Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/07/24/virginia-2016-pc-mac-ps4-xbone-review/

You are investigating the case of a missing person investigation in the small idyllic town of Kingdom in the Burgess County of Virginia through the eyes of graduate FBI agent Anne Tarver. Together with your partner, seasoned investigator Maria Halperin, the two of you investigate the disappearance of a young boy who nobody seems to know how or why they vanished.

Before long Anne finds herself negotiating competing interests, uncovering hidden agendas, and testing the patience of a community unaccustomed to uninvited scrutiny. Throughout this journey you will have to make decisions which will shaped the course of Anne’s and Maria’s lives all while investigating a town that seems to have a dark secret.

From the outset Virginia is fantastically paced. Unlike other games in the so called “Walking Simulator genre” there is no meandering about or spending minutes or even hours wandering around the games location looking for either an object, character, or just the next location to be in for the next event to happen.

If anything it’s paced more like a movie with cuts from one location to another much like how a movie cuts from one scene to another, leaving the implication of characters moving from one area to another instead of just having the game force you to wander around it’s beautifully crafted location at the speed of someone who sprained their ankle.

And the game does all of this without any character saying a word, doing a fantastic job of showing instead of telling.

That being instead, while the first half of the game comes out swinging, having no fat and leaving me interested in what the game had to offer, the second half of the game completely lost me when a lot happened all at once that made little sense due to how much was unexplained.

It just comes across as the game doing too much too fast when the game suddenly goes from subtlety getting it’s characters intentions across to cranking it up to 11 and numerous things started happening that really needed some context. I know that the game is wearing it’s influences on it’s sleeve, but the things that it takes it’s influences from, namely Twin Peaks, were paced out more slowly and let the audience take things in as the show went on.

Maybe if Virginia was presented more episodically in nature and expanded things out with the same lean pacing it wouldn’t have been so jarring when the second half of the game started introducing several twists and turns to it’s more grounded story.

There is something here in Virginia, and I wish that I could say that it lives up to the potential of that something, but unfortunately it never gets to see it.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/01/23/a-look-back-at-realmyst-masterpiece-edition-2014/

I was originally going to look at both the original realMyst and realMyst: Masterpiece Edition in the same article, but my look at the original realMyst was getting a bit wordy, so I split it up into two reviews.

Just like how the original Myst got an updated version with Myst: Masterpiece Edition, realMyst got an updated version of it’s own called realMyst: Masterpiece Edition, that came out in 2014, 14 years after realMyst. Unlike how Myst: Masterpiece Edition was just the original but remastered, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition is a remake of realMyst in the Unity Engine, so it’s technically the second remake of Myst so far along with being a remake of a remake. Plus it was made on the Unity Engine instead of a proprietary engine, so it ends up being less of a beta test for a whole new engine and more of a proper remake.

This time around there’s not much new to say about realMyst, so this is going to be shorter than my looks at the original Myst and the original RealMyst.

Since there’s not much of a difference between the plot of realMyst and the plot from the original Myst, you can find a plot summary as well as a more in-depth look at the original Myst here and my look at the original realMyst can be found here. The game pretty much contains all of the new content that the original realMyst introduced, including a whole new Age called Rime and better connections to the new Myst games along with the books, so it’s not like you’re missing out on content if you skip over realMyst.

This time around, the controls for realMyst: Masterpiece Edition are more in line with what you would expect from a first person game. The WASD keys are use to walk and mouse to look around. This time around the game forgoes a dead zone in the middle of the screen for the cursor and you just point and click at what you want to interact with. There’s still a little bit of a quirk to it’s design though. To interact with with objects, you right click to freeze the camera to move around the cursor around the area of whatever you’re looking at, and then right click again to go back to moving the camera.

It feels like this is what the original realMyst was trying to do with it’s controls but the developers just couldn’t execute due to their unfamiliarity with first person controls. I still feel like being able to interact with objects without freezing the screen should have been an option, but considering that it runs a lot smoother than the controls in the original realMyst, I can’t really complain too much, since they work fine.

But realMyst: Masterpiece Edition adds in a new gameplay option called ‘Classic Mode’, in which you can navigate the game the same way as the original, but instead of using still images to get around, the game instead mimics the still images by recreating their angle and position in the newer engine. Moving around in this mode can cause a little bit of whiplash when moving around since the game it clearly wasn’t designed with it in mind as the optimal way of moving around, but it’s still a neat little retro throwback. Plus if you’re using the ‘Classic Mode’, holding down shift brings up the still image of wherever you are from the original Myst, allowing you directly compare both the original and the remake, showing off what 21 years of advancement in games looks like.

This time around, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition is a lot more polished than the original realMyst. It wasn’t always quite so polished though, as the original release of realMyst: Masterpiece Edition was known to crash quite often, but since then the game received a 2.0 update that fixed pretty much all of the bugs and added a bunch of graphical features and updates.

This version of realMyst keeps the day-night cycle that the original realMyst introduced, but with a few changes. The day-night cycle doesn’t happen as quickly as it does in the original realMyst, making it feel like you’re actually spending days in the world of Myst instead of the game just showing off a fancy new graphical feature. The nights in Masterpiece Edition are much darker, way too dark. To compensate for this, the developers added a flashlight. I feel like having a flashlight doesn’t really fit with Myst’s whole aesthetic. If you had to use something, why not a lamp?

There are times when the full moon comes out and brightens up the area to some degree, but it’s still way too dark. I feel like making night not be so dark could have easily fixed this, and you still could have had slightly darker nights when the moon wasn’t out.

Various other changes have also been made across the game. The Stoneship Age is now more stormy than it was in the original realMyst, and thanks to the change to a newer engine, it actually looks more like a storm. The Selenitic Age had it’s day-night cycle removed, but the Channelwood Age now has a day-night cycle. And the moon in Channelwood is now massive.

My only complaint with the graphics is that they left out the whales in the Rime Age, which added a nice bit of atmosphere to that location.

realMyst: Masterpiece Edition does look pretty good for being a game being made by a smaller team.

But just like how the original realMyst re-uses the video files from the original Myst, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition once again uses those same files, in all of their highly compressed glory. And if they were looking a bit shabby by the year 2000, they’re definitely not looking so hot when 2014 rolled around, a whole 21 years after the release of the original Myst, especially since another game came out from another high-profile (for a game series know for having FMV) game series with live action actors, “Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure”, coming out the same year, along with a few other lesser known titles, like “Roundabout” and “Missing: An Interactive Thriller”, and “LocoCycle” coming out the year before.

