Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/06/17/mod-corner-alien-quake-quake-review/

The moment that a lot of of early First Person Shooters gave users the ability to mod the game, such as Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, etc, became the moment that a lot of people saw the opportunity to make a video game version of their favorite franchise. One of the most popular ones to make into a First Person Shooter is the Alien franchise, probably due to Aliens being heavily action focused and already being the inspiration for a lot of games, such as Contra and Metroid. One of the earliest and more infamous examples of an Alien mod is Alien Quake, obviously for Quake 1.

Mild spoilers for Aliens ahead in this plot summary, but if you’re clicking a mod for Aliens, you’ve probably already seen it.

Taking place 50 years after the original incident on LV-426, you play as a hardened mercenary hired by a rival company to investigate a rumor that Weyland Yutani has begun to rebuild Hadley’s Hope. Going in alone, your job is to sniff out the details of what they’re up to. While sneaking in, you were captured and placed in a holding cell awaiting interrogation. A week after sitting in your cell, one of the guards interrogating you has something rip it’s way out of his chest, killing him instantly, before running off into the darkness. Before you can take in what you’ve seen, you hear an inhuman sound before being knocked out. You wake up an undetermined amount of time later, with the door to your cell open. Now knowing that Weyland Yutani is definitely up to something involving the Xenomorph, you grab the gun from the now corpse and head out to figure out exactly whats going on before you escape from this hell hole.

None of this plot shows up in the actual game, all of this is in the Readme file that comes with the mod. I’ll give it a pass since this was the early days of Quake modding and expecting even the most basic cutscenes from modders is a tall order.

Being developed in 1997, about a year after the release of Quake, the game is obviously a bit rough around the edges to what Quake mods are being released more than 20 years later, and looks very much of it’s time. Even looking past this, the mod does look pretty good in some areas for when it was released, such as Hadley’s Hope looking accurate to the movie and the parts of the base being transformed by the Xenomorphs look good, along with the Xenomorphs themselves looking exactly like the movie version.

There’s even a secret hidden level that takes place on the Nostromo from the first film that looks really accurate to that movie.

Unfortunately, there is some bad level design to go along with the good game design. Some parts of levels are insanely dark, making it incredibly hard to navigate, and along with one enemy being an insta-kill making a few areas a bit frustrating to get through. Even turning up the brightness and contrast do very little to make the levels navigable. The levels aren’t confusing, just incredibly dark. It puts Doom 3 to shame with how dark it is. Muzzle flashed are going to be how you will get through an area or two of this game.

Maybe the modders wanted it to be dark to make it more scary, but they just over did it and getting through some of the darker areas can be frustrating.

This problem is compounded at the boss battle right at the end of the game where that part of the level is incredibly dark, what little light there is is flashing in and out, and to top it all of, there are large parts of the floor that are rising up, causing you to either slide down the side of them, or stop you in your tracks when you hit them, making the boss battle way more difficult than it needed to be.

All of the iconic monsters from the first three films make it into the game, 4 variations of the Xenomorph that all act the same, the Facehugger, which is a one hit kill enemy, and you know when it kills you, because all of a sudden you’ll have the Facehugger attached to your face, covering your screen, the Chestburster, which bursts out of dead bodies with Facehugers on them, and the Xenomorph Queen, which is obviously the end boss of the game.

For some reason, whenever you get into the proximity of a Xenomorph, it will play a music stinger from the movies, and it does this whenever you get near on of them, no matter if you’re coming across one for the first time or the seventeenth time, and if you end up in a situation where you’re running away from the Xenos, it can repeat numerous times. It’s probably just fan service to the films, but it’s still a weird design decision, and I don’t know why they didn’t just do it the one time when you first encounter a group of Xenomorphs.

Along with the Xenomorphs there are a few human and android enemies that are just reskins of Grunts and Enforcers, and they occasionally shout “Game over man!” when shot at. There is a new enemy called a Search Droid, but it’s just annoying. It shoots lightening at you and can take huge chunks out of your health, and the first time you come across one, you’re bound to die, and destroying one is going to take a couple of tries.

The mod does come with some music, but for some, it doesn’t play through a level or even in a certain area or situation. For some reason it seems to emanate from certain areas. It’ll be loud when you’re next to the area it’s coming from, but trail off when you leave.

The thing that makes this mod infamous in the Quake modding scene is that 20th Century Fox sent a cease and desist to the mod maker and told them to take it down from their website, since, of course, it has content from their films. This was so infamous that it coined the term “Foxed”, for when a company tries to take down a fan mod or project that contains their content. The following message was posted to their website following the takedown:

“The Alien Quake project has been discontinued by 20th Century Fox. I received an email on April 11th, 1997, from a 20th Century Fox representative that ordered us to cease all activity. The Alien Quake project was using copyrighted material without permission and this makes Alien Quake an unauthorized and illegal production. Therefore, you are hereby ordered to remove all your Alien Quake files from your computer storage. You must also remove all references to Alien Quake from any WWW pages or internet sites you keep or maintain. All distribution of Alien Quake is illegal and you should know that the Alien Quake team are under obligation to report the name and URL of any distributor to 20th Century Fox. Please let us know if you know the URL of a distributor or potential distributor.

Thank you for your co-operation.”

Since then, of course, it’s ended up on other websites such as MODDB, so it’s not difficult to find yourself a copy of this mod.

Weirdly enough, this mod got an unofficial port to the Dreamcast, and it’s a decent port for what it is. So if you’re looking for another homebrew game to pad out your Dreamcast library, Alien Quake isn’t a half bad choice.

This mod works perfect with the sourceports I’ve tried, such as Darkplaces and QuakeSpasm, so getting it running isn’t a problem. The whole mod is short and shouldn’t take you more than 45 minutes to an hour to complete, even with it’s bad lighting in areas and frustrating boss battle, and for what it’s worth, is an interesting footnote in the history of Quake mods to check out.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/09/16/you-are-empty-pc-review/

I’m just going to say this up front, ‘You Are Empty’ is a very “love it or hate it” game. If it doesn’t look or sound interesting to you, nothing about it is going to win you over. It it looks like it’s right up your alley, you’re probably going to get a lot out of it.

‘You are Empty’ was developed by Ukrainian developers ‘Mandel ArtPlains’ and ‘Digital Spay Studios’ and was published by ‘1C Company’ in 2006, with the English version published by ‘Atari’ in 2007.

You are Empty takes plane in an alternate universe Soviet Union in the year 1955, where Joseph Stalin still reigns. In an attempt to ensure the global victory of Communism, the government has constructed a massive psychic antenna to broadcast a reality-altering signal designed to transform the population of the Soviet Union into supermen. You play as a mid-rank military officer who is involved in an accident at his job and is knocked unconscious. You wake up later in a hospital and find yourself attack by mutants and people who have gone mad all while the world has fallen into ruin in. You now must survive by fighting your way through these hordes of monsters, all while stumbling into the mystery of what is going on.

A lot of the story is kind of vague. I know that a lot of it is going to be lost in translation since it’s a small studio that probably could afford a proper English translation and probably wasn’t made for anyone outside of Russia. There a clearly parts of the game that get across their intended effect, such as when you begin playing the game, if you look out the window, you can see one of the monsters attacking a person in the building across the street, and it’s moments like that that really add to the game.

But by the end of the game I got a pretty good picture of what was going on even if it was out there. There are notes scattered throughout the game that do explain parts of the plot, so you probably should watch out for those.

Jumping right into the game, the gameplay feels weird. I don’t know how to explain the characters movement other than it feels like the character is constantly trying to walk through water. And there is no run key either, which means that if you’re backtracking to pick up some health or ammo, it can end up being a bit of a chore simply because of how slop you are. If the apocalypse was actually happening, you would think that it would be such an emergeny that it would make the character want to speed himself up a bit.

I’m pretty sure that the bad character movement is tied to the framerate, because the moment that I changed the refresh rate of my graphics card from 60hz to 144hz, all of a sudden my character moved much more smoothly. When the framerate occasionally dipped, the dodgy movement returned. So that’s another thing to keep in mind.

Also, I put the game on easy because I was constantly worried that the game would end up crashing at the best of times an I didn’t want to be constantly set back. Thankfully, the game does come with an autosave system and it never crashed on me once. Also, probably due to the game either not having the budget or time to get beta testers, there is a difficulty spike that comes out of nowhere and the game becomes hard all of a sudden.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s get into the game.

‘You are Empty’ comes with an oppressive atmosphere that I’m pretty sure is ingrained into anything set in Russia or comes out of Russia. It feels like a mix of Silent Hill and Half-Life. It even has the “sexy” nurses from Silent Hill 2. I know that since Half-Life 2 is set in an Eastern European country with Cyrillic writing and a lot of those locations can look the same, but I’m not just talking about the locations, I’m also talking about the art style of the Half-Life games too, not only the stuff that made it into the Half-Life games, but a lot of the concept art too. It’s like the team saw what Valve was doing and took inspiration from it. A lot of it fits the game well and has it’s own distinct spin on it, so I didn’t really mind.

Considering that 2006 was when a lot of graphically impressive games were coming out, like Gears of War, Black, Resistance: Fall of Man, and Just Cause, but the game really stands on it’s own by having an oppressive atmosphere. I know that it can look dull at times and doesn’t appeal to everyone, but the people who like their depressing looking media are probably going to get something out of this game. And even though it might grey, at least it wasn’t one of those annoying games who thinks that slapping a filter onto it to make it look grey despite the fact that it looks awful, and it’s actually part of the art style.

On a technical front, the game is surprisingly graphically impressive, but not for the way you think. The game doesn’t actually have proper lighting or shader effects, instead getting it’s look through great texture work to give off the impression of lighting, with all of the shadows being part of the textures. So despite the fact it wasn’t cutting edge and probably had a small team behind it, it shows what creativity can do when you’re a small limited team and you have to work around your limitations.

There is also some actually pretty decent level design. While the whole game is pretty linear, it doesn’t feel like the game is guiding you through some pre-determined hallway. You actually feel like you’re going through an actual location. There was only one time where I had trouble knowing where to go because the door I had to go through blended into the rest of the environment and it didn’t look different to any other door that I couldn’t access.

The game’s soundtrack also adds to the whole depressing atmosphere of the game, with a mix of IDM for it’s soundtrack that range from droning ambiance to industrial to dance, and even some classical Russian music mixed in.

The English acting though, that’s another story. I have no idea what the Russian acting was like since I didn’t listen to it, but I’m pretty sure that the way that the English acting turned out was completely by accident. From what I can tell, every single character in the English dub is done by one man, and he doesn’t even try to put on an accent let alone hide his British accent, and it really clashes with both the tone that the game is going for and the location of the game. The notes are also narrated in English too. There was even one time where he is narrating a propaganda film and it sound like he remembers that he has to have an accent half way through. The guy is clearly trying his best with what he’s been dealt.

But the worst dub, and by worst, I mean most offensive, is a flamboyant stage actor who opens a door for you, talks to you for about 30 seconds, was completely unnecessary to the plot, and immediately gets killed after he’s finished his dialogue.

On top of that, the lip sync doesn’t match what the characters are saying, and I’m willing to bet that counts for the Russian dub too despite never even hearing it, because the character movements, both actions and lip movements, are over exaggerated, adding onto the weirdness, and this is the one thing that I’m not sure was intentional or not. To watch and listen to these characters is an experience all in of it’s own. There was one character who I’m pretty sure was speaking frenetically since their performance is way off.

But the weakest part of the game is the gameplay. It’s not bad by any means, it’s just a bit awkward in places. For example, your health points only go up to 99. I don’t know if it was an engine limitation, an intentional design choice, or by that point in the development the team couldn’t change it to 100 so they were stuck with it and released it like that.

