2007
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/10/16/nsfw-manhunt-2-2007-wii-psp-ps2-pc-review/
After the controversy of the first Manhunt, you would think that Rockstar wouldn’t put the money and effort into making a sequel. Maybe a few ports of the first game to other consoles to help recoup some of it’s costs on the down low, but not a fully fledged sequel. But surprisingly, 4 years later, Manhunt 2 was announced and released to the public.
The PC and PS2 versions were developed by Rockstar London, the PSP version was developed by Rockstar Leeds, and the Wii version was developed by Rockstar Toronto, with the WII, PSP, and PS2 versions being released in 2007, an the PC version being released in an uncensored form in 2009.
Instead of being a direct sequel of the first game’s plot, Manhunt 2 instead goes in a different direction. Focusing on two inmates at the Dixmor Asylum for the criminally insane, Daniel and Leo, as a severe thunderstorm causes the security system to go offline, opening all of the cell doors in the facility, letting the people locked inside out to roam around.
In the chaos, Daniel, who is a partial amnesiac, unable to remember how he got into the asylum, with the help of Leo, escape. After this escape. Daniel tries it figure out why he can’t remember his past and how he got into the asylum in the first place. While you’re following the clues, a group of people called the Watchmen are hunting you down, trying to prevent you from finding the truth.
Manhunt 2 tries to do something slightly different with it’s main character in that it tries to make you feel at least some sympathy for the main character. Daniel seems to be just as disgusted with his actions as a lot of the people playing would be. He does get desensitized to it as the game goes along, but when you’re brutally killing people in the dozens like Daniel is, I’m pretty sure most people would get desensitized to it.
While the first game had a great 80’s horror movie vibe going, with a John Carpenter-esque synth soundtrack, and slasher style, Manhunt 2 goes for more of a conspiracy thriller vibe with it’s plot. It isn’t bad by any means, it just doesn’t have the same vibe the first game did, and just doesn’t capture the same vibe as the first game.
The first noticeable difference between this game and the first is that Manhunt 2 definitely cranks it’s mature content up to 11, where the first Manhunt only got the ESRB rating “Mature”, this one got an “Adults Only” rating, meaning it would be refused sale on store shelves for major chains in the US. The difference is that Manhunt 2 adds some sexual content and use of drugs on top of it’s high impact violence and strong language. I earlier asked why Rockstar would want to release a sequel to probably it’s most controversial game, but if you were going to release a sequel to Manhunt, upping everything that made people disgusted to the first one seems like you’re just making it worse.
As a result, the PSP, PlayStation 2, and WII version of the games were censored, with all of the executions having a filter applied to them, to the point of not being able to see whats going on in some of these versions of the game, with the WII version getting the worst of it. But strangely, a lot of the sexual content seems to be intact in these versions. And the Wii version seems to have the best quality video with the cutscenes. Weird.
The core gameplay is the same as the first one. You’ll be hiding in shadows, running from enemies if any of them see you, and be performing executions. Executions have more variety this time around. The instruments of violence you can pick up have a wider variety than the first game, making executions a little less tedious having to sit through the same animations over and over again.
A new addition to the execution system is that you can also use parts of the environment to perform executions, similar to the earlier Punisher game from 2005, which also had to get censored on consoles. You’d think that people would learn. These include electrocuting someone to death with a fuse box, freezing someones head in liquid nitrogen and smashing it to pieces, and even trapping someone in an iron maiden with spikes on the inside. Quite a few of these are level specific, so it never gets old as there is always something new to see.
The gun combat has significantly improved. It’s still not amazing by any stretch, but it’s now a viable option, especially since gun combat has a heavier focus than the last game. If actually running and gunning in this game isn’t your cup of tea, guns can now also be used for executions too, making them actually worth your time. The Melee combat is also better, but is still only viable as a last resort.
Surprisingly, the WII and even the PC version has motion based movements for it’s executions, requiring you you to use the Wiimote and nunchuck to re-enact the executions on screen to execute enemies, while the Wiimote even has noises coming out of it’s speaker when you perform these executions, adding another layer to the already disturbing nature of the game.
The PC version has a slightly gimped version that has you simply moving the mouse in a certain direction to complete the execution. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t feel as smooth as the Wii version, because you’re limited to the mouse. If you are annoyed by it, you can turn it off in the PC version. Because of this feature, both the PC and Wii versions come with a tutorial to show how these move based executions work.
Probably the most annoying part of Manhunt 2, for me at least, is that in the Wii and PC versions of the game, while you’re hiding in the shadows, someone hunting you can come over to the area that you’re hiding, and while they’re inspecting your hiding area, a circle pops up, and you have to hold your mouse/Wiimote in that circle as it moves around. It just feels like an unnecessary addition ontop of the motion controls. I get that it’s supposed to make the stealth part of the game more tense, but it just feels like an annoyance the further you get into the game.
Also, like the fist game, the PlayStation 2 version takes advantage of the PS2 headset, and in a similar fashion, you can hear Leo through the earpiece along with using your voice to attract nearby enemies.
Another feature that the PC and Wii versions also come with is an alternate ending that you can unlock if you do well enough during the game and get a high enough star rating in each level.
While Manhunt 2 isn’t a bad game, and in a lot of ways is much better than the first, it still feels like a step down from the first game purely because it cranks up the shocking content, going for violence and sexual content over the sense of atmosphere the original one. If you liked the first Manhunt, you would probably enjoy the second one, but for the people who don’t like extreme content in their video games, this game is a skip.
After the controversy of the first Manhunt, you would think that Rockstar wouldn’t put the money and effort into making a sequel. Maybe a few ports of the first game to other consoles to help recoup some of it’s costs on the down low, but not a fully fledged sequel. But surprisingly, 4 years later, Manhunt 2 was announced and released to the public.
The PC and PS2 versions were developed by Rockstar London, the PSP version was developed by Rockstar Leeds, and the Wii version was developed by Rockstar Toronto, with the WII, PSP, and PS2 versions being released in 2007, an the PC version being released in an uncensored form in 2009.
Instead of being a direct sequel of the first game’s plot, Manhunt 2 instead goes in a different direction. Focusing on two inmates at the Dixmor Asylum for the criminally insane, Daniel and Leo, as a severe thunderstorm causes the security system to go offline, opening all of the cell doors in the facility, letting the people locked inside out to roam around.
In the chaos, Daniel, who is a partial amnesiac, unable to remember how he got into the asylum, with the help of Leo, escape. After this escape. Daniel tries it figure out why he can’t remember his past and how he got into the asylum in the first place. While you’re following the clues, a group of people called the Watchmen are hunting you down, trying to prevent you from finding the truth.
Manhunt 2 tries to do something slightly different with it’s main character in that it tries to make you feel at least some sympathy for the main character. Daniel seems to be just as disgusted with his actions as a lot of the people playing would be. He does get desensitized to it as the game goes along, but when you’re brutally killing people in the dozens like Daniel is, I’m pretty sure most people would get desensitized to it.
While the first game had a great 80’s horror movie vibe going, with a John Carpenter-esque synth soundtrack, and slasher style, Manhunt 2 goes for more of a conspiracy thriller vibe with it’s plot. It isn’t bad by any means, it just doesn’t have the same vibe the first game did, and just doesn’t capture the same vibe as the first game.
The first noticeable difference between this game and the first is that Manhunt 2 definitely cranks it’s mature content up to 11, where the first Manhunt only got the ESRB rating “Mature”, this one got an “Adults Only” rating, meaning it would be refused sale on store shelves for major chains in the US. The difference is that Manhunt 2 adds some sexual content and use of drugs on top of it’s high impact violence and strong language. I earlier asked why Rockstar would want to release a sequel to probably it’s most controversial game, but if you were going to release a sequel to Manhunt, upping everything that made people disgusted to the first one seems like you’re just making it worse.
As a result, the PSP, PlayStation 2, and WII version of the games were censored, with all of the executions having a filter applied to them, to the point of not being able to see whats going on in some of these versions of the game, with the WII version getting the worst of it. But strangely, a lot of the sexual content seems to be intact in these versions. And the Wii version seems to have the best quality video with the cutscenes. Weird.
The core gameplay is the same as the first one. You’ll be hiding in shadows, running from enemies if any of them see you, and be performing executions. Executions have more variety this time around. The instruments of violence you can pick up have a wider variety than the first game, making executions a little less tedious having to sit through the same animations over and over again.
A new addition to the execution system is that you can also use parts of the environment to perform executions, similar to the earlier Punisher game from 2005, which also had to get censored on consoles. You’d think that people would learn. These include electrocuting someone to death with a fuse box, freezing someones head in liquid nitrogen and smashing it to pieces, and even trapping someone in an iron maiden with spikes on the inside. Quite a few of these are level specific, so it never gets old as there is always something new to see.
The gun combat has significantly improved. It’s still not amazing by any stretch, but it’s now a viable option, especially since gun combat has a heavier focus than the last game. If actually running and gunning in this game isn’t your cup of tea, guns can now also be used for executions too, making them actually worth your time. The Melee combat is also better, but is still only viable as a last resort.
Surprisingly, the WII and even the PC version has motion based movements for it’s executions, requiring you you to use the Wiimote and nunchuck to re-enact the executions on screen to execute enemies, while the Wiimote even has noises coming out of it’s speaker when you perform these executions, adding another layer to the already disturbing nature of the game.
The PC version has a slightly gimped version that has you simply moving the mouse in a certain direction to complete the execution. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t feel as smooth as the Wii version, because you’re limited to the mouse. If you are annoyed by it, you can turn it off in the PC version. Because of this feature, both the PC and Wii versions come with a tutorial to show how these move based executions work.
Probably the most annoying part of Manhunt 2, for me at least, is that in the Wii and PC versions of the game, while you’re hiding in the shadows, someone hunting you can come over to the area that you’re hiding, and while they’re inspecting your hiding area, a circle pops up, and you have to hold your mouse/Wiimote in that circle as it moves around. It just feels like an unnecessary addition ontop of the motion controls. I get that it’s supposed to make the stealth part of the game more tense, but it just feels like an annoyance the further you get into the game.
Also, like the fist game, the PlayStation 2 version takes advantage of the PS2 headset, and in a similar fashion, you can hear Leo through the earpiece along with using your voice to attract nearby enemies.
Another feature that the PC and Wii versions also come with is an alternate ending that you can unlock if you do well enough during the game and get a high enough star rating in each level.
While Manhunt 2 isn’t a bad game, and in a lot of ways is much better than the first, it still feels like a step down from the first game purely because it cranks up the shocking content, going for violence and sexual content over the sense of atmosphere the original one. If you liked the first Manhunt, you would probably enjoy the second one, but for the people who don’t like extreme content in their video games, this game is a skip.
2013
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/race-the-sun-pcmaclinuxps2ps4psvitaios-review/
Endless runners exploded when the iPhone’s App Store was introduced. They all have an easy to understand concept, easy to use controls, and low barrier of entry for both developer and user, so It’s easy to see why. Trying to get the onscreen character as far as possible through an environment as far as possible without hitting any of the obstacles makes for a pretty good and addictive time waster. But due to the low barrier of entry when developing for this genre, endless runners are a dime a dozen. But every now and again, a game breaks through and really grabs your attention.
In Race The Sun, you control a solar-powered spacecraft through a pseudo-procedurally-generated landscape, and your objective is to get as far as possible before the sun sets and your spacecraft runs out of power or you accidentally crash into one of the obstacles. The landscape is broken up into regions, each region increasing in difficulty and having a new and increasing difficult variety of geometry to avoid.
Visually, the game foes for a simplistic style that is effective in it’s simplicity, keeping everything in grey-scale, leaving the few colors that the game does use for power-ups and collectibles, making them stand out from the landscape. The game foes for flat-shaded polygons and keeps everything low-poly to match it’s art style. Mixed with some nice shadowing, the game does looks quite nice. Overall, the game graphics do come across as a prettier version of Cube Runner.
To keep the game play interesting, a newly generated level appears every 24 hours, so if you enjoy memorizing a level and love getting through a lever through memorization alone, you’d probably be a bit disappointed by this. The leader boards also reset every 24 hours, so if you like having the top spot on the leader boards, you have your work cut out for you. There is however a feature that allows users to create their own levels and upload them, so that might be a feature worth checking out for both people who like level memorization or creating their own levels.
The goal of the game is to get the highest score you can and to try and get on the leader board, or to just try and beat your personal best. To get a high score, you fly your spacecraft as far as possible as well as collecting Tri’s. The Tri’s add to a score multiplayer as well as add to the overall score. Collect 5 Tri’s and the score multiplayer increases by 1. Accidentally knock against any of the obstacles, your score multiplayer loses a few multipliers and you have to build it up again.
Another game play feature is keeping your solar-powered spacecraft out of the shadows of both obstacles and clouds. Flying through shadows for too long and your spacecraft slows down as it’s battery is drained. Being in the shadows for too long or or crashing into geometry head on and your spaceship explodes and it’s game over for you.
Being something a bit more advanced than the average endless runner, Race The Sun’s game play is a bit more complicated than usual. The game has power-ups which are unlocked by completing challenges while racing. They range from something as easy and simple as completing a region without colliding with obstacles or collecting a certain amount of Tri’s to something a lot more difficult like getting a 25x multiplayer in one run.
The more the difficult the challenge, the more points the challenge is worth. Each challenge is worth 1, 2 or 3 points depending on it’s difficulty. Get 6 points and you level up. After leveling up, you get an upgrade. You don’t really pick your upgrades so much as they’re given to you. You’ll start out with attachment for upgrades, so you’ll have to carefully pick and choose which upgrade to put on your ship and make a strategy around it.
There are two types of upgrades, unlockable items and ship upgrades. Items include Energy/Speed Boost, which gives you a temporary speed boost, Jump, which allows your spacecraft to jump, and Emergency Portals, which activate when you collide with an obstacle that would have normally kill you, and re-positions your spacecraft over where you crashed into and you glide back down to the planet. Both Jump and Emergency Portals don’t trigger when you fly over them. Instead you pick them up and use them whenever you see fit.
