vibe as the first game.
The first noticeable difference between this game and the first is that Manhunt 2 definitely cranks it’s mature content up to 11, where the first Manhunt only got the ESRB rating “Mature”, this one got an “Adults Only” rating, meaning it would be refused sale on store shelves for major chains in the US. The difference is that Manhunt 2 adds some sexual content and use of drugs on top of it’s high impact violence and strong language. I earlier asked why Rockstar would want to release a sequel to probably it’s most controversial game, but if you were going to release a sequel to Manhunt, upping everything that made people disgusted to the first one seems like you’re just making it worse.
As a result, the PSP, PlayStation 2, and WII version of the games were censored, with all of the executions having a filter applied to them, to the point of not being able to see whats going on in some of these versions of the game, with the WII version getting the worst of it. But strangely, a lot of the sexual content seems to be intact in these versions. And the Wii version seems to have the best quality video with the cutscenes. Weird.
The core gameplay is the same as the first one. You’ll be hiding in shadows, running from enemies if any of them see you, and be performing executions. Executions have more variety this time around. The instruments of violence you can pick up have a wider variety than the first game, making executions a little less tedious having to sit through the same animations over and over again.
A new addition to the execution system is that you can also use parts of the environment to perform executions, similar to the earlier Punisher game from 2005, which also had to get censored on consoles. You’d think that people would learn. These include electrocuting someone to death with a fuse box, freezing someones head in liquid nitrogen and smashing it to pieces, and even trapping someone in an iron maiden with spikes on the inside. Quite a few of these are level specific, so it never gets old as there is always something new to see.
The gun combat has significantly improved. It’s still not amazing by any stretch, but it’s now a viable option, especially since gun combat has a heavier focus than the last game. If actually running and gunning in this game isn’t your cup of tea, guns can now also be used for executions too, making them actually worth your time. The Melee combat is also better, but is still only viable as a last resort.
Surprisingly, the WII and even the PC version has motion based movements for it’s executions, requiring you you to use the Wiimote and nunchuck to re-enact the executions on screen to execute enemies, while the Wiimote even has noises coming out of it’s speaker when you perform these executions, adding another layer to the already disturbing nature of the game.
The PC version has a slightly gimped version that has you simply moving the mouse in a certain direction to complete the execution. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t feel as smooth as the Wii version, because you’re limited to the mouse. If you are annoyed by it, you can turn it off in the PC version. Because of this feature, both the PC and Wii versions come with a tutorial to show how these move based executions work.
Probably the most annoying part of Manhunt 2, for me at least, is that in the Wii and PC versions of the game, while you’re hiding in the shadows, someone hunting you can come over to the area that you’re hiding, and while they’re inspecting your hiding area, a circle pops up, and you have to hold your mouse/Wiimote in that circle as it moves around. It just feels like an unnecessary addition ontop of the motion controls. I get that it’s supposed to make the stealth part of the game more tense, but it just feels like an annoyance the further you get into the game.
Also, like the fist game, the PlayStation 2 version takes advantage of the PS2 headset, and in a similar fashion, you can hear Leo through the earpiece along with using your voice to attract nearby enemies.
Another feature that the PC and Wii versions also come with is an alternate ending that you can unlock if you do well enough during the game and get a high enough star rating in each level.
While Manhunt 2 isn’t a bad game, and in a lot of ways is much better than the first, it still feels like a step down from the first game purely because it cranks up the shocking content, going for violence and sexual content over the sense of atmosphere the original one. If you liked the first Manhunt, you would probably enjoy the second one, but for the people who don’t like extreme content in their video games, this game is a skip.
2005
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2020/07/04/mod-corner-night-at-the-office-half-life-review/
In Night at the Office, you play as a recently hired administration assistant working for a courier company called ‘Parcel Passages’ in their High-rise headquarters office building. One night, while you happen to be working, a group of terrorists attacks the high-rise. You soon find yourself trying to either escape or stop the terrorists, all while trying to survive.
It should be pretty obvious to anyone reading that description that Night at the Office is heavily inspired by the original Die Hard film. But this mod does do enough differently that it feels more like an homage than a complete rehash of the film. Although, it’s probably more likely that the mod team didn’t want to be sued by 20 Century Fox, so did some reworking. But in the end, it does feel like a passionate homage to Die Hard but in the form of a Half-Life mod.