The enemies all fit the aesthetic perfectly, even if they’re heavily Silent Hill inspired. You have the previously mentioned “sexy” nurse zombies, crazed patients in straight jackets, firefighters, various zombies who range from people in military uniforms to farmers (I think), mutants, and the average people who are just trying to survive and see you as a threat. One of the enemies looks like the homeless version of Mr. Bean. It’s a weird bunch, but none of it felt out of place. Then you have the more creative enemies, like the guy who has a rotor on his back that lets him fly and the giant mutant chickens that appear out of nowhere. Yeah, it’s that type of weird.

The worst enemy in the game is the one with the flamethrower, and thank god there was only one of them. He does a lot damage really quickly. But thankfully pretty much all of the enemies have the same guns as you, so any time you’re in company with someone or something with a gun, it actually feels like a fair fight.

Thankfully there is some enemy infighting, so there are times where you can save on ammo by simply waiting for enemies to kill each other and you can pick off the ones that are left due to their depleted health.

You should also watch out for some of the cars that are scattered around some areas because they aren’t just scenery that you can hide behind. Not only do they react to being shot, but after enough hits they can explode, and can hurt you. They can hurt the enemies too, so there could end up being some situations where you might want to use the cars to your advantage.

There were also a few times where I jumped down to a lower point and I got injured despite the fact that the fall shouldn’t or even wouldn’t injure you, or at least as not as badly as the game would lead you to believe, so you might want to watch out for a few jumps that look like you can make it.

The weapon selection is a mix of guns that you would see in most First Person Shooters an a few more unique ones. You have your melee weapon, which is the wrench, your standard pistol, sub machine gun, bolt action rifle, double barrel shotgun, Flamethrower, and grenade and molotov-cocktails. Nothing that you haven’t seen before and all work pretty well. The more unique ones include the Nailgun, and the Electrogun, which is just OK.

But for some reason there are two weapon slots assigned to the exact same rifle, the only difference being that one has a scope and one doesn’t. And it’s not like the scope is useful as all, since a lot of the other guns are also effective at exactly the same range, an it takes so long to get in and out of using the scope that the enemy can either run up to you or take you by surprise, seriously injuring you or even killing you in the time you stop using the scope.

Apparently the “medicine” you pick up during the game is 95% medical grade alcohol, so throughout the game I was wondering if the whole game was happening of it was just the main character was hallucinating from chugging 190 proof alcohol.

‘You Are Empty’ seemed to have received a mostly poor reception when it was first released, at least overseas. GameSpot gave it a 1.5, which is a score associated with the word ‘Abysmal’, straight up calling it a rip-off of other shooters as Doom, Serious Sam, and Painkiller. I don’t know if I would either call this game abysmal, or a rip-off of any of the games that the review mentioned, since this game is more slow paced and focuses more on atmosphere and story than those games. It would compare it more to Silent Hill and Half-Life, which I’ve previously mentioned in this review.

Other reviews also seem to compare it games like Doom, Serious Sam, and Painkiller too, with GameSpy calling it a “mindless kill-festival”. It’s gameplay might be basic, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Common complaints include the fact that the game is ugly and runs like shit. This game came out the same year as the infamous 2006 Sonic game, was released. I know that they’re not exactly comparable, but I can guarantee that ‘You Are Empty’ got closer to what it intended than what ‘Sonic the Hedgehog got to’.

And I know that I’m playing this 15 years after it’s release with a patched version, but I still wouldn’t call it bad by any stretch. Maybe ‘rough around the edges’, but certainly not as terrible as it’s reputation will lead you to believe. It’s certainly not a game for everyone, and it definitely has problems, but it’s an enjoyable experience.

To top it all off, this game is pretty hard to find. And even if you do find it, it has some pretty intrusive DRM, preventing it from being played on more modern systems and is hard to remove. But like I mentioned earlier, thankfully someone has uploaded the game without the DRM and patched applied to it to make it more stable as well as making it easy to get up and running.

Apparently there is even a remake happening, but I’m skeptical about it though, but I have no idea if it is even ever going to come out. It would be neat to see a version of the game that is more stable and works on more modern systems. Plus it could add in the alternate ending that was cut from the final game or even some of the content that are still in the files of the game, such as enemies, weapons, and even whole levels, but never made it into the final release of the game.

‘You Are Empty’ is quite a unique experience that you would be hard pressed to find anywhere else, so if it the concept looks appealing to you and you don’t mind a game that’s rough around the edges, I would highly recommend giving it a try.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/04/14/pyst-review-retrospective/

Like anything else that gained massive popularity, there were the inevitable parodies of and jokes at Myst. And probably the most infamous parody of Myst takes the form of the creatively bankrupt Pyst. Written by Peter Bergman, one of the co-founders of the Firesign Theatre, and published by Parroty Interactive in 1996 (Get it? Because ‘Parroty’ sounds like parody and they produced nothing but parody games), a whole three years after the release of Myst. And considering how lackluster that this “parody” is, that’s a little late to the party.

There isn’t really a plot to Pyst so much as there are jokes that your dad or uncle would make about something that they’ve only heard about because it was the big thing at the time. Well, I say jokes, but it’s more like a joke, singular, and that one joke is “What if 4 million people actually DID visit the island of Myst?”, which is how many copies that Myst had sold when this “parody” was released. And the incredibly obvious punchline to that incredibly obvious joke is that the island would obviously be trashed by the millions of people who tried Myst because it was popular, got frustrated at the puzzles, and gave up and just started trashing the place.

Apparently Peter Bergman along with the rest of the team at Parroty Interactive thought that this single joke was so incredibly funny that they thought they could press it to a CD and shit out to store shelves for money. And this was long before someone could easily dump their game onto any digital storefront was available at the time, in which you had to actually invest time and money to get your video game out. In any other game, a joke at the expense of Myst would either be a brief joke in an out of the way line of dialogue or note somewhere or a brief section of the game, not making a whole game based on a very limited joke.

The game actually begins with a narrator joking about how he fell into a manhole and accidentally landed onto the island of Pyst. I would assume that this is a reference to Cyan’s previous game called ‘The Manhole’, but considering how the rest of the game is, I’m pretty sure it’s less of a reference and more of a joke that the developers thought was funny.

Once you land on Pyst Island, you’re greeted by a trashed version of the original Myst Island, graffiti covering every surface, trash strewn all over the place and anything that wasn’t bolted down being torn up. There’s even a trailer park filled with trailers and porta-potties along with a giant TV called the ‘Mumbo Jumbo-Tron’ plopped right in the middle of Pyst Island. And the game quickly makes it obvious just how much of a one-note joke the whole thing.

But getting around in Pyst isn’t the same as getting around in Myst. Instead of the Island being presented with still images like in Myst, where you click on certain parts of the screen to explore the game, Pyst presents each image as a postcard and 99% of the “gameplay” is pressing on something and watching an incredibly short “funny” animation.

When you’re not clicking around the screen to see what moves, you can either click the top or bottom of the screen to see a message on the back of the postcard, with each postcard coming with two handwritten messages, one for the top or bottom. And this is where the few jokes that the ‘game’ relies on quickly gets driven into the ground and becomes irritating really quickly, with whoever wrote the message complaining about how hard the puzzles are or how trashed the island is because of it’s popularity. To move from screen to screen, you just click on the right to get to the next postcard and the left to get the previous postcard. Which is extra amusing (or baffling on your point of view) since the first time you move to another area is when you move from the dock to the room with the holographic machine you have to click right despite it being located to the left of you when you first land on Pyst Island.

Each postcard does come with a speaker on the bottom right that has an announcement from the ‘Octoplex Corporation Tour Guide’, with each announcement talking about buying out Pyst Island and changing it into a popular resort, including adding beaches and mini-golf to the Island. I have no idea is this was poking fun at the rumors of Disney making an actual attraction based on the original Myst before it got canned, or just a generic joke about giant companies jumping on trends and riding them until they’ve milked it dry and I’m just retroactively justifying it in my brain and making the game more interesting than it is.

So basically the game is filled to the brim with lowbrow jokes that I’m pretty sure were “edgy” in the 90s, but are so incredibly lame and played out that the only other place that you’re going to hear them is a bad joke book and your uncle who told you a joke once when you were 7 that made you laugh and has been telling you bad jokes ever since because he got that one reaction out of you.

Surprisingly, the game also features Full Motion Video with live action actors just like the original Myst. Honestly, with just how lazy the introduction to the game was, I just assumed that the whole game would have been simple still images.

On the second screen, or postcard, a parody of the room featuring the holographic machine from the original game, we get out first look at the FMV with the three characters parodying the three characters from the original game. This includes Prince Syrrup, who is overwhelmed by the amount of people coming to the island and was entirely based around the world syrup sounding funny, the character named ‘The Prince Formerly Known As Prince’, a self-absorbed stereotype based on musical artist Prince and only here because someone thought the name was ‘The Prince Formerly Known As Prince’ was clever, and King Mattrus, played by, of all people, John Goodman, king of the game and Pyst Island.

You read that right, John Goodman in this game, and he’s the best thing about the game, if only because of his charm and enthusiasm. At least I know where all of the budget went. But the absolute highlight of getting John Goodman to be in this game is that he sings the lyrics to the song “I’m Pyst”, which you can either play by selecting it one of the menus in the game, or by putting it into your CD player. It’s incredibly catchy and I could actually see myself listening to it outside of the game.

And you might ask yourself, “If Pyst is making fun of Myst, then how does it make fun of it’s puzzles?”, and the answer to that question is that it doesn’t. Instead of poking fun at the puzzles in Myst, Pyst instead just makes fun at the people who visited Myst Island finding the puzzles of Myst being too hard. There isn’t even an attempt to make fun of the puzzles of Myst. And everything I described about interacting with the game, clicking on stuff to get an incredibly brief animation, flipping over the postcard to see what the messages are on the back of the card, and them moving on is the entirety of the interaction with the game.

Adventure games aimed at children at the time had more interactivity than this. Just look at any of the games that Humongous Entertainment was putting out. All of the interactivity in Pyst would have been amusing interactive objects in the background of any of Humongous Entertainment’s games. Even Myst, the very game that this was parodying, had more interactivity, and it was criticized heavily by hardcore adventure game fans for “dumbing down the genre”. Myst had a variety of puzzles to solve, where this is just clicking on a few random things and getting a fart joke. Both “Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It’s Dark Outside” and “Freddi Fish 2: The Case of the Haunted Schoolhouse” and even Edutainment games like “Logical Journey of the Zoombinis” and “Chill Manon” (the sequel to “I.M. Meen”) were released the same year as Pyst, along with multiple “Putt-Putt” and “Freddi Fish” mini-game collections that have just as much interactivity as this game, and are meant for kinder-gardeners.

That’s right, there is no gameplay to Pyst. If Myst was criticized at the time by dedicated adventure game fans for both dumbing down adventure games so that even your grandmother can enjoy it, then Pyst has no gameplay at all. Sure, you can click on a few things, but that’s not gameplay. And the whole thing takes about an hour at most to get through and has no replay value. It still took me an hour to get through the original Myst when I was replaying it, and that’s with me knowing the solution to all of the puzzles and knowing exactly where to go. And it’s not like the jokes in Pyst were so gut busting that it’s worth playing it a second time.

But then again, if Pyst did have puzzles, they wouldn’t have lead anywhere like the ones in the original Myst because Pyst features Myst Island and ONLY Myst Island. The original game had several places you could visit beyond the initial island. Which means one of three things happened. One, the development team got stuck on these puzzles and just decided to wing it with what they had.

Two, the development team quickly ran out of material before they could make fun of the other areas of the game, and considering that you can’t even visit all of Myst Island, with there only being 10 postcards in total for a place with several locations with multiple screens, is completely embarrassing. And three of these screens are on the back of the box, so you’ve seen a giant chunk of the game even before buying it.

Or three, which is the most likely, the development team just jumped onto whatever was popular at the time, which would become more blatant as Parroty Interactive, the developers who made this game, went on to make more ‘games’.

However there is exactly one good joke in the game, and it’s about the adventure genre as a whole, and that is a joke making fun at how older adventure games used to use words to interact with environment, such as ‘Look’, ‘Use’, and ‘Speak’, and presents it as the building blocks of the language of interaction in video games. And I’m pretty sure it’s entirely accidental considering how the rest of the jokes turned out.