The ship upgrades include a Magnet, which allows your ship to collect Tri’s from further away, the Battery, which increases your battery capacity and allows you to fly through shadows for longer, and the Turning Jets, which increase your spacecrafts turning speed, allowing you to avoid obstacles a whole lot faster. Other ship upgrades include increased Jump and Emergence Portal storage, up to 3 slots, making the more difficult regions a bit easier.
The final unlockable is another mode called Apocalypse Mode, where the difficulty is cranked up to 11. Good reflexes even with the Turning Jets upgrade are need here, since there are non-stop obstacles popping up.
Another gameplay feature of Race The Sun are Portals that appear randomly throughout the regions that’ll warp you into different user created worlds as a sort of replacement for the current region. The game does come with a default region to show off how the Portals work. So your user created levels are bound to be seen someone.
Since the games release, it has been updated with a first person view, showing what its like from the ships view. If the game ever gets VR support, i can see people easily getting nauseous very easily, but it still would be pretty fun to try out once.
Race The Sun is a simple but effective game that i would definitely recommend. At USD$10, it is a tad expensive, but on sale i can definitely recommend it. There is piece of DLC called “Sunrise” that has a new mode that lets you fly through a level without having to worry about leader boards or the sun setting, creating a xen-like experience. The DLC goes for a purple color instead of the regular games grey scale. It’s nice, but at USD$2, i don’t know if i can recommend it. I wish it would have been an update to the base game instead of DLC. A definite pick up when on sale.
Endless runners exploded when the iPhone’s App Store was introduced. They all have an easy to understand concept, easy to use controls, and low barrier of entry for both developer and user, so It’s easy to see why. Trying to get the onscreen character as far as possible through an environment as far as possible without hitting any of the obstacles makes for a pretty good and addictive time waster. But due to the low barrier of entry when developing for this genre, endless runners are a dime a dozen. But every now and again, a game breaks through and really grabs your attention.
In Race The Sun, you control a solar-powered spacecraft through a pseudo-procedurally-generated landscape, and your objective is to get as far as possible before the sun sets and your spacecraft runs out of power or you accidentally crash into one of the obstacles. The landscape is broken up into regions, each region increasing in difficulty and having a new and increasing difficult variety of geometry to avoid.
Visually, the game foes for a simplistic style that is effective in it’s simplicity, keeping everything in grey-scale, leaving the few colors that the game does use for power-ups and collectibles, making them stand out from the landscape. The game foes for flat-shaded polygons and keeps everything low-poly to match it’s art style. Mixed with some nice shadowing, the game does looks quite nice. Overall, the game graphics do come across as a prettier version of Cube Runner.
To keep the game play interesting, a newly generated level appears every 24 hours, so if you enjoy memorizing a level and love getting through a lever through memorization alone, you’d probably be a bit disappointed by this. The leader boards also reset every 24 hours, so if you like having the top spot on the leader boards, you have your work cut out for you. There is however a feature that allows users to create their own levels and upload them, so that might be a feature worth checking out for both people who like level memorization or creating their own levels.
The goal of the game is to get the highest score you can and to try and get on the leader board, or to just try and beat your personal best. To get a high score, you fly your spacecraft as far as possible as well as collecting Tri’s. The Tri’s add to a score multiplayer as well as add to the overall score. Collect 5 Tri’s and the score multiplayer increases by 1. Accidentally knock against any of the obstacles, your score multiplayer loses a few multipliers and you have to build it up again.
Another game play feature is keeping your solar-powered spacecraft out of the shadows of both obstacles and clouds. Flying through shadows for too long and your spacecraft slows down as it’s battery is drained. Being in the shadows for too long or or crashing into geometry head on and your spaceship explodes and it’s game over for you.
Being something a bit more advanced than the average endless runner, Race The Sun’s game play is a bit more complicated than usual. The game has power-ups which are unlocked by completing challenges while racing. They range from something as easy and simple as completing a region without colliding with obstacles or collecting a certain amount of Tri’s to something a lot more difficult like getting a 25x multiplayer in one run.
The more the difficult the challenge, the more points the challenge is worth. Each challenge is worth 1, 2 or 3 points depending on it’s difficulty. Get 6 points and you level up. After leveling up, you get an upgrade. You don’t really pick your upgrades so much as they’re given to you. You’ll start out with attachment for upgrades, so you’ll have to carefully pick and choose which upgrade to put on your ship and make a strategy around it.
There are two types of upgrades, unlockable items and ship upgrades. Items include Energy/Speed Boost, which gives you a temporary speed boost, Jump, which allows your spacecraft to jump, and Emergency Portals, which activate when you collide with an obstacle that would have normally kill you, and re-positions your spacecraft over where you crashed into and you glide back down to the planet. Both Jump and Emergency Portals don’t trigger when you fly over them. Instead you pick them up and use them whenever you see fit.
The ship upgrades include a Magnet, which allows your ship to collect Tri’s from further away, the Battery, which increases your battery capacity and allows you to fly through shadows for longer, and the Turning Jets, which increase your spacecrafts turning speed, allowing you to avoid obstacles a whole lot faster. Other ship upgrades include increased Jump and Emergence Portal storage, up to 3 slots, making the more difficult regions a bit easier.
The final unlockable is another mode called Apocalypse Mode, where the difficulty is cranked up to 11. Good reflexes even with the Turning Jets upgrade are need here, since there are non-stop obstacles popping up.
Another gameplay feature of Race The Sun are Portals that appear randomly throughout the regions that’ll warp you into different user created worlds as a sort of replacement for the current region. The game does come with a default region to show off how the Portals work. So your user created levels are bound to be seen someone.
Since the games release, it has been updated with a first person view, showing what its like from the ships view. If the game ever gets VR support, i can see people easily getting nauseous very easily, but it still would be pretty fun to try out once.
Race The Sun is a simple but effective game that i would definitely recommend. At USD$10, it is a tad expensive, but on sale i can definitely recommend it. There is piece of DLC called “Sunrise” that has a new mode that lets you fly through a level without having to worry about leader boards or the sun setting, creating a xen-like experience. The DLC goes for a purple color instead of the regular games grey scale. It’s nice, but at USD$2, i don’t know if i can recommend it. I wish it would have been an update to the base game instead of DLC. A definite pick up when on sale.
2018
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2020/10/17/oakwood-2018-review/
You are going up to Oakwood, an abandoned campground, to meet up with your friends and spend the weekend having fun. Arriving late, you find your friends campsite abandoned, clothes and items strewn across the ground. As you head a scream in the distance, you run to find out what happened to them, and you soon find yourself trying to escape from the deadliest creatures from history.
I don’t quite know why you would go to an abandoned campground of all places to camp when there are probably a lot of other nicer places to camp with a lot of similar activities, but I guess that wouldn’t be as interesting as going to an abandoned place where no body would find you.
While the game has you spend most if walking through the dark with a flashlight, thankfully it doesn’t include needing to collect batteries for your flashlight like a lot of these games have. At some point, you move over to Night Vision Goggles, but that’s almost immediately after your flashlight breaks.
Even though the game doesn’t quite have the budget to make the visuals live up to it’s ambition, the game tries it’s hardest to add a few bits here and there to make it seem as creepy as possible. Outside of the few jump scares that a lot of horror games have, you can hear the occasional scream in the distance or see a pool of blood that leads off into the distance as one of your friends was dragged of, there is enough to keep this game afloat in terms of scares. There’s even a few sections where you have to run through long grass as dinosaurs run passed you out of the corner of your eye. Sure, it’s all predictable, but it’s more effort than some other bigger games have put in.
It does have notes that you can pick up throughout the game, but they all make sense as to why they’re there, with most of the notes done by your friends located at where their camp site is, and the ones featuring the history of the park located in draws in the campground building. It adds a bit of flavor to an otherwise forgettable short horror game.
Throughout the game, there are collectable totems, and if you collect all of them through one of your playthroughs, there is a slightly out of the way door you can find and open. I won’t ruin the surprise, but it’s a nice little addition that adds some replayability and variety to the game, despite the fact that the game is incredibly short, only being about ~45 minutes long.
There was even a Halloween event where the developers placed 10 pumpkins around the game for you to find for a surprise, so it’s obvious that the developers actually cared about the game that they were making, even if was a low budget game that got lost under the torrential pour of unknown games on Steam.
My only real complaint is that the game runs a bit sluggish for what it is. There are a lot of other games out there done by small studios (and I mean small) that look better and run smoother than this game. I don’t expect a graphical powerhouse out of such a small project, but It would nice if it the game was at least hitting 60 FPS.
Is Oakwood going to win any “Game of the Year” awards? No. But then again, it’s definitely a step up over the glut of cheap asset flips. At least Oakwood has some personality. If anything, this game will end up being cheap during a Steam sale, and probably be worth picking up for whatever price it’s on sale for.
You are going up to Oakwood, an abandoned campground, to meet up with your friends and spend the weekend having fun. Arriving late, you find your friends campsite abandoned, clothes and items strewn across the ground. As you head a scream in the distance, you run to find out what happened to them, and you soon find yourself trying to escape from the deadliest creatures from history.
I don’t quite know why you would go to an abandoned campground of all places to camp when there are probably a lot of other nicer places to camp with a lot of similar activities, but I guess that wouldn’t be as interesting as going to an abandoned place where no body would find you.
While the game has you spend most if walking through the dark with a flashlight, thankfully it doesn’t include needing to collect batteries for your flashlight like a lot of these games have. At some point, you move over to Night Vision Goggles, but that’s almost immediately after your flashlight breaks.
Even though the game doesn’t quite have the budget to make the visuals live up to it’s ambition, the game tries it’s hardest to add a few bits here and there to make it seem as creepy as possible. Outside of the few jump scares that a lot of horror games have, you can hear the occasional scream in the distance or see a pool of blood that leads off into the distance as one of your friends was dragged of, there is enough to keep this game afloat in terms of scares. There’s even a few sections where you have to run through long grass as dinosaurs run passed you out of the corner of your eye. Sure, it’s all predictable, but it’s more effort than some other bigger games have put in.
It does have notes that you can pick up throughout the game, but they all make sense as to why they’re there, with most of the notes done by your friends located at where their camp site is, and the ones featuring the history of the park located in draws in the campground building. It adds a bit of flavor to an otherwise forgettable short horror game.
Throughout the game, there are collectable totems, and if you collect all of them through one of your playthroughs, there is a slightly out of the way door you can find and open. I won’t ruin the surprise, but it’s a nice little addition that adds some replayability and variety to the game, despite the fact that the game is incredibly short, only being about ~45 minutes long.
There was even a Halloween event where the developers placed 10 pumpkins around the game for you to find for a surprise, so it’s obvious that the developers actually cared about the game that they were making, even if was a low budget game that got lost under the torrential pour of unknown games on Steam.
My only real complaint is that the game runs a bit sluggish for what it is. There are a lot of other games out there done by small studios (and I mean small) that look better and run smoother than this game. I don’t expect a graphical powerhouse out of such a small project, but It would nice if it the game was at least hitting 60 FPS.
Is Oakwood going to win any “Game of the Year” awards? No. But then again, it’s definitely a step up over the glut of cheap asset flips. At least Oakwood has some personality. If anything, this game will end up being cheap during a Steam sale, and probably be worth picking up for whatever price it’s on sale for.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/mod-corner-7th-serpent-crossfire-genesis-max-payne-2-the-fall-of-max-payne-review/
The Max Payne games might have a smaller modding community than most games, but they are definitely a dedicated bunch, still releasing some pretty good stuff every now and again. One of the best mods for Max Payne 2 is 7th Serpent: Crossfire.
The story for both mods are actually fairly lengthy, since there is a bit of backstory going on. I’ll try to summarize whats necessary to understand for both mods, but if you want to go check it out, it does come in the manual for both mods.
In Crossfire, you play Damon, the first prototype of the Serpent Industries serpent agent program, and your first assignment was the assassination of the CEO of a company called Hryfter Armament Technologies. The mod begins right after the assassination, right when you are making your escape. The rest of the mod is you escaping through the city, trying to get to the extraction point, as a city-wide emergency alert has been issued and the local authorities have promptly deployed.
Crossfire is a good looking mod considering that the team behind it was pretty small, definitely pushing what the mod tools were possible of. Most of the game is going through the streets of a futuristic sci-fi city, but the mod does have a larger scale to it, making the fact that it’s fairly detailed more impressive.
Gameplay wise, it’s pretty much the base game from Max Payne 2, nothing has really changed. But when the gameplay is as solid as Max Payne 2’s was, there isn’t really a need to change it.
The mod is on the shorter side, being about 45 minutes long, but that isn’t really a complaint since it’s free and has a lot of effort put into it. My only real complaint is that it’s a tad too hard, which might cause some people to struggle with it, but it’s not unreasonable, and it’s nothing that a bit of quicksaving couldn’t help.
At some point after Crossfire’s development, the team meant to release a second episode for Seventh Serpent, but life got in the way and people got busy, and what the team was working on couldn’t be finished. So the series was giving to another team, and just over 2 years later, that team released the second mod, Genesis. But that's for another review.
7th Serpent: Crossfire is a great time and is well worth checking out if you're into playing mods.
The Max Payne games might have a smaller modding community than most games, but they are definitely a dedicated bunch, still releasing some pretty good stuff every now and again. One of the best mods for Max Payne 2 is 7th Serpent: Crossfire.
The story for both mods are actually fairly lengthy, since there is a bit of backstory going on. I’ll try to summarize whats necessary to understand for both mods, but if you want to go check it out, it does come in the manual for both mods.
In Crossfire, you play Damon, the first prototype of the Serpent Industries serpent agent program, and your first assignment was the assassination of the CEO of a company called Hryfter Armament Technologies. The mod begins right after the assassination, right when you are making your escape. The rest of the mod is you escaping through the city, trying to get to the extraction point, as a city-wide emergency alert has been issued and the local authorities have promptly deployed.
