2019
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/07/24/american-fugitive-2019-ps4-pc-switch-xbone-review/
Will Riley has been framed for the murder of his father and has been falsely imprisoned because of it. Will might not be an angel, but he’s no killer. He soon breaks out of prison to clear his name. As he does this he must make his way across Redrock County, a sleepy American town with a booming criminal underbelly, as he tries to prove his innocence, all while evading the police who want to take him back to prison and the criminals who want to put him 6 feet under.
American Fugitive is a top down open world crime game this is obviously heavily inspired by the early Grand Theft Auto games, but with more of an 80’s action movie vibe.
While the presentation is a nice throwback to older games and movies, the whole game does come across as very shallow. Every character is the bare bones stereotype of a character, and while it’s not a bad thing to have a character be bare bones, it has to be made up for with great presentation to carry it through to the end, but the presentation here just comes up short.
You barely get to know each character as your character only gets to briefly to talk to them before a mission in only a few lines of dialogue, leaving very little wiggle room to get even the most menial character development. The entire paragraph you could use to summarize any character is their entire character. I was not expecting much, but I wish there was enough time to at least develop the main characters.
And the plot is just as shallow, finishing of a very unfulfilling note at the end that just feels rushed. It also doesn’t help that the mission variety for the story missions is very small. Steal a car, steal something from someone’s house, beat someone up and take them somewhere, or just outright kill them. By the second area of the game it’s already become tiresome busywork.
What compounds this is that even the side content has more variety, such as finding hidden stashes, stealing items to resell, timed races, making jumps, and even getting to drive a tank around and destroying as much property as you can within a time limit. I don’t know why some of this couldn’t have been sprinkled throughout the story to not make it feel so repetitive. It could have even been used to get a few players to play a few of the side missions if they like a type of mission.
Not much would have needed to be changed when it comes to the game world to incorporate these missions into the story and it could have easily been used to give each character more depth. Maybe the developers ran out of time, budget, or both.
The game also comes with basic skills you can level up, such as the usual health or inventory space increase, but also more helpful things such as metal detector to let you know how close a hidden stash is or making it easier to know if a building is occupied before you rob it. The side content also gives you points to help level your character up too, which I imagine could easily be help a player who is having trouble with a mission, but I only found out by playing one of the side missions out of curiosity.
If you’re looking for a throwback to the old Grand Theft Auto games, there probably isn’t going to be much in American Fugitive to throw down the money for it. It’s probably worth it on a sale, but with just how little variety in content there is, it’s a lukewarm recommend at best.
Will Riley has been framed for the murder of his father and has been falsely imprisoned because of it. Will might not be an angel, but he’s no killer. He soon breaks out of prison to clear his name. As he does this he must make his way across Redrock County, a sleepy American town with a booming criminal underbelly, as he tries to prove his innocence, all while evading the police who want to take him back to prison and the criminals who want to put him 6 feet under.
American Fugitive is a top down open world crime game this is obviously heavily inspired by the early Grand Theft Auto games, but with more of an 80’s action movie vibe.
While the presentation is a nice throwback to older games and movies, the whole game does come across as very shallow. Every character is the bare bones stereotype of a character, and while it’s not a bad thing to have a character be bare bones, it has to be made up for with great presentation to carry it through to the end, but the presentation here just comes up short.
You barely get to know each character as your character only gets to briefly to talk to them before a mission in only a few lines of dialogue, leaving very little wiggle room to get even the most menial character development. The entire paragraph you could use to summarize any character is their entire character. I was not expecting much, but I wish there was enough time to at least develop the main characters.
And the plot is just as shallow, finishing of a very unfulfilling note at the end that just feels rushed. It also doesn’t help that the mission variety for the story missions is very small. Steal a car, steal something from someone’s house, beat someone up and take them somewhere, or just outright kill them. By the second area of the game it’s already become tiresome busywork.
What compounds this is that even the side content has more variety, such as finding hidden stashes, stealing items to resell, timed races, making jumps, and even getting to drive a tank around and destroying as much property as you can within a time limit. I don’t know why some of this couldn’t have been sprinkled throughout the story to not make it feel so repetitive. It could have even been used to get a few players to play a few of the side missions if they like a type of mission.