If you’re going to jump on the popularity of something, you could at least make jokes specifically about what you’re making fun of. Imagine if the game made fun of the maze in the Selenitic Age by having something that completely skips over it that somehow everyone missed, or the rotating fortress in the Mechanical Age having an ‘Overkill’ mode that spins it so fast that it makes you puke. Stuff that’s still incredibly obvious and low hanging fruit, but at least interesting and with some variety.

Just like the original Myst, Pyst comes with a “Making Of” video. In the same vein with the game, the making of video is filled with jokes mixed in with a few highlights on how the game was made. It’s neat, but it’s more of a video of the developers having fun while making the game rather than being informative.

And the cherry on top the sundae is the credits, which have more people listed than the original Myst did. That’s right, the original Myst, a game that not only helped the gaming industry move from floppies to the CD-ROM, got more computers into peoples homes, and was more visually impressive, had less people working on it despite having more content. If a couple of people can end up making something like Myst at a time when not only making a video game was a lot more difficult than it is these days but getting it onto shelves, then Pyst is looking pretty shallow in comparison.

There was even going to be a sequel to Pyst called “Driven: The Sequel to Pyst.”, which a demo of it was included on later versions of Pyst. But due to the company going under, for some pretty obvious reasons, so that never came out.

In retrospect, was Pyst good? No, of course not, it was a product meant to jump onto a fad, and even if it had a few things going for it, it’s not really worth visiting unless you’re a hardcore Myst fan. The only thing the game had going for it was that it was $15 when it was released, which clearly shows that even the creators of this game knew how little they had on their hands. We could have had a game poking fun of adventure game tropes as told through a Myst parody and what we got was a few mildly funny jokes quickly worn out.

The creators of Myst seemed to be amused by this game, and they even have a copy of it in their vault over at ‘Cyan, Inc’ so clearly they had no hard feelings about it. So clearly this isn’t worth getting annoyed over.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/12/07/skyroads-1993-ms-dos-review/

I don’t think there are too many sci-fi themed racing games set in space. There are plenty of racing games set on other planets, but a track actually set in the middle of space with nothing around? The only other thing I can think of is Rainbow Road from the Mario Kart franchise. How the physics of it work, I have absolutely no idea, but Imagine it was funded by someone who had a lot of time, money, and boredom who thought it was a good idea to set one of the tracks in the middle of an asteroid field.

Released in 1993 only for MS-Dos, SkyRoads was developed by Bluemoon Software and published by Creative Dimensions.

The game is a remake of the companies previous game, Kosmonaut, which was, from what I could find, was the first commercially released game from Estonia, which is a country you don’t hear a lot from in the game development world. It was even successful enough for one of the developers to buy his own car. Due to it’s success, we now have SkyRoads.

The gameplay is simple, you control a Skycar. I don’t know why it’s called a Skycar, since we’re in space, not the sky. Maybe it was a bit more catchy than Spacecar, but whatever. Left steers left, right steers right, up makes you faster, and holding down makes you slower. The Skycar will stay at whatever speed you leave it at, which I guess is the advantage of driving in space, once you’ve started accelerating, you don’t need to press the pedals and waste gas.

And finally, the space bar makes your car jump, which is needed for when you’re jumping from platform to platform. If you miss a platform or don’t jump in time, you either crash into a part of the skyplatform and explode and I’m assuming either die or get critically injured, or float off into space, and I’m assuming to wait for someone to collect you, all while speeding off at hundreds of miles an hour into space or a possible asteroid belt.

The tracks are mostly flat surfaces floating in space, so no having to worry about overly complicated turns or course design. Apparently you can just put platforms wherever you want in space. My guess is that there aren’t any laws in this part of the universe (physical and governmental) and this is out of the way for the Space Cops to find you. Like this is the space equivalent of back roads or maritime law.

The goal of each course is that you have to jump from platform to platform on each track before driving through a small tunnel at the end of the road. And if you don’t accidentally crash into one of the obstacles and blow yourself up or fall or jump off of one of the platforms to be lost in the emptiness of space, doomed to float away forever, you have the Oxygen (O2) and Fuel meters to worry about. If you run out of fuel, you can’t control your skycar and you’re either going to crash into something or fly off into space, and if you run out of Oxygen, you just explode. I don’t know how you would explode in space if there isn’t any oxygen. I guess the developers have decided to take some liberties with science as a whole.

The Oxygen meter doubles as a time limit, in that you have to make it to the end of the course before you use it all up, and the fuel meter only depletes when your Skycar is accelerating. If you run out of either, you’ll lose. There is also a bar on the dashboard that shows how far you are on the course, but it doesn’t really matter much, since you’re going to spend your time concentrating on the track, and the speed meter that i mentioned earlier.

Certain surfaces on the course have different effects on your whip. Blue increased your O2 and Fuel, Light Green rapidly increased your speed, Dark Green rapidly decreases your speed, Grey is slippery like oil and if you either drive left or right on the surface, your stuck going in that direction, and Pink causes your ship to explode when you land on it. I’m not sure how friendly this is to color blindness, so you might want to watch a couple of videos before playing.

Some stages also have a higher or lower gravity, with 500 being normal gravity. The game has 10 worlds, with each having 3 stages each. All this really means is that each has a different background, which is nice having some variety in visuals. You can play any of the stages in any order, but it would be best if they were played in order, since it would be easier for beginner players.

The only thing to show for the completion of tracks is that each track gives you a gold medal when you win, each track giving you 7 gold medals total. This is really only for show though. The earlier game that his is a pseudo remake of, Kosmonauts, had a scoring system, which was a nice was of showing up your friends with a higher number.

Following the success of SkyRoads, Bluemoon released the SkyRoads Xmas Special the following year with another 10 worlds. and I threw that game into this review because I couldn’t justify another review for something that’s just regular SkyRoads but with more levels and a Christmas coat of paint. Not only that, I could also claim this as a Christmas review despite it not being the main focus. Only 4 of theme are Christmas themed though, with new artwork for the backgrounds, all of which are obviously Christmas inspired. The rest use backgrounds from the original SkyRoads. I guess the development team just wanted to capitalize on SkyRoads popularity by rushing something new onto the market with minimal effort. How weirdly predictive of modern gaming companies.

All of the gameplay mechanics are the same, so the is pretty much only counts as a level pack. The only real difference is that all of these levels are more difficult, so this is more for the skilled SkyRoads players. Still, it’s still nice to get more levels, because playing the first game could get boring pretty quickly for some players who like a challenge.

Bluemoon didn’t go on to do much else. They released a few more games and a couple of other projects. The only other think related to SkyRoads they released was a tech demo called Stellar Xpress that was meant to to be a 3D version of SkyRoads, and it even got sold to a VR gear manufacture as a demo to be bundled with their headsets, but further plans were abandoned due to the gameplay not being able to be reproduced in 3D. It was also released for free, and it’s a neat little experience.

Since the game is officially freeware released by the company itself, you can easily find a copy on the internet without having to worry about it. And as a result, there have been user created versions of SkyRoads along with games with similar gameplay.

There is a version of SkyRoads called ‘OpenRoads’ that plays the game in a web browser. Unfortunately, the original Kosmonaut or the VR Stellar Xpress isn’t playable through the web browser, but ‘OpenRoads’ does come with a VR enabled version of both SkyRoads and the X-Mas special, which is a neat little addition. But it’s limited to the DK1 and DK1 from what I can get from the website.

There is even a SkyRoads clone called ‘Tasty Static’ (epilepsy warning for that game), which is a fantastic name for a game, and the soundtrack for that game is also free.

And the soundtrack is even free, so if you can’t get those beeps and bloops out of your head, feel free to click the link below to throw them onto whatever devices you listen to your music from.

Bluemoon actually went on to help in the development of the peer-to-peer software behind file sharing programs Kazaa, Grokster, and iMesh and the audio and video communicator software Skype, so Bluemoon not only has had an interesting foray into video games, but an interesting history in tech overall to say the least.

Skyroads managed to leave a little legacy of it’s own, achieving cult status. But it was never popular enough to make it big, but it did entertain a few people along the way. Best of all, all of the games mentioned in this review are freeware that you can download from Bluemoon’s site, which is surprisingly still up. So go download it and have fun.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/11/06/the-beast-within-a-gabriel-knight-mystery-gabriel-knight-2-the-beast-within-1995-pc-review/

While the first Gabriel Knight wasn’t a massive success for Sierra, it did receive a lot of critical praise from both critics and adventure game fans alike, so a sequel was greenlit and put into development almost immediately, and a year and a half after the release of the first game, The Beast Within was released.

When the original Gabriel Knight was released, video games were making the transition from the 3 and a 1/2 inch floppy discs that were limited to 1.44 megabytes per disc to CDs which had up to 700 megabytes per disc, and while the original Gabriel Knight did take advantage of the new format by adding voice acting and having cutscenes with more animation, it was still clearly made for floppy discs in mind.

Released in the same year as the first Gabriel Knight, Myst and The 7th Guest were released to both critical and financial success, with Myst becoming the highest selling game at the time and became the reason to own a CD drive, along with several other games around the same time also receiving moderate success, and it really showed off the advantages that the extra space that CDs allowed by adding high quality music and sounds along with videos, and the team behind The Beast Within took notice and decided to use Full Motion Video for the game. Jane Jensen returns to pen the story for it’s sequel, which helps it be consistent in tone with the previous game.

The result of this choice lead to the game using a whopping 6 CDs, which was massive at the time. I know that doesn’t sound as impressive more than 25 years after it’s release considering that file sizes have ballooned so much that the average indie game made up by a small team could easily match it or even surpass it in file size, sometimes by accident even, but it was expensive at the time to print a game on that many discs, and a company wouldn’t normally do that unless the studio knew it was going to be a big hit, or was at least hoping that it was a big hit, or the studio making the game was being incredibly ambitious, requiring all of that extra space.

Considering that The Beast Within was being developed along with and eventually released the same year as other titles developed with a serious tone in mind such as ‘Shivers’, ‘Roberta William’s Phantasmagoria’, and the spin-off of ‘Police Quest’ titled ‘Police Quest: S.W.A.T.’, Sierra was clearly banking on their games being higher quality and more ambitious than a lot of the other games at the time to get their games flying off of shelves, with all of these tiles requiring at least two CDs to store all of their content.

Set one year after the events of the first game, Gabriel Knight has written a best-selling book loosely based on the events in the first game, titled “Voodoo Murders”. Since then, Gabriel has since moved into his late uncle’s castle, Schloss Ritter, located in Rittersberg, Germany, and has taken on the title of Schattenjager, or Shadow Hunter in English, passed down to him from his uncle. Since the events of the first game, Gabriel has been struggling to recreate the success of his previous book, with very little in the way of progress.

One night, during one of his many unsuccessful writing sessions, a group of people from the nearby town arrives at Schloss Ritter in the middle of the night, looking for the Schattenjager with a story that the daughter of one of the townsfolk being attacked and murdered by what they claim is a werewolf. After a moment of reluctance, Gabriel agrees to find the alleged werewolf for them and prevent the killing of more people.

His investigations soon lead him to a shadowy hunting club and infiltrate their ranks by leaving an impression on the person in charge of the club, Baron Von Glower, and while the other members are suspicious of them, Glower vouches for Gabriel, and both of them soon find a connection between them.

In the year that Gabriel has been living in Schloss Ritter, Grace Nakimura, Gabriel’s assistant, has been taking care of his rare book store back in New Orleans. Grace finds this frustrating, since the only communication that she has been getting from Gabriel is through letters in the mail saying that he’s making great progress with his new book and she shouldn’t worry about him and should just focus on taking care of the book store, leaving Grace frustrated that instead of being able to use her abilities as a researcher like she did in the first game by helping Gabriel investigate the Voodoo Murders, which inevitably got him success with his first book, she is relegated to taking care of a dusty old book shop that has been getting an increase in visitors in the form of new fans from Gabriel’s recently successful book.

