Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/10/01/the-7th-guest-25th-anniversary-edition-2019-review/

While it might not be as well known 25 years after it’s release as it was when it was first released as it has been overshadow by two and a half decades of games that are either just as influential or have become significantly more popular, but ‘The 7th Guest’ and definitely left it’s impact on the industry by helping push it forward as I have discussed in my original review. It certainly has left enough of an impact to gain a cult following and be respected enough to get a remaster in the form of ‘The 7th Guest: 25th Anniversary Edition’.

I’m just going to go over the differences between the original and the remaster, since otherwise most of this review is just going to be an almost exact copy of the original.

Since the plot is the exact same as the original game due to the ’25th Anniversary Edition’ being a simple update, I’ll just copy and paste the plot synopsis here since there’s no point it re-summarizing it.

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 toymaker. 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 illens and slowly die one by one. Apon 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 graphics largely remain the same as the original version of the game. The full motion video remains in all of it’s pixelated and interlaced glory. It’s much more noticeable since it’s now being shown on higher resolution screens, but hey, what are you going to do? The developers couldn’t really do much without going back to the original 3D renders of the mansion and original video files and completely re-rendering them to look much better on more modern screens, and unfortunately they didn’t get archived properly due to budget constraints on the original game, so this is the best that we’re going to get.

The game is now in proper widescreen. For the purists, you don’t have to worry about things getting cut off since the original game was presented in widescreen formatted for the square monitors at the time, so all the game had to do was zoom in. There is an option to toggle between a widescreen mode that has the game touching all sides of the monitor or the game having narrow black bars at the top and bottom, making it slightly thinner than 16×9, but showing everything from the image. It’s a tiny difference, but if a purist wants those extra pixels, the option is there.

There is an optional filter that you can turn on to smooth out the graphics to try and make them look a little less pixelated, but it just looks like a smudged mess to me, especially since the resolution of the original images and videos is pretty low compared to the more modern games released 25 years since the original release of ‘The 7th Guest’. There’s no real reason to apply a filter to a game so low res and pixelated. I’m pretty sure the graphics snobs weren’t going to play this anyway, but it is nice that it was included as an option.

All of the animations that play when you’re going from one area of the mansion to another are now sped up, making the process of exploring new areas along with revisiting the puzzles that you took a break from have become less tedious. This is the most significant and all around best update to the game, for me at least, since having to move around or backtrack in the original game was such a pain.

Also, the cutscenes in this game now can easily be skipped. Well, technically sped up like the transitional animations, but being able to skip through that intro cutscene on another playthrough is fantastic.

A small part of me misses the slower animations. It was as if the character was slowly creeping throughout the mansion scared of what might jump out at them, not wanting to draw attention to themselves, like the developers were taking advantage of the limited speed of CDs when the game was first released. But if I had to pick between faster animation or the atmoshere, I would pick the faster animation ever time just because of how tedious the original was. It would have been nice to have a toggle to choose between them to appeal to the purists, but I’m fine with the faster animations.

Also, is it just me of is the spinning icon on the loading screen look like it’s spinning the wrong way?

The sound and music pretty much remains the same as the original game. There is an option to switch between a re-mastered version of the score or go back to the high quality Midi or Adlib, which is nice. You do have to load a game or start a new one to change it in the game though. This version does add in voice acting for German, French, and Russian, along with subtitles for those new languages long with subtitles for several other languages. I can’t speak those languages, but I hope that they’re equally as cheesy as the original acting.

Since the ’25 Anniversary Edition’ is almost exactly the same as the original, pretty much all of my complaints about the original carry over. From puzzles ranging from tedious but solvable to practically needing a walkthrough to complete, it’s not exactly the most warm welcome, but it’s entirely presented as it originally was, warts and all, so fans should be happy.

The ’25th Anniversary Edition’ mobile port, which has a HTML front end while the game is running on ScummVM, made obvious by the game’s credits. My only real complaint about this is that a few of the hotspots used to move around the mansion are a bit awkward to use. There is a way of highlighting which areas of the screen allow you to move around the mansion, but it took a while for me to get used to clicking on the right hotspots, taking me to a wrong part of the room or changing my view. It’s not egregious but it does take some getting used to.

It even comes with a bonus mode called “Open House Mode” as an unlockable. It doesn’t allow you to actually wander around the house and do whatever you want, it only allows you to solve any puzzle from the game again without having to wander around the house.

The one thing that I have to point out is that this is based on the mobile port of the game. Not the original mobile port, since several puzzles were removed in that version because of the size of mobile devices at the time, with the infamous microscope puzzle getting it’s own version on mobile devices. So if you’re reading any reviews talking about missing content, you can ignore those parts of the review.

But is the ’25th Anniversary Edition’ of ‘The 7th Guest’ worth playing? If you’re into old adventure games and are fine with dealing with some of the frustrating quirks of old adventure games, then yes. Is it worth playing over the original? Also yes. The ’25th Anniversary Edition’ is enough of an improvement in my opinion that I would recommend playing it over the original, since it removes a few of the frustrations of the original game.

And if you’re a purist, the ’25th Anniversary Edition’ comes with the original game as a free bonus anyway, even if it’s weirdly hidden away as DLC in the Steam release.

But because of the flaws inherent to the original game, I can’t exactly recommend this to a lot of people outside of the people who are already fans of the original or people who are fans of 90s adventure games and all of the hair pulling puzzles that was part of the genre back in the early 90s. There are way too many puzzles that either rely on luck or aren’t clear with their logic that make it a hard game to recommend to a lot of people.

Maybe watch a retrospective or playthrough if you’re curious but don’t want to put up with the puzzles.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/03/05/gabriel-knight-sins-of-the-fathers-1993-review/

‘Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers’ is a point-and-click adventure game that came out in 1993, and was developed and published by Sierra On-Line for the PC and Mac and was released at the beginning of when Sierra was trying to break into more mature games, with both ‘Phantasmagoria’ and ‘Shivers’ being the companies other attempts at games aimed at older audiences, which were released 2 years later in 1995.

‘Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers’ was written and designed by Jane Jensen, who was given a great deal of freedom when writing and designing the game, with some help from company co-founder Roberta Williams. Jensen was previously a designer for ‘EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus’ and the writer and co-designer for ‘King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow’ along with Roberta Williams, as well as working on ‘Police Quest 3: The Kindred’ by doing some additional writing, and helped design ‘Pepper’s Adventures in Time’, which came out the same year as ‘Sins of the Fathers’.

Thankfully, the game is pretty easy to set up, as it runs in ScummVM just by selecting the folder that the game is located in, so you don’t have to fiddle with DOSBox, unless that’s your method of choice. The GOG version already comes pre-packaged with ScummVM.

But to tangent for just a moment, for some reason ‘Sins of the Fathers’ was released in one of the weirdest boxes for a game I’ve ever seen. While it did ship in the regular rectangular box that most games shipped in at the time, one of the boxes that ‘Sins of the Fathers’ came in was designed by a madman. Some even came in a trapezoid shape, which was already pushing it, but ‘Sins of the Fathers’ came in something completely different. I have no idea what shape this is. If the trapezoid shaped boxes already had trouble fitting on your shelf, then you’re going to need a whole shelf dedicated to putting this on it.
The puzzle box from Hellraiser wasn’t this complicated.

My pet theory is that someone at Sierra accidentally sent the work for the box designer to the puzzle creators instead and the puzzle creators didn’t question it and thought that it might be an Raster Rgg and sent it back without questioning it, and the person who sent it out in the first place okayed it assuming it would look like every other box for a video game, and by the time it was being printed it was too late to change and they were stuck with a bunch of copies of this game that looked like this.