Also, if you want to properly enjoy the story, you’ll need to play this mods equivalent of the Hazard Course, which is recommended before playing the campaign.
The mod even comes with it’s own original voice acting. Sure, it’s all recorded on microphones of varying quality and very obviously done by amateurs, but it adds to the charm of the mod.
While the mod is entirely limited to a high-rise, the mod makes up for it by letting you move freely between the 16 different floors, all connected by a staircase, along with air vents. As a result, the story can be a tad non-linear depending on how you approach it, but it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
Depending on how you play, you can get one of three different endings that the mod has to offer, so there is a decent amount of replayability.
The terrorists attacking the office building have patrol routes around their respective floors, meaning that you can’t just rush in guns blazing. Plus you wouldn’t want to anyway since you can’t refill your health, so keep those quick save and quick load buttons on standby. I don’t know why there aren’t even the bare minimum of health items, such as a basic medkit located in a kitchen somewhere. As a result, you’ll have to spend time sneaking around, at least for part of the mod, before getting your first weapon, an axe, before eventually having to take out one of the terrorists and getting yourself a machine gun.
Night at the Office does offer something other than the standard First Person Shooting that a lot of mods have. There are some parts of the game that involve finding access to cards to unlock more areas, and the previously mentioned crawling around vents to get from floor to floor and other areas, along with being stealthy enough to avoid some enemies.
Strangely, this mod doesn’t have a crosshair, making aiming a little more difficul than it should. Also, when changing the magazine of your gun, you’ll end up discarding any of the remaining ammunition that is still in it, so be careful to not absently minded reload like in other similar mods and first person shooters from the era.
In a surprising but welcome addition, Night at the Office comes with a bunch of bonus content located in zip files located in the mod folder (where you installed the mod). If you complete the mod, you get the passwords to unzip these files, all of which contain behind the scenes content, including sketches of levels and characters, early drafts of the scrips, images and videos of beta content, and ever more story content. I wasn’t expecting such a small obscure mod to have stuff like this, but it’s much appreciated.
Looking back at Night at the Office, it clearly has some ambition with it’s multiple endings and non-linear story, but unfortunately, it came out the same year as the original release of Afraid of Monsters, so it pretty much ended up being overshadowed by the success of that mod, and unless you were a die hard player of mods at the time, it was pretty clear which one was the one to play. It might be a bit rough to go back to since the standards for Half-Life mods and mods in general have gotten higher, but Night at the Office is still a mod you should go back and play if you’re a fan of the modding scene.
And it’s especially recommended over the official recreation of the film, “Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza”.
In Night at the Office, you play as a recently hired administration assistant working for a courier company called ‘Parcel Passages’ in their High-rise headquarters office building. One night, while you happen to be working, a group of terrorists attacks the high-rise. You soon find yourself trying to either escape or stop the terrorists, all while trying to survive.
It should be pretty obvious to anyone reading that description that Night at the Office is heavily inspired by the original Die Hard film. But this mod does do enough differently that it feels more like an homage than a complete rehash of the film. Although, it’s probably more likely that the mod team didn’t want to be sued by 20 Century Fox, so did some reworking. But in the end, it does feel like a passionate homage to Die Hard but in the form of a Half-Life mod.
Also, if you want to properly enjoy the story, you’ll need to play this mods equivalent of the Hazard Course, which is recommended before playing the campaign.
The mod even comes with it’s own original voice acting. Sure, it’s all recorded on microphones of varying quality and very obviously done by amateurs, but it adds to the charm of the mod.
While the mod is entirely limited to a high-rise, the mod makes up for it by letting you move freely between the 16 different floors, all connected by a staircase, along with air vents. As a result, the story can be a tad non-linear depending on how you approach it, but it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
Depending on how you play, you can get one of three different endings that the mod has to offer, so there is a decent amount of replayability.