The thing is that by this point, not only have video games moved on from the CD to DVDs and now digital distribution, but affordable cameras that small teams have also increased in quality, with even the iPhone 6’s recording quality being decent for a consumer grade camera for the time, so I don’t know why these videos weren’t updated for this release. Maybe the developers just didn’t have the budget to got back and update them, and I can’t really get annoyed for something that was probably out of their control.

realMyst: Masterpiece Edition overall is a much better experience than the original realMyst, with better graphics and controls, while keeping the content that realMyst introduced. While I do have a soft spot for that original version of realMyst, I have to recommend this over the original version, not only because it’s the most widely available, but it’s the best version of Myst at the time of it’s release.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/06/13/a-look-back-at-the-various-ports-of-myst/

NOTE: This has been slightly edited from the original but the contents are 99% the same.

You would think out of all the consoles that would be perfect for a port of the original Myst, the Nintendo DS would in the top 5. It has touch controls, which would be perfect to walk through Myst and solve it's puzzles, and it's portable, which is a nice way to play the game, especially since the game is low stress and you can save anywhere, and it's not like the console didn't have it's fair share of point-and-click adventure games along with adjacent genres like Visual Novels and Hidden Object games. And it's top screen would be great for things like a map for whatever Age you were in, optional hints, and easily showing which page you've picked up without being intrusive on the bottom screen.

But somehow this version of the game ends up being absolutely awful and the problems begin right off the bat.

Both the audio and video have been compressed to the point that the game now looks and sounds awful. I'm fine with each screen being compressed since it was made for something as small as the DS screen, but the compressed sound really ruins the experience. The sound chip in the DS was never the best, but there have been games that have sounded fine, so I don't know how this ended up sounding this bad. And it only gets more grating as the game goes on.

And it’s not like this is a minor nitpick since having the sound be this bad actually affects the gameplay. The puzzles in the Selenitic Age are all based around sound, which means that there is no excuse as to why the game sounds this bad.

Just like the PSP version of Myst, the DS version is missing the flyby videos for each Age. While the PSP had about 1.8 gigabytes to work with, the DS was limited to 512 megabytes at the absolute biggest, so there did have to be some compromise. But considering what the development team did with that with the PSP version of Myst, that compromise didn't have to be there, but more on that later.

But for an actual nitpick, the intro movie for this version of Myst has Comic Sans for the credits. I know that Comic Sans has received a lot of hate over the years, mostly due to people misusing it, but did the developers really have to use Comic Sans of all things? Not something like New Times Roman? It doesn’t even fit with the games tone of aesthetic, which is extra bad since Myst is centered around books of all things. I know it’s kinda pointless, and it was probably chosen because it pops out on the screen, but it still irks me.

And that’s not even the last of it, as the gameplay of Myst, what little it had, also gets a downgrade. Literally the only interactivity that Myst has was clicking on a still image to interact with something, clicking on a still image to move around, or clicking on a still image to pick something up.

In the DS version it took me a couple of taps on the screen to figure out what what exact pixel that I was supposed to click on the be able to do anything. Imagine trying to now only solve the sound puzzles of the Selenitic Age with audio that makes it hard to do so, but having to try and get through the maze twice with these controls is unbearable, even just by thinking about it. The Selenitic Age is borderline unplayable.

But it’s not like this version of Myst is completely without merit. This version does come with a Map that you can easily bring up by tapping the map icon that displays on the top screen showing off whatever location that you’re currently in. I don’t know why it’s not there permanently, but whatever. Whatever page you’ve picked up and are now holding onto are shown in a square instead of just changing the cursor to a hand holding a colored piece of paper, which would have been awful on the DS screen.

The game even come with a camera feature that lets you takes a picture of whatever screen that you’re currently on and displays it on the top screen. It’s limited to one shot at a time, but it’s still nice that it’s in here and can be helpful for puzzles. It comes with the ‘Zip Mode’ that lets you get through areas that you’ve already explored more quickly, and it even comes with a notepad that you can write notes in. You have to type thing out on an onscreen typewriter, which fits aesthetically, but so would have being able to use the stylus to write in a diary or journal. It’s still a good feature.

But just as I was able to say something good about this port of the game, the problems show up again and are even worse.

Just like the PSP port, this also comes with Rime, which was introduced in the original realMyst from the year 2000. It looks just as out of place in this version too, since it's from a game with a completely different engine and aesthetic. And just like the PSP port, it's not only introduced in the same way, with the game just plopping you into the new content without the context that realMyst gave it, but it's done way worse. Not only is it just as awkward to make your way through the Age due to it not being designed to be played as still images like the original was, but now it has the awful controls of the DS version.

Plus the DS version looks much worse that the PSP, since I can barely see anything with just how dark and grey the new area is. And if I wasn't sure if the puzzle introduced in the PSP version was broken, I didn't even try in this version. This whole section could have easily been cut, and should have. I would much rather have the fly-by videos from the original and maybe some better sounds.

It also doesn't help that the homebrew community has ScummVM, which not only would allow you to play Myst: Masterpiece Edition on the DS with some handywork, but is significantly better in every single way.

But the port of Myst to the DS wasn’t the worst port of Myst. In fact, it wasn’t even the worst version of Myst on the DS. The 3DS port holds the distinction of being the single worst port of Myst in existence.

https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/10/01/infliction-extended-cut-review/

Explore a home plagued by tragedy and uncover the heartbreaking secrets hidden within messages, artwork, household objects, and other vestiges of domestic life. Uncover clues and use items to unlock new paths and make discoveries while doing everything possible to avoid the malevolent presence inhabiting the residence. Hide under tables or beneath beds and harness light sources like camera flashes to stun the spirit and momentarily elude its pursuit.

From the first frame of the game, it’s incredibly obvious that Infliction is yet another P.T. clone in the vast tsunami of P.T. clones after the popularity of that demo spiked. And once you know that, you know exactly what to expect from the game. Looping rooms, a ghost woman, and blatantly obvious hints as to what the twist of the game is. I don’t even have to expand on what the game is about because P.T. clones have become such a cliche at this point, like with the the Amnesia and Slenderman: The 8 Pages clones before it. But let’s take a dive into the game anyway, shall we.