Not much would have needed to be changed when it comes to the game world to incorporate these missions into the story and it could have easily been used to give each character more depth. Maybe the developers ran out of time, budget, or both.
The game also comes with basic skills you can level up, such as the usual health or inventory space increase, but also more helpful things such as metal detector to let you know how close a hidden stash is or making it easier to know if a building is occupied before you rob it. The side content also gives you points to help level your character up too, which I imagine could easily be help a player who is having trouble with a mission, but I only found out by playing one of the side missions out of curiosity.
If you’re looking for a throwback to the old Grand Theft Auto games, there probably isn’t going to be much in American Fugitive to throw down the money for it. It’s probably worth it on a sale, but with just how little variety in content there is, it’s a lukewarm recommend at best.
The most relatable video game character.
2023
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.
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.
2006
This review contains spoilers
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/03/12/spoilers_el-matador-2006-review/
It’s not very often that a game comes out that is basically the equivalent of a Direct-To-DVD movie. A lot of games try to be the big blockbuster but rarely do you get something that feels like a movie that was always destined to be on the budget shelf of a big chain of stores. And El Matador is one of those Direct-To-DVD feeling games.
But as it turns out this game has some turns and twists to it. But more about that later.
El Matador follows Victor Corbet, a DEA special agent tasked with taking down drug barons. After a successful raid in the first mission, Victor is soon sent to Colombia to assist the local police in taking down La Valedora Cartel, who were involved in the massacre that killed Victor’s brother. Not long after arriving he is soon given the nickname of Matador for his determination at the way he takes down his enemies.
I would mention the other characters but nobody has a personality beyond the one line used to describe them in the design document and all of them only get a couple minutes each of screen time.
At least the acting is amusingly cheesy, even if it’s pretty obvious that English is not the first language of a lot of the cast, or I hope it isn’t because what dialogue that isn’t campy is stilted and obviously comes across as someone just reading it off a page. The main character even has the line “I need to shoot some scum” to give you an idea of the level of dialogue that we’re dealing with here. The game ends with a “And knowing is half the battle!” message about drugs.
The most noteworthy thing about the game is that it runs on the Max Payne 2 engine. I’m guessing this was done by Rockstar to make up for the low sales of Max Payne 2. And as a result the game comes with the bullet time mechanic from Max Payne 2 but nowhere near as polished. I’m pretty sure it was included in the game just because it was part of the engine. It’s not awful but it does feel rough around the edges, the fact that it’s using the engine of a much more polished game to help make up for it’s low budget and short development time.
The lack of budget really shines through with every boss just being the same as a goon but with more health.
Also I guess the developers were doing Max Payne set in a South American country long before Rockstar dragged Max Payne into a South American country.
Graphically the game looks alright for what it is. There are definitely parts of the game that try to take advantage of the physics engine that Max Payne 2 had by having explosions that through a bunch of crap around or having to shoot out boards nailed to a doorway to move into the next location. You can even jump through partially shot out windows and have glass flying everywhere.
It does have a few graphical glitches, mostly with the Steam version, where shadows don’t work properly, so if you feel the need to check this game out you should buy the GOG version.
It’s also pretty short so it’s more of an easy afternoon game. But it’s an incredibly cheap game even when it’s not on sale so I didn’t feel ripped off when seeing the credits 2 and a half hours and booting up the game.
But there’s more this game than it seems. It turns out that the actual bad guy is a Nazi named Helmet Koch. I don’t know how this game about taking down a drug cartel suddenly had Nazis in it, but there you go.
Surprisingly there is a completely different version of El Matador out there somewhere. When getting released in Germany it obviously got censored like a lot of games do when getting released in that county. Not only were some guns changed, like the MP5 being changed into a tranquilizer gun and the ragdoll physics being removed along with the ability to shoot at corpses along with the removal of blood. The most obvious change were the removal of a bunch of Nazi references
But I wouldn’t be talking about the German version if it was just a censorship change. In the German version the story was rewritten so that the main character was not an official agent of the DEA but a gangster and a double agent. There were numerous new cutscenes made to work around these changes too. So in Germany there exists this bizarro world version of this game.
It’s not very often that a game comes out that is basically the equivalent of a Direct-To-DVD movie. A lot of games try to be the big blockbuster but rarely do you get something that feels like a movie that was always destined to be on the budget shelf of a big chain of stores. And El Matador is one of those Direct-To-DVD feeling games.