The terrorists attacking the office building have patrol routes around their respective floors, meaning that you can’t just rush in guns blazing. Plus you wouldn’t want to anyway since you can’t refill your health, so keep those quick save and quick load buttons on standby. I don’t know why there aren’t even the bare minimum of health items, such as a basic medkit located in a kitchen somewhere. As a result, you’ll have to spend time sneaking around, at least for part of the mod, before getting your first weapon, an axe, before eventually having to take out one of the terrorists and getting yourself a machine gun.
Night at the Office does offer something other than the standard First Person Shooting that a lot of mods have. There are some parts of the game that involve finding access to cards to unlock more areas, and the previously mentioned crawling around vents to get from floor to floor and other areas, along with being stealthy enough to avoid some enemies.
Strangely, this mod doesn’t have a crosshair, making aiming a little more difficul than it should. Also, when changing the magazine of your gun, you’ll end up discarding any of the remaining ammunition that is still in it, so be careful to not absently minded reload like in other similar mods and first person shooters from the era.
In a surprising but welcome addition, Night at the Office comes with a bunch of bonus content located in zip files located in the mod folder (where you installed the mod). If you complete the mod, you get the passwords to unzip these files, all of which contain behind the scenes content, including sketches of levels and characters, early drafts of the scrips, images and videos of beta content, and ever more story content. I wasn’t expecting such a small obscure mod to have stuff like this, but it’s much appreciated.
Looking back at Night at the Office, it clearly has some ambition with it’s multiple endings and non-linear story, but unfortunately, it came out the same year as the original release of Afraid of Monsters, so it pretty much ended up being overshadowed by the success of that mod, and unless you were a die hard player of mods at the time, it was pretty clear which one was the one to play. It might be a bit rough to go back to since the standards for Half-Life mods and mods in general have gotten higher, but Night at the Office is still a mod you should go back and play if you’re a fan of the modding scene.
And it’s especially recommended over the official recreation of the film, “Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza”.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/01/mod-corner-kung-fu-3-0-max-payne-mini-review/
The idea for a mod for Max Payne that adds in the ability for Max to use martial arts to take down his enemies might seem absurd (and it is), but the idea for it makes more sense in context. Max Payne was influenced by two things, the high energy and explosive action scenes of John Woo films, and the bullet time from the original Matrix film, which had only come out a few years beforehand. So being able to fight through Max Payne in hand-to-hand combat just like Neo did in The Matrix makes sense considering it’s influences.
Kung Fu 3.0 (The latest version of the mod) is pretty much everything you’d expect from the title. Wall running and jumping, spinning kicks, slow-motion wire-fu for takedowns, a pole weapon for you to use in hand-to-hand combat. The mod comes with a tutorial on how to use all of it’s features, which is appropriately a Dojo, just like the training scene from the first Matrix.
A mod like this doesn’t seem like much, but it was so significant for the Max Payne modding community that it influenced and was incorporated into several other Max Payne mods, mostly Matrix themed mods, along with mods like Katana and Polar Payne. Kung Fu 3.0 is definitely worth checking out if you’re at all interested in the Max Payne modding scene and don’t mind the absurdity of seeing Max leaping around in the name of getting revenge for his family, and it adds enough variety to the gameplay Max Payne that it makes the game worth replaying if you need yet another reason to replay it.
The idea for a mod for Max Payne that adds in the ability for Max to use martial arts to take down his enemies might seem absurd (and it is), but the idea for it makes more sense in context. Max Payne was influenced by two things, the high energy and explosive action scenes of John Woo films, and the bullet time from the original Matrix film, which had only come out a few years beforehand. So being able to fight through Max Payne in hand-to-hand combat just like Neo did in The Matrix makes sense considering it’s influences.
Kung Fu 3.0 (The latest version of the mod) is pretty much everything you’d expect from the title. Wall running and jumping, spinning kicks, slow-motion wire-fu for takedowns, a pole weapon for you to use in hand-to-hand combat. The mod comes with a tutorial on how to use all of it’s features, which is appropriately a Dojo, just like the training scene from the first Matrix.