After an encounter with a particularly annoying fan, Grace decides to temporarily close the book store to visit Gabriel and see if Gabriel is actually making as much progress as his letters say he does and goes to meet up with Gabriel in his recently inherited castle, soon finding that Gabriel had already started his investigation elsewhere, leaving Grace with the Gerde Hull, carer of the Castle that Gabriel inherited from his uncle, which Gerde had previously assisted with and potential love interest, which thankfully goes nowhere. Soon Grace is helping Gabriel with his investigation by researching werewolves as Gabriel is investigating the hunting club, with both of them communicating via mail throughout most of the game.

And just like the first game, ‘The Beast Within’ uses real world locations, history, and people for it’s story. And just like last time, this review/retrospective is going a little too long for me to talk about it, so I’ll have to make another post about it if there’s enough interest for it.

Much like the first game, this got a novelization by Jane Jenson, released in the box with the game, and expands on a lot of the details of the story. It’s hard to get a physical copy of it these days, and if you know where to look by sailing the high seas, you could probably easily track down a copy of it yourself and read it if the game’s plot has peaked your interest.

This time around instead of just playing as Gabriel like in the first game, Grace is now a fully playable character alongside Gabriel, with whole chapters dedicated to just playing as just her. While Gabriel is getting his hands dirty by getting involved with all the major characters involved with the events in the surrounding story and getting close to them, going to any location that seems linked to said characters and events, and generally getting his hands dirty, Grace is at the opposite end of the scale, with her investigating the history of werewolves and the real world history tied to what Gabriel is getting involved with.

And despite being separated for most of the game, Gabriel and Grace still keep in contact by sending each other letters to keep up with each other and to inform the other person of their own investigations. Remember when you actually had to send someone a physical letter via snail mail? Actually, a lot of people reading this would be young enough that they might think snail mail is referring to sending e-mail over a 56k modem, which is also now archaic. Oh no, my back hurts.

For most of the The Beast Within, it’s your typical point-and-click adventure game. You click something and the character moves across the screen to interact with the something that you clicked. It even comes with some helpful ways to guide you through the game if you’re having problems, such as a feature on the map screen that highlights locations that still have things to do at them. But the game is not without some problems.

Because the game is now using real world images instead of pixel art, some stuff naturally blends together where the pixel art might have been used to properly highlight something, through making something distinct or the focus of the room, where as staring at an image of a real world location might not trigger the same response since it might come cross as white noise, even if it isn’t intended. It’s never terrible since everything pretty much makes logical sense, but it can still happen to some degree.

There are also times when the game shows a short video clip to help make transitioning from one location to another smoother, but there have been a few times where I clicked to skip what I thought was a video that I had seen a thousand times before only to find out later through items either appearing, disappearing, or being combined in my inventory, or when something suddenly becomes interactive when it wasn’t before that I realized that I had clicked through an entirely new clip simply because the first moments of it were exactly the same as the other clip. It would have been helpful if the video transition was from a different angrily or at least zoomed in or out so that it would have been easier to notice that the game was signalling that I had trigger something new in the game.

In one of the sections of the game focused on Grace when she is going on a tour of multiple locations, the Neuschwanstein Castle, the Herrenchiemsee Museum, and the Wagner Museum in Chapter 4, you have to go through every single room, look at every single painting, listen to every single tour tape, and read every single plaque under every single painting, costume, and letter sent to make any progress.

As much as I loved this virtual tour of real world events and getting to see real world locations that I’m probably never going to see myself, it can become quite tedious, especially if you’ve missed something and you have absolutely no idea what it was, causing you to have to go back and go through everything again to make sure that you didn’t miss something from earlier. Thank god there was the hint button on the map screen highlighting places with stuff that you still had to do at that specific location, otherwise I would have pulled my hair out wondering exactly what I had to do.

There are also a few minor problems throughout the game, such as the audio quality seeming to change from scene to scene. Sometimes it will sound more compressed and there were a few clipping issues. There will be a few people out there who are into audio who would probably notice, but most people would probably be fine with it.

Like I mentioned in the introduction, the developers of ‘The Beast Within’ decided to jump on the Full Motion Video trend that had become big in the 90s instead of keeping the pixel art of the first game. But unlike most of the other FMV games that were coming out in the mid-90s that were using the lice action videos as a gimmick to try and get their games to fly off shelves through trend chasing, Sierra was actually trying to take advantage of FMV as a new medium to it’s fullest potential, and the effort really shone through, placing ‘The Beast Within’ above it’s competition.

Like most of the ambitious Full Motion Video games of the time, ‘The Beast Within’ uses blue screen to place their actors digitally onto sets that didn’t exist, but unlike other FMV games, a lot of the locations in this game actually existed, it’s just that actually filming in a lot of these locations or building sets would have been prohibitively expensive, and ‘The Beast Within’ was already becoming one of the more expensive video games of it’s time period.

But the one thing that they did do was sent out a few of the developers to the real world locations that were used in this game and took hundreds of images and carefully stitched them together in such a way to make the face feel like it actually took place in the real world locations seen in the game. And credit to the developers, the actually did a pretty solid job of representing the real world locations with their limited budget and time schedule.

The game features real world castles such as “Neuschwanstein Castle”, Burg Rabenstein”, and “Starnberger See”, along with several other real world locations such as the “Hellabrunn Zoo”, the “Richard Wagner Foundation” in Bayreuth, and the “Rathaus-Glockenspiel” and “Marienplat 21” in Marienplatz.

Although the games writer Jane Jensen admits that it was pretty limiting on what the characters could do, since it no longer could get away with the more heightened reality of the first game that allowed the creation of new locations where none existed.

After seeing some of the locations in YouTube videos, in images on Google, or through street view in Google Earth, all of the locations look very close to the real world counterparts, but some smudging of reality to make it work in a video game of course. If you’re a fan of the game and want a vacation, maybe you can take the “Gabriel Knight Tour” if you have the time.

This time around the cast is completely different from the first game, with none of the high-profile actors returning at all, probably due to the previously mentioned increased cost of moving from voice acting to actually filming the equivalent of several hours of live action video. That’s not to say that the actors in this game were bad by any means, but it was clear that actually hiring someone like Tim Curry would have blown the budget of the game several times over, so the developers chose authenticity over star power.

Instead of Tim as the titular Gabriel Knight, Gabriel is now played by Dean Erickson, whose biggest acting credit is this game unfortunately enough. The only other notable role that he ever got is a re-occurring bit part as a waiter for a few seasons on the TV show Fraiser. The difference between Dean and Tim is pretty obvious, as Dean doesn’t even try to mimic Tim’s performance from the original game, instead of going with a smarmy New Orleans accent Dean instead going with his native Californian accent.

Dean did state in an interview with “Adventure Classic Gaming”‘ that he didn’t even try to mimic Tim in any way since, in his own words, there was no way that he could even come close to doing an impression of Tim, so he played the character down to Earth. ‘The Beast Within’ was Dean’s last acting gig and while he did want to pursue acting at the time, he has since move onto other things and seems to have no resentment with the fact that his acting career fell through.

Although I do think that Dean did the best job that he could with this game, the fact that Gabriel now sounds like a confused surfer dude who just found out that werewolves existed throughout the whole game is amusing to me, and watching him try to pronounce German words in his natural accent just adds some unintentional comedy to some of the scenes. Also, “Surfer Dudes Vs German Werewolves” is my idea, do not steal.

This time around Grace is now appropriately played by an Asian Actress, Joanne Takahasi. Unlike Dean, I couldn’t find much about Joanne other than her appearing in a few minor roles, such as a doctor in episode 22 of season 4 of ‘Babylon 5’, which is her biggest role outside of this game. Looking her up on IMDB, the rest of her filmography seems to be dubious in quality from the looks it. Unfortunately Joanne doesn’t seem to act alongside a lot of other characters, although that’s most because of the way the story is told, but I still find it a tad disappointing. Her performance as Grace is solid and she does a pretty good job of helping the character make the transition from the art of the first game to the live action of the second game.

She hasn’t done any interviews about this game and has disappeared from the public eye, which is likely what she is probably enjoying the quiet life.

The other character who is important to the games story is Baron Friedrich Von Glower, played by Peter J. Lucas, and watching him and Dean play off each other as Glower and Gabriel as the character’s relationship developers is the highlight of the game’s story.

Peter’s biggest role outside of this game is Piotrek Kroll, from the David Lynch film ‘Inland Empire’. He also played a Russian reporter from ‘Independence Day’ and a Russian buyer from “Cradle 2 The Grave”, so he seems to have been pigeonholed as that guy you hire if you need someone to play a Russian basically. He’s mostly had bit parts throughout his career, but he still seems to be acting on and off as of writing this. He also had done some musical training along with acting and has appeared on a reality show about dancing, so he’s clearly had a well rounded career on stage and on screen

I know that the acting and special effects can be seen as pretty cheesy these days, especially since the overall quality of games has gone up in the 25 years since this game has come out and the budgets of the big budget studio games has skyrocketed, but the cutscenes in this game still hold up fairly well, clearly showing off the ambition that the developers have, regardless of the videos being small, interlaced, and having a low framerate.

‘The Beast Within’ doesn’t have the agonizing nails on a chalkboard first-year level hammed up acting or amateurish screenwriting like 95% of the games coming out at the same time. that would have been laughed out a 10-year olds school play.

I know that comes across as pretty backhanded, and I admit that it kind of is, but “The Beast Within” stands out from the rest of the FMV games of the time and is actually enjoyable the entire way through.

The few FMV games that still come out have been relegated to the indie scene and are a rarity in the modern era. Despite having internet speeds that now allow games like ‘The Beast Within’ to be downloaded or Blu-Ray discs to contain all of that footage, it’s still much easier to make assets instead of video due to the ease it can be reused throughout a game.

And while the technology to actually film them and show them in a game has significantly improved, none of them have had the budget to replicate something like ‘The Beast Within’, leaving it as something that probably won’t even be replicated ever again, leaving it feeling quite unique unless some rich millionaire somewhere has a specific interest in niche FMV games and money to burn.

While ‘The Beast Within’ doesn’t really retain much from the first game besides the characters, like the general look, the actors, and even tone in a lot of areas, going in a different direction with the FMV, it’s still a fantastic follow up to ‘Sins of the Fathers’. I’m pretty sure in the 25+ years since it’s first release, fans have found much to appreciate about it, and since it’s initial release it has become a beloved cult classic and I would wholly recommend it to any adventure game fans.

Original post here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2017/06/06/chasm-the-rift-1997-pc-review/

In the 90’s, ID Software was the king of the FPS genre. So much so that for about the first half of the decade, First Person Shooters were called Doom Clones. Quake had a similar effect, but to a lesser extent, and the focus was more on the tech than the gameplay, but there were still a lot of games trying to ape off of it’s success. By 1996 with the release of Quake, FPS games had finally settled own as the genre that we all know and love today.

And one of the Quake clones is an unfortunately forgotten game called Chasm: The Rift.

Chasm: The Rift (AKA “Chasm: The Shadow Zone”, which was the name for the demo, and “The Chasm – Entering the Shadow Zone”, which was it’s announced name before being changed to Chasm: The Rift) is a FPS released in September 30th, 1997, and was released for Windows and MS-DOS. It was developed by Action Forms, who are most famous for “Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason”, which came out in 2008, and their cult classic Carnosaurs franchise.

It was published by GT Interactive as competition to Quake, which came out the year before, as a way of getting back at Activision since GT lost the publishing rights of Quake to them. The release for Chasm: The Rift was poorly timed however since it came out a month after Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64, and was release about 3 months before Quake II, which was released for the Christmas rush, meaning that Chasm never had a chance. The only reason that I even knew about it is that I found a cheap copy of it released by one of those bargain bin labels.