But as it turns out this game has some turns and twists to it. But more about that later.
El Matador follows Victor Corbet, a DEA special agent tasked with taking down drug barons. After a successful raid in the first mission, Victor is soon sent to Colombia to assist the local police in taking down La Valedora Cartel, who were involved in the massacre that killed Victor’s brother. Not long after arriving he is soon given the nickname of Matador for his determination at the way he takes down his enemies.
I would mention the other characters but nobody has a personality beyond the one line used to describe them in the design document and all of them only get a couple minutes each of screen time.
At least the acting is amusingly cheesy, even if it’s pretty obvious that English is not the first language of a lot of the cast, or I hope it isn’t because what dialogue that isn’t campy is stilted and obviously comes across as someone just reading it off a page. The main character even has the line “I need to shoot some scum” to give you an idea of the level of dialogue that we’re dealing with here. The game ends with a “And knowing is half the battle!” message about drugs.
The most noteworthy thing about the game is that it runs on the Max Payne 2 engine. I’m guessing this was done by Rockstar to make up for the low sales of Max Payne 2. And as a result the game comes with the bullet time mechanic from Max Payne 2 but nowhere near as polished. I’m pretty sure it was included in the game just because it was part of the engine. It’s not awful but it does feel rough around the edges, the fact that it’s using the engine of a much more polished game to help make up for it’s low budget and short development time.
The lack of budget really shines through with every boss just being the same as a goon but with more health.
Also I guess the developers were doing Max Payne set in a South American country long before Rockstar dragged Max Payne into a South American country.
Graphically the game looks alright for what it is. There are definitely parts of the game that try to take advantage of the physics engine that Max Payne 2 had by having explosions that through a bunch of crap around or having to shoot out boards nailed to a doorway to move into the next location. You can even jump through partially shot out windows and have glass flying everywhere.
It does have a few graphical glitches, mostly with the Steam version, where shadows don’t work properly, so if you feel the need to check this game out you should buy the GOG version.
It’s also pretty short so it’s more of an easy afternoon game. But it’s an incredibly cheap game even when it’s not on sale so I didn’t feel ripped off when seeing the credits 2 and a half hours and booting up the game.
But there’s more this game than it seems. It turns out that the actual bad guy is a Nazi named Helmet Koch. I don’t know how this game about taking down a drug cartel suddenly had Nazis in it, but there you go.
Surprisingly there is a completely different version of El Matador out there somewhere. When getting released in Germany it obviously got censored like a lot of games do when getting released in that county. Not only were some guns changed, like the MP5 being changed into a tranquilizer gun and the ragdoll physics being removed along with the ability to shoot at corpses along with the removal of blood. The most obvious change were the removal of a bunch of Nazi references
But I wouldn’t be talking about the German version if it was just a censorship change. In the German version the story was rewritten so that the main character was not an official agent of the DEA but a gangster and a double agent. There were numerous new cutscenes made to work around these changes too. So in Germany there exists this bizarro world version of this game.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/10/27/disneys-extreme-skate-adventure-2003-gcn-ps2-xbox/
I imagine that not a lot of people have actually played this back when it was first released when they were the right age to play it when growing to have played in the first place. It doesn’t exactly have the most interesting of covers, with an awful looking cartoony character on the front surrounded by mediocre 3D renditions of Disney and Pixar characters, and from the look of both the front and back cover, it was pretty obvious that this was more of a tie-in for multiple popular Disney movies that had come out in the decade before this games release.
I’d be willing to bet that more people have probably heard about this game through the mod for PC version of Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 called T.H.U.G. PRO that takes all levels and characters from every other game that ran on the same game engine that came out on the sixth generation of consoles, which included Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure. Yep, this runs on that same engine as those sixth gen Tony Hawk games, but more about that later.
There is no plot to Skate Adventure, nor is there even an attempt at one. Since the game entirely exists to promote multiple Disney and Pixar movies as easily as possible, along with the product placement that they could shove into the game, as it just gives you a choice between several characters from three different Disney and Pixar characters and lets you ride around in three locations from the movie that they’re from.
