Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/12/11/daze-before-christmas-review/

Much like there is a lot of Christmas themed media, such as movies, books, music, there was bound to be some Christmas themed video game to try and make bank off of the holiday. And one of those games was Daze before Christmas. And already I have a complaint. Why isn’t is called “The Daze Before Christmas”? Because I just naturally call it that anyway and it just sounds nicer. But I digress, let’s jump into the game.

Our story follows Santa Claus, right as December rolls around, and Louse the Mouse has dastardly plans to prevent Christmas from happening. So Louse the Mouse gets help from his motley crew of creatures, which features Mr. Weather, The TimeKeeper, and the Evil Snowman (amazingly original names, I know), as they execute their plans when Santa is asleep. The Evil Snowman scared the all of the elves away, and The TimeKeeper stole parts from all of Santa’s machines. But that wasn’t enough for Louse the Mouse, as he stole all of the kids presents, and curse them all with a spell. When Santa wakes up, he finds that everything is not right, and has to spend the next 24 days before Christmas making everything right.

The manual puts it a little more eloquently as a rhyming poem.

Bizarrely, the Mega Drive/Genesis version was exclusive to Australia of all countries, and the SNES version had exactly one person porting it over to that console to get it released on time, and that version was exclusive to both Australia and Europe. You would think that something as specific and niche as a Christmas themed platformer would be released in more countries so it could recoup the cost the development of something so specific, but alas, only Australia and Europe were blessed with the release of Daze Before Christmas. From what I hear, America was going to get the SNES version, but the U.S. Division of Sunsoft was shut down before they could release it.

The whole game is pretty short. Sure, there might be 24 levels to represent the 24 days that it takes for Santa to save Christmas, but each is only 2 or 3 minutes at most, and that’s if you don’t screw up, which is rare. Screwing up is kinda difficult to do in this game since the whole game is pretty easy. The boss battles are a little more difficult, since it requires memorizing a pattern unique to easy boss, but those are pretty easy too. The harder difficulties aren’t too hard in terms of difficulty either. That’s probably because it’s aimed at children, so I can’t really complain about the difficulty.

The game comes with all of your standard sidescroller elements from the time. You have a health bar, represented by 5 Santa hats, lives, represented by Santa’s Face, and points, which you can get by picking up Blue Presents, throwing presents into children’s chimneys (I’ll be talking about this specifically later on), and defeating enemies.

There are some power-ups that you can collect too. The Lightning Bolt that let’s you throw fire, which can be used in snow filled levels to help your reindeer escape. However, the most noteworthy powerup is the Tea, which lets you transform into the Anti-Claus. I’ve also seen it referred to as a “potion” in the manual along with it being called a tea, as well as a coffee, so I’ll be using those interchangeably.

Apparently you can destroy all of the presents that Santa created when you’re the Anti-Claus, preventing you from getting more points, and the children from getting their presents. Although I never really used the Anti-Claus that much since regular Santa has a more useful (albeit short) ranged attack.

The camera feels way too zoomed in, and I’ve accidentally jumped on something in the level that hurts you or into a void that straight up kills you and takes a life away, or accidentally getting in the way of an enemies attack or running into an enemy because I couldn’t see where I was jumping or running.

There is a two-player option, although isn’t not all that fun. It’s kind of similar to that of the original Super Mario Bros for the NES. Each player takes over every other level, or if you die. Unless you had no other games at the time, I don’t see anyone playing this mode. And since it’s incredibly easy to find a lot of the classic sidescrollers from the time with a 2-player mode, I imagine it’s very hard to convince anyone that they should play Daze Before Christmas over anything else.

The game comes with infinite continues, making dying a bit pointless. The only thing it effects are the points, resetting it to zero when you lose all of your lives, so unless you’re the type of person who wants to try and get the highest score possible, it shouldn’t matter too much.

There are a few mildly amusing things found throughout the game, such as a present wrapping machine that you go through that wraps Santa in a box and wrapping, and a few of the loading for screens have some nice and funny pixel art. It adds some nice flourish to the game, but it doesn’t really save the rest of the game from being underwhelming.

The music ranges from forgettable and mediocre to actually kinda catchy, but you’re not going to remember it outside of playing the game. Probably the best music is when you play as Anti-Claus. It’s all upbeat and jazzy.

Weirdly enough, every couple of levels are broken up by a section where you have to drop presents that you’ve collected in the last couple of levels into the chimneys of all the good boys and girls, all while having to avoid whatever happens to flying through the air. While it’s not weird that Santa does this, it’s weird that this is not near the end of the game where, you know, it would be Christmas Eve, and an appropriate time for Santa to be doing this. It just make it seem like he’s dropping off presents all through December instead of just on Christmas Eve. It’s a fun section to play, and the developers were probably just using it to break up the levels, but I feel like that’s what the boss levels should be for.

The best part of the game is that some of the sprite work can be quite nice, and the best of it can be seen as the intro screen to each of the levels.

Daze Before Christmas might have some decent ideas and a nice sense of humor, but it can’t escape the fact that it’s just an average sidescroller. Considering how few good Christmas games there are, there’s not much choice for something to play around the holidays, with most games just having a Christmas coat of paint that only appear when it actually gets close Christmas, and that’s if you’re lucky. So if you’re in the mood to play something jolly and festive for the holidays, then you could a lot worse than Daze Before Christmas.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/04/16/mod-corner-katana-max-payne-review/

Katana is an ambitious mod for the first Max Payne, introducing a world and characters that are surprisingly fleshed out. Obviously inspired by the likes of The Matrix, Ghost In The Shell, Blade Runner, and Akira, so much so that the mod uses the soundtrack from Akira directly, as well as audio from several other sources, Despite that, the mod manages to feel like it’s own world.

The story is pretty thorough, so much so that the mod comes with a PDF explaining the story and characters in depth. The mod feels like it takes place in the middle of a story already in progress, so even though the PDF isn’t necessary to enjoy the mod, it gives the mod a lot of context.

But to summarize it the best i can, you play as an unnamed character who was raised as nobility, and is a trained soldier who became an assassin. His real memories were replaced by false ones by a shady organization called “The Order”. Our main character is now on the run from “The Order”, who has it’s eyes everywhere, and is now being hunted by them. As he makes his escapes, he comes across characters who seem to know a lot more than they’re letting on. All of this story was way more than was either necessary or expected for a small project like this, but is gladly appreciated.

Since the mod is called Katana, it’s pretty obvious that one of the new weapons for this mod is a Katana. To show it off, the mod implements another mod, which is Kung Fu 3.0. This means that hand-to-hand combat features a lot of acrobatic moves, such as running up walls and leaps. The only time hand-to-hand combat is a problem is with boss battles. The first boss requires melee combat, and takes away your guns during it. I’m pretty sure it does that to show off the combat.

And when the boss hits you, he takes off huge chunks of your health. You’ll be using up your pills pretty quickly, and will probably have to reload quite a bit. Thankfully, the rest of the boss battles let you use your guns. While this does make the bosses bullet sponges and easier to defeat, I’d rather that then having to reload a thousand times, wasting hours of my life.

Graphically, the whole mod is pretty impressive for a tiny team of modders. Most of the levels have lots of smaller details scattered around them, along with the odd easter egg. Some of the set pieces in the mod stand out and are fun to experience.

For some reason, cutscenes are unskippable, which means if you have to reload, you have to re-watch it over. And if you’re having difficulty with an enemy or forgot to save in a while, it’s going to get incredibly tedious. The base game lets you skip the cutscenes, so i don’t know why this mod doesn’t give you the ability to do it.

Katana surprisingly comes with voice acting, and it’s pretty amateurish and clearly recorded on several microphones of varying quality by several people who aren’t professional voice actors. But for a mod that came out around 2003, there wasn’t much to compete with, and it makes for a nice addition, especially when other mods at the time didn’t have it.

With a mix of unique ambition and a surprisingly high quality execution, Katana is definitely worth checking out. If this mod had been picked up and was done by a professional team, it could have been something interesting. But since it remains a relatively unknown mod for Max Payne that has a “To Be Continued…” ending, it’s probably going to fade off into obscurity. Considering that Max Payne is relatively cheap on Steam and pretty easy to get working on modern systems, this mod is definitely worth checking out.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2020/03/09/soldier-of-fortune-ii-double-helix-review-pc-xbox/

Due to the success of Soldier of Fortune, Raven Software soon started working on a sequel, and a mere 2 years later, Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix was released on May 20th, 2002. It was later ported to the original Xbox by Gratioutous Games. Considering how I feel about the PC version, I don’t know how SoFII would have done in the limitations of the original Xbox.

John Mullins returns, both the fictionalized character from the first game, and the real life John Mullins who was the main inspiration for said character who was brought on to consult and help have the game have a certain amount of accuracy. Considering that the second game is a lot more down to Earth and realistic, I’d say that a tad more of his advice and experience was used for this game than the last one.

The story starts in Prague in a prologue that takes place during the early years in John’s career. He is sent to Prague to get Dr. Piotr Ivanovich, one of the Soviet Union’s top biopreparat scientists who wants to defect in fear of his life and is willing to give up information in exchange for protection from the Soviet Union. After leaving the hotel they met in and escaping in an exciting car chase, the manage to get out of the country. 10 years later, and Mullins is now working for “The Shop” much like the last game.