A mod like this doesn’t seem like much, but it was so significant for the Max Payne modding community that it influenced and was incorporated into several other Max Payne mods, mostly Matrix themed mods, along with mods like Katana and Polar Payne. Kung Fu 3.0 is definitely worth checking out if you’re at all interested in the Max Payne modding scene and don’t mind the absurdity of seeing Max leaping around in the name of getting revenge for his family, and it adds enough variety to the gameplay Max Payne that it makes the game worth replaying if you need yet another reason to replay it.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/12/14/christmas-shopper-simulator-2-black-friday/
The one inevitable thing about Christmas is the shopping for presents. It’s tedious and annoying, with the constant advertising all over the place and having to deal with the crowds depending on how late you left it. So instead of going out to buy your presents, why not just buy everything online. But it’s not the same experience as seeing all of the shitty ads on every store front and obnoxious crowds rushing over and injuring each other to get the best deals, so that’s where Christmas Shopper Simulator has you covered. You can witness the virtual crowds from the safety of your own home.
Christmas Shopper Simulator was developed by an obscure company called Freak Storm Games, who seemed to rename itself Solid Storm Games shortly before being dissolved with the Christmas Shopper Simulator games being the only games under their belt. The game was actually published by the aptly titled video game store GAME, as a way to advertise their stores for, obviously, Christmas, being released December 16, 2014, literally 9 days away from Christmas, just in time for any shoppers leaving it this late.
The game consists of the player character, either a male or female avatar with absolutely no option for customization, which doesn’t really matter because of how short this game is, as they go buy, or steal if the player wants to complete this as quickly as possible, presents for their loved ones.
To know which presents to get, you have to accept missions from a payphone Hotline Miami style, and then wander around a smallish shopping mall finding each present from whatever store has it, such as kicking open crates for a panda mask, avoiding security in a store that hasn’t opened yet for a video game, and jumping over maintenance platforms to obtain a doll.
The whole game feels a little like Goat Simulator, which came out seven months before, as you can use and abuse the game’s physics engine to destroy the games environment. Doing so won’t really get you anything, but to make up for it, the game comes with a bunch of wacky achievements, such as finding bag ladies, trying use the physics to do the splits, and for some reason, fart a bunch.
It’s nowhere near as “polished” as Goat Simulator, it’s clearly not trying to be, as it’s an incredibly simple and really short game simply meant to be a quick advertisement for a game store for the Christmas Season. But it is mildly amusing for what it is for the 5 minutes you’ll play of it before promptly forgetting about it.
Christmas Shopper Simulator, along with the second game, should only take 30 minutes at most combined, offer very little in the way of content, and were only made as Youtuber fodder to help promote the storefront that it was made to promote. The only upsides to this are that it's short and free.
The one inevitable thing about Christmas is the shopping for presents. It’s tedious and annoying, with the constant advertising all over the place and having to deal with the crowds depending on how late you left it. So instead of going out to buy your presents, why not just buy everything online. But it’s not the same experience as seeing all of the shitty ads on every store front and obnoxious crowds rushing over and injuring each other to get the best deals, so that’s where Christmas Shopper Simulator has you covered. You can witness the virtual crowds from the safety of your own home.
Christmas Shopper Simulator was developed by an obscure company called Freak Storm Games, who seemed to rename itself Solid Storm Games shortly before being dissolved with the Christmas Shopper Simulator games being the only games under their belt. The game was actually published by the aptly titled video game store GAME, as a way to advertise their stores for, obviously, Christmas, being released December 16, 2014, literally 9 days away from Christmas, just in time for any shoppers leaving it this late.
The game consists of the player character, either a male or female avatar with absolutely no option for customization, which doesn’t really matter because of how short this game is, as they go buy, or steal if the player wants to complete this as quickly as possible, presents for their loved ones.
To know which presents to get, you have to accept missions from a payphone Hotline Miami style, and then wander around a smallish shopping mall finding each present from whatever store has it, such as kicking open crates for a panda mask, avoiding security in a store that hasn’t opened yet for a video game, and jumping over maintenance platforms to obtain a doll.
The whole game feels a little like Goat Simulator, which came out seven months before, as you can use and abuse the game’s physics engine to destroy the games environment. Doing so won’t really get you anything, but to make up for it, the game comes with a bunch of wacky achievements, such as finding bag ladies, trying use the physics to do the splits, and for some reason, fart a bunch.