‘Sins of the Fathers’ follows the titular character Gabriel Knight, a failed novelist with a string of unsuccessful paranormal mysteries under his belt that currently has writer’s block and owner of a book store located in New Orleans that sells rare books that’s barely any more successful than his novels. To overcome his writers block, Gabriel gets in contact with his childhood friend, Detective Mosley, who is currently working on a case referred to as ‘The Voodoo Murders’, hoping to use it as inspiration for his next novel. At the same time, Gabriel has been having vivid nightmares involving voodoo sacrifices that seem all too real.

To expand on the game’s story, ‘Sins of the Fathers’ came with a prequel graphic novel in the game box, back when games actually came in a physical box instead of being released onto current digital store shelves, that follows an incident from 1693 and follows a Schattenjager, German for Shadow Hunter, named Gunter Ritter as he investigates a series of brutal murders involving witchcraft. While it isn’t necessarily required reading to enjoy the game, it does fill in some of the background details as to what is going on in the game.

While it is a bit hard to find these days, it was eventually uploaded to Sierra Studio’s website, whis is unfortunately no longer up. But this was before the turn of the millennium and the comic is pretty low resolution compared to more modern scans of it. While digital version of the original game don’t come with the graphic novel for some reason, it should be fairly easy to find online through various websites. Eventually it was released with the 20th Anniversary Edition of ‘Sins of the Fathers’, which is nice, but that version of the game is for another day.

There was even a novelization for ‘Sins of the Fathers’ which was later released in the ‘Gabriel Knight Mysteries’, which included the first and second games, written by Jane Jensen herself. However, good luck buying a second hand copy of this collection or book, let alone at a reasonable price. It didn’t get re-released like the graphic novel did by being released as an extra in the 20th Anniversary Edition of this game, but there are digital copies of it floating around online and I don’t think anyone would mind people getting a copy of this book since there is no other way to get it.

I’d figure that I would briefly mention that ‘Sins of the Fathers’ uses a lot of real world history, including real life people, locations, and history as a basis for it’s story. The developers for ‘Sins of the Father’s have clearly done their research into the history of both Voodoo and the history of New Orleans and it’s entirely feasible that you could learn something about both Voodoo and the city of New Orleans from playing this game. Although, it has been more than 25 years since it’s release so it’s entirely possibly some information has been corrected and some blind spots have been filled in, but it could still be used as a jumping off point for it’s subject matter.

Gabriel’s rare book shop is even located on the famous Bourbon Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and looking at Google Maps, the game looks pretty accurate to the real world locations that are featured on the game’s map, barring Gabriel’s book shop of course since that isn’t real. Well, accurate for 1993 at least. I might actually write up something about the real world locations in ‘Sins of the Fathers’ since I had fun looking it up for this game.

The game obviously follows the previously mentioned Gabriel Knight, a womanizer and ladies man who has enough charm to work his magic on any woman he fancies. Mostly. Did I mention that this game was written by a woman? The only person to resist his charms is Grace Nakimura (outside of that one female cop later in the game), Gabriel’s assistant. It’s pretty obvious that Grace was written to be Gabriel’s inevitable love interest who is clearly in denial about her feelings towards him, but we don’t actually see Grace actually falling for him at any point, which is refreshing. Grace is smart, sarcastic, and doesn’t take any of Garbiel’s shit, which makes her my favorite character by default.

During Gabriel’s investigation, we soon come across several other important characters, including Detective Mosely, which is Gabriel’s Childhood friend and the sole reason that Gabriel is able to not only get information about the Voodoo Murders, sometimes Mosely giving up the info freely, but mostly Gabriel getting it through other more less than legal means, taking advantage of their life long friendship.

But there are more interesting characters related to the events of the Voodoo Murders. One of those people is Malia Gedde, who Gabriel Knight first notices as she is passing by one of the crime scenes of the Voodoo Murders, taking interest in both the crime scene and Gabriel the moment she see’s him. The other is someone who claims to be a distant relative of Gabriel and is trying to get into contact with him, but Gabriel brushes it off.

You’ll also meet several more characters throughout the game, all of which are unique and memorable in their own ways. Some of which are a lot more dangerous than they seem.

When ‘Sins of the Fathers’ was original released, CDs were becoming the hot new thing, allowing for up to 700 megabytes per disc instead of the incredibly limited 1.44 megabytes that the floppy disc had. And while ‘Sins of the Fathers’ came out on floppy discs, it also came out on CD. But instead of simply taking advantage of the extra space that CDs allowed by reducing the game from a whole 11 floppy discs to just putting 1 CD into your system, it also came with a bunch of other neat additions too. Not only did the Cd version come with a fully animated intro (well, fully animated by the standards of 1993), but it also came with a short video detailing the making of the game, which is a rarity for games in the modern era, let alone in the early 90s. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come with the digital re-release of the game.

But the biggest addition with the CD version of ‘Sins of the Fathers’ is that it adds voice acting for every single line of dialogue throughout the game. All 3700 lines of dialogue.And not only did Sierra put up the money for voice actors, but they went all in and hired actual movie and TV talent for the game.

The titular Gabriel Knight was voiced by Tim Curry (Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)), Detective Mosely was voiced by Mark Hamil (Star Wars (1977)), Grace Nakimura was voiced by Leah Remini (The King of Queens (1998-2007), Dr. John was voiced by Michael Dorn (Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994)), along with Desk Sgt Frink and a few miscellaneous characters throughout the game being voice by Jim Cummings, who has had over 550+ voice credits as of writing this review and has voiced everything from Whinnie The Pooh to Pete from Goof Troop to Darkwing Duck

And finally, the character of Wolfgang was voiced by the late Elfrem Zimbalist, Jr., who has voiced Alfred from “Batman: The Animated Series” (1992-1995), starred in the movie “Airport 1975” (1974), along with the long-running show “The F.B.I.”, which lasted 241 episodes over 9 season, and ran from September 19th, 1965, to April 28th, 1974, a whopping 9 years.

But despite playing as Gabriel Knight, the developers decided to go with a narrator to read all of the descriptor text instead of having the character read all of it. Which, considering the amount of text in this game, it’s pretty reasonable.

The narrator is played by the late Virginia Capers, an accomplished actress who has appeared on Broadway and has made various movie and TV appearances throughout her career. From everything that I’ve read about the game, the narrator is the only character (she’s not really a character, but she leaves one hell of an impression) that people seem to complain about, and by the end of the game, I sadly kinda agree, at least to some extent.

Virginia’s line readings can be a bit slow and I had already read through whatever line she had been reading before she had even got half way through it. But I did still enjoy her line readings, which were wonderfully sarcastic at times, even if they were still a little bit long in the tooth by the end of the game.

There is an option to turn the narrator off in the game’s settings, so if her performance does grate on you, you don’t have to listen to her throughout the game.

‘Sins of the Fathers’ looks great for an adventure game of it’s time, mixing film noir with the styling of a graphic novel, and it does it quite well. Sure it wasn’t going in on the shiny new pre-rendered 3D like a lot of the adventure games were doing at the time, like “Myst”, “The 7th Guest”, and even more obscure adventure games like “Gadget: Invention, Travel, & Adventure”, or going all in on the FMV trend like “Dracula Unleashed”, “Return to Zork”, and “Police Quest: Open Season”, which was also developed by Sierra, along with the previously mentioned “Myst” and “The 7th Guest”, all of which came out the same year as ‘Sins of the Fathers’, but the mix of pixel art and obviously painted backgrounds used as a basis for the backgrounds holds up a lot better that the now incredibly dated early pre-rendered 3D and cheesy acting of the FMV games.

There are even times in the game when an important even happens in the game and it switches to a graphic novel style cutscene made up of comic panels that highlight turning points in the story or feature important information for the plot, and they really add to the games atmosphere. The game also draws it’s inspiration heavily from the 1987 film “Angel Heart”, obvious from the way the first day of the game starts, an excellent film that anyone who is a giant fan of this game should check out if you haven’t yet.