With the information from Dr. Ivanovich, who now also works with “The Shop”, you are sent on a mission to prevent the usage of bio-chemical weapons that Dr. Ivanovich had been working on before he defected. The rest of the story is written like a pulpy Tom Clancy novel, filled with all of the clichés and plot points that you’d expect. You probably won’t remember a whole lot of it after you’ve finished, but is entertaining in the same way a so good it’s bad ’90s action film is as you’re watching it.

This time around the voice acting is not as enjoyably cheesy as the first games, with everyone being incredibly wooden and forgettable. However, a lot of the same actors have returned, which is nice.

The game runs of “ID Tech 3”, which is the Quake 3 engine, and the whole thing looks a bit like a mixed bag. Levels range from OK to decent at times. It doesn’t quite have something as appealing to look at like the giant castle which had a secret laboratory or the Tokyo skyline, but it still looks good for the most part. A lot of the levels have some pretty weather effect, such as rain, and levels do take place all over the world, so there is some great variety. Yet again Raven Software has taken an ID Software engine and made something alright for the most part. Except for one thing, the character models

Character models look a bit weird, but especially with their faces. When the characters are talking, their faces go into weird shapes that look like they’re going to tear apart at the seam. Half-Life did something similar back in 1998, fours years before SoF II. Maybe it’s because it looked simpler, but after the HD pack was released with Half-Life: Blue Shift the year before SoF II, which had better facial animation, SoF II just ends up looking weird.

Much like the first game, SoF II does come with the GHOUL damage system, but now upgraded to GHOUL 2.0, in which you can shoot the heads, arms, and legs off of enemies. Like the first game, I did come across a glitch in which after a bad guy got his head blown to pieces, but the guy was still running around trying to kill me. It was an unintentional piece of black humor.

The game also tries to flesh out the stealth sections by including mechanics where you can unlock doors with a lock-pick or cut tripwires, but it boils down to just pressing and holding E for a random amount of time that the game just decides on however it feels at that point in the game.

Some of the things that I complained about the first game have been improved. You can pick up health kits and it automatically replenishes your health just like the armor. Instead of an inventory, you can select certain items you are holding with the number keys. I’d still rather have specific keys for certain items that you;re holding, like G for grenades and N for the night vision. Overall, it’s better, which is nice. Speaking of items, you have Binoculars, Night Vision, and Thermal Vision.

SoF II comes with a stealth mechanic, although it’s borderline pointless. If you alert someone, an alarm goes off, and it stays on the entire section of the game that it’s used in, which means the enemies are constantly on alert for you. Since it’s incredibly easy to trip the alarm, the stealth is rendered completely pointless. There was only one level that it worked, and that in the prologue where you have to sneak Ivanovich out of the country.

Probably the biggest new feature is the Random Mission Generator, which generates a randomly generated map. Obvious, I know. The mode does come with a good variety of options to choose on, including the type of mission (escape, infiltration, assassination, and demolition), time of day, type of terrain (hills, snow, jungle, or desert), difficulty, and the ability to choose what items you want, or get whatever the mode decides to give you. The randomness is based on a random seed generator, so if you just so happened to like a level, you can save it for later. The levels end up looking a little bland, but that’s just because they’re randomly included.

SoF II comes with your standard arsenal for a First Person Shooter. You have your melee weapon with the Combat Knight. They can be thrown at enemies if you’re trying to stealth your way through a level, or are running low on ammo for your other weapons. They can be picked back up so you don’t have to run out of them. I’ve never really had low ammo, but then again I was playing on the lower difficulties because of how insanely difficult this game is. There are two handguns, two SMGs, three assault rifles, a grenade launcher, a rocket launcher, and 2 machine guns, one of which can also be found mounted in some levels.

Rounding out the arsenal are the grenades, which include the flashbang, smoke grenade, an incendiary grenade, and your regular grenades. A lot of the weapons come with add-ons that include things like laser sights and bayonets. It’s a nice, varied, and quite extensive selection of weapons. Sure, there are tons of inaccuracies that would send a gun nut up the wall, such as the way the grenade launcher reloads, but Soldier of Fortune was never really about being realistic, it was only about putting up the appearance of being realistic. The last game had a cyber ninja for fucks sake.

But by far, bot the most interesting and the most annoying weapon in the entire game is the “XM 29 SABR OICN”, which is supposed to be a long range weapon with an airburst grenade launcher with integrated night vision. Trying to switch between it being a grande launcher and automatic rifle is frustrating and is now worth using since you can just use the M4A1 with the night vision in your inventory.

Now comes the games major problems. Some of the earlier levels in the Single Player take place in Columbia, and they’re borderline impossible. The level is filled with foliage, and it’s difficult to see a lot of the enemies when they’re standing, and impossible when they’re crouching. The enemies are incredibly accurate with their aim, even if you’re trying to hide behind the same foliage that they are. The only way to hide is behind something solid, like a tree or a wall.

The enemies also frequently throw grenades, and the don’t seem to run out of them. This is also the only level with tripwires, so you have to deal with those taking off big chunks of your health, or even killing you if you’re low on health if you accidentally activate them. You could either cut them, or just jump over them. Just memorizing where they are and jumping over them is much quicker.

If the level wasn’t hard enough, there is also a helicopter that follows you around the level too, firing on you in scripted evens, and the only way to destroy it is at the end of one point during this section of the game. The entire section is having to deal with getting killed from every direction. The was one of the levels in the demo, and I wouldn’t have blamed people for this level putting them off from buying this game completely. If you can get passed this level without breaking your keyboard in frustration, then you deserve a medal. And some therapy.

The second half of the Columbia section has you meeting up with a team of marines, which brings up a whole new slew of problems. If you get too far away from them, either too far ahead or behind them, one of them yells “Execute him!”, and you die instantly. Sometimes, you don’t even hear a gunshot. I guess the in-universe reason is that the terrorists aren’t alerted to their and your presence, but it’s still obnoxious. The friendly characters aren’t very smart, but if you sit behind something and let them take out the enemies, it makes the level easier, but it also makes the level incredibly tedious.

There is another mission where you have to fight a helicopter, much like the first game, but only with the difficult cranked up to 11. You have to shoot the panels on the sides of the winds, exposing the engine in side. The helicopter can do tons of damage, so you’ll be constantly dying and quick loading. The team behind this game must have thought it was amazing, or had run out of time or budget, because the last level is also a helicopter fight, yet even more balls to the wall difficult.

Finally, there is the airport level. Years before Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s infamous airport scene, there was Soldier of Fortune 2. On this level, terrorists have taken over an airport in Switzerland, and because of this, there are civilians running around the level. If one of the civilians dies, game over, and you have to either start the level over again, or start from your last save.

That doesn’t sound so bad until you find out that when your enemies try and kill you, their AI is so bad that they will accidentally shoot through the civilians to try and kill you, resulting a game over. And the civilian AI is the worst of the bunch, as they keep getting in the way of the terrorists.

Couldn’t Raven Software come up with a reason to not have the civilians running around like chickens with their heads cut off? The game could have had the civilians locked in a room at the end of the level with the terrorists protecting the room, threatening to kill them, they could be hiding somewhere around the level, out of the way of both you and the enemies.

A Gold Edition of this game came out, and along with the typical bug fixes, it includes new content for the multiplayer, which is always a nice bonus.

This is going to be a lukewarm recommendation from me. While the fact that it’s a pretty good game, it’s insanely unfair difficulty makes it off-putting in a lot of ways. They didn’t even change the AI when patching the game. If there was one thing that I would change with this game, it would be the bullshit AI.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/06/05/stop-stress-a-day-of-fury-wii-wiiware-2009-review/

Jack is having a bad day. From the ever annoying alarm waking him up for yet another day of work to the inevitable traffic jam and having to put up with your obnoxious boss, Jack has had it with his daily life. So what does Jack do? Jack picks up the nearest object and turns it into a weapon, taking his fury out on everything and everyone around him.

Basically the plot of “Stop Stress: A Day of Fury” is like the movie Falling Down was told in a more comical over-the-top way.

And if anything, this game has made me feel even more stressed after playing it. The entire game might only be half an hour long, 45 minutes at most, but you’re going to be swinging your Wiimote and Nunchuck around the entire time, which can be tiring. If anything, you might get a small work out from this game with just how much swinging around of the Wiimote and Nunchuck you do.

The controls work pretty well, but the controls aren’t trying to be accurate like some other Wii games, instead using a simple motion for the characters actions, like using a a quick swing off the Wiimote to swing at an enemy.

To move around, you move the Wiimote to turn your character around like other first person games on the wii, but instead of using the analog stick to move your character forward or back, you move to one of the nearby highlighted spots by pressing one of the directional keys on the Wiimote.

This also removes an of the awkward First Person controls that most First Person games on the console had. It’s not great, but I would rather these controls than another game on the Wii with awkward First Person controls

There is some mild replayability to the game, but only to the extent of topping your own score either on the same difficulty or on a higher difficulty, and I don’t see a lot of people doing that once they’ve experience the little content that this game has.