Unfortunately, Infliction comes with a lot of small niggling problems. At one point I assumed that I had to move a hospital gurney to get into a vent, since it was clearly in the way of an open vent. But I actually had to move some boxes in another room that were completely covering a vent that I didn’t even know as there until I looked up a walkthrough. The ghosts/monsters/demons that appear throughout the game can’t actually kill you. You either die and respawn, possibly wasting your time with trying to get passed them depending on how you’re doing at the game, or one of them kills you to progress the story.

There have been a few times where merely opening a door knocked me into the wall, disorienting me for a few seconds before I realized what had happened and reorienting myself. I also got stuck in another area where I thought that I had to click the interact button with a pair of doors, but I had to walk through them. I don’t know how the game expected me to suddenly know to push up against the door to open them instead of just pressing the interact button.

Plus the walking speed feels like walking through molasses. I’m not expecting a Olympic sprinter, but being able to walk faster than an arthritic 80 year old would be nice.

All of these tiny problems add up and take what would have been a thoroughly tedious but forgettable experience and make it feel annoying and like you’re wasting your time.

But the game is not without some good qualities, as the game received a huge update to the game called “Inflicted: The Extended Cut” (which is the version that I played). It adds New Game+ that makes the game harder by increasing the amount of times the ghost appears and her difficulty, changes up the puzzles and adds new ones, and even adds another area to explore, and even a chapter select for players to jump into an area and replay it.

It also adds bonus content which includes concept art and videos of unused content that never made it into the game. It’s nice to see some of the behind the scenes stuff for the game, since it’s such a thing for games is a rarity, but even that doesn’t do much for the game.

There is an alternate ending, but I felt no need to go back and play through the game again on New Game+.

This is equivalent to one of those Direct-To-DVD or Made For TV movies that jump on a popular trend, but are poorly made generic. I’m so sick of P.T. inspired games with slow walking, looping rooms, and predictable plot filled with predictable scares. The only good thing that I can say about Inflicted is that I’ve played worse games. I know that’s and incredibly backhanded compliment, but it pretty much sums up my experience with the game.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/06/30/mod-corner-shamblers-castle-doom-3-review/

Seeing the original Quake in a newer engine such as IdTech 6 would be pretty great, but it’s probably never going to happen due to various reasons. A sourceport like Darkplaces with higher resolution textures and models would probably be the next best thing, but it’s just not the same (and often doesn’t look that great to begin with IMO, but that’s for another time) But the best thing we have so far is a Quake inspired map for Doom 3 called Shambler’s Castle. Sure, it’s not a full recreation of Quake, but it’s welcome all the same.

Not everything from Quake has been re-created for this mod, since it’s limited to only one level, but what has been recreated includes several monsters, such as the Shambler (obviously) Zombie, Scrag, the Fiend, the Vore, and even the fucking Spawns. Apparently there’s not escaping the Spawns in Quake, even when it changes engines.

Along with the enemies, there is the Quad Damage powerup, and all of the weapons with new sounds, which includes the Lightning Gun, but the Lightning gun wasn’t included in the mod itself since it’s sounds are broken. You can still spawn it via the console though.

Everything about this one map is top notch. All of the assets are original, nothing has been ported over from the original Quake, and it looks fantastic, looking exactly like how a Quake map would have looked back in the day, just on a different engine. This mod brings over the monsters, weapons, and powerups pretty accurately to the way the original game looked too, but with a new coat of paint that changes them just enough that they’re new and interesting to look at.

The mod captures Quake’s fast paced gameplay surprisingly closely, and it feels refreshing to get that oldschool gameplay in a newer engine.

When this was originally released, the developers claimed that there was a sequel in development that would have included an updated version of the map along with more maps and improvements, but from what I can tell, it never came out, which is a shame.

There’s not much to talk about this one, it’s one map. But it’s one hell of a map.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/07/28/198x-2019-pc-ps4-xbone-switch-review/

Welcome to Suburbia, just outside the City, some time in the 1980s. This journey follows Kid, a teenager stuck between the limitations of innocent youth and the obligations of inevitable adulthood. Their story unfolds when they happen to stumble across a local arcade – an arcade that shows them new worlds, new meanings, all through the lens of video games. With each vidit to the arcade a new game is uncovered, the Kid grows stronger. Soon the lines between the games and reality starts to blur….

198X pitches itself as an homage to the golden age of 80s games, covering a swathe of the genres that were popular at the time, such as brawlers, shoot ’em ups, racers, side scrollers, and even RPGs, and it makes for a good sampler pack of what the decade had to offer. None of them last all that long nor are they all that difficult, requiring nothing more than some level memorization. The only downside is that while each section has checkpoints for when you die, if you have to quit the game for any reason you have to start the entire section of the game over again. I wish there was some option to choose between “Classic/Retro” or “Modern” in which you could jump back into whatever part of each section you were in before you quit the game.

Plus the game’s presintation is mixed with other things that were popular in the 80s, such as coming of age family and adventure movies along with the anime that was popular in Japan that was also seeing a rise in popularity in the West at the time. But it ends up being incredibly basic, for reasons that I’ll get to in a sec.

Unfortunately there isn’t much more to the game outside of showing off what people find nostalgic about the 80s, as the game as a whole is pretty short. When I say that this games comes off as a sampler pack for the decade, I do mean sampler pack, as it’s only a small offering of what each of the genres it’s showing off look like. Not that its necessarily a bad thing, but it the game was centered around something more substantial.

But I guess this was due to the fact that it was funded through Kickstarter means it was too limited by it’s budget to really do much more than what is presented here.

There is a lot to like here, as brief as it is, but the result is a game that has only the bare bones of an interesting concept. And unfortunately there isn’t going to be a sequel that could iron out any of the issues or expand on it’s good points since the company that developed the game went under. And considering that the digital storefronts for this game claim it as ‘Part 1’, they clearly had plans for more games.

I wish that the studio had the chance to put out at least a second part to iron out some of the issues here, as 198X feels more like a prologue or extended demo of something larger.

I also briefly want to compliment the soundtrack, with tracks ranging from something that would sound right out of a game from the decade it’s making homage to to tracks that give a nice sense of nostalgia. It’s not much but it makes it feel more like a complete package.

I know the game’s length is probably going to put a lot of people off, but I would recommend it on a decent sale, even if it’s too little to late for there to be a sequel.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/mod-corner-mi-new-dawn-2005-max-payne-2-the-fall-of-max-payne-review/

Throughout the history of video games, there have been a metric fuckton of video games based on films. From infamous companies like LJN flooding the market on the NES/SNES, to the terrible budget games you’d see on the Wii and PC, and numerous cheaply made ad-filled “games” taking up the Android and Apple online stores. There are hundreds of them, and 90% of them are trash pumped out either in time to meet the movies release date or just to have a brands name slapped onto a product. So the 2005 Max Payne 2 mod, M:I – New Dawn, being one of the better ones despite being a fan made project is depressing.