The plot takes place in the not too distant future where scientists have discovered that the normal flow of time has been disrupted, from the past to the future, and time rifts have been forming in the Earth’s atmosphere, leading to different periods of history. Mutants known as Timestrikers (unrelated to Timesplitters franchise despite the name similarity) have been making their way through history to try and eradicate all human life. You play as am unnamed commando who has been volunteered and specifically trained to investigate and stop the attacks of these Timestrikers before all life is wiped out. You start out at a power station to investigate why people aren’t getting any power, and the game goes on from there.

The is basic but is enough to explain what is going on and gives you enough reason as to why you’re doing what you’re doing. At the end of each episode, the game is broken up by a cutscene further explaining the plot as you’re playing. The plot is a nice addition to make it stand out from Quake and helps break up the action, but the cutscenes are essentially fancy profile shots of characters and are there just to justify the next level. No award winning writing here, and no need.

There are only two other characters besides you, and one of which pretty much disappears from the plot immediately after the first cutscene and becomes almost completely forgotten after that. Enough other FPS games had at least some plot at this point, so this is nothing special, but it’s still pretty neat.

Graphically, Chasm wasn’t pushing the limits of the hardware of the time like Quake 1 did or Quake 2 would, since unlike those games, which used the graphical capabilities of OpenGL and 3DFX cars for higher video resolutions and colored lighting, Chasm instead goes for a 2.5D engine like the original Doom did, the main difference being that it looked completely 3D and had mouselook but operated on similar physics to Doom. It was designed this way to be able to run on as many machines as possible, taking advantage of the fact that games like the aforementioned Quake 1 and 2 requiring high end PCs to get a good framerate, letting a lot people be able to play their game over other games without having to upgrade their PCs. So while you couldn’t brag to your friends about how powerful your rig was, you still were having fun.

But what it lacks in graphical prowess, it makes up for having a good art design. Because of the time travel plot, the game jumps from the futuristic sci-fi setting that the game starts with and ends up having places set in ancient Egypt and the middle ages. As a way of making up for the lack of the graphical capabilities of the engine, the levels come with neat little details scattered throughout the levels, such weather effects that include rain and open windows that rocked back and forth in the wind, which you could shoot out and destroy.

The only downside to the levels are that more than a few of them come with sections that have close quarters combat, and if you happen to have one of your larger more powerful weapons out at the time, you can accidentally kill yourself from the splash damage of shooting a nearby wall. Once you get used to the tight nit parts of levels, you can train yourself to use some of the lesser weapons, but it’s annoying the first few times it happens to you.

Chasm’s weapons are mostly standard for a 90’s FPS game. You’ve got the Rifle, which is the default weapon and has infinite ammo, the Double-Barrelled Shotgun, Land Mines, which I never used because the other guns always had plenty of ammo and the levels were just small enough that I could get myself blown up on them if I wasn’t careful with their placement, the Blade Gun, which shoots out deadly spinning blades, the Grenadier, which looks like a grenade launcher but acts like a rocket launcher, the Laser Crossbow, the Chaingun, and the Mega Destroyer, which is this games BFG. And despite the fact that the game has tight corridors, I did manage to use this a few times in the slightly more open areas.

Of course, Chasm comes with the obligatory ’90s FPS power-ups too. Other than the health and armor pickups, there is temporary invisibility, which works pretty well, temporary invulnerability, and the reflector, which bounces some of the enemies attacks off of you and right back at them, and can be fun after some practice.

Unfortunately, the game is on the shorter side, with only about 15 or 16 levels total, and it’s pretty easy to complete this whole game in an afternoon. The only thing preventing it from being shorter is that more often than note, parts of levels turn into mazes that you can get lost in pretty easily, so half of your play though will be trying to find the next button or area. Thankfully, the game comes with a mini-map when you press the TAB button so it lessens the impact, but it’s still an annoyance.

While the enemies might mostly act the same, they all have unique look to them. You have your standard military looking guys in the first section of the game with the weapons that you’d expect them to have, such as lasers and rocks, but the enemy roster soon includes a variety of baddies that depend on the time period that you’re in, such as zombies, giant mutant warthogs, half animal half human mutants, alien warriors, mutant scorpions, and a gremlin-like creature wearing a jester outfit that the creative team like the look of so much that they put it onto the games cover. The game comes with a type of strategy where you can blow limbs off of the enemies, resulting in some of them changing their strategy by running up to and trying to beat you to death because you blew off their arm that was holding their ranged weapon. It adds that extra layer to the gameplay that Quake didn’t have.

At the end of each episode, there is a boss battle, which there is a total of 4. But instead of being bullet sponges like a lot of FPS games from the 90s, you have to use parts of the level to try and kill them. For example, you have to defeat the first boss by trapping it in a room with a giant fan and press a button to suck it into said fan.

Action Forms even released a free 3 level map pack on the website for this game, which has gone down over the years, but exists in both an archived form via the Web Archive, and is packed in with an installer that includes both the base game and these extra levels. These new levels add in even more variety in terms of it’s visuals, featuring snow levels, and has a few new monsters to boot.

The most surprising thing about the game is that it came with a level editor, but sadly I couldn’t find a whole lot of levels or mods for it other than a few ports of E1M1 from Wolfenstein 3D, a few test maps that few people have made, and even a Transformers mod that didn’t make it that far before it was eventually abandoned to be work on as a Quake II mod, which from what I can tell, didn’t make it far into development either. It is possible to make levels with the Doom SLADE editor, but I doubt it’s worth investing time and effort into a game no one remembers, unless you’re impressing the other 4 people who still love playing the game.

On the sound front, it’s pretty solid and everything sounds good. The soundtrack consists of atmospheric music, cribbing off of Quake’s soundtrack. It might not have had the talent of Trent Reznor or even be as memorable, but it’s still a pretty solid soundtrack.

Believe it or not, Chasm even comes with a multiplayer component, but compared to other FPS games coming out at the time, it’s one of the most unmemorable multiplayer experiences out there. It also comes with two cooperative modes where you can play through the game with or without enemies with friends. Considering how close quarters the game got at points during the Single Player, I can’t imagine how it would have been with other people. But it’s still an appreciated feature.

The multiplayer features the standard Deathmatch mode you’d come to expect from a 90s FPS with multiplayer, and even though it does have a few Deathmatch arenas, most of the levels are from the Single Player. And to gain access to most of the level, you have to play it like you would the Single Player. Why it doesn’t have the entire map unlocked from the beginning is baffling. And who would bother with trying to unlock these areas when you’re just going to get killer by the other players anyway, unless there was some mutual agreement to let someone open up the areas. And you’re limited to what weapons the level had to begin with. There is no reason to play Deathmatch unless you’re a sadomasochist who wants to set up a multiplayer game with an old FPS game and have several friends who are also sadomasochist who love obscure FPS games.

Chasm is a solid little game even if it couldn't compete with it's contemporaries. Back in the day this would have been difficult to get up and working which was compounded by it's obscurity meaning that not a lot of people could help you get it up and working, but thankfully developer General Arcade has come along and given the game a remaster which lets you not only play the game on modern systems but at resolutions up to 4K at higher frame rates without having to fiddle with some ini file.

Orignally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/12/legendary-2008-pc-360-ps3-review/

When I first bought Legendary, I bought it in a “2 for $25” deal with the Collector’s Edition of the 2008 Alone in the Dark game fairly soon after they both got released. Looking back at it, it was a pretty obvious sign as to the quality of both games. Alone in the Dark might have been the bigger disappointment, but Legendary was definitely the worse game.

Legendary is a FPS that was released in 2008 for the 360, PS3, and PC. Previously known as Legendary: The Box, the game was developed by Spark Unlimited, who had only developed a total of 5 games before they eventually shut down. While they did release the well received Call of Duty: Finest Hours, the did released a few middle of the road games, such as Lost Planet 3, Yaiba: Nina Gaiden Z, and Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, which is another game that I want to get to.

You play as Charles Deckard, a professional thief hired by a name called Orlando LaFey to steal an artifact from a New York museum, which turns out to be the real Pandora’s Box. Deckard opens the box with a key given to him, and after putting his hand into a clearly marked part of the box for seemingly no reason, he unwittingly opens to box and unleashes numerous mythological creatures into the world. In doing so, Deckard inherits a strange power in his left hand known as the Signet.

The initial premise for Legendary is a pretty solid one. Having to fight of mythological creatures from destroying the world with modern weapons and technology on an epic scale is a great concept, and could have lead to encounters on a large scale. But unfortunately, Legendary did not have the budget to make something on that scale.

Right from the outset the games low budget is pretty obvious. The graphics are a mixed bag at best. There are a few times where the game has a good sense of scale. Right at the beginning, the game shows what potential had. After unleashing chaos unto the world, you go from the museum to the streets of New York, and you see Griffons flying through the air, attacking people on the street, and flinging cars around. After walking through the city going to hell, you see a giant skyscraper sized golem form out of the debris of the surrounding destroyed buildings before it makes its way through New York.

Not too long after this, the game’s budget clearly rears it’s head. You’ll find yourself spending a good portion of the game going through hallways and absolutely tiny arenas to fight enemies. There are moments scattered throughout the game where something impressive in terms of scale happens or there will be something off in the distance that’s nice to look at, but the games load was clearly blown in the first 15 minutes. Plus the entire game has that brownish muddy look that a lot of lower budgeted Unreal Engine 3 games have, so most of the game is unappealing to look at.

Pretty much all of the weapons are cliched FPS weapons. Handguns, assault rifles/sub-machine guns, shotguns, throwable explosives including Molotov Cocktails and Grenades, a rocket launcher to take out larger enemies quickly, a flamethrower that I never used, and a fire axe as a melee weapon.

The most interesting weapon is the Signet, which is the mark permanently put into your hand when you accidentally opened Pandora’s Box. To use the Signet you pick up energy from the creatures that you kill called Animus, which goes into a reserve. At any point you can either shoot out a small blast of energy that can either kill smaller enemies such as the Blood Spiders or knock over larger enemies allowing you momentarily stun them. The Animus can also be used to restore your health.

On the other hand enemies have enough variation to them both to make them visually distinct from each other but gameplay wise to not just make them versions of each other when you get into the second half of the game. Werewolves are probably the most fun, and they’re the most generic of enemies. Werewolves can feign death, so the properly way to kill them is to shoot their heads off.

Firedrakes are heavily armored lizards that shoot fire. They infinitely spawn out of fire pits that you have to put out with a large amount of water through broken pipes or sprinklers by turning on a nearby valve. Nani, which are pixie looking creatures that fly around and switch between intangible and tangible, attacking you only while they’re tangible. They don’t do much damage, but they’re always in groups and attack together.

Probably the most annoying enemy are the Tsuchichmo’s Children, nicknamed “Blood Spiders.”, that are bright red from all the blood that they’ve consumed. They’re easy to see, but they infinitely spawn out of giant organic sacks and they swarm you. Unlike the Nani, they more frustrating because they’re harder to aim at and kill.

There is one enemy that appears very briefly, called the Echidna. Literally the only time you encounter it is when you’re going through the sewers under New York when you get attacked by giant tentacles. For half a second I thought they might have been the Kraken before it got big, but after doing some reading, it’s a completely different enemy.

And the two boss battles include the Golem and the Kraken. While they’re impressive with the scale of just how big they are, but are a mixed bag. Taking the Golem down requires powering up several EMP machines that blast it with a large amount of energy, and the Kraken is a “hit the enemies weak spot for massive damage” enemy where you have to shoot rockets into it’s mouth.

While most of Legendary was barely passable to begin with, and while it had some mildly interesting things such as the enemies being from mythology and the mix of mythology and modern military, there are several things that drag it from being close mediocre to being terrible. The checkpoint system is poorly thought out. There are stretches of game you can go without hitting a checkpoint, and if you die, you end up going back several minutes. It’s frustrating if you’re playing the game for longer stretches of time.

The controls on the PC aren’t changeable if you’re using a keyboard and mouse. The Xbox 360 controller has several control schemes to choose from, but that’s about it. You have to go into the games files and start modifying stuff to get the controls you want. Half the time I initially kept hitting the CTRL key meaning to crouch but kept bringing up the PDA instead.