And while the concept for the game was enough of an excuse to justify the game, it wore pretty thin by the end of it, which I’m pretty sure the developers knew because like I said earlier, it’s only half an hour to 45 minutes at most and is a small downloadable title.

I don’t know if I would recommend this game, even as a curiosity. While it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome, it’s still kinda annoying and the comedy doesn’t really make up for it’s other shortcomings, making the whole thing mediocre. And to top it all off, it was a whopping $8 when it was initially released. There’s no way I would have paid that much for it back when it came out.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/04/22/darkwatch-2005-review/

When I think of the PlayStation 2, First Person Shooters aren’t the first thing that comes to mind, but despite that, the system did have it’s fair share of really decent FPS games. One of those First Person Shooter’s is Darkwatch, a game developed by Blue Moon Studios (formerly Sammy Studios), and weirdly enough, published by Capcom of all companies in 2005 for the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox.

The game starts with Jericho Cross, an outlaw gunfighter in the late 19th-century American Frontier, doing one last job by robbing a train. Unbeknownst to him, the train belongs to the Darkwatch, an ancient organization committed to destroying supernatural evils. The train is not carrying gold or money, but a vampire lord that he accidentally releases named Lazarus Malkoth, resulting in Jericho getting bitten in the process, slowing turning into a vampire for the rest of the game.

Soon, Jericho is conscripted into the Darkwatch despite the uneasiness of the fellow elite operatives having a vampire join their ranks, and he has to defeat Malkoth with the help of his fellow Darkwatch agent Cassidy Sharp, who was murdered shortly after meeting Jericho, and now guides him as a spiritual voice. From there on, it’s pretty much what you’d expect.

The game has a moral system, or at least tries to have one. Throughout the game, you’re often given a choice to save someone in two different ways. The first are hidden damned souls located around every level, and you can choose to either to damn their soul to eternal torment or save their soul from suffering. The other type of moral choice is several times throughout the game, you’re given the choice to save someone from dying or turning into a zombie or ghoul, or turn them yourself. It doesn’t really add up to much. The only appeal of the moral system is that the choices lead to power ups, with both evil and good having their own exclusive powers, all of which you can use for a short period of time when a meter is fully charged. The only real choice that matters is towards the end of the game, and it’s a pretty obvious one.

Good powers include the “Silver Bullet”, which increases damage from firing your guns, “Fear”, causing enemies to run off, “Mystic Armor”, which adds an extra layer to your shields, and “Vindicator”, which causes all enemies in the vicinity to be struck with lightening. Bad powers include “Blood Frenzy”, causing your melee powers to increase their damage, “Turn”, which makes your enemies slaves, “Black Shroud”, causing enemies damage whenever they hit you, and “Soul Stealer”, which sucks out your enemies souls from a distance.

Playing through the game, it was pretty obvious that this was one of the first games that was clearly influenced by the first two Halo games that had come out at that point with a few of their design choices. Your character has a Blood Shield that regenerates when you hide behind cover, just like the shield from Halo. There are also Blood Canteens located around levels that act like Health Packs. But these are few and far between, since getting your health back is mostly done through picking up an enemies energy when they die. The energy you pick up from enemies can also be used to power up the energy bar for your special abilities.

The most annoying enemies are the ones holding barrels of TNT that can sneak up on you every now and again and kill you. At least with something like the Headless Kamikaze enemies in the Serious Sam franchise are screaming at the top of their lungs while running at you, making them easy to spot.

If you ever get a little lost, there is a handy feature called “Blood Vision”, that when you click in the right analog stick, your vision changes to red, and enemies, weapons, and other key elements to glow white, all while zooming in a bit so it makes those things easier to spot.

Thankfully the shooting sections are often broken up by a few other types of gameplay. A couple of times you ride a horse throughout the desert. You’re not really riding a horse through an area so much as you’re just shooting enemies as you’re either getting to your destination or catching up to a train in one of those sections. There is also a turret sections. It’s just OK, which is the best you could hope for with a turret section.

At a certain point in the game, you get to choose which mission you’d like to do next out of a list of missions, which is pointless, since you have to do all of them anyway. Maybe there was a section initially planned where you could walk around the Darkwatch base but it was cut out, but who knows. It also doesn’t let you know that much outside of a brief description of what to do, so picking a weapon for said mission is made more difficult, and you have to guess what to use if you’ve never played the mission before.

There is even a small driving section of the game, and it’s features the smoothest gameplay out of the whole game. The vehicle, named the Darkwatch Coyote (“coincidentally” named like an animal, like Halo’s warthog), also comes with a turret that you use to shoot nearby enemies, or you can run them over if you get bored. It’s a shame that it’s only one part of the game.

The game still looks pretty good for a PlayStation 2 and Xbox game. Nothing amazing, but the games artstyle has a really nice aesthetic, combining horror, western, and steampunk, on top the whole game generally looking pretty decent, especially the weapons.

Checkpoints are plentiful throughout the game, so when you die, you’re never sent back too far. And when you die, you don’t have to reload the entire level. The game thankfully just drops you back to the last checkpoint, which makes the game flow much better.

Probably the biggest downside of this game are the controls. The controls have those stiff feeling controls that a lot of PS2 and Xbox games had. It’s not awful, but I can see it turning a lot of people away who are more used to more modern gaming sensibilities. Despite that, all of the guns sound powerful and feel good to use.

You can also shoot off parts of an enemy, including their arms and heads, adding another satisfying layer to the shooting, as well as giving some indication that you’re damaging your enemies. There is also dynamite and a PlayStation 2 exclusive Splitter Grenade that explodes on impact, both sending enemies flying with ragdoll physics.

There are some unlockables that allow for some replayability. The best unlockable is the Gunslinger Mod, in which you can go back and play any of the chapters of the story mode that you’ve unlocked and play as either good or evil Jericho, and try to get high scores, such as the amount of enemies killed and weapon percentage accuracy. Getting good scores will unlock other things such as movies and concept art.

Like a lot of First Person Shooters of the time, Darkwatch came with a multiplayer component. It comes with some standard stuff, like Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag, but it does have a somewhat unique mode called “Soul Hunter” in which you fight to collect Blood Clouds and be the first to to fill your Blood Bar, and “Team Soul Hunter”, which is similar, but you have to fill your teams Blood Bar.

Weirdly enough, each version of the game has a few differences. The Xbox version let you play the game over Xbox live. Unfortunately, the PlayStation 2 version is a bit more limited, only letting you play splitscreen or co-op mode. This was probably because the multiplayer component of the PlayStation 2 was an optional part of the console where as the multiplayer of the Xbox version was already integrated into the console, and was probably easier to develop for.

Back when the game was being released, it had a pretty big promotional campaign and was planned to be the first installment of a new media franchise, but unfortunately its sequel got canceled in 2007, the only thing left is a phone recording of a brief concept trailer, and the planned film adaptation never got released. Which is a shame, because another game on a more modern system could have been neat to see.

I wish that Darkwatch could get a re-release on modern consoles and PC. It’s a really solid First Person Shooter stuck under a few limitations as a result of the time it was released, and smoothing out some of those issues, such as the controls and the multiplayer not being around any more, could really help this game.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/02/08/torins-passage-1995-pc-mac-review/

It was 1994, and video game designer Al Lowe, who was responsible for the Leisure Suit Larry series, was watching Mrs Doubtfire with his daughter in a movie theater with a crowd people. As he was watching the movie, he noticed that there was two groups of people the crowd. Children, who were laughing at the slapstick happening to the characters, and adults, who were laughing at the jokes that passed right over the heads of the children that they were with. When he noticed this, he asked himself: “Why isn’t there a computer game that my 9-year-old daughter an I could play like this?” And thus, the idea of Torin’s Passage was born.

Torin’s Passage was released on October 31st, 1994 despite it not being that spooky, and it was developed and published by Sierra On-Line. It was released for MS-DOS, Windows 3.1 and 95, and Mac. It was written by Al Lowe, who had previously written and was famous for Leisure Suit Larry, as well as Freddy Pharkas Frontier Pharmacist. Although, this wasn’t Al Lowe’s first kids game, previously working on The Black Cauldron, Mickey’s Space Adventure, and Donald Duck’s Playground.

The game begins on a dark and stormy night, as an evil warlock acts out his plan to kill thie king, queen, and their baby while they’re all sleeping. While he successfully manages to kill the king and queen, the baby manages to escape with it’s nursemaid, who happened to be taking care of it after it had woken up in the middle of the night.

15 years later, we find our protagonist, Torin Fahrman (buh dum tss), living on a farm with his parents. After his father sends him off on an errand, his parents get kidnapped by an evil sorceress, who he learns about after talking with a passer by, who happened to see the whole thing. The passerby tells him about how this evil sorceress is located in the worlds below, a series of worlds that are nested inside of each other inside of the planet, like a Russian nesting doll. Torin embarks on a quest with his sidekick, a pink dog-looking shapeshifting creature named Boogle, to save his parents.

The game’s story is pretty simple, but good enough to get the game going. For adults, it might be a bit simple to properly enjoy their attention, but there are plenty of jokes in their that an adult would get something out of. Probably the least funny part of the game are The Bitternuts in the second world. They’re a parody of 1950’s sitcoms, and the laugh track playing after every joke gets pretty old and annoying real quick.