Crossfire is a good looking mod considering that the team behind it was pretty small, definitely pushing what the mod tools were possible of. Most of the game is going through the streets of a futuristic sci-fi city, but the mod does have a larger scale to it, making the fact that it’s fairly detailed more impressive.
Gameplay wise, it’s pretty much the base game from Max Payne 2, nothing has really changed. But when the gameplay is as solid as Max Payne 2’s was, there isn’t really a need to change it.
The mod is on the shorter side, being about 45 minutes long, but that isn’t really a complaint since it’s free and has a lot of effort put into it. My only real complaint is that it’s a tad too hard, which might cause some people to struggle with it, but it’s not unreasonable, and it’s nothing that a bit of quicksaving couldn’t help.
At some point after Crossfire’s development, the team meant to release a second episode for Seventh Serpent, but life got in the way and people got busy, and what the team was working on couldn’t be finished. So the series was giving to another team, and just over 2 years later, that team released the second mod, Genesis. But that's for another review.
7th Serpent: Crossfire is a great time and is well worth checking out if you're into playing mods.
2008
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/mod-corner-polar-payne-polar-paradise-max-payne-review/
The manual for the first mod (a pdf that comes in the zip file) joking refers to a sequel in the form of a parody of Max Payne 2’s title, which was coming out around the same time as the first mod. But lo and behold, 5 years later in 2008, a sequel did materialize, called Polar Paradise. Well, it’s not really a sequel so much as it’s a fleshed out reboot that goes for the more over-the-top comical style.
Polar Paradise is yet again set at the North Pole, with you playing Dinky once more, who has returned home on Christmas Eve to find that his family was kidnapped by Santa Claus and forced to work in his evil Toy Factory. With nothing to lose, Dinky sets out for vengeance.
There is a plethora of new enemies, penguins with bombs on their back that explode on contact, angry Elves with guns, and penguins flying small aircraft shooting you with snowballs. It also features new weapons, ranging from Kung Fu, to throwing snowballs, a flame thrower, a bomb launcher, a sniper rifle and an assault rifle that shoots candy. The guns act close to the actual weapons in Max Payne so much that they have he same icons. You could easily figure out which is which.
This time, instead of having one small level, Polar Paradise has a few larger levels, making it closer to 10-15 minutes long. The mod starts you out in an Elf village before moving on to Santa’s workshop, which used some of the Santa’s Workshop cliches you’d expect you see from a parody of the holidays.
There’s even a bonus level where you snowboard to escape Santa’s Workshop. It’s obviously a bit clunky since Max Payne wasn’t designed for it, but it’s playable (kinda), and the fact that it exists amuses me to no end.
If you’re into the Christmas cheer, and you want something short to play in between hanging out with family for the holidays. Polar Paradise is worth checking out, taking at most 20 minutes to play
The manual for the first mod (a pdf that comes in the zip file) joking refers to a sequel in the form of a parody of Max Payne 2’s title, which was coming out around the same time as the first mod. But lo and behold, 5 years later in 2008, a sequel did materialize, called Polar Paradise. Well, it’s not really a sequel so much as it’s a fleshed out reboot that goes for the more over-the-top comical style.
Polar Paradise is yet again set at the North Pole, with you playing Dinky once more, who has returned home on Christmas Eve to find that his family was kidnapped by Santa Claus and forced to work in his evil Toy Factory. With nothing to lose, Dinky sets out for vengeance.
There is a plethora of new enemies, penguins with bombs on their back that explode on contact, angry Elves with guns, and penguins flying small aircraft shooting you with snowballs. It also features new weapons, ranging from Kung Fu, to throwing snowballs, a flame thrower, a bomb launcher, a sniper rifle and an assault rifle that shoots candy. The guns act close to the actual weapons in Max Payne so much that they have he same icons. You could easily figure out which is which.
This time, instead of having one small level, Polar Paradise has a few larger levels, making it closer to 10-15 minutes long. The mod starts you out in an Elf village before moving on to Santa’s workshop, which used some of the Santa’s Workshop cliches you’d expect you see from a parody of the holidays.
There’s even a bonus level where you snowboard to escape Santa’s Workshop. It’s obviously a bit clunky since Max Payne wasn’t designed for it, but it’s playable (kinda), and the fact that it exists amuses me to no end.
If you’re into the Christmas cheer, and you want something short to play in between hanging out with family for the holidays. Polar Paradise is worth checking out, taking at most 20 minutes to play
2007
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/mod-corner-polar-payne-polar-paradise-max-payne-review/
Set in the chilling backdrop of the North Pole, you play the role of Dinky, a polar bear who returns to find his family mercilessly slaughtered by Eskimos, high on a new designer drug called Valkyr. Enraged and hungry for revenge, Dinky embarks on a crusade for justice against his families murderers.
Released in 2003, Polar Payne is obviously a parody of Max Payne’s film noir story, but instead of a man avenging his family, it’s a polar bear instead. The original campaign for the mod is incredibly short, only being one small map that would take 5 minutes at most to complete, making it able to be finished in a lunch break.
Graphically, Polar Payne is only OK looking, but it’s almost entirely made up of new assets, sans animations. Probably the most fun part of it are the new ways to take out enemies since it incorporates the Kung Fu mod for it’s melee combat, with combat ranging from letting you kick off the heads of enemies or hugging them to death, to a new weapons such as the flame thrower and a “Trout of Death”, which is just a grenade re-skinned as a fish. You don’t get to use half of them before the mod is over because of how short it is.
On the other hand, you are able to play through the entire story of Max Payne as Dinky, using the new weapons. It is pretty amusing watching a Polar Bear going through the same levels and story as Max Payne.
The mod even comes with it's own manual as a PDF that details how to play the mod along with including the plot. This is something that even a lot of bigger budgeted games these days don't do.
If you’re into the Christmas cheer, and you want something short to play in between hanging out with family for the holidays. Polar Payne is worth checking out, taking at most 5 minutes to play
Set in the chilling backdrop of the North Pole, you play the role of Dinky, a polar bear who returns to find his family mercilessly slaughtered by Eskimos, high on a new designer drug called Valkyr. Enraged and hungry for revenge, Dinky embarks on a crusade for justice against his families murderers.
Released in 2003, Polar Payne is obviously a parody of Max Payne’s film noir story, but instead of a man avenging his family, it’s a polar bear instead. The original campaign for the mod is incredibly short, only being one small map that would take 5 minutes at most to complete, making it able to be finished in a lunch break.
Graphically, Polar Payne is only OK looking, but it’s almost entirely made up of new assets, sans animations. Probably the most fun part of it are the new ways to take out enemies since it incorporates the Kung Fu mod for it’s melee combat, with combat ranging from letting you kick off the heads of enemies or hugging them to death, to a new weapons such as the flame thrower and a “Trout of Death”, which is just a grenade re-skinned as a fish. You don’t get to use half of them before the mod is over because of how short it is.
On the other hand, you are able to play through the entire story of Max Payne as Dinky, using the new weapons. It is pretty amusing watching a Polar Bear going through the same levels and story as Max Payne.
The mod even comes with it's own manual as a PDF that details how to play the mod along with including the plot. This is something that even a lot of bigger budgeted games these days don't do.
If you’re into the Christmas cheer, and you want something short to play in between hanging out with family for the holidays. Polar Payne is worth checking out, taking at most 5 minutes to play
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2017/06/28/touring-car-champions-ms-dos-review/
Touring Car Champions might be one of the most annoying racing games that I’ve ever played. Maybe not the worst, but definitely one of the most annoying. Right now I’d be willing to bet that a few of you might thinking to yourself “Hey, I remember that game, and it wasn’t that annoying. What the heck are you talking about?” The game you’re remembering is TOCA: Touring Car Championship, a game that came out the same year as Touring Car Champions, and was an actual, fully fledged racing game. And good too.
And considering that 1997, the year this game came out, was also the year of other better racing games such as Need for Speed II, Gran Turismo, Moto Racer, and NASCAR ’98, it’s no wonder this game was forgotten to time. And to top it all off, this racing game decided to jump on the FMV bandwagon. Yep, it’s an FMV rgame.
Touring Car Champions was released in 1997 for MS-DOS. It was developed by Torus Games, an Australian company only known for various ports of other games to the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance as well as a few licensed games, and are surprisingly have been around since 1994 and are still going. To this day, they’re still releasing cheap licensed games and ports, and it’s quite amazing that they’ve lasted this long. They even have this game listed on their website. It was also published by Virtual Sports Interactive, who as far as i can tell, only published this game, which is a bad sign.
This game has the distinction of being the first game based on the Australian Car Touring Championship and Bathurst 1000, so it does have something going for it. But the only people who want to know an obscure face like that are motorsports fans and fans of obscure video games.
The game only has only one track, and that is the Mount Panorama Circuit, which is used in the Bathurst 1000. But instead of recreating the entire track in either 3D or 2D, the developers decided to use a looping recording of the track. I imagine it would have been neat to see a recording of the track from the perspective of the driver, but they could have saved money, time, and effort and easily released it on VHS at the time in a higher quality and without having to play an awful game to see it. And not only that, there is a bunch of stuff cluttering your view of it, so even enjoying it for the fact that you get to see some video from the sport you you enjoy, it’s pretty much worthless.
At least if the single track that they had was recreated, you could have messed around in it by driving in the wrong direction or at least seeing parts of the track from the tarmac itself. The game doesn’t even have that going for it.
Something actually interesting about the game is that it was fully endorsed by the Holden Racing Team, Holden Special Vehicles, Mount Panorama Consortium, and Mt Panorama Motor Racing Hall of Fame. The game even claims that has both Ford and Holden in there so, so i guess it has the infamous Holden and Ford competitive vibe going for it? This is probably not the best way to duke it out between the two companies.
If the track is FMV of the actual track, then you’re probably asking how the driving handles. The developers thought it was a good idea to put the vehicle you’re driving on top of the video. So what you’re left with is a visual mess that has no consistency. It’s so bad that the game has to tell you which car is yours before the race starts with giant bold letters “THIS IS YOU.”
To make matters worse, half of the screen is taken up by the dashboard of the car. So you left with two-thirds of track left to try and race on. It makes it confusing, because one part of your brain is trying to focus on your car, but another part is so used to seeing the dashboard when you’re trying to emulate actually driving the game. You won’t ever get used to it.
Either have the video full screen with minimal HUD elements, or have the whole game from the drivers perspective, with the video being full screen being the preferable since having the dashboard there doesn’t make you feel like you’re actually driving a car. But considering that the whole game is looping video with zero visual difference, the former would have be the only viable option.
Even the sound is annoying. The cars engine’s are overpowering and are incredibly loud. So much so that I permanently turned the sound off. There isn’t any music either, so it’s either the sound of the car’s engines boring themselves into your hear or silence. If you haven’t turned the game off at this point, I’d say turn the sound off and play some AC/DC in the background.
Once you get passed the eyesore that are the graphics, there is a very basic game here. There is the practice mode, where you can spend your time trying to get used to the game to see if you’ll end up playing the rest of it. There is Quickrace, where you can pick from a few basic options, such as the amount of laps you want, the amount of opponents, and the difficulty setting before jumping into a single race. And there is a “Round”, which is the tournament mode of the game, which spans several seasons of the Bathurst 1000.
“Round” is where most of the game is. You can select from a few real life drivers, such as Craig Lowndes, Peter Brock, Tomas Mezera, and Greg Murphy, as well as a generic girl or guy (the games description, not mine), as well as being able to select a team, manager, and pit crew, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t affect the game at all, so you could pick them at random and still get the same results. That also goes with the car upgrades, which include everything from the brakes, to the engine, to the exhaust.
There are only two real things that matter when it comes to the gameplay. The first is going off the track onto the dirt. Considering there isn’t any real feedback other than you slowing down, it’s hard to figure out what part of the screen is dirt and which part is the track. Something that would have been solved if the game had actual graphics instead of incredibly limited video.
The second is trying to get passed the other cars. At the beginning of a race, all of the cars are close to each other, and the perspective is atrocious, which makes trying to pass them difficult. And not in a way that realistically fits racing, but in a way that is only present in broken video games. When you hit another car, you comically spin around, confirming that the game wasn’t intended to be realistic or even good, but simply to show off the product, which are the cars and the Bathurst 1000.
The game is very basic, and because of it’s limited tracks, awful visuals, and annoyingly loud engine noises, it can’t even achieve being a simple fun racing game. The only people who would have played this are fans of the Bathurst race. And even then, there are better racing games out there featuring the track, such as the Forza and V8 Supercars/TOCA franchises. Even if you just like racing games in general, this came out the same year as the original Gran Turismo and TOCA Touring Car Championship, and even more arcade style games such as Need For Speed II and Moto Racer.
Torus Games still has this game on their website with pictures and text written like they’re still proud of it. The only good thing I can say is that getting this game up and running is fairly easy in this modern age of gaming with the advent of Dosbox. While it’s not the worst racing game that I’ve played, there’s a reason that this game has been almost completely forgotten by time, and you should definitely avoid this game, especially since there have been better games since.
Touring Car Champions might be one of the most annoying racing games that I’ve ever played. Maybe not the worst, but definitely one of the most annoying. Right now I’d be willing to bet that a few of you might thinking to yourself “Hey, I remember that game, and it wasn’t that annoying. What the heck are you talking about?” The game you’re remembering is TOCA: Touring Car Championship, a game that came out the same year as Touring Car Champions, and was an actual, fully fledged racing game. And good too.
And considering that 1997, the year this game came out, was also the year of other better racing games such as Need for Speed II, Gran Turismo, Moto Racer, and NASCAR ’98, it’s no wonder this game was forgotten to time. And to top it all off, this racing game decided to jump on the FMV bandwagon. Yep, it’s an FMV rgame.