Mission: Impossible – New Dawn, or M:I – New Dawn for short, is a mod for Max Payne 2, that was released in 2005. M:I – New dawn tells it’s own story, but it’s pretty obviously based on the Mission: Impossible films starring Tom Cruise that were incredibly popular at the time.

After an F-16 crashed over Utah, everything looks like an accident at first, but as the wreck is recovered, it is discovered that the pilot is gone, and the new generation of warhead that was on the F-16 is gone with him. Ethan Hunt is sent in to figure out where the man and warhead have disappeared to, and prevent said warhead from getting into the wrong hands. Soon, Ethan finds himself in the middle of something bigger than he first thought and has no one he can trust or turn to. The plot is pretty much a generic early 2000’s action movie, but it’s good enough to get the mod going and keep you paying attention.

For the most part, the gameplay is the same as Max Payne 2, but the character does have an ability called Gun Kata. Take from another mod called House of Mirrors, based on the film Equilibrium, which is where the ability comes from, and is that movies excuse to have slick action scenes by combining guns and martial arts. You have to go out of you way to select it and it only work on the dual MP5Ks, so there really isn’t a reason to use it.

My only real complaint is some of the level design, such as one area in a level having you run towards enemies shooting at you so you can get to a subway station, which comes across as counter-intuitive. This only happens once in the entire mod, so it’s not that big of a problem. Also, for some reason, sometimes the dialogue of a cutscene will play even though you skipped the cutscene. It seems like it happens when you skip a cutscene too quickly, but it happens at random.

M:I – New Dawn is about 2 hours at most, depending on player skill and difficulty, so it won’t take much longer than an afternoon. Plus it’s a free quality mod, so it’s not going to cost you anything other than your time.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/07/14/polyclassic-wild-2021-pc-review/

There is nothing worse than the ‘asset flip’ when it comes to games. For those not in the know, an ‘asset flip’ game is a game that uses nothing but pre-made assets instead entirely or mostly original content for a game. And while there’s nothing wrong with using pre-made assets for a game, even one mostly or entirely made up of pre-made assets. But just like most games, an ‘asset flip’ is still going to require effort put into it for the final product to end up good. But because of just how easy it is to buy pre-made assets and put them together in your game engine of choice, there are going to be a ton of games that end up slapped together and released in less than a week.

And one of those ‘asset flips’ is “PolyClassic: Wild”.

There is no plot to “PolyClassic: Wild”, no characters, not even much variety when it comes to gameplay, including weapons, map, or one map in this case, or enemies. Which shouldn’t be an issue since there a plethora of games that manage to use a singular location with little variety in it’s gameplay and presentation that you could forgive or even forget just how low budget that game is. But now with this game.

When it comes to gameplay, it’s entirely running around enemies with the most basic AI. Every “””mission””” is just trying to kill every enemy or a certain amount of enemies to complete the level. Guns include the standard handgun, both single barrel and double barrel shotguns, minigun, a rocket launcher that looks like the one from “Quake III”, fists and a sledgehammer as your melee weapons, and a laser gun that looks like the Plasma Gun from the original “Doom” games. It’s a arsenal of weapons as bland as it is unsatisfying to shoot. The enemies range from the enemies that swarm you to punch you, riflemen that shoot you, and two bosses that’s twice as big as the regular enemies. One that fires green balls of energy at you and the other that has rocket launcher. And there are the Health and armor pickups that do exactly what you think they do.

The whole game is just running around and shooting enemies with the most basic AI in a singular small town set in the wild west that is broken up into 6 “Missions” that require you to kill a certain amount of enemies before you can continue onto the next mission. Each of which is exactly the same. “Kill [X] amount of enemies to complete the mission”.

If those last two blocks of text sounds unappealing to read I can assure that it’s even more unappealing to play. The original “Doom” in 1993 had more variety in it’s weapons, enemies, and any one of the maps in it’s campaign, and that came out 28 years before “PolyClassic: Wild”. And you would think that being bored to death would be the worst of it, but it’s somehow worse than that.

There is no indication of if you’re being hit by enemies or where they’re hitting you from, and considering that enemies can do a lot of damage very quickly, you can end up having to do a mission several times over. Which is extra insulting since there is no difficulty option, so you just have to deal with the enemies that can easily kill you from half-way across the already small map while having to run away from the enemies that are swarming at you.

To tell you the truth, I told a small lie earlier when it came to the game’s variety. There is some variety in the form of optional secondary objectives. These range from “Complete a level with over 60HP remaining”, “Kill the Mini-Boss”, or “Only use the sledgehammer”. One secondary objective is to kill a bunch of enemies with a sledgehammer, which has awful range and constantly lead to me getting killed due to enemies being able to hit me more consistently than I was able to hit them, both melee and ranged.

With the games borderline unfair difficulty, mostly as a result of just how little effort there was in balancing the enemies and weapons, there is no real incentive to complete this objectives, and you don’t need to complete them to move onto the next level anyway. The Steam version doesn’t even give you achievements for these secondary objectives, only for completing the levels, so even achievement hunters don’t need to go through with them.

The movement also feels awful and stiff, which shows just how lazy the developers were when it came to just how little they changed from the default settings that the engine came with.

Graphically the game is not the worst looking thing I’ve played, but that is me being exceptionally kind with my backhanded compliment. There is only one level spread across the games six short missions, and that’s a small town in desert set during the wild west. The game even has the gall to call a level “Wild West” as if the entire game isn’t just the one map reused over and over and over again. The same applies to enemy models, which isn’t a problem with lower level enemies that frequently appear, but I’m pretty sure the developers could have changed something about them. Maybe given them a new hat and shirt maybe. There’s already so little to go on in this game that even the smallest amount of effort would have done something.

And to top it all off, the game froze multiple times when changing settings, requiring me to force close the game. It’s one thing to be an asset flip, it’s another to not even make your asset flip so lazily put together that it crashes the game.

The game is less than half an hour long if you power through it, and maybe an hour long if you’re masochistic enough to try and complete the secondary objectives. And it was one of the most mind-numbing hours of my life. At least it comes in a dozen or so languages, but I’m pretty sure those are the generic “New Game”, “Options”, and “Credits” translated to those dozen languages that every game engine comes with.