And if Torin’s voice sounds familiar to any fans of 90’s First Person Shooters, that’s because he’s voiced by Mike Shapiro, who voiced Barney and G-Man from Half-Life. I guess he’s accidentally had a place in my childhood across both games.

Unfortunately, the game’s simple story is the result of the developers intending to have four sequels, which was supposed to chronicle the rest of Torin’s life, from his marriage to Princess Leena and assumption of the throne in the second game, up to his death in the fifth game. With Ken Williams (company founder) departure from Sierra and disappointing sales, along with the eventual buyout of the company prevented this from ever happening. It’s still nice to get a glimpse into what could have been.

Visually, Torin’s Passage is a fantastic looking game for it’s time, and has aged well, with it’s Disney inspired graphics, despite the fact it had a limited 256-color palette. The backgrounds are all hand-painted and look gorgeous, the game knows it because the interface came with a ‘Scroll Handle’ that let’s you look at any part of some screens that contain a large piece of art for it’s background, both horizontally and vertically. And it worked because every now and again I would just scroll to look at the background art.

The game also features 3D objects too. They’re a bit low detailed from today’s perspective, but between that and the highly stylized art style, it actually works well with the rest of the games aesthetic. The soundtrack is also pretty solid, done by 3-time Academy Award winner Michel LeGrand. Those 3 awards were for ‘Summer of ’42’ (1971), ‘Yentl’ (1983), and the original song “The Windmills of your Minds” from the ‘Thomas Crown Affair’ (1968). I don’t exactly think of these when I think of Torin’s Passage, but that’s one hell of a resume.

During the game, you can pick between Torin’s inventory and Boogle’s inventory. This is because, like I mentioned earlier, Boogle has the ability to change into varying objects. I feel like Boogle could have made a fun toy, but I guess this games low sales prevented that, but I digress. The middle of the inventory has a platform where you can view anything in your inventory in 3D. This only comes in handy 2 times in the whole game where you can actually interact with an item, but for 1995, this was incredibly neat being able to see your inventory up close and in 3D.

Unfortunately, a few parts of the game really bring down the experience. In chapter 4, there is a giant lava maze that’s difficult to navigate to find an item that sparkles, but only every couple of seconds. Apparently it was designed by Al Lowe’s daughter, while is absolutely adorable and is an incredibly nice thing to do, but is not exactly the best art of the game. I genuinely feel bad criticizing the drawing abilities of a child. The chapter right after has a slope you have to try and climb, but you have to click on very specific parts of it, and it’s practically pixel hunting, all while the slope tells you what parts you can actually click on in a high pitched voice. All for the sake of the pun “slippery slope”.

The game does come with a hint feature represented by an hourglass with a question mark that pops up if you’re having a bit of trouble, which is useful for the younger players who might have trouble with some of the more difficult puzzles of the game.

While Torin’s Passage might not be a classic point-and-click game for either Sierra or the genre as a whole, it still has a ton of Sierra’s charm and polish, and is definitely worth checking out for any massive point-and-click adventure game fan.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2017/06/28/mod-corner-ancient-aliens-doom-ii-hell-on-earth/

Are aliens really out there, somewhere in the universe? Do they ever visit out ancestors hundreds if not thousands of years ago? Did they influence mythology or legends? Do they keep visiting us? And why do they keep abducting cows and giving people anal probes? We may never know. But in the mean time, lets look at a mod that might give us an answer.

Ancient Aliens’ basic plot setup has you going on a very tounge-in-cheek mission to investigate if aliens do exist, and is quite obviously poking gun at how silly a lot of conspiracy theories are at trying to shove aliens into every even slightly unanswered question of history. The story is simply the through line of the mod, but it delivers some amusing fluff to a mod that would have otherwise been a themed map pack otherwise.

All of the maps are pretty solid and well designed. It uses a mix of the earth tones of Mesoamerica for Earth levels and bright purples, teals, and pinks for the the out there alien architectures. It’s all hermetically pleasing and definitely gives the visuals some variety. The only downside is that the whole mod is on the more difficult side of things, with the mod having a ton of monsters on the later levels. While it doesn’t feel unfair, there are going to be a few more deaths for more casual Doom fans.

A few of the monsters from Doom have received a visual makeover to fit the aesthetic of the mod, and their new looks do a good job of mixing the original designs with what the mod is going for. There are a few new ones too, such as a fast moving invisible guy in a robotic looking suit who only appears when he’s shooting at you, and a hexahedron looking monster with faces on each side that shoots rockets.

Another thing this mod has is an original soundtrack that fits the mood of the mod, fitting the bizarre fever dream that is this mod, and is currently on sale for only a few bucks over on the composers Bandcamp.

Amongst all of these compliments, i have only one real complaint, and that is the mod does get a tad bit hard in the second half. All in all, Ancient Aliens gets a recommendation.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/05/11/soldier-of-fortune-2000-pc-ps2-dreamcast/

It was the year 2000, and it was a fantastic year in First Person Shooters. It was the year of The Operative: No One Lives Forever, Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force, Perfect Dark, Timesplitters, Medal of Honor: Underground, and Counter-Strike got it’s first boxed release to the public. Among these classics is Raven Software’s Soldier of Fortune.

Developed by Raven Software and published by Activision, Soldier of Fortune was released on February 29th, 2000 on the PC, and was later released for the PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast, as well as being ported to Linux by Loki Software. The game was named after the magazine with the same name, which was aimed at actual mercenaries, with it’s last issue being released on April, 2016. Leading up to it’s demise, it was but a shell of it’s former self due to several controversies, including multiple people placing “GUN FOR HIRE” ads in the magazine for the actual assassinations and murders of people. How multiple people managed to get multiple personal ads for actual real world assassination through, let alone one to begin with, I still have no idea. You would have thought the wording would have triggered a closer inspection of the ad. But I digress.

The main character of Soldier of Fortune is John Mullins, based on the real life John Mullins, who is a Vietnam vet and former mercenary, and was brought in as a consultant to make the game more authentic. Although I don’t know what parts of the game were made authentic, because it goes with an over-the-top 80s and 90s action movie style instead of being a more realistic game like SWAT 3/4 or Rainbow Six. Although, in a video interview that came with the Platinum Edition of the game, John Mullins said that there are small parts of the story that mirror his real life, which makes me hope that he fought a psychopath in a highly advanced cyber suit at some point his life.

In the game, Mullins gets his contracts from a cloak & dagger anti-terrorism outfit called “The Shop”. The current contract that “The Shop” has given to Mullins involves the theft of four nuclear weapons stolen by a Afrikaner Neo-Nazi group based in Germany, led by a man called Sergei Dekker. They plan to sell the four nuclear weapons to various nations, and you’re the guy entrusted to stop them.

Helping you with your contract is your partner Aaron “Hawk” Parsons, who also works for “The Shop”, joins you in a few of your missions on the ground. Sam Gladstone, the other other person who works for “The Shop and is another friend, helps you by debriefing you on your contracts before you leave on your mission.

Surprisingly, Soldier of Fortune has a pretty famous voice cast behind it, including Michael Clarke Duncun (The Green Mile), Earl Boen (The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day), Brian Thompson (The Terminator, Cobra), Michael De Santo (The English dub of the 1995 Ghost in the Shell movie), and John Mullins himself is played by Tod Sussman (The Taking of Pellam 123, Beverly Hills Cop II). At lot of the voice acting is pretty cheesy, but it’s definitely on the entertaining side of being cheesy, and is pretty solid and fun.

The plot takes you all over the world, from NYC, Iraq and Japan to Germany, Sudan and Siberia, which means that the areas you visit are diverse to say the least, ranging from snowy mountains to jungles to deserts to the high tech city of Japan, meaning that you won’t just get the generic browns and grey of the modern shooters. Its pretty refreshing compared to the Call of Duty’s and Battlefield’s of today. There is even one level taking place in a slaughter house and is one of the highlights of the game.

Graphically, the game holds up fairly well for a game from it’s era, running on a modified Quake II engine. It does help that the game features a variety of locations so nothing gets visually stale. But the highlight of the game is the GHOUL damage model for the enemies which was made for this game, which is appropriately title for being a bit ghoulish, since it allows you allows you to blow the arms, legs, and hands off of your enemies with your shotgun, or blow them into small gibs with your rocket launcher.

Enemies react to where you shoot them. Shoot someone in the hand or leg, and they’ll clutch onto it out of pain. All of this adds a layer to the game that I guess makes it more realistic. It certainly makes the game stand out at least. There was one instance of a funny glitch where I blew the legs off of a guy and he still fell over like he still had them. The weapons also have some good sound design it, with the shotgun standing out, having some kick to it.

This GHOUL damage engine was what brought the previously mentioned controversy to the game. After the game was released, it received a complaint from a member of the public about the extreme violence to the British Columbia Film Classification Office, who then investigated the game. The BCFCO decided that the acts of violence and gore were not suitable for persons under the age of 18. In a controversial decision, the game was labeled as an “adult motion picture” and was rated as a pornographic film. In Germany, the game was placed on the Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons index. As you can tell, it got quite the extreme reaction.