If you’re a newer point-and-click adventure game fan deciding to leap into some of the point-and-click classics, then fair warning because ‘Sins of the Fathers’ uses something called a ‘dumb cursor’. A ‘smart cursor’ automatically selects whatever action is required for you to interact with something, where as a ‘dumb cursor’ is a cursor that lets you pick what action to use with whatever object, person, or place you’re trying to interact with.

A boot is or walking, the mask is for looking, the text bubble with a question mark is for asking questions, the text bubble with exclamation mark is for talking, the hand is for picking up, the door is for opening a door to something, the gears are for using something like a light switch or chair, the hand knocking something is for moving something, the pouch (it looks like an envelope) is the inventory, and the tape recorder is obviously the tape recorder.

Some of these cursors could have easily been combined. I feel like it’s pretty obvious that when I hover my cursor over the point on the screen where you have to either move to a different area or screen that I clearly want to move to that area, and the fact that I have to differentiate between opening a door and walking through a doorway that is already open is kind of annoying. Clearly I don’t want to unscrew the door from the doorway and take it with me.

There are points where I naturally want to use the hand icon to either use something or pick something up, but you have to use the ‘operate’ cursor instead. As much as I’ve always appreciated the fluff dialogue in older point-and-click adventure games, I’d rather seek it out than have to hear it every time that I accidentally use the wrong cursor.

You can right click to cycle through all of the cursors, but I quickly found myself just using the drop down menu not only because I found myself accidentally cycling past a cursor that I wanted to use by accident, doubly so when I had to do something in a quick time frame, but using the drop down menu paused the game to let you properly find the cursor that I wanted to use without having to worry about finding the right one in time for the small window of opportunity to narrowly dodge an event that would have killed me and given me a game over screen.

Apparently the cursors were designed like this because Sierra was getting letters about how ‘smart cursors’ assume too much about what the player wanted to do, like instead of just picking up a jar the character just opened it instead, and the players just wanted more control over the game.

Also, there are also several points throughout the game where you’re required to use something from your inventory and use it on something in the environment or with another character.

But my favorite part is having to learn Voodoo Code. At one point in the game, you’ll need to learn how to use Voodoo Code and Drum Code, the Voodoo Code to write a message, and Drum Code to translate a message, both requiring you translate to corresponding symbols and sounds to letters and words. It adds an extra layer to the puzzles to make them feel like they were properly designed around the plot and subject matter instead of just shoving puzzles in simply because it’s an adventure game.

Unfortunately, some of the puzzles still have a touch of the classic Sierra moon logic going, but I guess there wasn’t any escaping that from even the most sensible Sierra games.

I know that this game was released in 1993 when adventure games were still known for having some moon logic puzzles, but Gabriel Knight is clearly trying to tell a proper story, and some of the more out there puzzles cause a slight whiplash when it comes to the tone.

For example, one of the first puzzles in the game requires you to use a thermostat in the police station so that Detective Mosely takes off his jacket and puts it on the back of his chair so that you can fish out his detectives badge from it’s pocket. The way you do this is after he’s taken his jacket off, you have to ask him ‘politely’ to get you a cup of coffee.

This is all in character for Gabriel to do and makes logical sense. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t really get across that this is what you’re supposed to do. The game could have easily had Gabriel, or the narrator, to mention it offhandedly directly or indirectly in a line of dialogue. It doesn’t help that the thermostat blends in with the background of the game and the only way you’re going to know that it’s there is to mouse over it and for it to pop up with text.

Which also highlights the fact that there is some minor pixel hunting in this game. For the most part, the game does a fantastic job conveying the player what is what, but the game still has some limitation with the hardware from the time.

Thankfully, there is some wiggle room with what you can do on which day of the game that you’re up to. It’s like whoever developed the puzzle went went through all of the hoops to make sure that the puzzle made logical sense, but tripped up at the finish line and completely forgot that there was an audience playing the game and forgot to tell them about the puzzle.

Thankfully the game doesn’t put you into any death traps that you’re completely unaware of, setting you back hours and undoing all of your hard work and progress where you don’t have the slightest clue what you did wrong. But of course, you still have to go with the old adventure game adage of “Save and Save Often”.

I could easily see someone taking a peak at a guide or walkthrough at some point during their playthough, and I wouldn’t really blame a few people who had no experience playing older point-and-click adventure games.

But both the most important and infamous part of the game is the interrogation mechanic. While you’re interacting with other characters, there will be several characters important enough to the story that when you use the ‘Ask’ cursor on them, a list of questions pops up that allows you to ask very specific questions about any relevant information that you’re looking for, and any information you get about a subject that you get from one character can be used when asking questions to another character, meaning you’ll have to go back and forth between a few characters before you’ll get all of the relevant information.

Thankfully at the beginning of the game Gabriel does get a tape recorder in the mail which automatically records all of the conversations that you have with other characters throughout the game, meaning that you don’t have to constantly take notes. I know that some long time adventure game fans love their note taking, but when you have no idea what information is relevant and when, this is a godsend.

And it also lends to more realistic conversations too, as some characters tell you in an annoyed tone that they don’t want to have to repeat themselves over and over again, which pokes fun at the fact that adventure game protagonists are know for repeating themselves when asking a question by having the characters give realistic reactions to how annoying this would be in the real world.

There are still a few minor nitpicks I have with the game though that I thought that I should mention. These might not bug you like they do me, but I thought that I should bring them up anyway.

You have to wait for some animations to complete before you’re allowed to do something else like use your inventory or interact with something or someone else. I think this is more a weird quirk of the engine more than a bug, but it’s mildly annoying at times when you’re at the more time sensitive moments.

Gabriel’s walking speed is also a tad slow. It took so long for him to get from A to B in some places that I used this time to make notes for this look a the game that during these moments, including this complaint that I’m making right now.

A later part of the game has you going through not quite a maze, but it can get slightly confusing if you’re not paying attention and get turned around, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.

While Gabriel Knight: ‘Sins of the Fathers’ did receive great reviews when it was released, it wasn’t a commercial success, only selling around 300,000 copies by December 1998, a whole 5 years after it’s initial release, which was depressingly low even at the time. One of it’s competitors in the adventure genre, Myst, sold millions of copies and got people to adopt a whole new technology with the CD. But thankfully due to it’s positive response Sierra decided to greenlight multiple sequels anyway, which is great because it would have been a shame if Gabriel Knight ended at one game.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/10/

Speed dating is not my thing. Being forced into getting to know someone enough to start a possible relationship with them in a couple of minutes sounds frustrating, Pugs however are one of my things. So maybe speed dating a pug will convince me that speed dating as a whole isn’t so bad.

Hot Date was released on PC, MAC, and Linux on the 28th of May, 2013, and was later released on the iOS on the 16th of December. It was entirely designed by one man, George Batchelor, except for the soundtrack, which was by Levi Pack.

The game is so simple that there isn’t even a main menu, you just jump right into the gameplay. The game starts just as you sit down at a speed dating event, and you’re sitting right across from a pug. You start up a conversation by picking from a list of greetings, and soon you’re going down a rabbit hole of asking a weird series of questions.

From them, the game is seeing what amusing answers you’ll get. Each date is pretty short, which is to be expected, so it’ll take several playthroughs to see all, if not most of the content. The game takes 30 to 45 minutes to see all of the content. So it’s playable in an afternoon or a couple of lunchbreaks, and is worth checking out on a rainy day.