Touring Car Champions was released in 1997 for MS-DOS. It was developed by Torus Games, an Australian company only known for various ports of other games to the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance as well as a few licensed games, and are surprisingly have been around since 1994 and are still going. To this day, they’re still releasing cheap licensed games and ports, and it’s quite amazing that they’ve lasted this long. They even have this game listed on their website. It was also published by Virtual Sports Interactive, who as far as i can tell, only published this game, which is a bad sign.
This game has the distinction of being the first game based on the Australian Car Touring Championship and Bathurst 1000, so it does have something going for it. But the only people who want to know an obscure face like that are motorsports fans and fans of obscure video games.
The game only has only one track, and that is the Mount Panorama Circuit, which is used in the Bathurst 1000. But instead of recreating the entire track in either 3D or 2D, the developers decided to use a looping recording of the track. I imagine it would have been neat to see a recording of the track from the perspective of the driver, but they could have saved money, time, and effort and easily released it on VHS at the time in a higher quality and without having to play an awful game to see it. And not only that, there is a bunch of stuff cluttering your view of it, so even enjoying it for the fact that you get to see some video from the sport you you enjoy, it’s pretty much worthless.
At least if the single track that they had was recreated, you could have messed around in it by driving in the wrong direction or at least seeing parts of the track from the tarmac itself. The game doesn’t even have that going for it.
Something actually interesting about the game is that it was fully endorsed by the Holden Racing Team, Holden Special Vehicles, Mount Panorama Consortium, and Mt Panorama Motor Racing Hall of Fame. The game even claims that has both Ford and Holden in there so, so i guess it has the infamous Holden and Ford competitive vibe going for it? This is probably not the best way to duke it out between the two companies.
If the track is FMV of the actual track, then you’re probably asking how the driving handles. The developers thought it was a good idea to put the vehicle you’re driving on top of the video. So what you’re left with is a visual mess that has no consistency. It’s so bad that the game has to tell you which car is yours before the race starts with giant bold letters “THIS IS YOU.”
To make matters worse, half of the screen is taken up by the dashboard of the car. So you left with two-thirds of track left to try and race on. It makes it confusing, because one part of your brain is trying to focus on your car, but another part is so used to seeing the dashboard when you’re trying to emulate actually driving the game. You won’t ever get used to it.
Either have the video full screen with minimal HUD elements, or have the whole game from the drivers perspective, with the video being full screen being the preferable since having the dashboard there doesn’t make you feel like you’re actually driving a car. But considering that the whole game is looping video with zero visual difference, the former would have be the only viable option.
Even the sound is annoying. The cars engine’s are overpowering and are incredibly loud. So much so that I permanently turned the sound off. There isn’t any music either, so it’s either the sound of the car’s engines boring themselves into your hear or silence. If you haven’t turned the game off at this point, I’d say turn the sound off and play some AC/DC in the background.
Once you get passed the eyesore that are the graphics, there is a very basic game here. There is the practice mode, where you can spend your time trying to get used to the game to see if you’ll end up playing the rest of it. There is Quickrace, where you can pick from a few basic options, such as the amount of laps you want, the amount of opponents, and the difficulty setting before jumping into a single race. And there is a “Round”, which is the tournament mode of the game, which spans several seasons of the Bathurst 1000.
“Round” is where most of the game is. You can select from a few real life drivers, such as Craig Lowndes, Peter Brock, Tomas Mezera, and Greg Murphy, as well as a generic girl or guy (the games description, not mine), as well as being able to select a team, manager, and pit crew, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t affect the game at all, so you could pick them at random and still get the same results. That also goes with the car upgrades, which include everything from the brakes, to the engine, to the exhaust.
There are only two real things that matter when it comes to the gameplay. The first is going off the track onto the dirt. Considering there isn’t any real feedback other than you slowing down, it’s hard to figure out what part of the screen is dirt and which part is the track. Something that would have been solved if the game had actual graphics instead of incredibly limited video.
The second is trying to get passed the other cars. At the beginning of a race, all of the cars are close to each other, and the perspective is atrocious, which makes trying to pass them difficult. And not in a way that realistically fits racing, but in a way that is only present in broken video games. When you hit another car, you comically spin around, confirming that the game wasn’t intended to be realistic or even good, but simply to show off the product, which are the cars and the Bathurst 1000.
The game is very basic, and because of it’s limited tracks, awful visuals, and annoyingly loud engine noises, it can’t even achieve being a simple fun racing game. The only people who would have played this are fans of the Bathurst race. And even then, there are better racing games out there featuring the track, such as the Forza and V8 Supercars/TOCA franchises. Even if you just like racing games in general, this came out the same year as the original Gran Turismo and TOCA Touring Car Championship, and even more arcade style games such as Need For Speed II and Moto Racer.
Torus Games still has this game on their website with pictures and text written like they’re still proud of it. The only good thing I can say is that getting this game up and running is fairly easy in this modern age of gaming with the advent of Dosbox. While it’s not the worst racing game that I’ve played, there’s a reason that this game has been almost completely forgotten by time, and you should definitely avoid this game, especially since there have been better games since.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/12/14/christmas-shopper-simulator-2-black-friday/
Christmas Shopper Simulator seemed to be a success though, as it got a sequel on November 20 of the following year, called Christmas Shopper Simulator 2: Black Christmas. I would say that because they had several months to improve their idea since they’ve got the foundation set with the first game, but it seemed to end up as a mixed bag more than anything.
Instead of just getting a mission from a payphone and then completing said mission by buying a present for someone, you now have to earn money by doing random tasks to buy your Christmas gifts. These can range from abusing the games physics to launch yourself as far as you possibly can, find a taser and use it on people, and take random selfies. And if you want easy money, find a fire extinguisher and knock a lot of people over in a row to get hundreds of dollars.
There are even a few new characters to choose from besides the Female and Male shoppers, including two unlockables. A guy in an Ice Cream Sandwich costume is the third option, and the two unlockables are a Fly and an Ant. Both are unlockable just by typing Ant and Fly into the code menu.
While Christmas Shopper Simulator 2 is an improvement in a lot of ways over the first game, it just seems like it’s way more buggy. Right off the get go, for me personally, the framerate was pretty bad. It’s not entirely unplayable, but it was definitely impacting my enjoyment game. Between the framerate and the clunky movement, I’ve been struggling to even get around certain parts of the mall. I’ve even had a crash or two on Windows 7, and the game won’t even work on Windows 10. I feel like it’s because the physics objects piling up and nobody bothered to optimize for it because it needed to be out for Black Friday. I doubt any of these bugs will be fixed since the company behind this game got shut down.
The fake stores in the game such as “Snake’s Solid Boxes”, “Gnocchi on Heaven’s Door”, and “TV & Curry”, as well poking fun at the way video game companies shove out expensive DLC with effort and try to make every game a franchise by trying to sell you figures and real world collectables with the Shopper Simulator website are mildly amusing, but the jokes get really old really fast.
Black Friday, along with the first game, should only take 30 minutes at most combined, offer very little in the way of content, and were only made as Youtuber fodder to help promote the storefront that it was made to promote. The only upsides to this are that it's short and free.
Christmas Shopper Simulator seemed to be a success though, as it got a sequel on November 20 of the following year, called Christmas Shopper Simulator 2: Black Christmas. I would say that because they had several months to improve their idea since they’ve got the foundation set with the first game, but it seemed to end up as a mixed bag more than anything.
Instead of just getting a mission from a payphone and then completing said mission by buying a present for someone, you now have to earn money by doing random tasks to buy your Christmas gifts. These can range from abusing the games physics to launch yourself as far as you possibly can, find a taser and use it on people, and take random selfies. And if you want easy money, find a fire extinguisher and knock a lot of people over in a row to get hundreds of dollars.
There are even a few new characters to choose from besides the Female and Male shoppers, including two unlockables. A guy in an Ice Cream Sandwich costume is the third option, and the two unlockables are a Fly and an Ant. Both are unlockable just by typing Ant and Fly into the code menu.
While Christmas Shopper Simulator 2 is an improvement in a lot of ways over the first game, it just seems like it’s way more buggy. Right off the get go, for me personally, the framerate was pretty bad. It’s not entirely unplayable, but it was definitely impacting my enjoyment game. Between the framerate and the clunky movement, I’ve been struggling to even get around certain parts of the mall. I’ve even had a crash or two on Windows 7, and the game won’t even work on Windows 10. I feel like it’s because the physics objects piling up and nobody bothered to optimize for it because it needed to be out for Black Friday. I doubt any of these bugs will be fixed since the company behind this game got shut down.
The fake stores in the game such as “Snake’s Solid Boxes”, “Gnocchi on Heaven’s Door”, and “TV & Curry”, as well poking fun at the way video game companies shove out expensive DLC with effort and try to make every game a franchise by trying to sell you figures and real world collectables with the Shopper Simulator website are mildly amusing, but the jokes get really old really fast.
Black Friday, along with the first game, should only take 30 minutes at most combined, offer very little in the way of content, and were only made as Youtuber fodder to help promote the storefront that it was made to promote. The only upsides to this are that it's short and free.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/10/03/magrunner-dark-pulse-pc-ps3-360-review/
The Lovecraft mythos aren’t a highly represented concept in video games. Sure, there have been plenty of video games heavily influenced by the works of Lovecraft, but not a lot taken from Lovecraft’s work itself. While it’s not a direct adaptation of any of Lovecraft’s work, it’s still nice seeing the iconic creatures in video game form.
Magrunner: Dark Pulse is a first person puzzle game developed by Frogwares and published by Focus Home Interactive, and was released for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 in 2013.
The game takes place a couple of decades into the future, when the Gruckezber Corporation has risen to a position of world dominance. By 2035, their LifeNET Total Existence Network has connected billions of people across the world, and is big enough to have influence over both public and private services, as well as social, environmental, and governmental areas. By 2050, the company had built a training facility for deep space exploration, with a selection process for their astronouts using the LifeNET service.
You play as Dax C. Ward, one of the finalists to get to go through the training facilities along with several others, along with the help of his lifelong family friend Gamaji. But soon, a major malfunction takes the facility offline, locking the whole place down, all while the facility starts to change in appearance to something more creepy and inhuman.
Right off the bat, it’s pretty obvious that the game took it’s presentation and gameplay influence from the Portal franchise, but instead of robots and portals, it has Cthulhu and magnets. Once you get past the obvious initial comparison, Magrunner does do enough to differentiate itself from the Portal games, going for horror instead of comedy. The game isn’t all that scary, since it does still go with the cheesy science experiments gone wrong, but you’re definitely not going to get the two games confused.
In between puzzle solving chambers, there are elevators that take you from one puzzle room to the next. The whole point of these elevator rides is get exposition out through interviews and conversations between the main character and other characters. These kinda kill any momentum the game might have if it went from one puzzle straight to another, and the conversations could have easily been trimmed slightly and been had during puzzle sections.
Plus the game has quite a few loading screens, which is only compounded by the fact that you need to load both the elevator ride when you get on and off it, making the game a touch tedious to play, making the idea of replaying the game a tad unappealing. If the game used this time with the elevators to load each level as it gave you exposition, it wouldn’t be as bad, but you’re stuck looking at loading screens. Levels are often so short that often times it feels like there are more loading screens than there are.
Magrunner uses the whole magnet concept fairly well. Your character has a glove that lets you control an objects magnetism. Left click can make object attract and right click makes them repel. Levels come with several things that use magnets, such as small platforms that are used to get to different parts of each level, and both small and large cubes that are used several ways, such as to help power some of the platforms throughout a level, put on buttons, and are used to smash through breakable glass. Although the cube doesn’t come with as much of a personality as the Companion Cube from Portal.
Later in the game, you do get an add-on for your glove in the form of Newton, a robotic dog made by the protagonist, and he’s used to help with attracting objects that are just out reach from other means. Puzzles do get to the point where you can get stuck for ~30-45 minutes in a room, but none of them feel completely unfair. There are a few puzzles that don’t quite communicate what you need to do immediately, but it’s never gets to be a problem.
However, the game does come with the option in the menu to see how far an objects magnetic reach can go, making the puzzles a bit more manageable, not leaving you to guess how far away something is from a magnets reach.
Probably the most frustrating part of the game is that in later levels, there are creatures that you have to either kill or avoid, which is definitely the biggest difference between Magrunner and Portal. To kill them, you have to fire off explosive cubes from a cube ‘launcher’. If you miss, you have to get the enemy to circle around to a position the be able to hit them, all while get another explosive cube to hit them with.
If the game was a bit smarter, it would have tried skipping combat at all and figured out a way to let you either outrun every encounter with a creature, or let you get rid of it in another manner, such as trapping them, distracting them, or fooling them to run off of a platform and killing themselves. While you’re faster than them, there isn’t a sprint button.
Graphically, the game is a bit of a mixed bag at times. Early on, the game looks quite nice, with levels and character models looking polished. But when it gets to later parts of the game where you come across underground puzzle chambers that are falling apart, some of the caverns featured in puzzle rooms that are falling apart look a little rough around the edges (in more ways than one). Nothing terrible, but a bit of a dip in quality.
Magrunner: Dark Pulse might not be to everyone’s taste, but for those who loved the puzzle solving of at least the first Portal game, and are OK with Magrunner’s lesser parts, it might be worth checking out for anyone looking for more first person puzzle solving.
The Lovecraft mythos aren’t a highly represented concept in video games. Sure, there have been plenty of video games heavily influenced by the works of Lovecraft, but not a lot taken from Lovecraft’s work itself. While it’s not a direct adaptation of any of Lovecraft’s work, it’s still nice seeing the iconic creatures in video game form.
Magrunner: Dark Pulse is a first person puzzle game developed by Frogwares and published by Focus Home Interactive, and was released for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 in 2013.
The game takes place a couple of decades into the future, when the Gruckezber Corporation has risen to a position of world dominance. By 2035, their LifeNET Total Existence Network has connected billions of people across the world, and is big enough to have influence over both public and private services, as well as social, environmental, and governmental areas. By 2050, the company had built a training facility for deep space exploration, with a selection process for their astronouts using the LifeNET service.