Speaking of the PDA, the game has collectables in the form of PDA’s that you pick up throughout the game by going slightly out of the way. Pretty much any information on the creatures you’re fighting is in these PDAs. Surprisingly, as the game goes on the main character has the time to put down his thoughts down in the PDA despite being in the middle of combat and encountering the most horrifying of creatures.

If for some reason, you want to pick this game up, watch out for the PC version. Right before the final boss fight, you’re supposed to take an elevator up to the top of a building. But because the PC version is running at a higher framerate than both the console versions, you fall out of the elevator and the world. The only way to solve this is to go into one of the files and modify a couple of things. So unless you’re willing to fiddle around in the files for half an hour just to play the last 30 minutes of game, don’t buy this version.

Legendary is a frustratingly annoying game that tries to capitalize on it’s premise, but once you get past that it doesn’t have anything going for it. If you want to buy this and add it to your collection of terrible video games, go for the 360 or PS3 versions, since the PC version is absolutely broken. For everyone else, avoid at all cost.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2020/05/24/echo-2017-ps4-pc-review/

ECHO was developed and published by the Danish indie studio Ultra Ultra, and was released on the 19th of December of 2017. Unfortunately, the game was not a financial success, and ended up being the only game released by Ultra Ultra before they shut down.

After spending a century in stasis, En arrives at her destination call “The Palace”, an enormous technological construct the size of a planet that bears a resemblance to the Palace of Versailles. En is a designer baby called a “Resourceful” that was freed from her Bread and Circuses life by a man named Foster. Foster was heavily injured during the rescue, and En was forced to “translate” him into a small, red cube. In an attempt to pay him back, En plans to traverse “The Palace” to find a way to restore him to his original body.

Soon after entering “The Palace” and turning it on, En finds that “The Palace” is seemingly alive and filled with numerous clones of her, all attempting to kill her, that she gives the title of “Echoes” And this is where the gameplay loop of Echo comes in.

Because of the power that “The Palace” takes in having the “Echoes” AI learn from your movement, “The Palace” runs on five-minute cycles in which every 5 minutes, “The Palace” shuts down and then reboots. Whatever moves you make during these 5 minutes, the AI will have learned to use, and then apply after the reboot. Thankfully, they only learn the moves you used in the last cycle, and it’s not a cumulative learned experience, which means if you did something last cycle, but didn’t use it in the current cycle, the “Echoes” won’t use it the next cycle.

In between cycles, the is a blackout where “The Palace” is teaching the “Echoes” what you did during the last cycle. During this down period, “Echoes” won’t learn from your actions, but it’s short, so you should plan your actions in advance and use your time wisely.

Graphically, the game looks great. Like I mentioned earlier, each area involving the “Echoes” resembles the Palace of Versailles, and have quite the sense of scale to them, even if the gameplay area isn’t as big as the visuals give off. Graphically, the game looks great, even if it ends up looking a bit samey by the end of it. The soundtrack is also pretty good, also does a good job of adding a haunting empty feeling to the large halls of the “The Palace”, and is quite nice in a lot of places.

The game is on the shorter side, and unfortunately, does feel a tad underwhelming by the end of it. I don’t know how much you can expand on the game without the gameplay loop getting tiring after a while, but there is a universe here and I wouldn’t minded more of it. Sadly, the development company behind this game, Ultra Ultra, shut down not too long after this game came out, so there’s not much of a chance of a sequel coming out. Here’s hoping that if there is a chance of a sequel coming ever coming out, it keeps the low-scale story of the first game.

Apparently a film adaptation is in the works too, but I don’t think it will ever see the light of day.

Unfortunately, Echo is just OK. While I can recommend it, it’s a lukewarm recommendation. If you’re eying this game, you should probably wait for a sale.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2020/03/11/classified-the-sentinel-crisis-2005-xbox-review/

Never heard of Classified: The Sentinel Crisis? I don’t blame you. The only reason that I found this games was during one of my late night sessions of trying to find obscure games to play. And everywhere I looked for information on this game has shown me just how little of a footprint it has left on the history of video games.

You play as a Black Ops soldier recruited by the U.S. Military’s highly classified Sentinel Program. Your only tools are the Intelligent Sentinel Combat Suit (ISCS) and the multifunction OIWC assault rifle, a weapon of unparalleled versatility and power. The military scientist responsible for he sentinel technology was on a mission somewhere in the Blakans, but has now disappeared, and you’re sent in to find him. To find him, you must join forces with a rebel faction to expose the enemy and locate your quarry before the Sentinel technology falls into the wrong hands.

Got that? Because this game has the bare minimum of a story for it to qualify as a story, and is pretty much one step above just having text before every mission. This type of story has been done a thousand times better in a thousand other stories, and has been stretched as thinly as possible over the 6 hour single player campaign in this game. Meaning that nothing about the story stands out or is satisfying.

The level design for this game reminds me a lot of how levels for First Person Shooters for the Nintendo 64 were designed. Incredibly basic level design and structure. Get from point A to point B with little to no deviation. Even something like Goleneye 007 for the Nintendo 64 had more going on.

While everything looks passable, the whole thing kinda reminds me of the XBLA version of the original Perfect Dark, where everything about the game is the exact same except for the slightly higher quality models, textures, and higher screen resolution. Except that was done to make the game look like how you remember the game looking, and here, it just looks slightly outdated, even for the time.

You can’t even destroy computers, tables, and chairs like you could in the previously mentioned Goldeneye 007. At least let me destroy crates for ammo, health, or armor. But the game makes up for it with dropping plentiful amounts of ammo, and you have regenerating shields for most of the game.

There aren’t even any spots off the beaten path where you can collect extra ammo or health. The game is so linear that I’m surprised that it isn’t a light-gun game. This whole game is so generic that It could be a stand in for one of those generic games that you would see in the background of a movie that only exists because they couldn’t afford the rights to a real game.

The AI is so simple that I’ve seen multiple bad guys running into a wall trying to get where they are going. One time I saw two enemies doing this at once, while running in two completely different directions. Somehow, sometimes the enemies don’t hear your weapon fire. The either rely entirely on line of sight, or only notice you when you’re incredibly close to them, and when you’re that close, you’re already firing at them, killing them before they can even fire at you. There are some guys who are slightly harder to kill than the others, but they’re still such an insignificant amount of trouble.

Every now and again, the game likes to have a section that breaks up the shooting, but always ends up being slow, boring, and tedious. There’s one level that begins in a tram (train?), where you have to protect the tram from being damaged and exploding. It isn’t that long or difficult, it’s just incredibly tedious. It’s soon followed by an incredibly short section where you have to use your fists to attack enemies because they captured you and took all of your weapons that was so short that it feels like it could have been taken out of the game completely and replaced with a cutscene of your character attacking one of the guards and stealing his weapon.

There is even a pseudo stealth section, and I say pseudo, because it doesn’t even put in the bare minimum of just hiding in the shadows until someone turns around you can sneak past them. And it doesn’t even matter anyway, because you can just blast everyone away, and you don’t get punished for it. The only thing that matters is killing the guy that the objectives want you to kill.

The weapons are also pretty generic. I say weapons, plural, but really there is one weapon that slightly changes its look depending on it’s fire mode. Basically the gun is a stand in for the generic array of weapons that most First Person Shooters have. The assault rifle and sniper rifle modes are the most useful, followed by the grenade launcher and the RPG, which are good for taking out groups of enemies close together. But then we have the shotgun.

The shotgun is one of the most mediocre shotguns I’ve ever seen in a game. For it to even be effective, you have to run right up to an enemy and hope your aiming is good enough that you can take it out in one go. Any further and it’s useless. With the other modes in the gun, the shotgun pretty much never gets used outside of you using it once, finding out it’s terrible, and never using it again.

Actually, there is a second gun, a generic handgun. The only time I used it is when the game took away my omni-weapon. It works, but I’ve never felt the need to ever go back to it outside of that one time.

You can pick up upgrades for your gun throughout the game. Some of them you seem to get automatically, but I have no idea where your character got these from. Maybe it’s a Metroid: Other M situation where you’re playing a character who isn’t allowed to use them until a certain point in the game. Or maybe I’m trying to make up excuses for an already bad game by comparing it to an even worse one.

The game doesn’t even include multiplayer. Not even split-screen multiplayer or co-op. This game has such little replayability that you could watch someones let’s play on Youtube and pretend it’s a machinima movie put together by a couple of friends.

While the game doesn’t have ragdoll physics, since games were still in that transition period where not every game had realistic physic yet, but it’s still mildly amusing to see a character’s body zip past the camera like Wile E. Coyote when a grenade explodes next to them. How depressing is it that the most fun I had with this game was purely accidental.

This game was released in 2005. At this point, the original Xbox had Halo 1 and 2, Doom 3, Unreal Championship, and Half-Life 2. This game was even released the same year as Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil, Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict, Serious Sam 2, Star Wars: Republic Commando, and Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath. It’s not like the Xbox was hurting for fantastic First Person Shooters. And that’s only the FPS games that only appeared exclusively on the original Xbox (sans PC version of course, we’re talking consoles only here), as there were tons of multi-platform First Person Shooters on the console too. So it’s incredibly easy to see why Classified: The Sentinel Crisis was so overlooked.

Why would you buy this over any other FPS the system had to offer? You could buy the disc version the Halo 2 Multiplayer maps and have a better time playing by yourself by just running around and looking at how good the level and art design is. At least then you could have some friends over and a good time.

This game might not even be close to the worst game I’ve played on a technical level, or even on a conceptual level, but there is one thing I can say about a lot of bad games. They either have ambition, personality, or, if nothing else, they’re easy to make fun of.

At some point there was going to be a PS2 version, but it ended up being cancelled for unknown reasons. I’m guessing it’s because this game barely sold any copies, and was promptly forgotten before it even hit store shelves.

Classified: The Sentinel Crisis has to be one of the most bland First Person Shooters that I’ve ever played. From it’s name and box art, to it’s characters, plot, and levels. Not great, not terrible, just incredibly bland and forgettable. Unless you are on the hunt to collect everything you can for your retro games collection, you should probably avoid this.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/01/11/a-look-back-at-myst-1993/

With so much time passing since it’s release, it’s hard to get across just how big Myst was back in 1993. It became the highest selling video game at the the time, selling over 3 million copies world wide, and was only surpassed by the original Sims 9 years later in 2002. And while the series has unfortunately gone to the wayside since it’s original game, it still has a place in gaming history.

When Myst was first released, it was so popular that it was the thing that finally got people to move on from the old 3 and a half inch Floppy Disks, which contained a meager 1.44 megabytes, to the then brand new format of CDs, which contained up to 700 megabytes on a single disc, hundreds of times bigger than what a Floppy Disk could ever hope to achieve, and Myst was the flagship title that really showed off what that extra space could do. High quality music, better looking graphics, characters being able to have voice acting that gave the characters more of a personality, and it even allowed for videos.

The version of Myst that I’ll be checking out is Myst: Masterpiece Edition because it’s the version that is the most widely available version of the game. It’s a remastered and updated version of the original game that came out 7 years after the release of the original version with remastered graphics and sound. Plus there isn’t any real reason to go back to the original version beyond nostalgia, curiosity, or if your a mega Myst fan.

In Myst, you play as “The Stranger”, a nameless person who is a stand in for anyone playing the game, who comes across a book with the word MYST on it’s cover. After reading through the book, which describes a fantastical island, you come across the final page, which, to your surprise and confusion, contains a moving picture of the island that was described in the book.

After touching the image, you find yourself being teleported to the island. Now stuck there, you have no choice other than to explore the island. Located in the center of the island is a library that contains shelves of mostly burned books, which a few have survived and contain a brief history of the island, along with two other shelves containing one book each, a Red Book and a Blue Book.

When opening these books, you come to find that each has someone trapped inside them. Sirrus, who is stuck in the Red Book, and Achenar, who is stuck in the Blue Book. Both tell you to not trust the other one and to find the corresponding missing colored pages from their books and to bring them back to them. And this is where the game picks up.