But the most insulting thing about this whole game is that the developers behind it are charging $12USD for the game. That’s right, 12 dollars. Or a single dollar when it’s on a 99% sale, which is still too much for this game. And what makes this the most insulting part, other the price gouging, is that it appears to be made by the same company that developed and published a game called “We Are The Dwarves”, which looks to be a game that the developers actually put time and effort into.

If someone told me that a child made this as their first game and were selling it for 50 cents, I would have given it some leeway. Hell, I might even buy to support the kid, but I’m definitely sure that’s not the situation.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/01/06/antz-extreme-racing-2002-ps2-xbox-pc-review/

Someone out there thought it was a good idea to release an Antz game in 2002, a whopping 4 years after the movie came out.

If it isn’t obvious from the title and box art, Antz Extreme Racing is a kart racing game based on the film Antz. Original idea, I know. Now you might be asking yourself, “Why are you reviewing a shitty 18 year old video game based on a movie that people only talk about when someone goes ‘Hey, do you remember Antz?'” I have a lot of free time, and very little in the way of dignity.

And to make matters worse, it doesn’t even take advantage of the large time span between the films theatrical release and the game’s release date by having a more polished game. If this was rushed out to come out as the same time as the theatrical or even VHS release for the film, the game being a kart racer would make a lot more sense, or at least a more more excusable as to how and why it ended up the way it did, but somehow this game ended up on the XBOX and PS2, 4 years and a whole console generation later.

It’s not the worst looking game that I’ve seen on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox and the characters do look like their movie counterparts, despite their faces having the exact same facial expression the whole game. Plus it carries of the art style of the movie well enough. But that feels like I’m reaching for compliments when I’m talking about the graphics, which I am.

I’m going to make a comparison to another obvious cash grab, “Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding”, to make a point. That game is literally just the gameplay from Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 but with a Disney and Pixar coat of paint to promote the movies that were big at the time. But the team that developed the game clearly knew that they were making a game that was just a promotional tool, so they jumped on the back on the gameplay of another game to do the heavy work for them, and it ended up being a competent game despite the fact that it was obviously an advertisement. Antz Extreme Racing doesn’t even do that and ends up being a lazily put together cash grab that’s somehow late to promoting it’s own film.

Antz Extreme racing doesn’t even have voice clips from the movie for it’s characters. Not even sound-alikes, something which even Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding did. When you’re getting one-upped by Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding, it’s time to call it quits.

And unlike the game that it’s trying to ape off of, Mario Kart, Antz didn’t exactly have a lot of characters to pick from, and it’s pretty obvious from the fact that the game has 6 total characters to pick from, with 4 of them being unlockables. And what’s annoying is that the game doesn’t even have the two wasp characters from the movie, which could have added some more variety and visual flair, and at least would have padded out the roster to an acceptable amount, despite the fact that one of them is even on the cover of the game. As a result, the game is filled with samey looking characters. And to bring up Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding again, that game has characters with a variety of visually different looking characters, even the ones from the same movie. I would have even loved to see someone like Barbados as an unlockable character.

And to top it all off, the driving is pretty bad. The one thing that had to be good, and it ended up being awful. Everything feels so slippery. It’s unnecessarily difficult to turn corners. And if you collide with something, it can accidentally turn you around, and the slippery controls make it hard to get back in the right direction. Half the time I had to restart a race because I got so turned around. To compound the problem, some of the tracks have incredibly tight turns, meaning that you’re either going to find yourself driving off the track or hitting a wall and finding yourself a few positions behind where you were.

And yes, I know it’s the game and not me because even the AI has trouble with the driving at times. I know this is a game aimed at kids, and they don’t have high expectations, but I feel like something as simple as a kart racer shouldn’t have controls this bad.

The game at least tries to have some variety in it’s gameplay by having multiple different types of races. But for some reason, the game changes the controls depending of the type of race you pick. The first type of race is using the standard kart vehicle. The second type of race has you running on foot. The final type of race, which is a time trial where you have to make it through flag gates without missing them five times, with every time you miss them, the game adds time to your total time at the end of the race.

But for some reason, the developers thought it was a good idea to completely switch up the controls depending on the race. If you’re driving a vehicle, you use the right trigger to accelerate, but if you’re running on foot, or “snowboarding”, you have to use up on the D-Pad to accelerate. I have absolutely no idea why the developers decided to do this. Why not just make the controls the same across the board. It’s not like each race is so drastically different from each other that it needed to be changed.

Which is annoying, because there are some neat course designs, such as a course where a giant kid is stomping around and you having to avoid his feet. If I didn’t have to worry about constantly crashing due to the slippery controls, I could have enjoyed this game at least to some degree, even if only for it being a Mario Kart knockoff.

Each racer has their own career, which is being generous to call it a career. While there is a lot of overlap with the tracks in between the racers, but the tracks usually try to have something different going on, such as different weather like sunshine or fog, or reverse it. While it does it’s best to try and break up the monotony, it all still feels very samey. Even the racers cars show some level of creativity, such as either a kart being made out of rubbish left on the ground by people or is a bug that they ride.

However, the game’s final race is the the exact same with every single racer, where you race another one of the racers up a mound in the middle of the ant hill. This final track even has platforming, which is made doubly worse with the fact that you’re constantly doing tight turns, on top of the slippery driving. Surprisingly, it’s one of the easier races, and I always beat it on the second or third try at most.

And just like every other Mario Kart clone, there are several power ups that you can collect during a race. There are the usual power-ups where you can leave something on the track for a racer to accidentally hit, or something to fire at another racer. The worst power-up is the speed power-up, which is just completely useless. Not because it doesn’t give you a decent boost, but because just how poorly the driving is. By the time you could have used it, you’ve probably accidentally picked up another power-up that’s more useful.

The game does come with some unlockables, all of which are located under the “Secrets” menu.

The best one is “Infinite Missiles”. Which at least makes the races slightly more fun, but just barely. Another one is “Time Change”, which just turns the current track that you’re playing from day to night. I don't know why this isn't just an option when picking tracks outside of the "campaign".

There’s also “Wobble Cam”, which turns the camera 360 degrees in the direction that you’re turning, “Freaky Vision”, which just makes the screen blurrier, and “Speedy Play”, which makes the race faster, making it more difficult to turn. All three make the game more unplayable. But hey, it's neat that they're here.