If you look at the game today, the game doesn’t seem as violent compared to some of the games released these days games, such as Mortal Kombat 11 and Doom: Eternal, or even something like Manhunt which came out 3 years after this game, especially when games have been getting more realistic in the 14 years since the game came out. On the other hand, I wouldn’t exactly call it tame either, since it’s still pretty extreme in the violence department.

But the game does come with an option to disable all of the gore and password protect the option from younger people. There even was a version of the game with the gore permanently locked-out, titled “Soldier of Fortune: Tactical Low-Violence Version”, specifically made for Wal-Mart. You can pretty much buy the game uncensored these days through places like Steam and GOG, so it’s not much of an issue these days.

Gameplay wise, the game plays pretty much like your standard First Person Shooter. You run and gun your way through a series of corridors, gunning down the bad guys as you go. However, there are a few other things on top of this.

There is an inventory, but it isn’t all that great. You get your standard grenades and explosives with C4 Explosives and M24 Frag Grenades.They work exactly the same away and you have to go through the inventory to select each one, so there is no point to having the C4 Explosives. There are also Flashbangs, which you can use to blind your enemies, which i never used outside of just the once just to see how effective it was.

There are also First Aid Pack’s that you can pick up, which are frustrating to use because you have to use it the same way you use other items in your inventory. I don’t know why you couldn’t just pick it up to replenish your health the same way you pick up Bulletproof Vests to replenish your armor. Finally, there are Night Vision Goggles, which I’ve never had to use. Ever. So really, the inventory is completely useless since items could have been left our and whatever is left could have just been associated with a key, like G for grenades or N for Night Vision.

The weapons are what you’d expect for a FPS for the most part. You have two handguns, the 9mm Handgun and .44 Magnum, a Combat Shotgun, a Sniper Rifle, a sub-machine Gun, a Silenced SMG, a Heavy Machine Gun, and a Rocket Launcher. There’s also the Combat Knife, which you can throw at enemies but are limited. You can pick up off the floor or pull them out of your enemies when they’re dead. Finally there is the H-24 Slugthrower, which can take out almost everyone immediately, and a Flamethrower that I also never used but works well.

The one gun that stands out however is the Microwave Pulse Gun, which i guess is one of the liberties that Raven Software took when John Mullins was consulting for them. Before you go on your mission, you can select what weapons and equipment you want to take with you. By default, i took the Bulletproof Vest and Health Kits because a few of the enemies are a little difficult to get past. I also take the Heavy Machine Gun because enemies drop the most amount of ammo for it and its generally the most effective against enemies.

The enemies are on the more difficult side but aren’t too bad. My only major complaint with the difficulty is about the final boss of the game. He’s not only a complete bullet sponge, but he has an overpowered gun that can pretty much kill you in one shot. There are also automated turrets during the boss battle that can kill you within seconds.

You pretty much have to get in a place he can’t reach, strafe left and right to avoid his one shot kills, and continually hit him with your most powerful gun, the Microwave Pulse Gun. It feels like such a cheap way to end the game.

The game also comes with a multiplayer component that a lot of other FPS games at the time. It comes with your standard fare, like Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag, but it has some good variety in it’s other game modes. Realistic Deathmatch is more difficult, and has you carry only one weapon, increased weapon damage, and a fatigue meter.

Arsenal is another variant of Deathmatch, but you get all of the weapons, and you get one kill with each of them to win the match. Assassin has you chasing after a specific target, whom you have to kill, all while someone is trying to assassinate you. You can only kill these two people, or you will lose points. Finally, there is Conquer the Bunker, in which there are capture points all around the map but touching easily identifiable by flags. The longer you hold down these capture points, the more points you get. The more capture points you have, the quicker you get those points. It’s pretty much Domination from Unreal Tournament.

The game is very easy to get working on modem systems. If you own a physical copy, there is a mod out there called SoFplus for people who already own the game, and it helps a lot. Not only does it get it running on modern systems, but it comes with a bundle of other features, including widescreen support, FOV, fixes, a multitude of new graphical features that made it easier on the eyes, and the ability to play online without GameSpy.

Unfortunately, the company who now owns the rights to the game seems to have taken down the website for SoFPlus, but it is included in the “Community Edition” mod, which adds significant improvements to Soldier of Fortune along with adding community maps for the multiplayer.

Looking back at Soldier of Fortune, it does hold up fairly well and there is certainly a lot of fun to be had here if you’re a die hard retro First Person Shooter fan.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/the-vanishing-of-ethan-carter-2014-2015-pc-xbox-one-ps4-review/

Over the years, video games that have a lot of walking around and exploring an interesting or beautiful environment with minimal gameplay were given the nickname of “walking simulators”. While a few of them might the deserve the title, quite a few of them just use exploration as a way of getting to what gameplay and story there is. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter might look like another “walking simulator” from afar, but it has a lot more going for it than just it’s nice looking environment.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a horror adventure game developed and published by The Astronauts. It was originally released in 2014 for PC on the Unreal 3 Engine, and was re-released in 2015 as the Redux version, updating the game to the Unreal 4 Engine, and was released on the PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Switch.

You play as Paul Prospero, an occult minded detective who receives a disturbing letter from a boy named Ethan Carter. Thinking that Ethan could be in trouble, Paul goes to Ethan’s hometown of Red Creek Valley to check on him only to discover that a supernatural force in the town has take over the minds of Ethan’s family, and that Ethan may be in worse danger than he first thought.

Beyond the initial premise, the game doesn’t hold your hand, making you figure out the story on your own at your own pace by giving you access to several areas in Red Creek Valley, along with a puzzle in each area to solve that gives you story and clues as to what is going on that are solvable in any order for you to solve. Which means that if you get stuck solving a puzzle in one area, you can go to another area and solve another puzzle and come back to the puzzle you were stuck on.

None of the puzzles feel unfair, and at worse, are a little tedious. Which is most pronounced in one section where you have to go through an abandoned mine collecting several things, and what you’re collecting blends into the surroundings, making it more frustrating than it should.

Graphically, the game is gorgeous. During the games development, the development team used a process called photogrammetry in to create the look of the game, a process in which several photographs are taken of a real world object and are used to make the in-game object look like the real-world counterpart. The result is that the environment looks borderline photo-realistic (pun intended), and i really feels like you’re walking through a small almost forgotten American town.

Almost every part of the game is wallpaper worthy. I don’t think there will be or has been a user that won’t take a screenshot from the game or from online, and not put it as their wallpaper after playing this game. The only thing bringing it down are the character models. While not looking bad, they do look out of place in the game environment, but they weren’t bad enough to destroy the aesthetic of the game.

On the audio side, the game is just as pleasant to listen to as to look at. Walking through Red Creek Valley’s locations is very calming, with trees and grass rustling, wind blowing, and streams flowing. The game’s soundtrack only adds to this. Apparently the developers agree, because the Xbox One and possibly PC versions are getting a “free roam” mode in which you can just walk around Red Creek Valley.

The year after the release of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, a updated version of the game called The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux came out, moving the game from Unreal Engine 3 to Unreal Engine, coming with a lot of new graphical bells and whistles that the new engine had. The content remains the same, but it comes with a better autosave feature, saving your progress after you find each clue instead of saving the game after finishing whole parts of the game, making the game much easier to jump back in to after quitting, and it also makes backtracking better late into the game, making the Redux version the version of the game to get.

There is also VR DLC, released for $10. I haven’t checked it out, but from everything I’ve seen, it seemed to get a mixed to positive response. I imagine it would be quite nice to see some of these environments up close and in detail.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is about 6 hours long, maybe a bit longer for the more experienced, but it’s definitely a highly polished game that’s beautiful visually and sound wise, has great puzzles, and a mystery that’s engaging from beginning to end. This game is highly recommended.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/03/14/alien-incident-1996-review/

It’s nice coming across a lesser known adventure game. People always talk about the heavyweights such as Sierra’s and Lucas Art’s library of games, or even Telltale Games, along with stuff like 7th Guest, Myst, Zork, and Broken Sword. But every now and again when I’m looking through websites hosting obscure games, I come across a hidden gem not a lot of people seem to know about. One of these games is Alien Incident.

Released in 1996 after 2 years of delays, and originally known as Muukalaisten Yö (Finnish for “Night of the Aliens”), Alien Incident was developed by a small team called Bloodhouse before they merged with Housemarque, and was published by GameTek for MS-DOS in 1996, which was getting a little late for MS-DOS games to still be released. There was going to be an Amiga 1200 version, but that got cancelled.

The game takes place on Halloween, and Benjamin Richards is at his uncle’s mansion to bear witness to his newest invention, the “Worm Hole Spawner.” But at the moment it’s turned on, it is hit by lightening, accidentally creating a wormhole in space that brings an alien spaceship who happens to be chasing another alien species through into our solar system. The aliens kidnap Benjamin’s uncle to know why they were brought here, while Benjamin, you, have to rescue as well as stopping the alien threat.