You play as Dax C. Ward, one of the finalists to get to go through the training facilities along with several others, along with the help of his lifelong family friend Gamaji. But soon, a major malfunction takes the facility offline, locking the whole place down, all while the facility starts to change in appearance to something more creepy and inhuman.
Right off the bat, it’s pretty obvious that the game took it’s presentation and gameplay influence from the Portal franchise, but instead of robots and portals, it has Cthulhu and magnets. Once you get past the obvious initial comparison, Magrunner does do enough to differentiate itself from the Portal games, going for horror instead of comedy. The game isn’t all that scary, since it does still go with the cheesy science experiments gone wrong, but you’re definitely not going to get the two games confused.
In between puzzle solving chambers, there are elevators that take you from one puzzle room to the next. The whole point of these elevator rides is get exposition out through interviews and conversations between the main character and other characters. These kinda kill any momentum the game might have if it went from one puzzle straight to another, and the conversations could have easily been trimmed slightly and been had during puzzle sections.
Plus the game has quite a few loading screens, which is only compounded by the fact that you need to load both the elevator ride when you get on and off it, making the game a touch tedious to play, making the idea of replaying the game a tad unappealing. If the game used this time with the elevators to load each level as it gave you exposition, it wouldn’t be as bad, but you’re stuck looking at loading screens. Levels are often so short that often times it feels like there are more loading screens than there are.
Magrunner uses the whole magnet concept fairly well. Your character has a glove that lets you control an objects magnetism. Left click can make object attract and right click makes them repel. Levels come with several things that use magnets, such as small platforms that are used to get to different parts of each level, and both small and large cubes that are used several ways, such as to help power some of the platforms throughout a level, put on buttons, and are used to smash through breakable glass. Although the cube doesn’t come with as much of a personality as the Companion Cube from Portal.
Later in the game, you do get an add-on for your glove in the form of Newton, a robotic dog made by the protagonist, and he’s used to help with attracting objects that are just out reach from other means. Puzzles do get to the point where you can get stuck for ~30-45 minutes in a room, but none of them feel completely unfair. There are a few puzzles that don’t quite communicate what you need to do immediately, but it’s never gets to be a problem.
However, the game does come with the option in the menu to see how far an objects magnetic reach can go, making the puzzles a bit more manageable, not leaving you to guess how far away something is from a magnets reach.
Probably the most frustrating part of the game is that in later levels, there are creatures that you have to either kill or avoid, which is definitely the biggest difference between Magrunner and Portal. To kill them, you have to fire off explosive cubes from a cube ‘launcher’. If you miss, you have to get the enemy to circle around to a position the be able to hit them, all while get another explosive cube to hit them with.
If the game was a bit smarter, it would have tried skipping combat at all and figured out a way to let you either outrun every encounter with a creature, or let you get rid of it in another manner, such as trapping them, distracting them, or fooling them to run off of a platform and killing themselves. While you’re faster than them, there isn’t a sprint button.
Graphically, the game is a bit of a mixed bag at times. Early on, the game looks quite nice, with levels and character models looking polished. But when it gets to later parts of the game where you come across underground puzzle chambers that are falling apart, some of the caverns featured in puzzle rooms that are falling apart look a little rough around the edges (in more ways than one). Nothing terrible, but a bit of a dip in quality.
Magrunner: Dark Pulse might not be to everyone’s taste, but for those who loved the puzzle solving of at least the first Portal game, and are OK with Magrunner’s lesser parts, it might be worth checking out for anyone looking for more first person puzzle solving.
2014
2003
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/chaser-2003-pc-review/
Chaser might be one of the most forgettable First Person Shooters in the sea of First Person Shooters, and it’s pretty easy to see why. The story, world, and art style are pretty much all things we’ve seen done before a lot better in both in video games and other forms of media. And that’s before we even get to the generic gameplay.
Developed by Cauldron and published by JoWood Productions, Chaser was released on August 30th, 2003 only for PC, and considering how broken this game ended up being in areas, I can’t imagine how more broken the game would have been if it had been ported to anything else, so be thankful that it came out in the working state that it did.
The game opens in the year 2044, on the H.M.S. Majestic, a space station orbiting Earth. The generically titled main character John Chaser wakes up in the medical bay, groggy and without the faintest clue who he is, conveniently suffering from amnesia. Just as he is waking up, the space station gets boarded by a group of heavily armed and armored men who are looking to kill Chaser.
Luckily, Chaser manages to escape the space station just before it explodes and crash lands on Earth. If the story couldn’t get any more unoriginal, Chaser just takes the plot points wholesale from 1990’s Total Recall, just without any of the quality. Also, what kind of a name is Chaser anyway?
Every single voice actor sounds bored out of their minds or they just took Ambien because they were brought in 30 seconds before they were about to record, got a glimpse of the script, and that was the only way they could tolerate their way through it. Most of the voice acting sounds like the actors were reading the lines out to themselves for the first time and didn’t realize the weren’t going to get a second take. Some of the dialogue doesn’t even match up to the subtitles. Its like the people who were doing the acting and the people doing the subtitles got two completely different scripts.
Graphically, the game is underwhelming. Its average at best and inconsistent at worst. The game uses an engine developed by the company’s in studio engine, the CloakNT engine. The company was hoping that it competes with the likes of the Unreal engine and ID’s IDTech, but its pretty easy to see that it couldn’t compete and had no chance.
The engine tries to have realistic water for the time, you shoot the water and the water ripples. At one point during the game, the water was placed so poorly that if you shoot it the right way (or wrong way depending on how you look at it), the rippling effect slipped out of the surrounding ground geometry.
A section of the game involves you using a sniper rifle to shoot across an open area as a way of showing what the engine is capable of. Which is immediately destroyed by the fact that if you move your character, giant parts of the level will disappear into a what appears to be a black void.
Character models are blocky and are animated weirdly (seriously, look at the characters eyebrows during cutscenes). Half the time you shoot at windows, shards will stay floating in place. The only compliment I can give Chaser is that some of the early levels on Mars look OK, which is not saying much considering the rest of the game.
Levels are incredibly unintuitive. Trying to find out where your objectives are is incredibly tedious, and are often hidden in locations that you would only find after looking in every other location trying to find where to go or by accident.
The controls have a floatyness to them. Hitboxes for enemies are a bit wonky, and are especially bad when using the sniper rifle. Its a mix of the people that you’re shooting at being just small enough in your scope and the rifle being inaccurate enough that you’re bound to miss who your aiming at half of the time. Which is the second blow to the section focused around using the sniper rifle.
The second unforgivably bad section of Chaser is the underwater section. Just like the rest of water levels in video games, the level starts hurting immediately. If the games floaty controls weren’t bad enough on land, they’re even worse here. The underwater section takes places in a ship graveyard in which you have go through the interiors of several ships. The floaty controls and small areas do not mix.
I think the developers also knew this level was terrible, because they put in lights to help guide you through the level. Even then, you’ve still bound to get lost anyway, due to the levels being overly unintuitive. This entire level could have been another cutscene, I’d rather have 5 minutes of mildly annoying voice acting rather than 45 minutes of frustrating level design and awful controls.
It also doesn’t help that the level geometry has problems throughout the game. You’ll end up getting stuck on geometry with no way to get unstuck, so you’ll have to abuse the quickload button. So you’d better save often. Using ladders is a pain in the ass to use. You try and jump off of them to the area you climbed to only to not make it end up hitting the ground.
Which brings us to the worst part of the game. The game doesn’t show you if you take any injuries when falling, so it took multiple deaths to realize it was the fall damage getting me killed. Doors take a second to open. And it doesn’t help that a lot of doors make the same sound when both locked and unlocked if the make a sound, if the make a sound at all, which also contributed to a few deaths before I caught on to what was going on.
The AI is also pretty bad. Which is compounded by the fact that there is no real pathfinding. Enemies will run into objects and friendly AI will try to follow you by going in a straight line instead of about the level, which results in them constantly running into the wall.
For no reason, your weapons disappear between levels, only for you to get an almost, if not completely, different arsenal. And this isn’t your character going into a completely different location or situation either. This happens when you move to a new area of the same place you were just before, like it assumed what weapons the player would have. Why not have a location early on for the player to get those weapons early on in the level.
Also, There was even a glitch that had a puddle of blood land ON the water. Not in it, ON it, like it was a solid object. I don’t know if that’s just how the engine works or someone did that on purpose.
The biggest problem with the game is that it COULD have been good. There are several moments throughout the game that show the developers were at least trying. After you escape the space station at the beginning of the game, it gets blown up and you see the aftermath, with parts of it crashing onto Earth. You see parts of the destroyed space station hitting buildings in the city you landed in. It would have been a good moment if it weren’t for the fact that gang members attack you for being in their territory instead of trying not to be killed by falling debris. And the space station being destroying a major city never gets brought up again.
In the end, Chaser really isn’t worth playing. There have been so many better games in the FPS genre before and since. If you want to play anything that has Mars in it, play any of the Red Faction games, they’re ALL better (And I’m hesitant to say this, but yes, even Armageddon. Even the “Gangstas In Space” segment from Saints Row The Third is significantly better). If you want to experience the plot of Chaser, but much better, just watch the 1990 Total Recall film instead.
Chaser might be one of the most forgettable First Person Shooters in the sea of First Person Shooters, and it’s pretty easy to see why. The story, world, and art style are pretty much all things we’ve seen done before a lot better in both in video games and other forms of media. And that’s before we even get to the generic gameplay.
Developed by Cauldron and published by JoWood Productions, Chaser was released on August 30th, 2003 only for PC, and considering how broken this game ended up being in areas, I can’t imagine how more broken the game would have been if it had been ported to anything else, so be thankful that it came out in the working state that it did.
The game opens in the year 2044, on the H.M.S. Majestic, a space station orbiting Earth. The generically titled main character John Chaser wakes up in the medical bay, groggy and without the faintest clue who he is, conveniently suffering from amnesia. Just as he is waking up, the space station gets boarded by a group of heavily armed and armored men who are looking to kill Chaser.
Luckily, Chaser manages to escape the space station just before it explodes and crash lands on Earth. If the story couldn’t get any more unoriginal, Chaser just takes the plot points wholesale from 1990’s Total Recall, just without any of the quality. Also, what kind of a name is Chaser anyway?
Every single voice actor sounds bored out of their minds or they just took Ambien because they were brought in 30 seconds before they were about to record, got a glimpse of the script, and that was the only way they could tolerate their way through it. Most of the voice acting sounds like the actors were reading the lines out to themselves for the first time and didn’t realize the weren’t going to get a second take. Some of the dialogue doesn’t even match up to the subtitles. Its like the people who were doing the acting and the people doing the subtitles got two completely different scripts.
Graphically, the game is underwhelming. Its average at best and inconsistent at worst. The game uses an engine developed by the company’s in studio engine, the CloakNT engine. The company was hoping that it competes with the likes of the Unreal engine and ID’s IDTech, but its pretty easy to see that it couldn’t compete and had no chance.
The engine tries to have realistic water for the time, you shoot the water and the water ripples. At one point during the game, the water was placed so poorly that if you shoot it the right way (or wrong way depending on how you look at it), the rippling effect slipped out of the surrounding ground geometry.
A section of the game involves you using a sniper rifle to shoot across an open area as a way of showing what the engine is capable of. Which is immediately destroyed by the fact that if you move your character, giant parts of the level will disappear into a what appears to be a black void.
Character models are blocky and are animated weirdly (seriously, look at the characters eyebrows during cutscenes). Half the time you shoot at windows, shards will stay floating in place. The only compliment I can give Chaser is that some of the early levels on Mars look OK, which is not saying much considering the rest of the game.
Levels are incredibly unintuitive. Trying to find out where your objectives are is incredibly tedious, and are often hidden in locations that you would only find after looking in every other location trying to find where to go or by accident.
The controls have a floatyness to them. Hitboxes for enemies are a bit wonky, and are especially bad when using the sniper rifle. Its a mix of the people that you’re shooting at being just small enough in your scope and the rifle being inaccurate enough that you’re bound to miss who your aiming at half of the time. Which is the second blow to the section focused around using the sniper rifle.
The second unforgivably bad section of Chaser is the underwater section. Just like the rest of water levels in video games, the level starts hurting immediately. If the games floaty controls weren’t bad enough on land, they’re even worse here. The underwater section takes places in a ship graveyard in which you have go through the interiors of several ships. The floaty controls and small areas do not mix.
I think the developers also knew this level was terrible, because they put in lights to help guide you through the level. Even then, you’ve still bound to get lost anyway, due to the levels being overly unintuitive. This entire level could have been another cutscene, I’d rather have 5 minutes of mildly annoying voice acting rather than 45 minutes of frustrating level design and awful controls.
It also doesn’t help that the level geometry has problems throughout the game. You’ll end up getting stuck on geometry with no way to get unstuck, so you’ll have to abuse the quickload button. So you’d better save often. Using ladders is a pain in the ass to use. You try and jump off of them to the area you climbed to only to not make it end up hitting the ground.
Which brings us to the worst part of the game. The game doesn’t show you if you take any injuries when falling, so it took multiple deaths to realize it was the fall damage getting me killed. Doors take a second to open. And it doesn’t help that a lot of doors make the same sound when both locked and unlocked if the make a sound, if the make a sound at all, which also contributed to a few deaths before I caught on to what was going on.
The AI is also pretty bad. Which is compounded by the fact that there is no real pathfinding. Enemies will run into objects and friendly AI will try to follow you by going in a straight line instead of about the level, which results in them constantly running into the wall.
For no reason, your weapons disappear between levels, only for you to get an almost, if not completely, different arsenal. And this isn’t your character going into a completely different location or situation either. This happens when you move to a new area of the same place you were just before, like it assumed what weapons the player would have. Why not have a location early on for the player to get those weapons early on in the level.
Also, There was even a glitch that had a puddle of blood land ON the water. Not in it, ON it, like it was a solid object. I don’t know if that’s just how the engine works or someone did that on purpose.