It’s nowhere near as “polished” as Goat Simulator, it’s clearly not trying to be, as it’s an incredibly simple and really short game simply meant to be a quick advertisement for a game store for the Christmas Season. But it is mildly amusing for what it is for the 5 minutes you’ll play of it before promptly forgetting about it.
Christmas Shopper Simulator, along with the second game, should only take 30 minutes at most combined, offer very little in the way of content, and were only made as Youtuber fodder to help promote the storefront that it was made to promote. The only upsides to this are that it's short and free.
2016
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2020/03/03/mod-corner-swat-4-elite-force-swat-4-sketchkov-syndicate/
While SWAT 4 and it’s expansion pack Sketchkov Syndicate had a fantastic premise and a lot of great features that were executed pretty well, it also had a notorious difficulty spike and often annoying unpredictability that made a lot of the later levels a tedious slog to get through. That’s where SWAT: Elite Force comes in, not only adding even more great features to the game, but ironing out some of the problems that I had with the game.
From the get go, the changes are immediate. While the graphics remain the same, the mod still manages to add a few new bells and whistles, such as resolutions that go up to 8K, meaning that you no longer have to deal with the 1600×1200 resolution limit, along with new features such as an FOV slider and mouse smoothing. These might seem like small things, but once they’re there, you can’t imagine playing the game without them.
When you start a Single Player game, there is now the option to play through all of the levels of SWAT 4 and Sketchkov Syndicate together, which is nice for repeated playthoughs if you don’t want to have to switch between the two. If you’re really concerned about the story of the expansion being broken up by the levels from the base game, you can still choose to play them separately.
There are also some new levels that come included with the Elite Force mod. There’s only a few of them, but they fit in perfectly with the rest of the levels. You can also choose to include these levels in your Career or play them separately.
If you’ve played SWAT 4 and it’s expansion so much that the HARD difficulty is a breeze, there are some Premadeath options. Permadeath is exactly what you think it is, in that if you die, you have to start the career all over again, and if your AI permanently die, and they’re out for the rest of the game, meaning if you want to get through the game as easy as possible, you have to make sure your teammates are safe too.
While the difficult from the base game still manages to peak through every now and again, but thankfully it’s been significantly reduced to the mod re-balancing the game by moving around the maps in a new order, easing you into the game and it’s mechanics a lot better.
The AI also got a re-balance. In situations during the base game that I know I would have definitely failed in the base game and have to spend up to an hour on a level, I managed to pass with very few tries, if any, in Elite Force, even if it was by the skin of my teeth.
Throughout any of the missions, the mod now tells you when you complete individual objectives as you complete them, meaning that you no longer have to constantly check what your mission objectives are every couple of minutes by going into the objectives menu. It makes the whole experience feel smoother.
Your fellow SWAT members can still be taken out fairly quickly some times, but nowhere near as much as in the base game. SWAT members didn’t really start getting incapacitated on my play through until at least the 10th mission. Although, SWAT members still seem to get hung up on corners every now and again. I guess that’s a bug that’s baked into the AI.
You can now also order your fellow officers to do some of the stuff that only you could before, such as use grenades, lightsticks, C2, the optiwand, the pepper spray, and even use the door wedge on both closed and open doors. It really does take some of the tedium out of playing with the AI squad mates. The mod even introduces Speech Recognition. I haven’t tested it out myself, but it seems to work from what I’ve heard. This really helps for those who more immersion, and it certainly cuts down on going through menus.
There are also several new weapons, including a SCAR-H, Aks-74u, MP5K PDW, Glock 18 Glock 19, and even the option to carry no weapon at all. I guess that’s for if you know the game so well that you feel up for a challenge and a no-weapon run. Also, there are 2 new armor pieces. The Heavy Kevlar Armor and Heavy Ceramic Armor.
When you’re tired of playing the game by yourself, there is a myriad of new features for the multiplayer, including various new commands and key binds. You can even play though the single player in CO-OP.
This mod even restores content that didn’t make it into the final game due to time constraints during the development, but were left on the disc, along with more than 100 bug fixes throughout the game.