Getting this game to work isn’t too bad, since it’s a DOS game. Just the usual mild fiddling with DOSBox, nothing too difficult. However the game did crash one me once or twice, and that lead me to discovering a great little unique feature that the game has when it crashes. When you re-open the game, it loads right back to just before when it crashed, preventing a major loss in progress.

This might initially sound annoying, but the game is actually pretty stable and rarely ever crashes. It’s like the original (anti-crash) checkpoint before checkpoints became a gaming staple, and it’s a nice addition to have for an adventure game. It certainly prevents the save scumming that a lot of old point-and-click adventure games needed just to be tolerable.

Even if the game didn’t have this feature, the games world isn’t that big, so backtracking to find something or just to explore isn’t that much of a problem. Thankfully the game isn’t Sierra hard, and every puzzle makes sense or can be easily be solved with a bit of thought and exploration. Which makes this good for a younger audience.

I have two gripes with this game. They’re not major, but they still stand out. The first gripe is that there is one part of the game that can screw you over, and you don’t see it coming and it can set you back to however long ago your last save was. It doesn’t require going back and replaying most of the game, so it shouldn’t take you too long to catch up to this section if you’ve remembered the adventure game mantra “Save Early, Save Often.”

The second gripe I have is that another part of the game has a short maze. It’s not the worst maze I’ve seen in an adventure game in that once you’ve memorized the route, you can get through it faster on multiple playthroughs, but it’s still annoying when you do it for the first time and incredibly tedious on multiple playthroughs.

I’ll never why some adventure games decided to have mazes in their games. Mazes are annoying in the best of games. Thankfully, when you reach the end of the maze, you don’t have to backtrack through it, with the game kindly teleporting you back to the beginning of it. Even the developers knew how annoying that would have been, which begs the question of why they even put it here in the first place.

Pretty much everything else is minor nitpicks, such as there being one or two things that you need to interact with that blend into the background. Thankfully the game has some text when you highlight an object, so it’s not too hard to find something, you just to sometimes sweep the mouse cursor across the screen.

The pathfinding for the main character is a bit wonky, but it’s a minor gripe. There will be a time where he’s walking or you click to going in a direction, only for him to be briefly turned around before going where you want him to go. I don’t know if that’s a bug with the game or the way I’ve got the game setup, but it isn’t a major issue, just a mildly annoying glitch.

Alien Incident isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely worth checking out for fans of adventure games who haven’t yet played this game yet and are looking for something to fulfill that adventure game shaped hole in their heart, of adventure game veterans who want to go back and play it for the first time in years.

On top of that, the game’s humor is actually pretty amusing. It’s pretty obvious that English wasn’t the developers first language, but most of the jokes land despite that.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/mod-corner-poke646-half-life-2001-review/

Note: I’m Reviewing the Anniversary Edition.

Back before Half-Life 2 was was even close to being released to the general public and adoring Half-Life fans (curse you Valve Time), there were several mods made over the years that tried to continue the story of the first Half-Life, showing just how desperate the fans were for a continuation for their favorite video game franchise. One of these mods was Poke646.

Set 13 months after the incident at Black Mesa, The Black Mesa Research Facility has been shut down. The rest of the nation (along with the rest of the world) never knew of the experiments that happened there. As a result of the accident, the government founded a new organization to handle another incident. It was called Poke646.

A few days ago, the scientists noticed alarming signals coming from the Xen home world, and it looks like the aliens are planning to invade by opening a massive amount of portals in a certain city. Thankfully, the Poke646 Tech Labs were prepared, as they have developed a huge generator that is able to close hundreds of portals at once with an energy beam. Four of these generators are about to be installed at the edges of the city.

You play the role of Damien Reeves, the technical assistant of Dr. Fuller, who gets accidentally knocked out during the construction of one of these generators. When you wake up a couple of hours later, you soon find out that aliens are appearing all around the city, and through communications with Dr. Fuller, you soon find out that you’re the only one left and the only one who can close the portals.

The majority of the mod is running around the city trying to activate the four generators trying to survive the alien invasion. You get your objects throughout the mod from Dr. Fuller by using IU Devices that you find througout the mods. You’ll usually know when you’re nearby one of these things because a message pops up telling you to connect to one of these things.

Where you have to go is not always clear, and I know that’s a result of most video mods of the time, but it feels slightly more difficult the know where you’re going than some of the mods around the same time. It wasn’t necessarily the biggest problem, but I thought it was worth making a note of.

There are notes you come across around the environment that can tell you were keys or 4 digit codes are to help you unlock doors. They aren’t exactly highlighted for you, but once you know what you’re looking for, they’re easy to spot.

Poke464 comes with a new range of variants on the standard First Person Shooter firing range. The Melee weapon is a pipe, and whenever you swing it, your character gets tired. It’s easy to get around this by simply switching weapons, but after a while of trying to get through smashing a couple of crates to get ammo and weapons, it can be a little tedious. I don’t know why you would add stamina to what is supposed to be your last line of defense.

Other weapons include 2 different nailguns, one with a slow firing rate, and a second one with a higher firing rate that can hold more nails. There’s also the Pipebomb, which takes some getting used to when you’re trying to use to it, a Double Barreled Shotgun, and a CM-LW Bow Rifle for long range combat.

And the most unique one out of all of them is the Xen Squasher, a small alien creature that must be fed a certain brand of candy so it can shoot acid. The thing is pretty adorable depending on the way you look at it. The mod comes with a Training Course to get you all up to speed on the weapons and mechanics so you don’t end up getting killed a thousand times over in the same spot early on.

The mod got released as an “Anniversary Edition”, essentially updated to work on the modern version of Half-Life along with a bunch of bugfixes. I only seemed to have one major mod breaking glitch near the end of the mod, but it seem to be fine when i simply reloaded the mod.

Poke646 is surprisingly good, and lasts for a good 4 hours at most depending on the difficulty and how well you know the most. And it’s free, so it costs nothing but a free afternoon.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/11/21/double-s-t-e-a-l-the-second-clash-2005-xbox-review/

The plot description contains slight spoilers for the first game (ENG: “Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions”, JP: “Double S.T.E.A.L.”), but they are minor.

After arresting Tiger Takagi and loosening the grip of the Yakuza on Hong Kong, the Dragons of the Hong Kong Police Force fly to America to hand off Tiget Takagi to the CIA. But not even 5 minutes after landing in Chicago, the Yakuza gang working in the USA break Tiger Takagi out of police custody, allowing Tiger Takagi to wreak chaos throughout the city of Chicago. It’s up to the Dragons to reign in Tiger Takagi and the Yakuza before it’s too late.

I don’t think there is even 5 minutes of cutscene total throughout the game. But it’s not like it matters much since the gameplay is the thing holding this game together.

I guess that the first game didn’t do too well outside of Japan, because ‘The Second Clash’ stayed in it’s home country of Japan. And on top of that, this game remained an exclusive to the original Xbox unlike the first game. And considering that the original Xbox wasn’t flying of the shelves like the PlayStation 2 and GameCube were in Japan unlike it was in the Western countries, I guess it was doomed to obscurity, even in it’s own country.

But despite the fact that it’s a game exclusive to Japan the game is entirely in English. And I don’t just mean the game has English menus and subtitles, but the whole thing is dubbed in English, which means that anyone from an English speaking country could play though this game with ease. Maybe the original game sold well enough in English speaking countries that the company developing or it publishing it thought that it could sell just as well enough in those countries, but pulled out at the last minute because it didn’t sell quite enough to justify the release. I didn’t even know that this game existed until I was doing some research on the first game for my review. And if you were a fan of the original outside of Japan, you probably wouldn’t have know that a sequel would have even came out because of the different name. Also, that cover isn’t exactly an eye catcher.

The most amusing thing about the English voice acting is that Tiger Takagi, the bad guy, is voiced by someone from the UK, in a game set entirely in Chicago, playing a member of the Yakuza, who was previously working in Hong Kong. It’s the most mismatched accent and I wouldn’t change it because of just how perfectly silly it is.

But the most obvious, and best, change to the game is that it automatically saves all of your progress the moment that you complete a mission. I still don’t know why this wasn’t a feature in the Xbox version of the first game. I didn’t expect it in the PlayStation 2 and GameCube ports because those use Memory Cards, but the original version was developed for a console with a permanent hard drive, which means you could save any time.

The driving feels much better this time around. While the cars can still feel a little too ‘bouncy’, for a lack of a better word, for my liking, it feels like it was refined from the fist one, making it feel much better. It also help that the roads are wider, allowing the cars to make wide turns without making you feel like you’re about to hit into a wall every time you make a turn around a corner. Although, there was still the odd moment when I crash and my cars still ended up bouncing around like a pinball, which is still annoying, but it didn’t happen often, and was still be amusing in it’s own way. There are still a few times where you have to drive on tighter spaces, and while it isn’t as tedious as it was in the previous entry in the series, it’s probably still the worst part of the game.

Most of the cars now have a turbo boost that lets you catch up to your objective if you’re falling behind. You can earn extra turbo boosts by destroying propery and traffic, most of which get knocked around as you’re car is the unstoppable force looking for an immovable object. It’s pretty fun watching a tiny car make a giant bus, or even a train, fly off into the distance. But when the booster bar is maxed out however, then it will be expelled out all at once and time stops briefly.