You’re not only left to explore the island, but across the island are similar books to the one you originally came across called MYST, called “Ages”, in which colored pages are located. To gain access to each Age, you have to solve a puzzle to get to the book linking to that Age. Hints to these puzzles are not only located in the few normal books that survived being burned in the library in the middle of the island.

Myst is a first person point-and-click adventure game and it’s gameplay is about as basic as you would expect from a game likes. You point and click on certain parts of the screen to make your way through each location. It can be more accurately be described as interactivity than gameplay. There are a few spots that are a little confusing to navigate because it places you a direction that doesn’t always do a good job of setting up where you can and can’t go, but it’s few and far between. The game also comes with a feature called ‘Zip Mode’, which lets you quickly move around whatever location you’re in by hovering over where you’ve previously big and pressing a hot spot on the screen that’s indicated with the cursor changing from a hand to a lightening bolt. It can come in handy for those who don’t have the patience to click through each screen.

You can complete each Age in whatever order you want, who is both a burden and a blessing, which I’ll get into in a minute. You can read up on each Age in the previously mentioned library on Myst Island, so you don’t have to go into each new location blind.

But despite the fact that Myst is so simple in it’s gameplay and concept, it’s execution is where it starts to waver a bit. For starters, you can’t pick up both the Red Page and Blue Page at the same time. I don’t know if this was a deliberate design decision or a limitation of the software and/or hardware, but it effectively means you have to ‘complete’ each Age twice to get both pages to see what both Sirrus and Achenar have to say. Thankfully the game seems to leave all of the puzzles how you left them from when you played through each Age, so replaying them isn’t too bad.

A few of the Ages are easy to get through on a second play. The Channelwood Age (The one with all the trees) isn’t too bad since it’s just flipping a couple of switches and you’re back out of the Age in less than 2 minutes with the second page, but other Ages are a lot more aggravating. Thankfully, Myst also places you right back at the beginning of whatever Age you play no matter how many times you’ve played it before, which means that you can just skip replaying some puzzles, which helps speed the process along.

There are also a few other minor problems that scattered throughout the game, such as the telescope in the Stoneship Age (the one on the boat) being a bit finicky because in order to move it around you have to drag the screen to the left or right and there were a few times that I rushed and I accidentally clicked away from it a few times.

But the low point of the game for me is the Selenitic Age (the one with the rocket ship). A portion of The Selenitic Age has you playing through a maze. And for the players who might have picked this as their first Age to try and complete probably weren’t expecting to have to revisit locations on their first play through, resulting in some people not having mapped it out or not have it memorized. Unless you were one of the few who actually thought to map it out first time around, it just becomes a tedious slog. Having yo navigate a maze through sound cues sounds is a neat idea, but there has never been a good maze, even in the best of games.

It does actually fit with the rest of the Age, with there being noises for clues on how to get through the maze. It is telegraphed with sounds from the Mechanical Age, but I doubt most people would even notice after hours of playing the first time around, or even on a replay, and it was one of the rare times that I had to look up a guide for a game. I wasn’t going to spend hours of my life to grind out the maze or try to map it out, and I know it wasn’t just me because when I look up reactions to this game, it’s the only section for the game that other people used a guide for.

So the game does help guide you through the maze, but because mazes suck even in the best of games, it was still the worst section of a pretty enjoyable experience.

Myst: Masterpiece Edition also added a general map for whatever location you’re in that highlights anything that you need to pay attention to, which is great for those who are struggling to remember whats located where.

Myst was not the first game to make use of pre-rendered CGI stills for it’s graphics, with games such as ‘Alice: An Interactive Museum’ (1991) and ‘L-Zone’ (1992) coming out the previous years, and ‘The Journeyman Project’ (1993) and ‘Gadget Invention, Travel, & Adventure’ (1993) coming out the same year. But unlike those games, which go for more complex CGI and distinct art styles, Myst instead goes for both a more simplistic art style and more basic with it’s CGI. I’m pretty sure this was due to Myst having a smaller team size that reigned in the scope a bit, but it ends up working in Myst’s favor. And that’s not to say that the other games from the same time period looked bad or aged worse.

Douglas Adams, author of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ and eventual writer of his own pre-rendered adventure game ‘Starship Titanic’, was quoted as calling Myst a “Beautiful Void”, naming the trope in the process, when the game originally came out and it’s easy to see why. Interactions with other characters are kept to a minimum and in very specific circumstances, so you’re entirely left to exploring places that empty and have even been abandoned, essentially creating something akin to the feeling of kenopsia, having an eclectic aura, or being a liminal space a few decades before those terms took off and giving it this really distinct feeling.

This was also around the same time that polygons were starting to finally take off more on home computers and consoles. 1993 also had games like the original Star Fox for the Super Nintendo, which was also graphically impressive, and the previous year had the likes of the original Alone in the Dark. But as impressive as they were, no game at the time was going to come even remotely close to showing off what Myst was doing in real time. So the trade off is that while it wasn’t running in real time, it did make the game look impressive in other ways.

It looked so good that Cyan, Inc. released a screensaver with screens from the game, which was back when screensavers were a thing because computers didn’t go into a standby mode that turned the screen off, preventing the image to be burned into the monitor. And this screensaver even has exclusive images that didn’t make it into the game along with behind the scenes content. It’s the equivalent of a company today releasing a 10 hour video onto their YouTube video that’s just game ambiance.

1993 even had ID Software’s Doom, but it wasn’t until 3 years later in 1996 with Quake that having games running smoothly with polygons in real time that it was even feasible for both developers and consumers to work with, so Myst’s graphics were making the best of a very limited situation in multiple ways.

And to add to the other worldly feeling of the game is the memorable soundtrack of the game. Done by Robyn Miller, one of the two brothers who founded Cyan, Inc, a lot of the tracks from the soundtrack adds to the ambiance of each location you’ll visit as well as add to some emptiness that some of the levels create. But it’s not a constant throughout the game, as there are times where it pulls back and lets you just take in the ambient noises of each location, which includes the wind blowing through the trees, water lapping up on the shore, and whatever wildlife resides in a location to walking through some empty caves or through the empty corridors of abandoned buildings.

Both the music and ambient soundscapes show just how alone you are in these locations. Don’t worry, it’s not as creepy as I’m making it sound.

If you want to track down a copy of this game, I would recommend getting the GOG version since it comes with a program called SCUMMVM that means you don’t have to fiddle with anything to get the game running on modern systems. Just boot it up and play.

The original Myst is from a unique period of time where the technology of video games were making giant leaps, which Myst help to make popular. It might be a little rough around the edges compared to more modern games and somewhat limited by the technology of the time, but it’s an enjoyable little adventure game that clearly has the markings of a small team who had some big ideas.

Due to the previously mentioned success, Myst managed to become a franchise, with multiple sequels, remakes, and spin-offs, along with a book series, a comic series that was cancelled half way through its run, and a potential TV mini-series and movie projects that never seemed to get off the ground. After looking back at the original Myst, it’s pretty obvious that it was never really intended to be a franchise, but the developers took advantage of the success that they were given and ran with it.

It even spawned a trend of what were called “Myst Clones”, which all involved going through a series of pre-rendered images, or even worlds made up of photographs of actual locations or real-world sets, in a similar style to Myst. Adventure fans thought that Myst’s popularity would kill the adventure genre by making it “dumbed-down” and making the genre more accessible to more people, along with Doom, which came out the same year, which, according to adventure game fans at the time, required no thought at all to play. The irony is that Myst making it more accessible to people probably made it better because you didn’t have to deal with the genre’s non-stop use of awful logic for puzzles.

Considering that a lot of previous adventure games required brute forcing your way through a game, either because you could easily screw yourself over, wasting hours and even days of your life (I’m looking at you Sierra), or because it only made sense in the designers head and they didn’t take in consideration that that other people would be playing it, or both at the same time, both could mean that you could end up wasting tens of hours of time only to get frustrated and often confused, so a game that made logical sense was a warm welcome.

Myst was even popular enough for Disney to get in contact with Cyan to build a Myst themed island as Disneyland Florida, in which only a limited amount of people would have been allowed onto the island in any given day, with park goers having to figure out what happened to the islands last inhabitants over 11 acres of land, with the whole thing being non-linear, meaning that no two people would have had the same experience. But alas, that never came to be. But from the sounds of it, it probably would have had more success in the modern world of geo-caching and escape rooms.

The library from Myst Island even made it’s way onto an episode of The Simpsons, in the background of the ‘Homer3’ segment of ‘Treehouse of Horror VI’ along with a snippet of the soundtrack, which in turn was featured in the IMAX film Cyberworld 3D, which was the film used to promote the then new IMAX cinemas. Unfortunately, you can’t see the film anymore since it only gets used to test out new IMAX theater before they’re opened to the public.

Looking back at the original Myst, it’s quaint compared to other games that have come out since it’s release, not only on a technical level, with games being able to easily be rendered in real time that look much better than even some of the later Myst games, but with how adventure games are now designed to be more accessible roughly 30 years later (as of this look back at the original Myst), which the original Myst helped to some degree, even with it’s own series, with it’s sequels leaning from the mistakes made in the original.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/09/16/wreckless-the-yakuza-missions-jp-double-s-t-e-a-l-gcn-ps2-xbox-review/

For everyone, there is that one game that you played as a kid, a game that only you seem to remember. The one game that remains at the back of your mind, laying dormant, until it pops up randomly out of nowhere as a distant memory that you could swear is a fever dream, but after some searching online, you find out that it wasn’t a fever dream, but an actual game that got released, and no one else seems to have heard of it besides you. For me, one of those games is ‘Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions’. Or as it’s called in Japan, ‘Double S.T.E.A.L.’, but for the sake of consistency, I’ll be calling the game Wreckless since an English audience is going to be the ones reading it anyway.

Set in Hong Kong, you either play as a pair of police women who are part of the corrupt Hong Kong Police Force, called the Flying Dragons, attempting to crack down on rival Yakuza operations, or a pair of spies hired to take down the Tiger Takagi, the head of the Hong Kong Yakuza, along with trying to uncover the links between the mafia and the police and helping to stop the Yakuza stranglehold of Hong Kong.

The funniest thing that I could find about the plot to this game though comes from the official Nintendo website, in which the two police characters that you play are described as “But they’re more like Inspector Clouseau than Robocop.” If that doesn’t set the tone, I don’t know what will.

Not that it matters all that much since I could probably count the amount of cutscenes of this game on one hand, all of them less taking up less than 5 minutes total combined. The characters are dumb caricatures and they don’t even get enough screen time to even be 1 dimensional, let alone get more character development than the two sentence description that they all had that were more of a vague concept that a character description. They’re fun to watch, but you’re not going into Wreckless: for the in-depth characters. They’re more there to help give the game it’s comedic tone. The best way that I could describe Wreckless is that it’s like ‘You’re Under Arrest!’ and ‘Tank Police’ had a baby and that baby came out through an explosion.

To give an indication of just how silly the game’s plot is, there is one mission in the Police campaign where the bad guy is on top of a skyscraper and the two female cops are in a helicopter, with the car, for convenient reasons, in the helicopter with them. The bad guy then shoots out of the sky, and somehow both characters and their car land safely on top of the skyscraper. And at this point the bad guy gets the good idea to know you and your vehicle off the skyscraper wit his car, which came up on the same elevator that he did.

I’ll briefly mention it here that Xbox version and the PlayStation 2 and GameCube versions are different. I’ll focus on the Xbox version for now, but I’ll come back to these differences later. Each ‘Campaign’ has 10 missions each, with 20 missions total. The missions range from taking blood packs from a crashed ambulance to a hospital without taking too many hits from the Yakuza or running into walls before getting to the hospital, to smashing more Dim Sum stands than the Yakuza can, to saving a kidnapped Feng Shui Professor who has been tied to the front of a monstrous dump truck. And to save the Feng Shui professor, you have to driving into the dump truck off a higher ledge, causing explosions due to the dump truck being filler with dangerous explosive barrels.

It can get pretty weird and funny with it’s objectives.