And finally, there is “Select-a-car”. This one has to be the most confusingly implemented extra. Instead of bringing up a menu where you can select a car like any other racer with cars that you can unlock during the Career Mode, you have to unlock the “Select-a-car” mode. And instead of letting you pick a car like any other racer, when you pick one of the races in the Single Player mode, you have to hit up or down on the D-Pad to select the vehicle race order, which instead of just changing the car, you get switched to whichever place the other racer was.

This is so poorly implemented that I had no idea what I was doing the first time I tried it.

Surprisingly, the game came out on the PC, PlayStation 2, and XBOX, but not the Gamecube. Maybe the developers knew that it couldn’t compete with the Mario Kart franchise, so they didn’t even try. But it still came out on the same consoles that several Crash Team Racing games came out on, so there were still better kart games that came out on those platforms. But it still got a Gameboy Advance port, and that version was alright, so there’s that.

Hilariously, the game can be played in four-player split-screen multiplayer. I want to know what kid tried to convince their friends to play Antz Extreme Racing over literally any other racing or party game. There has to be that one kid, right?

Antz Extreme Racing might not be the worst licensed video game, as low as that bar is, but that doesn’t stop it from being yet another bad licensed video game in the every growing pile of bad licenced video games. This wasn’t even the best licensed kart game at the time, with Mickey’s Speedway USA being released on the Nintendo 64 the year before, and Shrek: Swamp Kart Speedway coming out the same year on the Gameboy Advance. Even the GBA got a version of this game which was at least a step up over this game.

Imagine being third place to a Mickey Mouse and Shrek.

If there’s a moral to this review, it’s don’t waste your time playing awful video games that no one has heard of. You only have so much time to live, go out and do something with your life.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/02/14/dinner-date-pc-review/

Dinner Date was developed and distributed by Stout Games, and was developed by a single person, Jeroen D. Stout, who also voices the protagonist’s subconscious. The only other person involved was Than van Nispen tot Pannerden, which is a mouthful, who specifically did the music for this game.

Dinner Date is an experimental video game told entirely from the protagonists point-of-view, as a man named Julian Luxemburg, as we hear his inner thoughts during a date as he slowly realizes that he’s been stoop up. The only control that the game gives you is interacting with what Julian has set up for his date and the dining room of his apartment. Essentially being in control of his subconsciousness.

You interact with these items by looking around the room and pressing whatever button the item corresponds with. The keys are laid out the same way one of your hands fingers rests on the keyboard, meaning that there isn’t much interactivity. The game lasts about 25 minutes total. There is some reputability in what you pick, but the majority of the content is limited to one playthrough.

Julian is a very unlikable character. I don’t know if that’s supposed to be intentional or not, but it makes playing through the game annoying. All he does is complain about work, thinks about how he wants to get laid, and how he wants to do more cycling. He comes off as incredibly shallow and selfish. If you’ve consoled a friend after they’ve been dumped or stood up, you’re pretty much experienced this game.

The game has a pleasant presentation. Graphically, the game looks pretty nice. Which is surprisingly nice since it was all done by one guy. The soundtrack is nice to listen to and sets the mood.

I can’t recommend Dinner Date. It’s short, has little replayability, and it doesn’t have much depth. Plus the main character is unappealing and I wouldn’t want to spend any time with him. Maybe that was the point, and I could see that argument, but no one outside of a few people wanting to analyze something like this, there’s no reason to go play this.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/mod-corner-7th-serpent-crossfire-genesis-max-payne-2-the-fall-of-max-payne-review/

Two years after the release of 7th Serpent: Crossfire got released for Max Payne, 7th Serpent: Genesis came out.

In Genesis, you play as Vincent Pretro, the 7th prototype of the Serpent Industries serpent agent program, on a mission with Abraham O’Conner, the 3rd prototype, as they infiltrate the H.A.B.I.T. Conference center to assassinate the Chairman of the H.A.B.I.T. Organization at their meeting, after destroying the security server to make sure you’re not identified.

Like the first mod, Genesis is pretty short. It doesn’t have the larger scale of the first game or the length, being only about 30 minutes long, but what’s there is still pretty solid highly polished level design. There isn’t much to elaborate on since it’s so short and talking about anything would spoil it, but it is worth checking out like the first mod.

And just like the first one, the second team couldn’t get everything they wanted into the mod, so they just released what they had. It seems a bit unfortunate, since the team behind the 7th Serpent mods clearly had a universe in mind, but just couldn’t fully realize it, considering how much backstory there was in the manuals.

Both mods are great glimpse into what could have been, and you can complete both of them in an afternoon too. 7th Serpent and 7th Serpent: Genesis are both worth checking out.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/10/01/a-look-back-at-the-7th-guest/

It might not seem like it now with more than 25 years of advancements in computer tech allowing for some fantastic looking games, but ‘The 7th Guest’ helped to push a lot of advancements of it’s own, not only graphically, but technologically as well. Released in 1993, ‘The 7th Guest’ was one of the few games at the time to be exclusively released on CD, just like it’s just as influential competitor Myst, which came out around the same time. Moving from the limitations of the 1.44 megabytes of 3’5″ floppy discs up to the 700 megabytes of the CD, roughly 500 times bigger in size, a jump in storage never seen in physical media ever again.

It did just a good job of pushing tech forward that Bill Gates himself called the game “the new standard in interactive entertainment”, which are pretty big shoes to fill.

The game was conceived by Graeme Devine and Rob Landeros, who met in 1988 while working at Virgin Games, and who both had a love of making games. They liked working together and would often watch moves while they worked, one of their favorites being ‘The Shining’. Soon they hatched a plan for a new game of their own, inspired by shows like ‘Twin Peaks’ and the board game ‘Clue/Cluedo’, and wanted to make something with a similar tone.

They handed the idea over to Martin Alper, president of Virgin Games, over lunch, who said that it had failure written all over it since he thought that gaming’s future was in cartridges, and fired them on the spot. And we all know how well cartridges went. Well, technically they weren’t fired, but they were now free agents. Soon they were under a new banner at Trilobyte Games, so if they failed, it wouldn’t look bad for Virgin Games, who would still publish the game.

He gave them three conditions with making the game. It had to ship on floppy disc, they had to work 30 to 40 miles from where martin was, an they had to make the game in 6 months. Of course, none of this happened, and 2 years later ‘The 7th Guest’ made it’s way onto store shelves.

The lengthy intro flashes back to the year 1935, showing a drifter by the name of Henry Stauf, who steals whatever he can from small business that he comes across going from town to town., as he is in the middle of killing a woman just to steal her purse. Soon, he finds himself having a beautiful doll, and the next day he begins carving it.