‘Second Clash’ also toned back some of the graphical effects from the original Xbox version of the game, which is good because that version of the game, despite still being the best looking out of all the versions of the game, went wild with the bloom and particle effects. It’s still pretty good looking ang gets across the look and feel of Chicago, even if it’s not the most accurate portrayal of the city. A couple of the areas feel a little barren, but I’d still prefer that than the developers feeling the need to shove as much stuff as they can into the game. And to top it all off the game can run in 720p at 60 fps, which is pretty nice considering just how good the game looks.

Just like the first game, you’re tasked with completing a series of missions where you stop the Yakuza from causing chaos across the city, but instead of Hong Kong, it’s Chicago. Objectives can range from destroying cars, such as Yakuza members chasing someone or a group of people performing an illegal street race, or you having to get something from ‘Point A’ to ‘Point B’ without being hit too many times. It does feel varied enough that it doesn’t get too tedious or repetitive.

Missions have fare more generous time limits compared to the first game, but almost to compensate for that, each mission now has a rating, and earning a high rating on a mission can unlock extra mission in the free roam mod and extra cars. The game even came with leaderboards so you can see how well you did compared to other people. They don’t work any more, obviously, but it’s a neat feature to see in the game.

And surprisingly, the free roam mode from the PS2 and CGN versions make a return for sequel on the Xbox, which is nice to see. But instead of just being able to drive around the city having to make up your own fun or just to admire the look of the game, you can now do extra missions that are unlocked when you get a good enough rating in a Story Mission. These extra missions can include racing in a dirt race, reaching all of the checkpoints as quickly as possible, or as something simple as delivering a pizza.

Plus there are hidden car parts scattered around the city in free roam that you can find, and for every 5 car parts you collect, you unlock a car. There’s no way to choose which car that you want to unlock first, they just unlock in a specific order. You can also unlock cars by completing the story missions.

Some of these unlockable cars include various sports cars, muscle cars, a monster truck, a toy car, and even a tank that lets you fire the barrel, which is not only fun to use in the free roam mode, but cut down the time of a few missions where you have to take out Yakuza cars from roughly 2 and a 1/2 minutes to about 10 seconds.

Is Double S.T.E.A.L.: The Second Clash worth tracking down and buying? Only if you’re an avid collector of retro video games. While I did have a lot of fun with it, it would be hard to justify to someone to not only drop the money on both buying and importing the game but having to import a Japanese Xbox. There are other means to get it, but that's a whole other level of being able to play the game. I would still recommend it, even if it's to a select few who would actually go out of there way to play it.

NOTE: This is a review for the Arcade version of the game

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/25/michael-jacksons-moonwalker-review-part-1-arcade/

Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker is a pretty weird film to say the least. For those not in the know, it was an anthology film, several of which were just Michael Jackson’s music vidoes, mostly using music from the ‘Bad’ (1987). Probably the most infamous segment of the film is the “Smooth Criminal” segment in which a drug-dealing mobster called Mr. Big, played by Joe Pesci, kidnaps all of the worlds children to get them addicted to drugs, so Michael Jackson comes to their rescue and defeats Mr. Big by turning into a giant robot. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie.

And then along comes the video game based on the film that the 80s and 90s seemed to be filled with. While Moonwalker seems like it wouldn’t make sense as a video game, it actually makes sense with some contect. Michael Jackson was a giant fan of video games, having a giant arcade in his masnion filled to the brim with both arcade machines and the lastest video game consoles alone with a large video game collection.

He also secretly composed music for some of Sega’s games, including the Sonic series, along with making cameos in Space Channel 5, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2, and he was even the focus for a cencelled MMO called Planet Michael. He even designed the video games based on the Moonwalker movie. Which finally brings us back to Michael Jackson’s Moonwaker for the arcade.

Of course the best version of the game is the version that came out in the arcades. Developed and put out by Sega, Moonwalker is an isometric Beat-Em-Up. You play as Michael Jackson’s character from the previously mentioned “Smooth Criminal” segment from the movie, cut up into 5 different stages. Each stage is filled with Mr. Bigs’s thugs, along with characters exclusive to each stage, and then a boss battle at the finale of each stage.

As you’re going through each stage, you can save the children that have been kidnapped by the thugs. When you save the kids, they often have extra health for you, or give you a dance power-up. That’s right, you get a dance power-up. This power-up, called “Dance Magic”, makes every enemy currently on screen dance in sync with Michael Jaskson before Michael unleashes a wave of green energy, defeating all of the thugs.

The best part of this power-up is that not only does it works with the attack dogs that the thugs, causing them to dance along too, but the thugs controlling giant robots (yes, they have giant robots) to make the robot also dance along with Michael. It’s just as awesome as it sounds.

The second power-up turns Michael Jackson into a robot just like the movie, which results in you being able to run around shooting thugs with powerful lasers. To collect this power-up, you have to collect Bubbles the chimpanzee, based on Michael Jackson’s real life pet of the same name, who appears once per level.

Of course, the soundtrack is made up entirely of Michael Jackson’s music, and is fun listening to midi renditions of Michael’s music. My only problem with the soundtrack is that in the graveyard area, Thriller doesn’t play Not even when you use the dance power-up. How do you have a graveyard level in a Michael Jackson video game and not have the iconic Thriller play. Especially when Michael Jackson himself is working on it and he’s the biggest star at the time.

The game also lets you play the game with up to three players at the same time, and watching 3 Michael Jacksons in three diferrent colored suits fight of thugs, dogs, and robots, all while dancing in unison and themselves becoming robots that fire lasers is a fun thing to witness. The entire thing is onl 30 minutes long, but it was released at a time when arcade games wucked quarters out of people, so this was probably taking at last a couple of dollars out of people for the whole experience.

The arcade version of Moonwalker is easily recommendable for anyone who loves arcade games and Michael Jackson, but there isn’t a lot of places you can find it, especially since arcades don’t really exist any more in a lot of countries. And finding one to buy for yourself is borderline impossible because it would cost an arm and a leg and take up a ton of space, both of which most people don’t have.

And since there is no way to buy this game digitally, probably due to a mix of rights issues for both the music and game, as well as Michael Jackson’s unfortunate history, there is not going to be a way for you to play this unless you download it and emulate it.

But still, it comes highly recommended.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/10/27/disneys-extreme-skate-adventure-2003-gcn-ps2-xbox/

I imagine that not a lot of people have actually played this back when it was first released when they were the right age to play it when growing to have played in the first place. It doesn’t exactly have the most interesting of covers, with an awful looking cartoony character on the front surrounded by mediocre 3D renditions of Disney and Pixar characters, and from the look of both the front and back cover, it was pretty obvious that this was more of a tie-in for multiple popular Disney movies that had come out in the decade before this games release.

I’d be willing to bet that more people have probably heard about this game through the mod for PC version of Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 called T.H.U.G. PRO that takes all levels and characters from every other game that ran on the same game engine that came out on the sixth generation of consoles, which included Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure. Yep, this runs on that same engine as those sixth gen Tony Hawk games, but more about that later.

There is no plot to Skate Adventure, nor is there even an attempt at one. Since the game entirely exists to promote multiple Disney and Pixar movies as easily as possible, along with the product placement that they could shove into the game, as it just gives you a choice between several characters from three different Disney and Pixar characters and lets you ride around in three locations from the movie that they’re from.

These movies include Toy Story 1 and 2, Tarzan, and The Lion King. Why these three movies? I guess it was a mix of their popularity and that they were the easiest films to make a level based on. I have no idea is Disney or Pixar made any demands other than “get a game onto store shelves”, but this reeks of both studios not caring. The characters that are unlocked right from the start are Woody and Buzz from Toy Story, Young Tarzan and Young Terk from Tarzan, and Rafiki and Young Simba from the Lion King.

Unlockable characters include Jessie and Zurg from Toy Story 2, Young Tantor and Young Jane from Tarzan, despite the fact that Jane only ever appeared as an adult in the Tarzan film, but whatever, and Young Nala along with Timon and Pumbaa from The Lion King, with Timon and Pumbaa skating together on the same skateboard.

Locations from said movies include Pizza Planet, Andy’s Bedroom, and Zurg’s planet of Xrghthung from Toy Story 1 and 2, Tarzan’s Treehouse, The Human Camp, and Clayton’s Ship from Tarzan, and Pride Rock, The Elephant Graveyard, and Scar’s Canyon from The Lion King. The game does try to make each location visually distinct enough from every other level and it works well enough, and it’s a decent enough selection.

Although you can only play level only with the character from the movie that the levels is based on, so no Woody skating around Pride Rock or the jungle or Turk skating around any of the Toy Story levels. It’s a tad disappointing, but what are you going to do.

As I mentioned earlier, this game runs specifically on the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 engine, which actually fits with this game way more than it did with THPS 4. Tony Hawk 4 was more focused on giving the player goals than letting you just skate each level with a time limit, which works perfectly for a game like this, as having Disney and Pixar characters tell you want to do is pretty good motivation for a kid who loves those films

The Little Green Men from Toy Story do everything in the name of The Claw and Sarge from the green army men tests you on your abilities, like getting a high score or knowing how to perform a certain trick, or the Gorillas from Tarzan get you to mess up the human’s camp along with the Elephants getting help from you as their friend, or the trio of hyenas from The Lion King making bets with you or Zazu getting you to do jobs that help train you to become king, just to name a few.