Even though there isn’t much here, I’d say check it out. The PC, Max, and Linux versions of the game are pay what you want, but i recommend throwing in a dollar or two to the creators. The iOS version however requires money upfront, and costs $1.99USD/1.49.

https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/01/23/a-look-back-at-realmyst-2000/

The tech behind video games during the 90s and into the early 2000s was rapidly evolving. Games had moved from 2D pixel art and still images for it’s graphics with limited beeps and boops for sound to being fully 3D and seen in real time with proper high quality audio that allowed for voice acting, sounds, and music along with other features such as being able to play videos, all of which became available through dedicated video and sound cards along with the CD being the hot new format and able to hold all of this brand new technology easily.

And Myst was released right at the beginning of these advancements, only really seeing the beginnings of these new strides. So a remake of Myst wasn’t too absurd, and 7 years later, in 2000, realMyst was released, a fully 3D version of Myst where you could see it from every angle and not just the ones the developers had to provide.

It was developed by Cyan with some help with Sunsoft, realMyst was developed on the PLASMA engine as a way to test it out for the upcoming and then unnamed Uru, which was released 3 years later in 2003.

But when realMyst was released, it was released to a lukewarm reception at best from reviewers and a less than warm welcome even from it’s own creators. Billed as the version of the game that the creators (Rand and Robyn Miller) would have made if the technology at the time was available, Robyn Miller later went on record to explicitly deny that this version of Myst was what they would have made, calling it a pointless remake and saying “I only saw realMyst after it was released. As a remake, it was a lapse of reason and directionless; overt merchandising of the original Myst. It definitely wasn’t how we originally envisioned Myst, as was promoted.” [SOURCE: Retro GAMER Collection Volume Five].

Even the original version of realMyst is no longer considered to be canon and has been delisted from every available digital storefront, being replaced with realMyst: Masterpiece Edition, released 14 years after the original realMyst. Thankfully I managed to get my version of the original realMyst from GOG before it got delisted, but the only way to find that version now is second hand or to sail the high seas of the internet. Since it’s probably never going to go on sale ever again and Cyan is not going to get a cent from it ever again, just buy the Masterpiece Edition and get the original realMyst through other means.

But was it really all that bad? Let’s jump right into it.

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.

Right off the bat, the original version of realMyst is buggy, even when it was released. Even the version that I luckily got from GOG, which is know for getting older games to work properly on more modern computers, or at least as best they can, still has bugs. I did have to some slight fiddling with the game to get it running smoothly, and even then it did crash on me once and when you alt-tab out of the game it crashes. It’s nowhere near the worst experience I’ve had getting an older game to work, but just be cautious about playing it. You kinda have to dedicate yourself to it without being distracted by stuff in the background of your computer.

The controls for the original realMyst are a little weird too. The default controls are W for forward and S for walking backwards, and shift lets you run, but no A or D for strafing. The left and right mouse buttons also move you back and forward too. There is also a dead zone in the middle of the screen where you can move your cursor around to interact with the world and if you try to move your cursor out of this dead zone you can move the screen. These controls are a little unconventional to say the least. It’s like the developers were trying to create a mix of first person controls and the point-and-click controls from the original.

These are changeable in the settings. You can increase the area in which your cursor can move, ranging from taking up the entire screen and only moving the camera around when the cursor hits the edge of the screen, which is pointless since you’re interaction with objects is still limited by the dead zone in the middle of the screen, to having the area that the cursor can move in effectively be so small that it’s closer to what standard mouse controls were at the time in that it moves the screen when moving the mouse at all, which is much more preferable method since you can still point and click on whatever you want without having to worry about the cursor dead zone.

The other option in the settings is the ‘Advanced Mappings’, which adds in strafing, so using both the ‘Advanced Mappings’ and no dead zone gets you the standard controls of every first person game. You can also change the settings of the walking, strafing, and cursor speeds too. Apparently the ‘Advanced Mappings’ were patched in after the games release too, which seems baffling in retrospective considering that it had be a few years since the release of Quake at this point and that was one of the biggest and most famous games on the PC at this point.

Weirdly enough, they’re not the worst controls that I’ve encountered throughout the years, both from games before and since, it’s still weird that they’re presented like this considering that a lot of games had made their way into 3D at this point. It could have been entirely a limitation of the engine or the developers didn’t quite get how to work a 3D engine yet.

But there are a few times where you’re walking up some stairs and the game takes some of the control away from them. Like the spiral staircase in the Stoneship Age. You don’t have to turn your camera to climb them, you can just hold forward and the game will turn you in the direction of whatever way the staircase is going. Turning around with the mouse on the staircase can get you a bit disoriented when the game tries to correct the direction you’re going up and down stairs. The same thing happens in the Channelwood Age when you’re going up and down the spiral staircases their too. Maybe there was a bug that interfere with the game where you couldn’t get get close to the edge specifically with the stairs without some weird glitch, or maybe it’s an aesthetic choice that mixes first person controls with point-and-click controls like I mentioned earlier. Again, it could either be a weird limitation of the engine this was the best thing that the developers could do.

Just like the original game, you can only carry one page at a time. I know it’s a hold over from the original game, but it does feel a little tedious, and only goes to show the limitations of the original game. But then again, if you could carry both pages, the time it would take to complete the game would be significantly cut down and the whole game would be over pretty quickly, so it’s a damned if you do damned if you don’t situation.

Even the odd puzzle got an update. The elevation rotation puzzle has removed it’s drift from the original and stops when you remove your cursor from the lever. I know this is going to annoy some hardcore fan, and spending years playing Myst only for one of the puzzles to be made easier in an updated version of the game could make you feel like you’ve been wasting your time for years, but I’m more indifferent towards this change.

But realMyst is not completely without new content. Aside from the overhaul in graphics, which we’ll get to later on, realMyst comes with a brand new age for Myst fans to explore called Rime. If you’ve already familiar with Myst, you can easily get to it pretty quickly.

There are no new real puzzles to speak of since much like the rest of realMyst it’s was made more of a tech demo, but it’s still worth checking out since it still provides something for older fans. Since the original Myst, Riven had come out in 1997 and Myst III: Exile was still in development and wasn’t going to be released until the next year, so Rime was made as an attempt to connect the original game with the rest of the series, specifically Riven, by adding new lore.

I like the atmosphere of this new age. Unlike a lot of the other Ages, Rime is permanently stuck at night in a perpetual snowstorm, and even has whales that circle the island. It has a nice serenity to it. It actually tries to add something to the game instead of just being a 1-to-1 remake of the original with updated graphics. It might just be a selling point for the back of the box, but I still liked it.

But since one of the selling point of this remake are the real time 3D graphics, let’s dive into that. The moment you boot up the game the changes are almost immediate. Even the intro cutscene is in real time 3D, and there is a smooth transition picking up and opening the Myst book.

One you actually arrive on Myst Island, everything is now running in real time as opposed to the limited still images from the original game. They water actually has waves that crash into the store, and you can can see things moving in real time, such as the hands on the clock face of the clock tower moving when you turn the valves to solve the clock tower puzzle, and seeing the boat rising out of the water when you solve the connecting puzzle.

Even seeing the wildlife in real time is neat, seeing the birds fly around Myst Island outside of a compressed video is nice, and even Channelwood has newly added wildlife in the form of a frog that jumps into the water. The Ages still have that liminal feel, but just not quite as pronounced.

But the biggest selling point of realMyst’s graphics are the newly added day-night cycle and weather effects. If you spend any extended amount of time on Myst Island, the sun will actually go down and the game moves from daytime to nighttime. It actually looks quite nice when it happens, moving from a blue sky to an orange sunset to a purple night sky. And there are even small details when it moves over to night, such as the steps leading down to the dock having lights on them that turn off when the sun begins to set.

It varies from age to age, with the sunset in the Selenitic Age being more of a darker orange. The Mechanical Age has more of a lighter blue. The Stoneship Age now has a permanent storm, complete with lightening, thunder, and rain. I know that the ship being part of the rocks has a lore reason in that the Age was written when the author wasn’t quite use to writing Ages yet, but it does help explain why the ship couldn’t see the rocks or broken lighthouse.