He trades the doll to the owner of a local tavern for food, drink, and a place to stay. He soon has more dreams of toys, each more elegant than the last, and he soon starts making a lot more money, eventually becoming a successful toy maker. He uses his fortune to build a mansion at the edge of town. However, the children who had his toys begin to contract a mysterious illness and slowly die one by one. Upon hearing the news, Stauf disappears into his mansion and is never seen again.

In the present time, the character “Ego”, who is a stand in for the character, wakes up in the Stauf Mansion without knowing how he got there. As you explore, you soon discover that the mansion is deserted of people, but has ghostly visions of the past, of six guests who were invited to the Stauf mansion, all of which have a wish that they want granted, and who have to solve puzzles that are far more dangerous than they seem to get their prize.

There was a booklet that came with the original game that came with a lot more detail about the history of Henry Stauf, the mansion, and each of the characters that you come across when exploring the mansion. Thankfully this comes with the 25th Anniversary Edition, which also comes with the original game too.

The game was written by novelist Matthew Costello, who was brought in to write the games story, whose most recognizable book is ‘Murder on Thames’, the first book in the long running Cherringham series. He also wrote the novelization of ‘The 7th Guest’, which fills out a lot of details of the game, with the first half of the book following the characters before moving onto the story of the game itself and it actually came on the re-release of the game along with being a downloadable extra with the 25th Anniversary remaster of the game, so getting a hold of it is pretty easy.

It’s hard to get across just how good ‘The 7th Guest’ looked when it originally came out back in 1993. Yes, it was entirely per-rendered CGI for it’s still images and video and was made for a video game in 1993, but having a game be running in real time 3D graphics back in 1993 was extremely limited by the hardware at the time. The only way you were getting real time 3D games were either in arcades with games like Daytona USA or Virtua Fighter, games like Doom in the PC, or games like Star Fox on the SNES, which was only capable of it’s 3D through a special chip called the Super FX chip and even then it had a framerate that could almost be counted in seconds per frame. It’s not that it wasn’t possible, it was just incredibly limited.

And it was either the still images or pixel art as the only other options, and pre-rendered stills and videos were the only things that made sense for what Trilobyte Games wanted to do with their game.

White it’s quaint to see something pre-rendered from 1993 more than 25 years later considering that it could easily be outdone with the advancements in real time graphics that have happened since it’s initial release, with even phones in the 2020s being significantly faster than computers were in 1993, the pre-rendered backgrounds in ‘The 7th Guest’ have aged fairly well for the time that it was made in, with it’s graphics being stylized in such a way that prevents the aging that a more realistic style would have suffered from.

It really showed off what the extra space that the CD format could do for pushing video game graphics forward by having high quality images, videos, and sound all available on a single disc, even if it could still be bottle necked by the rest of the computer.

The game even presents itself in widescreen, even if it’s formatted to appear on the square monitors that computers were using at the time, so the developers were clearly confident that there game was so advanced that it was practically a movie. And much like a lot of games that were trying to be movies at this point, ‘The 7th Guest’ is a game filled with full motion video. And while that might sound dubious considering the reputation that FMV games have in retrospect, but it’s nowhere close to being one of the worst ones out there, not only in terms of being a game, but both it’s acting quality and gameplay quality.

It’s like watching an overly dramatic play, which was the style at the time since not only computer monitors were much smaller but the video quality was limited by the hardware computers at the time, which meant that the actors needed to do this to try and get across the intent of the acting and plot for the game for it to work. Plus it works in the games favor since the whole thing is pretty cheesy to begin with, intentionally or not.

Fun fact, the characters were never originally meant to be ghosts. It just turned out that with the quality of the video recordings, each character ended up having a blue aura around them when they were filming on the blue screen, so the developers made everyone into a ghost. Which is a sense of self-awareness that most developers who had Full Motion Video in their games lacked completely when it came to applying it to their games.

But my favorite part out of the entire game is the soundtrack. Entirely composed by George Alister “The Fat Man” Sanger, who has a small cameo in this game as a painting, along with David Sanger. George Sanger has done a lot of work in the video game industry, with a small sample of the games he’s worked on featuring ‘Maniac Mansion’ for the NES, ‘Loom’, ‘Wing Commander’ 1 and 2, ‘Ultima Underworld’, ‘Zombies Ate My Neighbors’, ‘Evil Genius’, and several Humongous Entertainment’s games just to mention a few, which is quite the career.

The games soundtrack ranges from the cheesy spooky vibes that you would expect from a game where you wander a haunted mansion filled with ghosts which only enhances the mood to tongue-in-cheek songs, with the notable example of “Skeleton’s In My Closet” performed by ‘The Fat Man and Team Fat’ and sung by Kris McKay, which plays during the credits, and is also featured on the album ‘7/11’ also done by ‘The Fat Man and Team Fat’, which is music from both ‘The 7th Guest’ and it’s sequel ‘The 11th Hour’. The whole soundtrack really is the stand out thing about ‘The 7th Guest’, and it even comes with the digital re-releases of the game, and I’ve been listening to it as I’ve been writing article looking back at the game.

While ‘The 7th Guest’ was technically impressive, from a gameplay perspective it’s a lot rougher. Moving from area to area is slow, mostly due to CDs at the time having slow read speeds, a side effect of adopting the new technology, and computers not being powerful enough to process a faster video. Meaning that going back and forth between puzzles was tedious at the best of times, frustrating at the worst if you just wanted to move on from a puzzle that you were stuck on. I know it’s a limitation of the technology at the time, but when you consider that other games just used still images instead of videos when moving from place to place, making the whole thing a lot smoother, it just feels like it’s the side effect of riding the bleeding edge of technology in a decade when technology was moving at lightening speed rather than a good idea. It was still impressive for the time though.

Calling the puzzles a mixed bag is putting it politely. A few of them are pretty easy and straightforward to figure out, like the heart maze or the cake puzzle. But then there are the puzzles that drive you up the wall. The piano puzzle is pretty much a ‘Simon Says’ puzzle where you have to press the keys in an ever increasing order, and if you mess up you have to start over again. This is incredibly tedious and sluggish, especially with the speed at which the game is limited to due to hardware limitations. These limitations also meant you couldn’t skip cutscenes either, so if you were replaying it just for the puzzles, you were out of luck and stuck with watching all of the cutscenes.