Aside from the regular goals that are accessible by all characters, the game also has a few goals which are exclusive to certain characters based on plot points from the films that they’re from, such as having to defeat Zurg as Buzz Lightyear.

The least interesting goals are collecting the 25 tokens throughout a level along with one special collectable, which you have to do for every single character for every single level that they access to. It’s especially tedious and obnoxious on the confusing Elephant Graveyard level and the area in the Human Camp from Tarzan where you have to grind on some vines. It makes the game quickly go from kinda fun to tedious busywork.

Aside from the characters from the Disney and Pixar characters, there are 10 real kids that are playable known as “The Extreme Skate Crew”, and that’s because during the development of this game, Activision decided to do a nationwide casting call search in the US as a promotional tool for this game to put 10 lucky kids into this game. Kids could either show up and skate live or send in footage into the company. You can briefly see footage of the competitions in the opening credits along with a bigger montage of footage in one of the unlockable videos. The top two kids ended up being highlighted on the cover for the game and the ones who were featured the most in the game.

These kids can not only skate in Olliewood, but skate in any of the levels based on the previously mentioned movies, being able to do a few of their own goals exclusive to the level, which are just finding Olliewood tokens and the Disney Extreme Skate Adventure logo.

The game might not be technically impressive, but it does run constantly at a solid 60 FPS, and it uses the art style of multiple Disney movies from the 90s along with the Toy Story films, even if characters faces can dip into the uncanny valley, which has helped it age better than some games from the same console generation. And the lighting in a lot of areas looks good, even if some of the areas are a bit too dark, like the Elephant’s Graveyard.

The controls are pretty much the same as THPS 4 except for one difference. There is both a set of “Basic” controls aimed at children to go along with the “Pro” controls that are just from THPS 4. The “Basic” controls seem to be context based and yet they never seem to work as intended, with tricks seemingly happening when the game feels like letting them happening. Manuals would always just happen and took me by surprise every time. I don’t see how kids could learn to play the game when every time you want to do something and the game just does it with little input. I think kids could put on the “Pro” controls and use them in the more simple levels in Skate Adventure and be fine.

There’s even a split-screen multiplayer if you want to play with your friends. There is no online play for any version of this game or a system link with other consoles, which is probably for the best as I don’t see multiple kids being able to have their own consoles, or their parents allowing them to use the internet like that in 2003.

Each level plays pretty well for the most part, doing a decent enough job of adapting the locations of the movie to work in a video game like this, and I had no real problem with any of them except for one, and that was the Elephant’s Graveyard, which was a little too confusing to navigate, with tunnel entrances feeling like they go to random locations and what feels like areas just randomly shoved wherever. I did learn a large chunk of it through memorization, but if I’m having trouble learning it as an adult, I think kids might have a worse time depending on the kid. Plus some parts of the level could easily be too dark if you’re playing on the intended hardware, and was easily fixed by playing through emulation.

I’ve also noticed that the levels based around humans are a little easier to navigate than the ones centered around animals.

However, there is one brand new location that takes place in the “real world” called Olliewood, although it’s pretty much a cartoony version of the real world, and it features it’s own unique characters for this games, and goals centered around the characters one basic characteristic, like one character being a captain of a boat or a character who is conscientious of the environment.

But these characters are pretty obviously here to advertise to the kids playing these games since they can’t shove the advertising in the levels based on the films. Like how one goal has you delivering McDonald’s menu items to each of the four characters, or how you have to deliver Nokia ringtones to them since this was at a time where phones didn’t have access to the internet and you had to pay for a ringtone since you couldn’t just use whatever songs you had on your phone because the internal storage was tiny and the thing could only play midi files.

Along with the two kid skaters who won the competition, you can unlock Lil’ Romeo, the artist for one of the songs on the soundtrack. Although I have no idea who would be excited for him to even appear on the soundtrack, let along as an unlockable character, even at the time when this game came out. Even the characters made up for this game were more memorable than this real person.

Every time you complete a goal you unlock something. The unlockables range from a piece of clothing or new design for you skateboard for your user created skateboarder or a new skate trick for whatever character you happen to be playing at that time, or some sort or video, mostly music videos of the songs from the soundtrack or clips and trailers of the movies that this game features, you’re always unlocking something. It always feels like you’re making progress, as trivial as that progress might be, so you’ll always have something new to look at or use.

There are even videos to unlock when you clear all of the goals in every level for all of the skaters that have access to that level. These unlockable videos include music videos of some of the songs featured on the soundtrack of this game, a video focusing on the skate competition to get featured in the game that’s pretty much just a montage, and clips from the movies that this game has taken characters from, but they are all edited to the songs from the soundtrack of this game and all come across like AMVs from 2006 – 2009 YouTube.

This soundtrack is so 2003. I don’t know if it’s the most 2003 soundtrack, but you’re not mistaking it for anything other than something that obviously came from the early 2000s. Some songs make sense for the soundtrack like “Grown Up” by Simple Plan, but other songs don’t really fit. Were kids allowed to listen to “Where’s Your Head At?” by Basement Jaxx? It technically doesn’t have anything on the soundtrack that a kid couldn’t listen to, but I wouldn’t say the song is for kids. And this game was released at a time when music videos were still aired on TV, and the music video isn’t something aimed at kids either. It also doesn’t really belong on the same soundtrack as “Live in Stereo” by Newsboys, which is on this soundtrack for some reason.

And if you get the Xbox version, it even lets you use your own music that were ripped onto the hard drive. So you could easily play the soundtracks of the movies that were featured in this game, or maybe some better annoyingly catchy 2000s pop music, like the soundtracks to the English dubs of “Pokemon: The First Movie” or “Digimon: The Movie”. At least those were trying to capitalize on what was popular instead of trying to sell you on a soundtrack.

The best songs on the soundtrack by far, and by best I mean the only good ones, are “Pacific Coast Party” by Smash Mouth along with “Sell Out” by Reel Big Fish. Whoever put “Sell Out” on the soundtrack knew exactly what they were doing considering that this whole game is not only trying to tell kids on Disney products but has advertising for McDonald’s burgers and Nokia phones too.

Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure is mostly harmless, even if it’s entire existence is purely to advertise movies, fast food products, and now incredibly outdated phones to children. It’s competent enough, though that’s because of the engine it’s on, not because of the game itself. I doubt any kid these days is going to want this outside of whatever popular thing is going on, unless they just so happen to really love older Disney and Pixar films.

But there’s just one last thing. Have you found all of the secret Mickeys in this game?

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/07/24/american-fugitive-2019-ps4-pc-switch-xbone-review/

Will Riley has been framed for the murder of his father and has been falsely imprisoned because of it. Will might not be an angel, but he’s no killer. He soon breaks out of prison to clear his name. As he does this he must make his way across Redrock County, a sleepy American town with a booming criminal underbelly, as he tries to prove his innocence, all while evading the police who want to take him back to prison and the criminals who want to put him 6 feet under.

American Fugitive is a top down open world crime game this is obviously heavily inspired by the early Grand Theft Auto games, but with more of an 80’s action movie vibe.

While the presentation is a nice throwback to older games and movies, the whole game does come across as very shallow. Every character is the bare bones stereotype of a character, and while it’s not a bad thing to have a character be bare bones, it has to be made up for with great presentation to carry it through to the end, but the presentation here just comes up short.

You barely get to know each character as your character only gets to briefly to talk to them before a mission in only a few lines of dialogue, leaving very little wiggle room to get even the most menial character development. The entire paragraph you could use to summarize any character is their entire character. I was not expecting much, but I wish there was enough time to at least develop the main characters.

And the plot is just as shallow, finishing of a very unfulfilling note at the end that just feels rushed. It also doesn’t help that the mission variety for the story missions is very small. Steal a car, steal something from someone’s house, beat someone up and take them somewhere, or just outright kill them. By the second area of the game it’s already become tiresome busywork.

What compounds this is that even the side content has more variety, such as finding hidden stashes, stealing items to resell, timed races, making jumps, and even getting to drive a tank around and destroying as much property as you can within a time limit. I don’t know why some of this couldn’t have been sprinkled throughout the story to not make it feel so repetitive. It could have even been used to get a few players to play a few of the side missions if they like a type of mission.

Not much would have needed to be changed when it comes to the game world to incorporate these missions into the story and it could have easily been used to give each character more depth. Maybe the developers ran out of time, budget, or both.

The game also comes with basic skills you can level up, such as the usual health or inventory space increase, but also more helpful things such as metal detector to let you know how close a hidden stash is or making it easier to know if a building is occupied before you rob it. The side content also gives you points to help level your character up too, which I imagine could easily be help a player who is having trouble with a mission, but I only found out by playing one of the side missions out of curiosity.

If you’re looking for a throwback to the old Grand Theft Auto games, there probably isn’t going to be much in American Fugitive to throw down the money for it. It’s probably worth it on a sale, but with just how little variety in content there is, it’s a lukewarm recommend at best.