Channelwood unfortunately doesn’t have a day/night cycle. Maybe it’s because the age has a bigger draw distance and the developers either didn’t have the time or couldn’t figure out to have a bigger draw distance and day/night cycle at the same time. All of these weather effects and changing of the time of day gives each age it’s own distinct feeling. It’s one of those details that the developers didn’t need to add, but it’s a much welcome one.

But aside from the obvious transition to real time graphics, realMyst includes other changes, specifically on Myst Island, that also connect with the lore of the series, not only the games but the books to, and I’m not going to spoil what for those unfamiliar to the series, but it’s another nice addition. It actually makes you feel like your making progress throughout the game. Or make you feel like your wasting your time if your not good at these types of games.

I know that a lot of Myst purists are going to hate me for saying this, and I don’t necessarily disagree with them, but I do like some of the graphical updates and changes in realMyst. I’m not saying they’re better by any means, but I do appreciate putting a little effort into the remake instead of just making a 1-to-1 remake just to leech money off of fans, which, considering the backlash even from it’s own creator, it probably still was that to some extent.

But that’s where the positives that I can say about the game end, and a lot of problems rear their ugly head.

The draw distance is awful in a lot of places. On Myst Island, you have to practically be on top of the trees for them to move from their low quality versions to their high quality versions. Plus the whole island has a fog on it, along with the other Ages. Games usually have the low quality versions of objects and parts of the map off in the distance and transition between them and the high quality versions smoothly enough when the player gets close enough to them that the player doesn’t notice.

This is done to have a game run a lot smoother since if all the high quality stuff was running constantly, it wouldn’t run smoothly on most computers. Which is extra bizarre here since Myst Island is quite a small area. Channelwood has a bigger draw distance, but it leaves Channelwood looking a little bit empty as a result.

And to make things worse, it ran poorly on computers at the time, even the high end ones, which was not exactly selling the game to many people outside of fans, since 4 years before Quake had came out, and many other games running in real time 3D had come out since then that ran smoothly on the same computers that realMyst would have had trouble running on. Plus, for some reason, the anti-aliasing doesn’t even seem to work, it won’t even let me enable it.

The game also includes the video clips from the original, the ones that featured actual people in front of a camera. They largely remain the same from the original game sans one. I’m assuming that the re-recorded it to make it more cannonical with the rest of the series like they’ve made certain changes elsewhere.

But since the release of the original game, there have been numerous games that used FMV footage of real actors actually appearing in front of the camera in the 7 years since the release of the original Myst. Maybe the developers didn’t have the money to properly update these videos, and the do look out of place, especially since better hardware and more space had become more plentiful in those 7 years, with even Riven having better looking videos 3 years before this, so going back to those videos was a little rough.

But on the upside, the audio quality, for all of the sound effects and music has been upped in quality, making the whole game sound much nicer. Maybe you could sit down in your favorite age and close your eyes and listen to the atmosphere while relaxing with a nice tea.

Even being optimistic, realMyst is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s less of a remake of a game and more like a failed experiment that was more concerned about being a tech demo and beta test for a new engine than a proper remake of a beloved classic point-and-click game. But it’s not completely without it’s merits. It’s neat seeing the whole game in 3D, and a fully 3D version of Myst could work, even if it’s just the original game over again.

Would I recommend the original realMyst? Not unless you’re nostalgic for it, want to seek it out for the sake of curiosity, or a completionist. Especially since other remakes have come out since the release of the original realMyst and the casual fan probably would just gravitate to the remake that’s going to cause the least amount of issues to play.

I can see why it was disowned, but I can’t hate it no matter what the reception to it is.

Layers of Fear 2 is a first person psychological horror game that follows a Hollywood actor who heeds the call of an enigmatic director to take on the lead role in a film shot aboard an ocean liner. Along the way you explore the story of a girl named Lily and her little brother James as they try to hide on the boat and escape from it’s crew.

Initially, Layers of Fear 2 seems to take the gameplay concepts and presintation from the first and refine them, but it doubles down on everything that made the first game tedious.

The gameplay mechanic of opening doors by having to turn their handles manually, like the first game had and had taken from Amnesia back when that game was all the rage, but it’s made worse by the fact that some sections now have you rushing to try and get away from a creature chasing you, just like Amnesia. It worked in Amnesia because that game gave you ample space to get away from creatures most of the time, but in Layers of Fear 2, it just feels clunky because every space is a small space that can lead you to easily be caught by the monster the first time since it often takes you by surprise.

Layers of Fear 2 also brings a whole host of new neat graphical tricks that give it a distinct visual flair from the first game, but since the game is much longer than the first one, even the new visuals get tiresome by the end of the game.

The game actually references several popular and well known films, shorts, and music videos. But instead of just having those references be either brief scenes, shout-outs, or simple references in the form of a poster or as a brief visual gag, they’re just lifted wholesale. These movies include Metropolis (1927), The Wizard of Oz (1939), and The Shining (198), short film A Trip to the Moon (1902), short film and music video Rubber Johnny (2005), and a whole section dedicated to the movie Se7en (Seven) (1995).

They’re so blatant that you don’t even have to have seen some those films to know what they’re referencing.

The only compliment that I can give this game is that it has actor Tony Todd, who plays the titular director of the game, and I can’t get enough of Tony Todd and his amazing voice.

The best way that I can describe Layers of Fear 2 is that it’s more of the same from the first game, just with a new coat of paint. And while that might be appealing to fans of the first game, it still has little to offer beyond a few neat visual tricks buried deep within a tedious gameplay loop and mediocre story.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/01/26/stone-2018-pc-review/

Self-described as an “Hip-Hop Stoner Noir”, the story begins with the titular character Stone, a hungover koala detective, finding out that his lover, Alex, has been kidnapped. Stone then spends the next few days desperately looking for Alex, trying to make sure nothing bad has happened to him.

STONE is pretty short, taking roughly 90 minutes to play, and no more than 2 hours at the absolute most. It’s hard to talk about anything in depth without spoiling the game due to how short it is, but I’ll try.

For most of the game, you go around town and ask everyone you know if they know anything about Alex’s whereabouts. This is done through using a map screen made up of roughly 4 or 5 locations at most, but the game ends up being pretty linear for the most part, being pretty obvious where you have to go next, making it kinda redundant. If you’re even confused as to where you should go, there are only three locations that you’ll ever end up going to anyway and you end up talking to the same three characters over and over until you’ve found a clue about where Alex might be, only for you to repeat the whole process the next day.

However, the when you’re interacting with people, you do get a few dialogue options that allow for some minor replayablity, but it’s very basic.

And for some reason, there is no run button, or even to speed up the character at all. I know that there are only 4 locations in the whole game, they’re all small, and the game is pretty short, but a run button would have been nice to have it.

The game is not without it’s merits. It’s art style is nice. While it is a bit simple, but it is relatively nice to look at. The game also has a cinema you can go to on the map screen where you can watch old black-and-white Australian shorts from the early days of cinema, but point stuff like this out feels like I’m grasping for straws to say something positive about the game.

Unfortunately, Stone is an underwhelming game in a lot of aspects, and I hate to say that because it’s rare to have a decent Australian themed game where Australia is the main focus. With the underwhelming plot and incredibly slow pace, it’s hard to recommend this to anyone.

Sure, it might gain a cult status down the line for a few people who like the Australian aesthetic or the game’s odd and unique characters and plot, but it’s a lukewarm recommend from me even with the most optimistic outlook.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/03/14/relicta-2020-pc-ps4-xbone-stadia-review/

The game is set in 2120 aboard a station on the moon where an artifact known as the Relicta has been discovered, and scientific experiments are being done in secret to discover what properties it holds. You play as Dr. Angelica Patel – a physicist on the Chandara base, who is testing a new device that allows the use to manipulate gravity and magnetism.