But a lot of these objectives can be more difficult than they need to be simply because of the way the cars control. I don’t know how to describe the driving other than it feels like a mix of trying to control a car while it’s driving on ice and trying to control a beach ball. Once I got used to it, it wasn’t the worst driving that I’ve ever experience, but it’s still feels a little bit slippery.

There were a few times where I either flipped the car and had to wait for the game to respawn my car back upright or got stuck on geometry and it took a while for the game to notice that I was stuck, both requiring me to restart the mission because the time was now too low to complete the mission. The amount of times that I’ve had to listen to one of the characters over the radio talk about taking the blood packs to the hospital or having to save the Fung Shui Expert have been drilled into my mind and I’m pretty sure when I’m 80 and reminded of this game, those quotes are going to come back up and haunt me.

And on top of that, every mission is timed. That doesn’t sound to bad, but the time limit is so low that you’re practically completing missions by the skin of your teeth half the time. But then if you screw up at specific points in some missions, the time limit resets to whatever it was when it sets you back, just giving you enough time to complete the mission I had one mission cut time off the time limit. Why would you give me that time limit if you were just going to take time away from me? I have no idea if this happened at other points of the game because I was too focused on trying to complete the mission in the time frame.

One of the most annoying missions is one where you’re playing as the spies and you have to take photos of someone. But instead of just driving around to take photos from certain angles, that simply require you to just drive to where you need to get the photos from as quickly as possible, you have to not only drive around a pier, which is narrow and has tight turns, but also requires you to jump over openings in the pier, one of which requires you to barrel roll. And that’s if you don’t know that you can just drive around. Which way to do you want to waste precious seconds, trying to perfect the barrel roll, or having to drive the long way? I’m pretty sure the PS2/XBOX/CGN Grand Theft Auto games had more reliable physics than this game.

It also doesn’t help that you have to manually save the game if you want to keep your progress. It doesn’t even bother to autosave the game after you’ve completed a mission, a feature that a lot of games had at this point. I found this out the hard way after completing a couple of missions and turning my console off, only to turn it back on again to find out that all of my progress had gone.

The game also has a variety of unlockable cars. Some of which you can unlock by simply completing missions, but others are located throughout levels and you have to go out of your way to not only find them and hit them with your current car, but also continue and complete your mission, which is going to take a lot of retrying with just how tight the game is with it’s time limit. These cars can range from a Monster Truck to a rip-off of the Delorean from ‘Back to the Future’ to a tank, which can actually fire rounds. When I used the tank, my time for the first mission went from just over 2 minutes to complete to just over 30 seconds, shaving off a whole minute and a half. It’s not quite as effective or all missions though.

That doesn’t sound too bad except for the previously mentioned floaty controls timed missions, causing a close shave, meaning you’re going to have to get really good at this game if you want to unlock those cars. And you don’t really have anyone to show them to since the Xbox version of ‘Wreckless’ is a Single Player game only, unless you have some friends around or posting proof on the internet and want to brag to them about some obscure game.

Also, I had some problems with the pause menu. For some reason, the ‘Retire’ button, which takes you back to the main menu, is right at the top of the menu, and it’s the button that the game highlights when you pause the game, for some reason. The ‘Return’ button that would take you right back into the game is right down at the bottom of the menu. Not even right under the ‘Retire’ button. Instead, the button under the button under the ‘Retire’ button is the ‘Restart’ button, which restarts the whole mission.

Which has resulted in me accidentally pressing the ‘Retire’ and ‘Restart’ button more times than I should have because I was rushing to press the controller buttons to get back into the game due to years of muscle memory from games having their return to game buttons at the top of the menu and being highlighted. You can also press the ‘back’ button and the ‘start’ button to also get back in the game, which means that there is three ways to get back into the game and all of them are the most annoying way to get back into the game.

The game also looks pretty good on a technical level for an Xbox game, with lots of destructible objects, bloom, great lighting (even if some of the shadows looked a little off at points), and the cars even having good looking damage models. There were a few moments that the screen was a little too cluttered and too many things were going on, but the game does look good.

And I guess this is a good time to transition over to comparing the Xbox version of the game to the PS2 and GCN versions of the game. The PS2 and CGN versions weren’t just a simple port job, as those versions of the game were developed by ‘Stealth Studios’, with the original being developed by ‘Bunkasha’, resulting in quite a few differences between the versions. The most obvious being the graphics.

The PS2 and CGN posts look downright awful to the Xbox, and even look bad for their respective consoles. There are a lot less things to destroy, random stuff like characters and a few vehicles look weirdly shiny for no reason, and all of the models are textures are so low quality, with a lot of the textures being blurry. And just because these consoles didn’t have the horsepower like the original Xbox did, that didn’t mean they weren’t capable of good looking games, such as other open world games like ‘Jak II’, ‘Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction’, and ‘Spider-Man 2’. It’s like night and day.

Also, the cutscenes in the Xbox version are in real time, while the cutscenes in the PS2 and GCN versions take the cutscenes in the Xbox version and present them as pre-rendered videos in the PS2 and GCN versions. Maybe the studio that ported the game just didn’t have the time, money, or both to properly port the cutscenes and this was the best that they could do. The PS2 and GCN versions also came with a myriad of technical performance issues, such as slow down, which pretty much confirms that it was a rush job.

The reason that the Xbox version looks so much better, technical limits notwithstanding, is that ‘Wreckless’ was originally designed for the Xbox from the ground up, resulting in a more polished experience, with the ports probably being after thought since they were ported by a different company. As a result, those versions are a worse looking and performing game, not only resulting in a worse looking game, but resulting in a game that had more glitches and slowdowns than the Xbox version despite looking worse.

And to top it all off, the driving feels so much worse. I know that I complained about how the driving in the original Xbox version felt slippery, but I could get used to the driving in that version. In the PS2 and CGN versions, the driving somehow feels both stiff and slippery at the same time. I don’t know how else to describe it. Although in this version, I can pull off drifting better.

But despite a lot of the game feeling rushed, there are some nice additions to the PS2 and GCN version of the game, even if it doesn’t make up for the downgrade in graphics and gameplay.

Firstly, there is an adrenaline feature that slows down time for a brief period along with a limited supply of short range missiles. I felt these additions were a little pointless and that they were added to make up for the way the cars control, but it’s nice that they’re here.

Missions are now ranked based on not only how quickly you complete them, with Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals to indicate you on how well you did, but the game has secondary objectives to complete as well, such as destroying a certain amount of traffic or objects in a mission. If you complete one of these objectives on Hard Mode, you can unlock a bonus mission. If you earn Gold, you can also unlock one of the cheat codes, such as low gravity or unlimited time on missions.

There are also now twice as many missions as the Xbox version, with 40 instead of 20. It’s hard to complain about new content. But weirdly, the missions that were ported over are now in a completely different order. It’s not super important, but I thought I should mention it anyway.

The PS2 and GCN versions also come with two new multiplayer modes exclusive to these consoles. The first one has one player chasing after the second, where the objective is the first player has to destroy the second players car as quickly as possible. But for some reason the mode has only one camera instead of being split screen, with the camera following the player who has to destroy the other player’s car. I imagine this is probably due to the time limits imposed on the development team.

The other multiplayer mode is a racing mode, which is pretty self-explanatory.

The game also comes with a free drive mode too, allowing you to drive through the city in a more relaxed casual manner, taking in the views of the city. I wish the original Xbox version has this, as it would have been nice to see the city with the better graphics without having to destroy Yakuza cars or take something somewhere.

Also, in the Xbox version the pedestrians run out of the way, while in the PS2 and CGN versions, you can hit the pedestrians, flinging them into the sky. So at least those versions have that going for it.

So when it comes down to it, you have to either pick between a better looking and better controlling game, or a game with more content, but controls worse, looks worse, and has more technical issues. I hope that down the line someone remasters this game with the Xbox graphics and controls with the PS2 and CGN content added in.

Would I recommend ‘Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions’? I know that I spent a large portion of this review complaining, but I would be lying if I said that I hated this game. Sure, the wonky physics are going to turn a lot of people away from this game, but I still enjoyed my time with this game, specifically the Xbox version, and I know that someone else is going to get something out of it.

It would be a lukewarm recommendation, since the only people who would probably play this are people who love finding weird obscure games, but it’s still a recommendation all the same.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/04/29/swat-4-the-stetchkov-syndicate-2006-game-review/

SWAT 4 must have sold pretty well upon it’s release, because less than a year later, an expansion pack called The Stetchkov Syndicate was released.

Unlike the base game, Sketchkov Syndicate has a single storyline tying all of the missions together. In this expansion, you’ll be tracking down the Eastern European crime family known only as The Stetchkov Syndicate, a mob of arms dealers. Throughout the campaign, you’ll be moving from people who’ve bought the weapons and drugs labs to dealing with the cartel themselves. It’s certainly nice to see some larger scale crimes being tackled instead of just small individual ones.

The gameplay for The Stetchkov Syndicate is pretty much the game as the base game. Picking up guns as evidence, taking down bad guys, handcuffing everyone you come across, and reporting it all back to HQ. The key difference between the base game and the expansion is several new types of equipment for you to take into a mission, but for some reason, they’re only usable in the expansion and not the base game.

Rounding out the new arsenal includes the 5.7x28mm Sub machine Gun, Colt Accurized Rifle, 5.66mm Light Machine Gun, and 40x46mm Grenade Launcher. The Grenade Launcher comes with the Triple Baton Round, which ejects three interlocking batons constructed of polymerized rubber, as well as projectile versions of the grenades, such as CS Gas Grenade Round, a Flashbang Round, and a Stinger Grenade Round.

Secondary weapons include the 9mm Machine Pistol and Mark 18.50 Semiautomatic Pistol, along with the Cobra Stun Gun, which is a new and improved version of the stun gun, and can hold two electrodes at the same time instead of the one.

The new Tactical Equipment includes the Ammo Pouch and Lightstick. Along with new Protection Equipment that includes Night Vision Goggles and the option to have no armor, which allows the player to be able to do things quicker, such as basic movement along with being able to do things such as lock-picking, door wedging, restraining people, etc, faster.

The Stetchkov Syndicate also introduces a new multiplayer mode, Smash & Grab. The suspects must collect the briefcase and take it to the exit before the timer runs out. The officers must stop the suspects from reaching the exit with the briefcase. If a suspect is arrested, 30 seconds are deduced from the game clock; if a suspect is killed or arrested carrying the briefcase, the case stays where it is dropped. Officers cannot pick up the briefcase.

Co-op has a few new additions too, you can run on custom missions and with up to ten players per game, which can further be split into two completely separate teams (red and blue) with a leader each. This is not similar to single player teams where an element leader controls both teams.

Since I couldn’t mention everything in the SWAT 4 review since it’s over 2,500 words long and it was already way too long for me to add even more too it, I’ll briefly go over some minor things here. The fake ads located around the levels are actually pretty funny if you take a second to look at them. The environmental detail is so good, that even the computers located around a level do stuff, like go to a screensaver if you’re in a level long enough, or blue screen if they’re near enough to an explosion or take bullet damage.

Unfortunately, just like the base game, Stetchkov Syndicate has a lot of the exact same problems as SWAT 4 does. SWAT members being taken out incredibly easily, accidentally killing a civilian when trying to fire upon a terrorist, enemies clipping through a wall and being able to kill you. There is even a level with bombs and a count down timer like SWAT 4.

It’s a bit disappointing that a lot of these problems weren’t fixed or smoothed over at all with patches or with the expansion pack. Maybe I wouldn’t be so angry at the level filled with bombs on timers if the entire game wasn’t ball-bustingly hard.

The amount of levels this expansion adds shows just how few levels the base game had, and that most of it’s length was entirely due to the previously mentioned difficulty. I just wish this expansion pack could have added some difficulty beyond the points required to finish a level.

If you liked SWAT, then Stetchkov Syndicate is definitely for you. But if the engagingly inconsistent AI of literally everyone makes you want to hit a hole into your monitor like the first game did, maybe give this a skip.