If you’re a fan of SWAT 4, then Elite Force is a must play. It’s amazing what a few tweaks can do to make a game better. If you want to know what every change is, the mod does come with a text file listing every single little detail. It does nothing but improve the game in a lot of ways along with adding a lot of new content for you to play around with. Elite Force is now my preferred way of playing SWAT 4, and I can’t see myself ever playing the game without it.
While SWAT 4 and it’s expansion pack Sketchkov Syndicate had a fantastic premise and a lot of great features that were executed pretty well, it also had a notorious difficulty spike and often annoying unpredictability that made a lot of the later levels a tedious slog to get through. That’s where SWAT: Elite Force comes in, not only adding even more great features to the game, but ironing out some of the problems that I had with the game.
From the get go, the changes are immediate. While the graphics remain the same, the mod still manages to add a few new bells and whistles, such as resolutions that go up to 8K, meaning that you no longer have to deal with the 1600×1200 resolution limit, along with new features such as an FOV slider and mouse smoothing. These might seem like small things, but once they’re there, you can’t imagine playing the game without them.
When you start a Single Player game, there is now the option to play through all of the levels of SWAT 4 and Sketchkov Syndicate together, which is nice for repeated playthoughs if you don’t want to have to switch between the two. If you’re really concerned about the story of the expansion being broken up by the levels from the base game, you can still choose to play them separately.
There are also some new levels that come included with the Elite Force mod. There’s only a few of them, but they fit in perfectly with the rest of the levels. You can also choose to include these levels in your Career or play them separately.
If you’ve played SWAT 4 and it’s expansion so much that the HARD difficulty is a breeze, there are some Premadeath options. Permadeath is exactly what you think it is, in that if you die, you have to start the career all over again, and if your AI permanently die, and they’re out for the rest of the game, meaning if you want to get through the game as easy as possible, you have to make sure your teammates are safe too.
While the difficult from the base game still manages to peak through every now and again, but thankfully it’s been significantly reduced to the mod re-balancing the game by moving around the maps in a new order, easing you into the game and it’s mechanics a lot better.
The AI also got a re-balance. In situations during the base game that I know I would have definitely failed in the base game and have to spend up to an hour on a level, I managed to pass with very few tries, if any, in Elite Force, even if it was by the skin of my teeth.
Throughout any of the missions, the mod now tells you when you complete individual objectives as you complete them, meaning that you no longer have to constantly check what your mission objectives are every couple of minutes by going into the objectives menu. It makes the whole experience feel smoother.
Your fellow SWAT members can still be taken out fairly quickly some times, but nowhere near as much as in the base game. SWAT members didn’t really start getting incapacitated on my play through until at least the 10th mission. Although, SWAT members still seem to get hung up on corners every now and again. I guess that’s a bug that’s baked into the AI.
You can now also order your fellow officers to do some of the stuff that only you could before, such as use grenades, lightsticks, C2, the optiwand, the pepper spray, and even use the door wedge on both closed and open doors. It really does take some of the tedium out of playing with the AI squad mates. The mod even introduces Speech Recognition. I haven’t tested it out myself, but it seems to work from what I’ve heard. This really helps for those who more immersion, and it certainly cuts down on going through menus.
There are also several new weapons, including a SCAR-H, Aks-74u, MP5K PDW, Glock 18 Glock 19, and even the option to carry no weapon at all. I guess that’s for if you know the game so well that you feel up for a challenge and a no-weapon run. Also, there are 2 new armor pieces. The Heavy Kevlar Armor and Heavy Ceramic Armor.
When you’re tired of playing the game by yourself, there is a myriad of new features for the multiplayer, including various new commands and key binds. You can even play though the single player in CO-OP.
This mod even restores content that didn’t make it into the final game due to time constraints during the development, but were left on the disc, along with more than 100 bug fixes throughout the game.
If you’re a fan of SWAT 4, then Elite Force is a must play. It’s amazing what a few tweaks can do to make a game better. If you want to know what every change is, the mod does come with a text file listing every single little detail. It does nothing but improve the game in a lot of ways along with adding a lot of new content for you to play around with. Elite Force is now my preferred way of playing SWAT 4, and I can’t see myself ever playing the game without it.