The moon base is soon involved in an accident involving the Relicta, separating all of the members of the crew, including Kira, Angelica’s daughter. Angelica finds herself having to save the rest of the crew at the base, all while having to worry about the Relica and the secrets that it holds.

There is quite a bit of story here that I can’t include here, but I don’t want to ruin a lot of it by revealing too much, but just be warned that this is a dialogue heavy puzzle game.

Relicta is a first-person physics-based puzzle game where the main gameplay mechanic is using magnetism and gravity to solve all of it’s puzzles. While Relicta is obviously a portal clone, there are also comparisons that can be made to Magrunner: Dark Pulse, which also heavily uses magnets for it’s puzzles and is another Portal clone. But Relicta is more involved with it’s magnetic puzzles.

The puzzles of Relicta focus around magnetic cubes where you can switch between a negative and positive charge, indicated by them turning either red or blue, or having no charge at all, which is controlled with the gloves that your character has as part of her suit.

Puzzles contain the obvious game mechanics, such as making the cubes attract or repel each other, and using them on pressure plates to open up doors or turn off conveniently colored energy fields, purple only allowing the player to go through, green only allowing cubes, and yellow preventing both from coming through.

But like I mentioned earlier, the cubes have an anti-gravity field too. Sometimes you’ll have to use the cubes to activate a button that is located on a wall or the ceiling, or guide them through a level using magnetic places located on walls, some of which you can change yourself, and even ride them to get to the location that you need to be at.

Unfortunately, there were a few times where I was stuck solving a puzzle, only to find out that the game had introduced a new mechanic that I had no idea was there and I had to eventually cave in and look up a walkthrough just to figure out what I had to do. After that, the puzzles weren’t too bad, it’s just the initial not knowing what to do that was frustrating.

This makes the game more tedious that it should be. Some sort of audio cue indicating what I should do would have been helpful, whether it something coming from what I’m supposed to be paying attention to, or have my character briefly mention something after a while of being stuck in a certain area. I had no clue what the game wanted me to look at, and it took me way too long to figure out a piece of the puzzle.

There were even a few instances where I was looking for one of the magnetic boxes required to finish a puzzle only to find out that it was somewhere that I didn’t think to look. Some slight telegraphing would have significantly improved this game.

Also, the length in between autosaves is a little too long. There have been times where I was half way through a puzzle, had to close the game for whatever reason, and come back to it and have to spend 5 minutes catching up to where I was last just so I could continue. Even if the game didn’t include more autosaves, I would have loved the option for a manual save, but I don’t know if there was a technical reason it couldn’t have been included or it was just the way that the developers designed the game.

These few minor changes would have made the game a much smoother experience.

Also, some of the dialogue is a bit awkward, such as one character calling another an “Orbi-Boomer” and having sarcasm for every other line, for at least the first half of the game, or having PDAs and dialogue filled with references to other media. The game is aware of the kind of story that it wrote for itself in the latter half, It gets a little tedious after awhile, especially with how self-aware it is.

The visuals are pretty solid, even it’s pretty obvious that areas are designed to be more like rooms than actual locations. It is nice to see off into the distance beyond the areas that you’re in and seeing some nice looking locations, which there is a variety off.

As you’re solving puzzles and trying to figure out what is going on, you have to move in between domes, which contain a range of biomes of Earth-based terrains, which range from a large dense forest and nice blue sky, to snowy wasteland with icy caves, and even a seemingly endless desert. This does a lot to separate itself from something like Portal, instead of having dull tech filled room after room, you have another vista to look at, which is only separated by a few moments of the sci-fi aesthetic of a moon base.

The games visuals are so nice that it comes with a photo mode, where you can take photos of the surrounding environment, and the photo mode comes with Instagram like filters, so you can have fun customizing your pictures to your hearts content. This is one of those features that you wonder why it isn’t in more games with nice looking art styles and graphics.

Relicta is quite a lengthy game, and I feel like that being a good or a bad thing is going to be up to the player. Some might want more of the game, but there just wasn’t enough variety in the gameplay and by the end of the game I was getting a little exhausted. If you’re going to play, maybe take a few breaks while playing and go do something else.

Despite a lot of my complaints with Relicta and the fact that it’s not a game that I would go immediately to with recommending first person puzzle games, there is still something to be enjoyed here. And anyone who is looking for their fix of something that only a Portal-like game can fill, it’s certainly worth checking out, but unfortunately, it’s a lukewarm recommendation from me.

Despite my negativity, I would like to see it’s developer ‘Mighty Polygon’ continue just to see something more polished from them.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2020/07/05/press-x-to-not-die/

You wake up to find your town in chaos. Everyone has gone crazy and is just attacking each other! Your friend gives you a cryptic message before he is killed. The secret to survival– Press X to not die!

Looking at the trailer and reading the description for this game, it’s pretty obvious that this game is pretty much a one joke game, and if you’re not into that joke, you’re definitely not going to be into this game.

I will give the game some credit, there is some replayability here. The game has multiple difficulties, which has the button combinations that you have to press be more complex the higher the difficulty. The game also has multiple dialogue choices throughout out the game, meaning that even though the game only has ~35 minutes of footage tops, the game requires at least a second play through to see most of it. Plus there are neat extras such as behind the scenes images, bloopers, and a “1994 Mode” that pixelated the screen to look like a mid-90s game, even if it’s not accurate.

There’s even a “Special Edition” DLC pack for the Steam version that comes with a prototype for the game that is a proof of concept with stuffed toys. While the whole experience is incredibly limited in what it has to offer, there was some effort and thought put into this game.

It’s obvious that the people behind this game were having fun making it, and it comes across. But when it comes down to it, you’re essentially watching a group of friends having fun making a dumb game with dumb jokes.

If the title or even the trailer don’t peak your interest, don’t even bother checking it out. If it weren’t for the fact that this game cost 75 cents when I bought it, which was the price while it was on sale at the time. Unfortunately, I don’t know if I can recommend it. Not unless you like similar “gimmick” games such as “Goat Simulator” or “Mother Simulator”.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/11/17/soldier-of-fortune-payback-pc-ps3-360-review/

If you’re one of the few who has ever wondered what ever happened to the Soldier of Fortune franchise, your question has been answered in the most disappointing way possible. It’s sad to see a series go from reasonably high profile for time it was released to bargain bin trash in 5 years. The previous entries I reviewed here and here.

Soldier of Fortune: Payback was developed by Cauldron LTD, which put out the mediocre and forgettable game Chaser, which I previously reviewed, as well as going on to make a bunch of Cabela hunting games and a couple of games for the History Channel, and was published by Activision Value, which was the Activision subsidiary that put out budget title games, which is already a great sign for Payback’s quality.

Payback’s story has very little to do with the previous installments other than the fact that you play as a gun for hire. John Mullins, both the character and real life person, are nowhere to be found in the game itself or the development of the game. Instead, Payback’s main character is freelance mercenary Thomas Mason, a name so forgettable that I had to copy and paste it just so I wouldn’t forget it in the 3 seconds I had to look up from the plot description to type it in.

When the game starts, we find Mason on a routine escort mission shortly before it goes tits up, as the other freelancer who you were on the mission with suddenly kills the person you were sent in to extract, and also turns on you. I also forgot this other characters name, as I did with every other character in the game.

None of the characters have much of a personality, all of them being incredibly cliched, and all of which you’ve seen done a million times in a million other things and done a million times better. The only other character you spend a decent amount of time with other than the one you play as is Cassandra Dekker, which is only slightly less generic than Thomas Mason. She briefs you between missions, updating you on your mission goals.