The biggest problem with the game is that it COULD have been good. There are several moments throughout the game that show the developers were at least trying. After you escape the space station at the beginning of the game, it gets blown up and you see the aftermath, with parts of it crashing onto Earth. You see parts of the destroyed space station hitting buildings in the city you landed in. It would have been a good moment if it weren’t for the fact that gang members attack you for being in their territory instead of trying not to be killed by falling debris. And the space station being destroying a major city never gets brought up again.
In the end, Chaser really isn’t worth playing. There have been so many better games in the FPS genre before and since. If you want to play anything that has Mars in it, play any of the Red Faction games, they’re ALL better (And I’m hesitant to say this, but yes, even Armageddon. Even the “Gangstas In Space” segment from Saints Row The Third is significantly better). If you want to experience the plot of Chaser, but much better, just watch the 1990 Total Recall film instead.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/a-story-about-my-uncle-2014-review/
Every now and again I come across a great game that focuses on it’s story instead of combat, such as A Story About My Uncle, which is a game that has no combat, and instead has the player leaping from platform to platform and experiencing the world it has developed.
Told through a father recounting a story told by a father to his daughter, the game follows a young boy who goes to look from his missing uncle Fred. After finding a a mysterious suit that lets you jump incredibly high and far, the main character soon finds himself in another world filled with a strange frog people that he becomes friendly with, along with encountering a few dangers along with the way.
Most of the gameplay involves the grappling hook mechanic, which feels incredibly smooth and satisfying. It’s like a smaller scale first person Spider-Man game. Along with the grappling hook, you can occasionally leap from platform to platform with the help of your suit, and half way through the game, you can get rocky boots that add a rocket jump, giving you some extra help with certain platforms.
Near the end of the game, it can go up in difficulty, and the young audience that this is aimed at might have some trouble getting through it. But the whole game is never unreasonably hard with it’s puzzles.
The game art stands out, and makes up for the games obvious lower budget. It starts out looking nice, but half way through the game, it really shines and shows how gorgeous the game can be. I can definitely see myself using a screenshot or two, or some of the art for this game as the background on my computer. I should also not that the soundtrack is also pretty nice, and compliments the rest of the game really well, really adding to the whole experience.
Every now and again I don’t quite know where to go due to some of the floating rocks you have to swing across not being immediately obvious, taking a moment or two to for me to find them. Sometimes, one of the rocks can be hard to determine how far away they are, leading to a few leaps of faith before getting it right.
There is some replayability in the game, with a few some unlockables both in the form of Time Trials you get after completing the game and collectables tucked throughout the game that give you stuff, including being able to change the color of your grappling hook, an Acrobatic and Adidas mode, along with something called Goat Mode (which is almost to be expected since this game is from the same guys as Goat Simulator after all).
A Story About My Uncle is a fun and pleasant experience the whole way through, and I found myself going back and playing it a second time a while after finishing it. I’d easily recommend this game.
Every now and again I come across a great game that focuses on it’s story instead of combat, such as A Story About My Uncle, which is a game that has no combat, and instead has the player leaping from platform to platform and experiencing the world it has developed.
Told through a father recounting a story told by a father to his daughter, the game follows a young boy who goes to look from his missing uncle Fred. After finding a a mysterious suit that lets you jump incredibly high and far, the main character soon finds himself in another world filled with a strange frog people that he becomes friendly with, along with encountering a few dangers along with the way.
Most of the gameplay involves the grappling hook mechanic, which feels incredibly smooth and satisfying. It’s like a smaller scale first person Spider-Man game. Along with the grappling hook, you can occasionally leap from platform to platform with the help of your suit, and half way through the game, you can get rocky boots that add a rocket jump, giving you some extra help with certain platforms.
Near the end of the game, it can go up in difficulty, and the young audience that this is aimed at might have some trouble getting through it. But the whole game is never unreasonably hard with it’s puzzles.
The game art stands out, and makes up for the games obvious lower budget. It starts out looking nice, but half way through the game, it really shines and shows how gorgeous the game can be. I can definitely see myself using a screenshot or two, or some of the art for this game as the background on my computer. I should also not that the soundtrack is also pretty nice, and compliments the rest of the game really well, really adding to the whole experience.
Every now and again I don’t quite know where to go due to some of the floating rocks you have to swing across not being immediately obvious, taking a moment or two to for me to find them. Sometimes, one of the rocks can be hard to determine how far away they are, leading to a few leaps of faith before getting it right.
There is some replayability in the game, with a few some unlockables both in the form of Time Trials you get after completing the game and collectables tucked throughout the game that give you stuff, including being able to change the color of your grappling hook, an Acrobatic and Adidas mode, along with something called Goat Mode (which is almost to be expected since this game is from the same guys as Goat Simulator after all).
A Story About My Uncle is a fun and pleasant experience the whole way through, and I found myself going back and playing it a second time a while after finishing it. I’d easily recommend this game.
2005
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/04/22/swat-4-2005-game-review/
SWAT 4 is both one of the best games that I’ve ever played and one of the most infuriating monitor smashing, keyboard snapping, stroke inducing games that I’ve played at the same time. How can a game be both of those things? Well, lets have a look, shall we.
There isn’t much of a story in the usual sense. Some of the mission briefings with have a few minor plot threads through out the game, but most of the the story that the game has is unique to each mission. Unlike previous installments of the franchise, where you followed the L.A.P.D. Branch of SWAT, SWAT 4 takes places in Los Angeles, California, the single player campaign taking place in the fictional East Coast city of Fairview (an amalgamation of New York City, Boston, a few other eastern cities). Taking place in the then far off future of 2008/2009. You can practice at the Riverside Training Facility, under the guidance of police Lieutenant Sunny Bonds, or jump right into the action.
Before every mission, you’re given the option to check your Objectives screen. This gives you a very throughout and detailed overlook of the situation, such as a briefing catching you up on the details, being able to listen to any related 911 calls, a map showing all of the entrances of the location and possibly the layout of the building that you can bring up in the pause menu, any known info on the supects, any civilians in the building, and a timeline of events. You can even choose which way you want to enter a building.
At the Equipment menu, you can choose the loadouts for yourself and your whole squad. The game comes with several loadouts included, but if you want to make your own personalized loadout, you can, and you save it. And you can copy any of the loadouts you’ve selected to the rest of your squad.
Your primary weapons include the Colt M4A1 Carbine, .45 SMG, Suppressed 9mm SMG, 9mm SMG, Nova Pump, M4 Super 90, GB36s Assault Rifle, AK-47, and Gal Sub machine Gun. And if you want to go in with a less lethal option, which is recommended in a few mission, are the Pepper-ball Gun, and Less-Lethal Shotgun, which fires sandbags.
Your secondary weapons include your standard guns such as M1911 Handgun, Colt Python Revolver, and 9mm Handgun. Less aggressive options include the Taser Stun Gun and Pepper Spray for the people who are refusing to be handcuffed or need some convincing to put down their weapon. Explosives include the Stinger Grenade cause quite a punch to anyone close to it, Flashbang, which blinds your enemies, and CS Gas, which can blind enemies with smoke and cause anyone close enough to it to go into a coughing fit.
If you come across locked doors, you have the Breaching Equipment, which includes a Shotgun that can breach locked doors by firing at the door handle or C2, which you can apply to the door around the same area, blowing the doors lock off.
Finally there is the Door Wedge, which you can used to prevent people from opening doors, essentially preventing them from escaping a certain way as you move around to another opening to a room, and the Optiwand, which lets you see under a door to check if there are any enemies in the room you want to enter.
To order your squad members around, there is a drop down menu that you can get to by holding down your right mouse button. You can order your team to follow you, move to wherever you’ve happened to aim at, to stack up at a door to check if it’s locked and to prepare to enter to room, or have them enter the room straight away. You can even separate your team, which is called “Gold” team, or “Element”, into two smaller teams, “Red” team and “Blue” team. This can help in certain strategies, such as them entering two doors of the same room, and taking on enemies from two different angles and having the element of surprise.
There are also few mode besides the campaign that you can try if you want some variety. There is Instant Action, in which you drop into the most recent mission that you’ve complete with the default gear. You can also create and play your own missions based off of the missions from the Single Player part of the game. There are a ton of options to choose from in this mode, including difficulty, whether or not you want the missions from the Single Player version of the level or a mix of objectives from a list, which entry point you want to start at and a time limit, and which load out you want to take in.
You can even choose to be a lone wolf or have a smaller amount of SWAT members on your team, and the amount of civilians there are in a level and the amount of and types of guns terrorists are holding. You can make any level as easy or insanely impossibly as you want, and is probably the most fun part of the single player experience.
One of the best features of SWAT 4 is the multiplayer. The multiplayer features several game modes, all of which are team-based. These include Barricaded Suspects, in which Teams gain points by arresting or neutralizing members of the other team, and whoever hits the score limit first or has the highest score when the round ends win, VIP Escort, in which a random member of the SWAT team is selected to be the VIP. The suspects must arrest the VIP and hold him for two minutes before they can execute him. SWAT must escort the VIP to the extraction point in the mission area while preventing suspects from arresting him.
Rapid Deployment, in which three to five bombs are placed throughout the map, and the SWAT team must locate and disable all of the within the time limit, and if they fail to do so, the suspects win. And Co-op, in you can play through all of the single-player missions with up to four other people taking place of the computer-controller SWAT officers.
Graphically, the game still holds up fairly well. Every location looks exactly like what it’s real world counterpoint would look like (I.E. Restaurant, Convenience Store, Medical Center, Jewelry Store, Run Down Apartments, etc.). Some levels even have a fantastic and creepy atmosphere that really drive home the point that you’re dealing with some pretty disturbed people, such as a level where a man has a kidnapped woman in his basement, and a level in an run down apartment building that has a cult in it.
What really stands out are the small details around each level that make the game world feel like the events in the game are actually happening, such as news reports on the radio of current and previous missions, and even in one mission, there is a live news report happening, giving away your SWAT team’s presence to the terrorists. The other squad members even comment on the situation as it’s unfolding along with occasionally commenting on certain things located around a location, and even give a few sarcastic remarks about the situation, location, and even about each other.
There’s even a few missions that have new objectives pop up as the mission goes on, giving the feeling as if the situation is unfolding before you. It’s small details like these that you wouldn’t even notice that make it seem like the developers were actually putting a lot of effort and love into each location.
The only minor complaint I have with the graphics are the mirrors, which look hilariously stretched and weird. But they do actually serve a purpose in the game, as a few spots in a few levels, you can use the mirror to spot enemies around corners.
SWAT 4 is also pretty impressive on the audio side too. At certain points, the game will appear like there is distant gunfire off in another part of the level, adding to the whole situation unfolding in front of you vibe the game is trying to give off, using what limitations the game has to make it seem like more is going on than possible. The soundtrack is dynamic to whatever situation is going on at the time. Whenever your team is breaching a room or coming into contact with enemies around the map, the music goes from the usual ambient music that plays when you’re exploring the area to a tense music that puts you on edge, really making it seem like a situation could go south any second.
Speaking of going south, the biggest flaw of SWAT 4 rears it’s ugly head. The thing that really brings the game down is it’s bullshit inconsistent enemy AI and absurd difficulty spikes. The first two levels are tutorial levels to ease you into the games concepts, but by the third or forth level, for some insane reason, the enemy difficulty spikes incredibly high, and a mere thug can take out your entire squad of 4 members with a 9mm handgun right as their going through a door, sometimes literally the first door of a map, simply by firing said handgun at them as they’re piling through the doorway. And it doesn’t help that every now and again a fellow SWAT member can be hung up on the side of some part of the level because the path finding got confused for half a second.
This can happen several times in a row, and then for no reason, you’re able to get through a mission with little to no difficulty. There can be 4 missions in a row that are incredibly difficult, and suddenly one is incredibly easy. And vice versa, where 4 mission are incredibly easy, and then for no reason, one mission is insanely hard. This is where another feature of the game, which is that the civilians and terrorists are randomly placed around the level, giving each level some level of replayability, becomes a curse. You’ll never know what happens next, making it even more difficult to predict where everyone is, making the difficulty spikes especially bad.
I’ve even failed a mission because a SWAT member was firing at a terrorist and killed a civilian. This happened multiple times. And that’s not even mentioning the infrequent cases of an enemy happening to clip through a wall and firing on me and killing me. Its like the game was 95% done, and all that was left was simply testing out the AI to make sure the game was balanced for players, only for the published to go “Lol, nope, we’ve got to publish this right now!”, making the game way too unbalanced. Either that, or the developers knew the game had too few levels or content and though that punishing AI was a way to combat that.
It doesn’t seem to help that changing the difficulty doesn’t seem to do much other than change the amount of points that you’re supposed to get by the end of the level. There are 4 difficulty levels. Easy is 0 points, meaning you can just run into every situation and fire off into every direction, and as long as you complete your mission goals, you can complete the level. Other difficulty levels include Normal, which is 50 points, Hard, which is 75 points, and Elite, which is 95 points. This is great is want to try and get through a level as close to procedure as you can, but I just wish there was an extra difficulty tab for enemy AI, maybe making the enemies more aggressive or strategic or something. As is, it feels like I have to abuse the games logic and rules to get through some of the levels.
While going through a level, you can also receive injuries from terrorists gunfire. I guess the point of this was realism, but it can make certain longer missions tedious, making it take an extra ~15 to ~30 minutes at least, and some missions literally impossible to complete without restarting them. There is one mission where you have to disarm bombs within a time limit, but you’d better not have one or both of your legs injured, because you have to restart the entire mission unless you’re somehow lucky enough to not get injured or injured with just enough time left, which I doubt.
Since you don’t want to lose a ton of points because you didn’t scream “Get Down!” at a terrorist before you had to fire upon him in a kill-or-get-killed situation, or get your legs injured and tediously spend ~45 minutes tediously walking throughout a level, you have to send in your fellow SWAT members so they can take the brunt of the situation. And when your fellow SWAT members can be taken out in half a second because enemy AI has instantaneous reflexes and eagle like sight, is not what you want to do, despite being something you have to do.