It’s also slightly confusing to get to some areas of the house with there being no obvious signs of where to go. If it wasn’t for me peaking at the achievements of the 25th Anniversary Edition, I would have had no idea that there were some unconventional ways of getting around the house to put it politely. You have to look at the floor in the foyer to get to the portraits room for example. I guess you would have seen it if you moused over it and the cursor changed, but I still would have been confused when a transitional animation played and suddenly I was in a room that was somewhere else. Even the room is detached from the rest of the house on the map.

Then there are the puzzles that range from trial and error to entirely luck based that are so obtuse that if takes way too long for you to figure them out.

The first infamous puzzle, and yes, I said first, was a puzzle so notorious in the adventure game genre at the time for it’s obtuseness that it ended up naming a trope for puzzles that not only obstructed the player from continuing but the player would have significant trouble figuring out the puzzle out on their own, even with major hints about the answer from the game itself. The puzzle in question is an anagram with letters placed on a soup can in the kitchen cabinet. In the modern era, this could easily be solved with brute force through an anagram decoder, but this would have been frustrating back in the day when it was released. It’s not as keyboard smashing as pre-1993 Sierra games were, which is probably it’s only saving grace.

This is a good time to mention that there is a hint book in the mansion’s library, which gives you three hints in order from a slight nudge to borderline telling you. If you use the fourth book, it just solves the puzzle for you, but you sacrifice a part of the story with the game just skipping over it. It doesn’t stop you from playing the game, you just don’t get that part of the story. And the third hint for this game pretty much requires using a thesaurus to solve, so you’re at bare minimum using a pen and paper to solve an anagram or spending 20 minutes looking through a thesaurus, and that’s if you even have one.

If anyone going through the history of video games for the first time is wondering why adventure games went from being one of the dominant genres in the medium to being more sidelined for more easy to grasp genres, it was less the fact that games like Doom and Wolfeinstein 3D were simpler action games for a wider audience, but more the fact that a lot of adventure games were filled with puzzles that frustrated people that most people pretty much gave up on the genre. And ‘The 7th Guest’ isn’t even the worst example.

Another infamous puzzle is the microscope puzzle, which was a problem but for entirely different reasons. This one involves going up an AI opponent. How the game’s logic works for the AI is that it uses the CPU speed to figure out the next couple of moves for the AI. The immediate problem with this is that in the next few years after this games release, CPU speeds skyrocketed, as did a lot of other tech at the time, meaning that the AI went from predicting a few moves ahead to predicting practically every move the puzzle could make, making the puzzle, and by extension, the entire game impossible to beat. It’s a pretty good example of not tying a game’s logic to the speed of what’s in your computer. The game still requires some luck in playing, but it’s not as egregious as other puzzles in this game. Thankfully emulators like ScummVM lowers the speed to what it was originally intended, making the puzzle perfectly playable.

But this puzzle still ended up being popular enough that it was released on it’s own on the iPad under the name ‘The 7th Guest: Infection’ by Trilobyte Games, where it can be played against Henry Stauf in a Single Player more or against another player, or in a demo mode where the game plays against itself. It sounds like a fun little time waster even though I haven’t played it for myself.

And then there are the puzzles based almost entirely on luck, like the picture flip puzzle, the coffin puzzle, and the portrait puzzle, which require little to no skill to beat but still require a lot of time playing them, making the player spend unnecessary time doing repetitive work. And to top it all off there is even a maze that you have to figure out. Every time you hit a dead and, Stauf mocks you by saying “Feeling lonely?”, which will happen often and start to drive you mad. And putting a maze in a game is a bad idea even in the best of games.

The game does try to give you hints to how the puzzle works are you’re playing them by having the character that you’re playing as talking to himself during the puzzle But he doesn’t do it just the first time that you’re trying to solve a puzzle, he does it every single time you start the puzzle over. And with every puzzle you’re going to hear him say the exact three or four things over and over and over again no matter what, making you press the space bar as quickly as possible to skip over the audio, which takes control away from you for a couple of seconds as he talks to himself.

And on top of that, Stauf taunts you every couple of moves in whatever puzzle you’re playing. It’s always the same line specific to each puzzle too. The taunting needed to be significantly reduced and the character dropping hints only needed to be played once and maybe brought up again every now and again as a reminder.

I feel like half of these puzzles are probably going to make the player just look up a walkthrough, and that’s if they haven’t already quit in frustration, and I wouldn’t blame them. Enough of the puzzles are actually fun and even the right kind of challenging to make a player invested, but so many others are just an exercise in frustration. Having to brute force your way through a game is never a fun time.

The whole thing just comes across as a game that has a mystery plot first adventure game second, with it’s aesthetic and tone coming first, gameplay second. All of the puzzles feeling so haphazardly strung together with how radically different they are in difficulty. And from what I’ve seen from the interviews from the creators, it seems like they just wanted to jump onto the CD as a technology first, with the game coming from what they could do with it rather than a good game first.

And since I have no idea where else to put it, some of the animations when moving around make no sense. You can click on a door that you want to go through but in order to move to it the game moves it another area first and then moves to the door that you originally wanted to go to because the animation to move to the door was only done from that angle. I know it had to to with the developers having a limited schedule and budget, but it still ends up being a frustration to the player.

Also, with a small aside, due to the era that this game was released in, if you click on certain spots in the game it plays a fun little animation, which is one of those things that developers didn’t have to do but did anyway because it’s just a fun thing to do.

At the time of it’s release ‘The 7th Guest’ managed to sell 2 million copies, which was an impressive feat at the time considering that CD drives weren’t cheap or readily available. Apparently it increased the sale of CD drives by 300% around the time of it’s release. It sold enough for the company to release a ‘Special Edition’ of the game which features a ‘Making Of’ video on the second disc, which is rare in games even today. This video also comes with digital versions along with other bonus downloads.

But when it comes down to it, I personally find it a little hard to recommend the game. While it’s considered significant game for a reason, it’s not for having good gameplay or a compelling story, but for pushing PC hardware forward which helped a lot of developers do a lot more with games down the line, which just make it feel like a tech demo more than a well thought out game.

‘Myst’ came out a few months after this and it’s puzzles were a lot better designed in that I could actually take notes and properly figure them out instead of having to brute force most of them.

‘The 7th Guest’ should be respected for it did but it should be respected from a distance. To be looked at but not touched. I know that’s a backhanded way to talk about a game, but sometimes time is not kind to some things, and ‘The 7th Guest’ is one of them, even if it does have it’s charm.