The story is completely forgettable. I don’t know if I would say that it rips off Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but both were published by Activision, with Payback coming out a little over a week after Modern Warfare, so I have to assume that when Modern Warfare was being made, Payback was rushed out the door as a budget title to ape off Call of Duty, but for those who couldn’t afford it but still wanted to play something like it.

It’s so much like the modern military era of games that plagued the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 generaion of consoles that when I search for Soldier of Fortune: Payback, it just recommends those games to me when I search for Soldier of Fortune: Payback in Google. I know this is technically a spoiler, but the game ends on a terrible cliched plot twist and cliffhanger. I don’t know if someone behind the scenes was expecting this game to do well, but I do wish I had that optimism.

The series defining series returns, being able to blow limbs and heads off of the enemies. This feature is mildly amusing, especially in the sea of games that were starting to become lazily cinematic and linear at this time. I guess it would be enough to sell a budget game, but at this point in video games, it’s not really impressive. And it doesn’t really help that the last two games from 5 or more years ago did it better.

This was apparently enough to get the game censored in Australia and banned in Germany. Which is extra hilarious in retrospect, because Australia got an R18+ rating a few years later in 2013 and the game would have totally passed with that rating, and the fact that it’s not even that realistic to begin with, which begs the question of how it even got banned to begin with. But I doubt that Activision would be bothered to re-release it in Australia, but it can be bought on GOG.

However, the series second (unofficial) feature makes a return, with the enemies that are unfairly accurate. Apparently, this is a series staple. But unlike the first two games, I’m assuming that this has to do with the fact that this game cost nothing to make and had to be rushed out the door rather than a group of people allegedly (by me) hating their audience.

It also doesn’t help that the game features several boss fights where the boss is just a bullet sponge, and the boss just looks like one of the regular bad guys. When mixed with the unfair difficulty, these fights just come across as way to difficult. On top of that, the game spawns in enemies when your fighting said bosses. Prepare to trial and error your way through these sections for about 45 minutes to an hour per boss battle. Who knows, you might luck out and manage to get the boss stuck and kill them in a minute or two.

Also, like every FPS from this time period, it comes with regenerating health, so health packs and armor are no longer needed. I can’t really complain since I never really liked the health packs and armor from the last games. It helps streamline the game, making it quicker. Also, they finally made the G key throw grenades. It took a while for that to finally happen, but better late than never.

For some reason, enemies can grab you and turn you around to face them. The only thing that this did the first time this happened was confuse the fuck out of me when it happened. I guess it was to confused the player for a moment and add extra difficulty, but since the rest of the game is unfairly difficult, and this was just annoying, this really feels like an unnecessary gameplay feature.

Another good feature that this game has is the option to choose your load out of weapons before going into a mission. There’s a pretty decent selection guns, including several smaller firearms that can be dual wielded except for two. A couple of them come with an optional silencer, which are pretty useless. There a bunch of SMGs, two of which can be dual wielded, and they all come with optional scopes and silencers.

There are several assault rifles, and these guns come with the most optional add-ons, including various scopes, one having an optional silencer, another having a hand grip, and even one that has an attachable grenade launcher, which not only makes it the best and most effective addition, but it’s incredibly fun firing it into a group of people and watching their bodies, body parts, and blood fly around a room as the physics do their thing. There are also 4 shotguns, and one comes with an optional scope. I don’t know why a shotgun needs a scope, but OK.

On the more destructive side, there is a grenade launcher and rocket launcher. And just like the attachable grenade launcher for one of the assault rifles, running into a room and having random arms, legs, and torso shaped pieces strewn across the room is pretty fun.

Most of these guns feel exactly the same. They don’t have much recoil, but at least their as accurate as the enemy guns are. Finally, there is the selection of grenades, which include a hand grenade, a smoke grenade, and the Phosphorous Grenade, which is exclusive to the multiplayer. Since nobody is playing the multiplayer anymore, you’re probably never going to use this.

But for some bizarre unknown reason, a lot of these guns are exclusive to the console versions of Payback, and are only accessible on the PC through mods for the game. I don’t know why this is the case. I assume that the PC version was an afterthought and these guns had to be cut due to not being able to be finished in time. But thankfully they’re still in the game’s files.

Graphically, the game is OK look, but lacking in some areas. It has the browns you’d come to expect from “realistic” FPS games from that era. The game was actually developed on Cauldron’s in-house engine, much like Chaser, called the CloakNT engine.

Like the previous games, the game goes globe hopping, but this time all of the locations look a lot more samey because it the overuse of the brown filter. You have the deserts of Al Qa’im and Eshkashem, and the jungles of Mogaung, to not so interesting locations, like a brothel, a garage, and a night club. Aside from the mostly browns and muted greens, there are lots of samey looking building interiors. It really is a step down from the last two games.

Surprisingly, the game came with multiplayer, and on launch, it was actually mildly active. it came with the standard game modes that you would expect, such as Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag, but there were two other game modes, such as Demolition, which was a lot like Counter-Strike in that one team tries to plant a bomb, and the other team tries to prevent them from doing that, and Infiltration, in which one team has to get into the other team’s base to steal a briefcase and leave without the other team stopping them.

Soldier of Fortune: Payback is actually OK for a $5 – $10 bargain bin game, but I can’t recommend this to a whole lot of people, yet again, for it’s bullshit difficulty, now made worse by the fact it’s nowhere near as polished as the last two games. And the only ones who would be interested in this are fans of the Soldier of Fortune franchise and more obscure First Person Shooter fans who are morbidly curious.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/10/10/mod-corner-paranoia-2-saviour-half-life-2015-review/

NOTE: There are slight spoilers for the first game.

Surprisingly, 8 years after the first Paranoia, a sequel was released, this time developed by a team called KPLabs exclusively for the Xasd3D engine, a reverse engineered version of the GoldSRC engine, meaning it didn’t need the original Half-Life to run.

Set three weeks after the events of the first game, the charter you played in the first Paranoia wakes up in a military hospital and finds it deserted. After briefly running around the hospital, the game cuts back to three weeks ago, two hours after the first game ended, the Spetsnaz troops are informed of the creatures breaking out the main laboratory and spreading across the lower labs.

The troops are ordered to do a clean-up and eliminate the monsters. After restocking on ammo, the Major and his team enter the lower labs, and eventually reach KROT-1 where the command has made a decision to have the laboratory destroyed. However, the infection of the virus has moved from the mutants to ordinary people, transforming them into Zombies. Soon, the virus escapes the laboratory and starts making it’s way into way Russia.

I had to find that out via a wiki since the game never really communicates this to the player all that well, but it lines up well enough to the story that it makes sense. Either way, the story is cliched and campy enough that it’s not much of an issue.

This time around, the game looks pretty fantastic. You can barely tell it’s the GoldSRC engine unless you’re looking pretty hard. It even comes with a few new bells and whistles such as new water and glass effects, all of which looks pretty decent for the engine that it’s on.

All of the gameplay mechanics from the first one make their way over to this game. Iron sights, painkillers you can carry around, being able to pick up ammo from bodies, having a ballistics helmet that can protect you a bit more in combat. Even the gas mask gets some actual use this time. This time around, the game has a lot less ammo. Not enough that it was anger inducing, but the game was definitely going for a more survival horror attempt this time around.

A few problems from the first game seem to persist. Every now and again I’m not allowed to go through a door unless every friendly NPC is in position, making a second play though a bit tedious in places. And this time around, every now and again I can’t pass one of the companion AI. Which wouldn’t be as annoying as it is if the companion AI didn’t give you shit for either getting in their way or standing still for half a second too long.