Because of the shitty AI, a lot of the small nitpicks become significantly worse. Sometimes, an enemy is sitting in the corner of some part of the map you might not know about or haven’t double checked. And if you’ve walked around a level for ~45 minutes only for an enemy to kill you, meaning you have to restart a mission for the umpteenth time, that minor problem suddenly becomes a massive rage inducing problem.
While you can order your squad members to handcuff people, you still have to report the person in, along with collecting dropped weapons as evidence and anyone who was either killed during the mission or killed or injured before you got there. And if you’re trying to reach the point threshold to properly complete a mission, all while your legs are injured, you’re now spending the next half hour slowly limping around any given mission.
Also, if I’m playing a professional SWAT member, why am I reacting this badly to gun recoil? I can even tap the mouse button without the gun suddenly finding itself aimed at the roof. And the spread for the guns seems way too far apart when I’m just firing off in short bursts.
Every now and again, one of your SWAT members can get caught up on the edge of a doorway or the side of a way when turning into certain hallways. You’ll inevitably notice this when you order your SWAT members to line up against a door, ready to enter on your command, and you sit there waiting for 10 minutes wondering why the rest of your SWAT team aren’t entering a room only to realize that one of them is somewhere in the map, stuck somewhere.
There are even SWAT snipers on a few levels that can give you info on certain people located in certain levels. You can even take control of one of these snipers and take out one of the enemies from a distance. These don’t deduct from your overall score, so I would recommend using the snipers as often as possible. It might be gaming the system, but when it comes to this games bullshit AI, you kinda have to.
I know this seems weird saying that SWAT 4 is still worth playing despite the fact that I ranted about it being atrociously unfair with it’s AI and the small accumulating problems that seem to just pile up, but SWAT 4 is worth playing to some degree. Just be aware of some of the bullshit problems this game has. If you can deal with the infuriating difficultly spikes and inconsistent friendly and enemy AI at the best of times, or have friends that think that playing as a member of SWAT is a fantastic idea and can overlook the games flaws to spend a couple of hours with friends to have a blast playing one of the better co-op games out there, SWAT 4 can be a lot of fun. Ironically, this is probably the most polished and mature game in the series up to this point.
SWAT 4 is both one of the best games that I’ve ever played and one of the most infuriating monitor smashing, keyboard snapping, stroke inducing games that I’ve played at the same time. How can a game be both of those things? Well, lets have a look, shall we.
There isn’t much of a story in the usual sense. Some of the mission briefings with have a few minor plot threads through out the game, but most of the the story that the game has is unique to each mission. Unlike previous installments of the franchise, where you followed the L.A.P.D. Branch of SWAT, SWAT 4 takes places in Los Angeles, California, the single player campaign taking place in the fictional East Coast city of Fairview (an amalgamation of New York City, Boston, a few other eastern cities). Taking place in the then far off future of 2008/2009. You can practice at the Riverside Training Facility, under the guidance of police Lieutenant Sunny Bonds, or jump right into the action.
Before every mission, you’re given the option to check your Objectives screen. This gives you a very throughout and detailed overlook of the situation, such as a briefing catching you up on the details, being able to listen to any related 911 calls, a map showing all of the entrances of the location and possibly the layout of the building that you can bring up in the pause menu, any known info on the supects, any civilians in the building, and a timeline of events. You can even choose which way you want to enter a building.
At the Equipment menu, you can choose the loadouts for yourself and your whole squad. The game comes with several loadouts included, but if you want to make your own personalized loadout, you can, and you save it. And you can copy any of the loadouts you’ve selected to the rest of your squad.
Your primary weapons include the Colt M4A1 Carbine, .45 SMG, Suppressed 9mm SMG, 9mm SMG, Nova Pump, M4 Super 90, GB36s Assault Rifle, AK-47, and Gal Sub machine Gun. And if you want to go in with a less lethal option, which is recommended in a few mission, are the Pepper-ball Gun, and Less-Lethal Shotgun, which fires sandbags.
Your secondary weapons include your standard guns such as M1911 Handgun, Colt Python Revolver, and 9mm Handgun. Less aggressive options include the Taser Stun Gun and Pepper Spray for the people who are refusing to be handcuffed or need some convincing to put down their weapon. Explosives include the Stinger Grenade cause quite a punch to anyone close to it, Flashbang, which blinds your enemies, and CS Gas, which can blind enemies with smoke and cause anyone close enough to it to go into a coughing fit.
If you come across locked doors, you have the Breaching Equipment, which includes a Shotgun that can breach locked doors by firing at the door handle or C2, which you can apply to the door around the same area, blowing the doors lock off.
Finally there is the Door Wedge, which you can used to prevent people from opening doors, essentially preventing them from escaping a certain way as you move around to another opening to a room, and the Optiwand, which lets you see under a door to check if there are any enemies in the room you want to enter.
To order your squad members around, there is a drop down menu that you can get to by holding down your right mouse button. You can order your team to follow you, move to wherever you’ve happened to aim at, to stack up at a door to check if it’s locked and to prepare to enter to room, or have them enter the room straight away. You can even separate your team, which is called “Gold” team, or “Element”, into two smaller teams, “Red” team and “Blue” team. This can help in certain strategies, such as them entering two doors of the same room, and taking on enemies from two different angles and having the element of surprise.
There are also few mode besides the campaign that you can try if you want some variety. There is Instant Action, in which you drop into the most recent mission that you’ve complete with the default gear. You can also create and play your own missions based off of the missions from the Single Player part of the game. There are a ton of options to choose from in this mode, including difficulty, whether or not you want the missions from the Single Player version of the level or a mix of objectives from a list, which entry point you want to start at and a time limit, and which load out you want to take in.
You can even choose to be a lone wolf or have a smaller amount of SWAT members on your team, and the amount of civilians there are in a level and the amount of and types of guns terrorists are holding. You can make any level as easy or insanely impossibly as you want, and is probably the most fun part of the single player experience.
One of the best features of SWAT 4 is the multiplayer. The multiplayer features several game modes, all of which are team-based. These include Barricaded Suspects, in which Teams gain points by arresting or neutralizing members of the other team, and whoever hits the score limit first or has the highest score when the round ends win, VIP Escort, in which a random member of the SWAT team is selected to be the VIP. The suspects must arrest the VIP and hold him for two minutes before they can execute him. SWAT must escort the VIP to the extraction point in the mission area while preventing suspects from arresting him.
Rapid Deployment, in which three to five bombs are placed throughout the map, and the SWAT team must locate and disable all of the within the time limit, and if they fail to do so, the suspects win. And Co-op, in you can play through all of the single-player missions with up to four other people taking place of the computer-controller SWAT officers.
Graphically, the game still holds up fairly well. Every location looks exactly like what it’s real world counterpoint would look like (I.E. Restaurant, Convenience Store, Medical Center, Jewelry Store, Run Down Apartments, etc.). Some levels even have a fantastic and creepy atmosphere that really drive home the point that you’re dealing with some pretty disturbed people, such as a level where a man has a kidnapped woman in his basement, and a level in an run down apartment building that has a cult in it.
What really stands out are the small details around each level that make the game world feel like the events in the game are actually happening, such as news reports on the radio of current and previous missions, and even in one mission, there is a live news report happening, giving away your SWAT team’s presence to the terrorists. The other squad members even comment on the situation as it’s unfolding along with occasionally commenting on certain things located around a location, and even give a few sarcastic remarks about the situation, location, and even about each other.
There’s even a few missions that have new objectives pop up as the mission goes on, giving the feeling as if the situation is unfolding before you. It’s small details like these that you wouldn’t even notice that make it seem like the developers were actually putting a lot of effort and love into each location.
The only minor complaint I have with the graphics are the mirrors, which look hilariously stretched and weird. But they do actually serve a purpose in the game, as a few spots in a few levels, you can use the mirror to spot enemies around corners.
SWAT 4 is also pretty impressive on the audio side too. At certain points, the game will appear like there is distant gunfire off in another part of the level, adding to the whole situation unfolding in front of you vibe the game is trying to give off, using what limitations the game has to make it seem like more is going on than possible. The soundtrack is dynamic to whatever situation is going on at the time. Whenever your team is breaching a room or coming into contact with enemies around the map, the music goes from the usual ambient music that plays when you’re exploring the area to a tense music that puts you on edge, really making it seem like a situation could go south any second.
Speaking of going south, the biggest flaw of SWAT 4 rears it’s ugly head. The thing that really brings the game down is it’s bullshit inconsistent enemy AI and absurd difficulty spikes. The first two levels are tutorial levels to ease you into the games concepts, but by the third or forth level, for some insane reason, the enemy difficulty spikes incredibly high, and a mere thug can take out your entire squad of 4 members with a 9mm handgun right as their going through a door, sometimes literally the first door of a map, simply by firing said handgun at them as they’re piling through the doorway. And it doesn’t help that every now and again a fellow SWAT member can be hung up on the side of some part of the level because the path finding got confused for half a second.
This can happen several times in a row, and then for no reason, you’re able to get through a mission with little to no difficulty. There can be 4 missions in a row that are incredibly difficult, and suddenly one is incredibly easy. And vice versa, where 4 mission are incredibly easy, and then for no reason, one mission is insanely hard. This is where another feature of the game, which is that the civilians and terrorists are randomly placed around the level, giving each level some level of replayability, becomes a curse. You’ll never know what happens next, making it even more difficult to predict where everyone is, making the difficulty spikes especially bad.
I’ve even failed a mission because a SWAT member was firing at a terrorist and killed a civilian. This happened multiple times. And that’s not even mentioning the infrequent cases of an enemy happening to clip through a wall and firing on me and killing me. Its like the game was 95% done, and all that was left was simply testing out the AI to make sure the game was balanced for players, only for the published to go “Lol, nope, we’ve got to publish this right now!”, making the game way too unbalanced. Either that, or the developers knew the game had too few levels or content and though that punishing AI was a way to combat that.
It doesn’t seem to help that changing the difficulty doesn’t seem to do much other than change the amount of points that you’re supposed to get by the end of the level. There are 4 difficulty levels. Easy is 0 points, meaning you can just run into every situation and fire off into every direction, and as long as you complete your mission goals, you can complete the level. Other difficulty levels include Normal, which is 50 points, Hard, which is 75 points, and Elite, which is 95 points. This is great is want to try and get through a level as close to procedure as you can, but I just wish there was an extra difficulty tab for enemy AI, maybe making the enemies more aggressive or strategic or something. As is, it feels like I have to abuse the games logic and rules to get through some of the levels.
While going through a level, you can also receive injuries from terrorists gunfire. I guess the point of this was realism, but it can make certain longer missions tedious, making it take an extra ~15 to ~30 minutes at least, and some missions literally impossible to complete without restarting them. There is one mission where you have to disarm bombs within a time limit, but you’d better not have one or both of your legs injured, because you have to restart the entire mission unless you’re somehow lucky enough to not get injured or injured with just enough time left, which I doubt.
Since you don’t want to lose a ton of points because you didn’t scream “Get Down!” at a terrorist before you had to fire upon him in a kill-or-get-killed situation, or get your legs injured and tediously spend ~45 minutes tediously walking throughout a level, you have to send in your fellow SWAT members so they can take the brunt of the situation. And when your fellow SWAT members can be taken out in half a second because enemy AI has instantaneous reflexes and eagle like sight, is not what you want to do, despite being something you have to do.
Because of the shitty AI, a lot of the small nitpicks become significantly worse. Sometimes, an enemy is sitting in the corner of some part of the map you might not know about or haven’t double checked. And if you’ve walked around a level for ~45 minutes only for an enemy to kill you, meaning you have to restart a mission for the umpteenth time, that minor problem suddenly becomes a massive rage inducing problem.
While you can order your squad members to handcuff people, you still have to report the person in, along with collecting dropped weapons as evidence and anyone who was either killed during the mission or killed or injured before you got there. And if you’re trying to reach the point threshold to properly complete a mission, all while your legs are injured, you’re now spending the next half hour slowly limping around any given mission.
Also, if I’m playing a professional SWAT member, why am I reacting this badly to gun recoil? I can even tap the mouse button without the gun suddenly finding itself aimed at the roof. And the spread for the guns seems way too far apart when I’m just firing off in short bursts.
Every now and again, one of your SWAT members can get caught up on the edge of a doorway or the side of a way when turning into certain hallways. You’ll inevitably notice this when you order your SWAT members to line up against a door, ready to enter on your command, and you sit there waiting for 10 minutes wondering why the rest of your SWAT team aren’t entering a room only to realize that one of them is somewhere in the map, stuck somewhere.
There are even SWAT snipers on a few levels that can give you info on certain people located in certain levels. You can even take control of one of these snipers and take out one of the enemies from a distance. These don’t deduct from your overall score, so I would recommend using the snipers as often as possible. It might be gaming the system, but when it comes to this games bullshit AI, you kinda have to.
I know this seems weird saying that SWAT 4 is still worth playing despite the fact that I ranted about it being atrociously unfair with it’s AI and the small accumulating problems that seem to just pile up, but SWAT 4 is worth playing to some degree. Just be aware of some of the bullshit problems this game has. If you can deal with the infuriating difficultly spikes and inconsistent friendly and enemy AI at the best of times, or have friends that think that playing as a member of SWAT is a fantastic idea and can overlook the games flaws to spend a couple of hours with friends to have a blast playing one of the better co-op games out there, SWAT 4 can be a lot of fun. Ironically, this is probably the most polished and mature game in the series up to this point.
2006
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/10/03/monster-house-2006-gcn-ps2-review/
Three teens discover that their neighbor’s house is a living, breathing monster that eats anyone who goes near it. With none of the adults believing them, and with Halloween approaching, the trio try and find a way to stop the Monster House before it eats half the neighborhood.
Not that you would know, since the game gives you the briefest of a plot description before shoving you into the game. It just assumes that you’ve seen the film, and probably are a fan of it.