The game is a lot more slow in a few places, and I suspect that this is why this game/mod isn’t as popular as the first game. A period of the game is looking for research documents that are located around a level and you can’t continue unless you find them all. This is pretty tedious since some of the documents blend into certain parts of the level, even when you know what your looking for. The checkpoints throughout the game are also pretty far apart, so quicksaving is a must.

Paranoia 2 seems to be a little more buggy than the first one. Whenever the game is loading, it’ll seem like it’s about to crash, but it’ll load the game anyway. I have had a crash or two as well. It was never really a big deal, but it’s something to watch out for.

In the middle of the game is a boss battle, and on the easiest difficulty of the game you just fire your gun into it as you run backwards for barely 6 or 7 seconds. I was surprised that it was over so quick that I died from a few zombies entering the room because I took a moment to go “What, was that it?”

Looking at some footage on Youtube, you’re supposed to kill it by leading up under one of the giant pistons and pulling the switch, crushing the monster under said piston. I don’t know if my game was glitched or the team behind this mod expected that the player would immediately get that you’re supposed to crush it with one of the pistons and never expected someone to unload an entire magazine or clip into it, even on the easiest mode.

Enemies are incredibly accurate, and the game has a tendency to have enemies surprise you when you enter a new room an aren’t expecting it, resulting in an immediate death upon entering certain environments. Sometimes it can take you 3 or 4 deaths before you get your bearing and you know where the enemies are. Maybe you have to slowly go through the level like you have military training, but it happens just often enough and so unexpected that I doubt that.

Is Paranoia 2 as bad as fans of the first one lead on. No, not really. But is it any good? And the answer to that is a bit complicated. It’s crashed enough that I don’t know how much i can recommend this to people, which really bring the whole game down, and if it didn’t crash as much as it does, I could have give in a more warm reception.

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.

Surprisingly, this is the second port of Myst to one of the DS handhelds. And you would think that it would be at least better than the first one, right? Nope. Somehow it's much, much worse.


You would think of all places that would be perfect for a port of the original Myst, the 3DS would be in the top 5 of that list, but somehow the 3DS versions is possibly the worst version of Myst. Or should I say, realMyst.

That's right, instead of just porting the original version of Myst to the 3DS, this version instead replaces all of the images from that version with screenshots from the original realMyst from 2001 replicating the stills from the original game. At least someone had the same thought that I did when I played the PSP port in that just shoving the new content from the 2000 version of realMyst didn't match up to the older content, which was both pre-rendered and 7 years old at that point. The one advantage to this is that Rime is finally consistent with the rest of the game, at least in this version. And that is the one compliment that I'm going to give the game.

For the more observant, this means that since it's using images the game can't even take advantage of the 3D that the 3DS was made with. Which is extra frustrating since the original realMyst was sold on the fact that it was using real time 3D. What's the point of using realMyst as a basis if you can't use the fact that it's running in real time to your advantage? Plus certain images are now misaligned when you open up things like draws and doors or change something in the environment. Clearly the developers didn't have the time or means to take the pictures in the game properly.

And on top of that, instead of suing the images on the bottom screen where it would have made sense since that screen is where you interact with the game, the still images are now on the top of the screen, with the menus on the bottom screen. The entire game is clicking still images and is where you're going to be spending most of your time, why would you ever put where most of the gameplay is going to be on the top screen? If I had to take a guess, this was probably done because the top screen of the 3DS is much nicer than the original DS screen and the development team probably wanted to take advantage of that to make the clearer, which would have been a problem if they had just ported the original game. Or if they had made their own engine and recreated realMyst to take advantage of the hardware. But again, I don't think the team had the time or money to do so.

Thankfully it comes with all of the features from the original DS port, including the maps for each age, the notebook, and the in-game camera that lets you take screenshots if you need or want to remember something. But how you get to Rime is still the same as the PSP port and original DS port. What's the point of using realMyst as you're base when you're still going to just drop you in front of the new book and not use to opportunity to give the game new gameplay?

But none of that come even close to being the worst part of this port of Myst. If it was just Myst with still images of realMyst instead using the still images from the original and having the still screens on the top, it would have at least been competent, even it not optimal.

But the worst thing about this version are the controls.

This version of Myst tries to make up for the fact that you can’t directly interact with each screen in this version by having a cursor. To control the cursor you have to use the Circle Pad. You can’t even use the D-Pad, it’s the Circle Pad or nothing. If that wasn’t bad enough, the moment that you let go of the Circle Pad, the cursor snaps back to the center of the screen instead of just leaving the cursor wherever you have it last on the screen. Which means that you have to spend a lot time holding it in place to interact with something or move it around with small movements if you have to move anything.

How do you even mess up Myst this badly? Literally the entire game is pointing and clicking on still images. It’s the most simple concept for a game that it could have been ported to almost anything that had the ability to run it. I’ve played flash games on Newgrounds more competent than this done by complete amateurs. Someone in their first game development class with no previous experience could do a better job. I can’t believe just how badly this version of Myst ended up. This deserves some kind of award for just how awful it is.

And this is on top of other various issues too, like how the sound is out of sync with the videos, and the game having a glitch that could cause your save to become corrupt, having to start the entire game over again.

And the game comes with various other issues too, like how the sound is out of sync with the videos, and the game has a glitch that could cause your save to become corrupt. But all of those seem so trivial for a version of a game that is frustrating to play even if they didn’t exist.

The 3DS version of Myst might be one of the worst ports of any game and one of the worst games on the 3DS.

And to top it all off, the homebrew community for the DS and 3DS can run ScummVM, a program which lets you run Myst: Masterpiece Edition on the handheld flawless, and significantly better than both the DS and 3DS ports. When a bunch of hobbyists could easily create something that not only lets you play a much better version of Myst on the console, and for free (sans the cost of the SD Card needed to hold the game), along with dozens if not hundreds of other games that the ScummVM emulator supports, a lot of them absolute classics, it's an extra bad look for something that should have been a slam dunk, especially if I'm paying for it.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/01/12/late-shift-2016-review/

You would think that in the age of high definition quality video and more money to spend developing games, that the few FMV (Full Motion Video) games that show up would have the same level of bizarre creativity that they did in the 90’s when CD’s became the hot new item. But it feels like that each and every FMV game is just taking advantage of the fact that they could copy movies and television to create something that just feels like anything else you could stream or rent online, which is a shame.

Our main protagonist is Matt, a college student who is working as a parking lot attendant as one night, he finds himself dragged into the criminal world of London when he is forced to work with a group of armed robbers looking to steal a valuable item that has gone up for auction. He ends up befriending one of the members of the group, a woman named May-Ling.

As a movie, Late Shift looks like your standard film. It doesn’t look terrible, but there’s nothing amazing to look at. It’s all well shot for what it is. The plot is bare bones, and it kinda has to be so the “choose-your-own-adventure” style choice system wouldn’t get too complicated. There isn’t any real gameplay to speak of. Every now and again a choice will pop up giving you 2 to 3 options to choose from that progress the game. Depending on your choices, this will lead to one of several endings.

Let’s face it, if this was just released as a movie, it wouldn’t do too well. It’s too by the numbers in terms of acting, plot, and everything else. It would be that film that would appear every now and again in someones “Recommended For You” feed on their streaming service of choice but not a lot of people would click on.

I don’t hate Late Shift. But when I can go back to the gold era of FMV’s and get something crazy, weird, and out there even if it’s a so-bad-it’s-good. And considering that some of those games even had other things, like actual gameplay in between the FMV, such as puzzles and action, the FMV felt more like a neat bonus, or hindrance on who you ask, rather than the focus of the game. And considering that the TV series Black Mirror has come out with it’s own choose-your-own-adventure with “Bandersnatch”, Late Shift can’t really hold a candle. Unfortunately, all this game does is fall into mediocrity, only to be forgotten hours after playing it.