Monster House is one of the most boring games I’ve ever played. 95% of the game is walking into a small room, shooting monsters made out of furniture around the titular Monster House, and then moving into the next room. If you’re lucky, you can do the most minimal amount of exploring that the game allows you to do, you’ll find collectable clapping monkeys that will unlock concept art for the movie. If you miss any, you have to go back through the game to get the ones you didn’t find the first time.
Since the developers knew that this was aimed towards kids, every monster battle just consists of you pressing the fire button, which automatically locks onto a monster, and you shooting at it while strafing around it until it’s destroyed. There isn’t even any ammo collecting. You just hit one of the buttons over and over until your water gun pumps up until it’s full again.
I guess there are a couple of things that could be counted as a “puzzles”, but are barely puzzles. One involves you have to shoot a certain amount of targets in a carnival game to get a clowns nose to place on a giant clown’s face so you can move onto the next room. Another is pipes coming up out of the floor in certain intervals.
The game has checkpoints, but they’re so few and far between, so you’ll have to go back 15 minutes of game. While the game isn’t all that difficult, it’s definitely makes the game more tedious than it should if you you do happened to lose all of your health. There are even a couple of quicktime events that come out of nowhere, but thankfully they’re always the same every single time they happen. The only real problem I have with the quicktime events is near the end of the game, you have to press them in the order that they pop up, and if you don’t press it quick enough, you can end up replaying the same small part of the game over and over again, up to a couple of dozen of times.
Graphically, the game actually looks OK, but that’s mostly because of the movies great art style. But that’s probably the best I can say about the games graphics, because the game uses the exact same couple of rooms over and over again, leading to a lot of repetition visually. Considering that you play as all three characters, it makes it even worse.
Probably the best part of the whole game is not the game itself, but a bonus game based on a video game from the movie, a game called “Thou Art Dead”, based on a video game from the film, which one of the characters from the film plays in an arcade. It’s a homage to old NES games like Castlevania and Ghosts ‘N Goblins. It’s actually incredibly fun. The only problem is that you have to collect coins throughout the campaign, and even then the coins are limited, and if you want to keep playing, you have to replay the game to collect the coins.
There was a version of “Thou Art Dead” released on the official website as a promotion for the film, and I would just recommend that over the actual game.
I know that I should have low expectations no only going into a children’s video game, let alone a children’s video game based on a film meant for kids bothering their parents so they have something to play, but there have been so many good video games for children based on other forms of media that it’s not really an excuse.
I don’t know why you would give this to your kid over just showing them the film, especially when you need to have seen the film in the first place to get what’s going on. Plus the film is much more entertaining, much shorter, and much better than this game. I honestly have no idea why I even played this game to begin with. Maybe it’s because I liked the movie and I was curious as to what the game was like. I probably should have just watched a couple of YouTube videos to satiate my curiosity.
Three teens discover that their neighbor’s house is a living, breathing monster that eats anyone who goes near it. With none of the adults believing them, and with Halloween approaching, the trio try and find a way to stop the Monster House before it eats half the neighborhood.
Not that you would know, since the game gives you the briefest of a plot description before shoving you into the game. It just assumes that you’ve seen the film, and probably are a fan of it.
Monster House is one of the most boring games I’ve ever played. 95% of the game is walking into a small room, shooting monsters made out of furniture around the titular Monster House, and then moving into the next room. If you’re lucky, you can do the most minimal amount of exploring that the game allows you to do, you’ll find collectable clapping monkeys that will unlock concept art for the movie. If you miss any, you have to go back through the game to get the ones you didn’t find the first time.
Since the developers knew that this was aimed towards kids, every monster battle just consists of you pressing the fire button, which automatically locks onto a monster, and you shooting at it while strafing around it until it’s destroyed. There isn’t even any ammo collecting. You just hit one of the buttons over and over until your water gun pumps up until it’s full again.
I guess there are a couple of things that could be counted as a “puzzles”, but are barely puzzles. One involves you have to shoot a certain amount of targets in a carnival game to get a clowns nose to place on a giant clown’s face so you can move onto the next room. Another is pipes coming up out of the floor in certain intervals.
The game has checkpoints, but they’re so few and far between, so you’ll have to go back 15 minutes of game. While the game isn’t all that difficult, it’s definitely makes the game more tedious than it should if you you do happened to lose all of your health. There are even a couple of quicktime events that come out of nowhere, but thankfully they’re always the same every single time they happen. The only real problem I have with the quicktime events is near the end of the game, you have to press them in the order that they pop up, and if you don’t press it quick enough, you can end up replaying the same small part of the game over and over again, up to a couple of dozen of times.
Graphically, the game actually looks OK, but that’s mostly because of the movies great art style. But that’s probably the best I can say about the games graphics, because the game uses the exact same couple of rooms over and over again, leading to a lot of repetition visually. Considering that you play as all three characters, it makes it even worse.
Probably the best part of the whole game is not the game itself, but a bonus game based on a video game from the movie, a game called “Thou Art Dead”, based on a video game from the film, which one of the characters from the film plays in an arcade. It’s a homage to old NES games like Castlevania and Ghosts ‘N Goblins. It’s actually incredibly fun. The only problem is that you have to collect coins throughout the campaign, and even then the coins are limited, and if you want to keep playing, you have to replay the game to collect the coins.
There was a version of “Thou Art Dead” released on the official website as a promotion for the film, and I would just recommend that over the actual game.
I know that I should have low expectations no only going into a children’s video game, let alone a children’s video game based on a film meant for kids bothering their parents so they have something to play, but there have been so many good video games for children based on other forms of media that it’s not really an excuse.
I don’t know why you would give this to your kid over just showing them the film, especially when you need to have seen the film in the first place to get what’s going on. Plus the film is much more entertaining, much shorter, and much better than this game. I honestly have no idea why I even played this game to begin with. Maybe it’s because I liked the movie and I was curious as to what the game was like. I probably should have just watched a couple of YouTube videos to satiate my curiosity.
2010
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2020/05/10/the-ball/
The Ball originally started out as a mod for Unreal Tournament 3, and went on to win “Best Single Player Mod for 2008” for ModDB, and came in second place in the 2008 “Make Something Unreal” competition held by Epic Games. Soon after that, it was ported over to the Unreal Development Kit, and eventually went onto be released as a stand alone game in 2010 for PC and the failed OnLive service, and in 2013, it was ported as a launch title for the failed Ouya console. Not exactly the best history for a game, but the fact that it’s still on sale on Steam and GOG is good.
But the “Make Something Unreal” competition is probably not the reason that you’ve heard of this game. The reason that you’ve heard of this game was that it was one of the 13 games contained in the Potato Sack Bundle, which was part of the Potato Sack Alternate Reality Game held by Valve leading up to the release of Portal 2, which helped in getting it released a whole 12 hours early. Unfortunately, it was almost immediately forgotten when Portal 2 eventually got released to great fan fare. But should it have been forgotten so quickly after Portal 2 came out. Let’s take a look at it shall we.
You play as an archaeologist working on the slopes of a dormant volcano in Pico del Miedo, Mexico, in 1940. While you and your team are digging, the floor gives out beneath you and you fall into an ancient cavern. After briefly exploring the cavern, you soon discover ancient ruins and a mysterious artifact, a gold and metal shelled Ball. With help from the Ball, you soon discover ancient secrets as you survive puzzles, traps, and ancient creatures that still lurk around in the darkness.
Probably the best way to describe The Ball is “It’s like Portal, but instead of Robots and Portals, it has a giant Ball, Aztec mummies, and an undead gorilla,” And when you have a description like that, it’s hard to not to perk your ears up at least a little bit.
Instead of the use of portals like Portal, The Ball has you have to control a giant artifact, the titular Ball, with another artifact, a gun like object that either attracts the Ball to you, or has you push it away with a forceful push.
Surprisingly, the puzzles of The Ball has some variety to it. Instead of just having you use the ball to hit buttons, the game has low gravity rooms, it lets you attach other objects to the ball so you can move them around, and has you destroying boarded up walls and support structures, along with the ball getting temporary powers. It gives the puzzles some much needed variety that makes it stand out.
But The Ball isn’t just puzzle solving, as you’ll have to take on enemies, such as undead Aztecs, which you kill by rolling them over with The Ball. There are even sections that I would call mini-Boss Battles, which include one with a giant gorilla, and multiple encounters with a giant worm and these giant lizard looking creatures in armor.
When you die, none of your progress is lost. If anything, dying is more of a road bump rather than a set back, since you’re respawned not too far from where you were and all of the progress that you’ve made is still there.
While the art style can be quite nice in areas, and other areas do have a sense of scale to them, unfortunately, the game does suffer from that brown tine that a lot of games had around that time. And while the rest of the game never looks bad, but it looks fine for a project done by a small team.
There a few parts where you use a minecart to go from one area, but you can’t control it, and the game doesn’t even use these sections to show off something impressive, just more caves. I know this levels were probably made to show off what the team could do, but in hindsight, they just feel pointless. But there is a large, ancient vehicle that you can drive, but unfortunately, it’s limited by the linearity of the levels.
Once you’ve completed the story campaign, the game features several Survival Levels that you can play with your newfound skills, where you have to survive multiple rounds from enemies, or solve a series of more advanced puzzles. There are two notable Survival Levels. The first is a piece of DLC that came out in 2012, made by some students from the FutureGames class of 2012.
The second piece of DLC is a series of Survival maps is a Steam exclusive set of maps set in the Aperture Labs from the Portal series, which were used in helping solve the Potato Sack ARG at the time. While it’s long passed the ARG, these levels are still incredibly fun to play, and mix the Portal and Ball gameplay sensibilities well.
Unfortunately, The Ball was quickly forgotten due to Portal 2 coming out not too long after this game, and ended up being a lot more impressive than The Ball. And when you’re dealing with something as polished as a Valve game, it’s pretty easy to see why The Ball ended up forgotten. Still, The Ball goes for USD$10 these days, and it’s worth checking out if you’re looking for some first person puzzling like the original Portal did.
The Ball originally started out as a mod for Unreal Tournament 3, and went on to win “Best Single Player Mod for 2008” for ModDB, and came in second place in the 2008 “Make Something Unreal” competition held by Epic Games. Soon after that, it was ported over to the Unreal Development Kit, and eventually went onto be released as a stand alone game in 2010 for PC and the failed OnLive service, and in 2013, it was ported as a launch title for the failed Ouya console. Not exactly the best history for a game, but the fact that it’s still on sale on Steam and GOG is good.
But the “Make Something Unreal” competition is probably not the reason that you’ve heard of this game. The reason that you’ve heard of this game was that it was one of the 13 games contained in the Potato Sack Bundle, which was part of the Potato Sack Alternate Reality Game held by Valve leading up to the release of Portal 2, which helped in getting it released a whole 12 hours early. Unfortunately, it was almost immediately forgotten when Portal 2 eventually got released to great fan fare. But should it have been forgotten so quickly after Portal 2 came out. Let’s take a look at it shall we.
You play as an archaeologist working on the slopes of a dormant volcano in Pico del Miedo, Mexico, in 1940. While you and your team are digging, the floor gives out beneath you and you fall into an ancient cavern. After briefly exploring the cavern, you soon discover ancient ruins and a mysterious artifact, a gold and metal shelled Ball. With help from the Ball, you soon discover ancient secrets as you survive puzzles, traps, and ancient creatures that still lurk around in the darkness.
Probably the best way to describe The Ball is “It’s like Portal, but instead of Robots and Portals, it has a giant Ball, Aztec mummies, and an undead gorilla,” And when you have a description like that, it’s hard to not to perk your ears up at least a little bit.
Instead of the use of portals like Portal, The Ball has you have to control a giant artifact, the titular Ball, with another artifact, a gun like object that either attracts the Ball to you, or has you push it away with a forceful push.
Surprisingly, the puzzles of The Ball has some variety to it. Instead of just having you use the ball to hit buttons, the game has low gravity rooms, it lets you attach other objects to the ball so you can move them around, and has you destroying boarded up walls and support structures, along with the ball getting temporary powers. It gives the puzzles some much needed variety that makes it stand out.
But The Ball isn’t just puzzle solving, as you’ll have to take on enemies, such as undead Aztecs, which you kill by rolling them over with The Ball. There are even sections that I would call mini-Boss Battles, which include one with a giant gorilla, and multiple encounters with a giant worm and these giant lizard looking creatures in armor.
When you die, none of your progress is lost. If anything, dying is more of a road bump rather than a set back, since you’re respawned not too far from where you were and all of the progress that you’ve made is still there.
While the art style can be quite nice in areas, and other areas do have a sense of scale to them, unfortunately, the game does suffer from that brown tine that a lot of games had around that time. And while the rest of the game never looks bad, but it looks fine for a project done by a small team.
There a few parts where you use a minecart to go from one area, but you can’t control it, and the game doesn’t even use these sections to show off something impressive, just more caves. I know this levels were probably made to show off what the team could do, but in hindsight, they just feel pointless. But there is a large, ancient vehicle that you can drive, but unfortunately, it’s limited by the linearity of the levels.
Once you’ve completed the story campaign, the game features several Survival Levels that you can play with your newfound skills, where you have to survive multiple rounds from enemies, or solve a series of more advanced puzzles. There are two notable Survival Levels. The first is a piece of DLC that came out in 2012, made by some students from the FutureGames class of 2012.
The second piece of DLC is a series of Survival maps is a Steam exclusive set of maps set in the Aperture Labs from the Portal series, which were used in helping solve the Potato Sack ARG at the time. While it’s long passed the ARG, these levels are still incredibly fun to play, and mix the Portal and Ball gameplay sensibilities well.
Unfortunately, The Ball was quickly forgotten due to Portal 2 coming out not too long after this game, and ended up being a lot more impressive than The Ball. And when you’re dealing with something as polished as a Valve game, it’s pretty easy to see why The Ball ended up forgotten. Still, The Ball goes for USD$10 these days, and it’s worth checking out if you’re looking for some first person puzzling like the original Portal did.