These movies include Toy Story 1 and 2, Tarzan, and The Lion King. Why these three movies? I guess it was a mix of their popularity and that they were the easiest films to make a level based on. I have no idea is Disney or Pixar made any demands other than “get a game onto store shelves”, but this reeks of both studios not caring. The characters that are unlocked right from the start are Woody and Buzz from Toy Story, Young Tarzan and Young Terk from Tarzan, and Rafiki and Young Simba from the Lion King.
Unlockable characters include Jessie and Zurg from Toy Story 2, Young Tantor and Young Jane from Tarzan, despite the fact that Jane only ever appeared as an adult in the Tarzan film, but whatever, and Young Nala along with Timon and Pumbaa from The Lion King, with Timon and Pumbaa skating together on the same skateboard.
Locations from said movies include Pizza Planet, Andy’s Bedroom, and Zurg’s planet of Xrghthung from Toy Story 1 and 2, Tarzan’s Treehouse, The Human Camp, and Clayton’s Ship from Tarzan, and Pride Rock, The Elephant Graveyard, and Scar’s Canyon from The Lion King. The game does try to make each location visually distinct enough from every other level and it works well enough, and it’s a decent enough selection.
Although you can only play level only with the character from the movie that the levels is based on, so no Woody skating around Pride Rock or the jungle or Turk skating around any of the Toy Story levels. It’s a tad disappointing, but what are you going to do.
As I mentioned earlier, this game runs specifically on the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 engine, which actually fits with this game way more than it did with THPS 4. Tony Hawk 4 was more focused on giving the player goals than letting you just skate each level with a time limit, which works perfectly for a game like this, as having Disney and Pixar characters tell you want to do is pretty good motivation for a kid who loves those films
The Little Green Men from Toy Story do everything in the name of The Claw and Sarge from the green army men tests you on your abilities, like getting a high score or knowing how to perform a certain trick, or the Gorillas from Tarzan get you to mess up the human’s camp along with the Elephants getting help from you as their friend, or the trio of hyenas from The Lion King making bets with you or Zazu getting you to do jobs that help train you to become king, just to name a few.
Aside from the regular goals that are accessible by all characters, the game also has a few goals which are exclusive to certain characters based on plot points from the films that they’re from, such as having to defeat Zurg as Buzz Lightyear.
The least interesting goals are collecting the 25 tokens throughout a level along with one special collectable, which you have to do for every single character for every single level that they access to. It’s especially tedious and obnoxious on the confusing Elephant Graveyard level and the area in the Human Camp from Tarzan where you have to grind on some vines. It makes the game quickly go from kinda fun to tedious busywork.
Aside from the characters from the Disney and Pixar characters, there are 10 real kids that are playable known as “The Extreme Skate Crew”, and that’s because during the development of this game, Activision decided to do a nationwide casting call search in the US as a promotional tool for this game to put 10 lucky kids into this game. Kids could either show up and skate live or send in footage into the company. You can briefly see footage of the competitions in the opening credits along with a bigger montage of footage in one of the unlockable videos. The top two kids ended up being highlighted on the cover for the game and the ones who were featured the most in the game.
These kids can not only skate in Olliewood, but skate in any of the levels based on the previously mentioned movies, being able to do a few of their own goals exclusive to the level, which are just finding Olliewood tokens and the Disney Extreme Skate Adventure logo.
The game might not be technically impressive, but it does run constantly at a solid 60 FPS, and it uses the art style of multiple Disney movies from the 90s along with the Toy Story films, even if characters faces can dip into the uncanny valley, which has helped it age better than some games from the same console generation. And the lighting in a lot of areas looks good, even if some of the areas are a bit too dark, like the Elephant’s Graveyard.
The controls are pretty much the same as THPS 4 except for one difference. There is both a set of “Basic” controls aimed at children to go along with the “Pro” controls that are just from THPS 4. The “Basic” controls seem to be context based and yet they never seem to work as intended, with tricks seemingly happening when the game feels like letting them happening. Manuals would always just happen and took me by surprise every time. I don’t see how kids could learn to play the game when every time you want to do something and the game just does it with little input. I think kids could put on the “Pro” controls and use them in the more simple levels in Skate Adventure and be fine.
There’s even a split-screen multiplayer if you want to play with your friends. There is no online play for any version of this game or a system link with other consoles, which is probably for the best as I don’t see multiple kids being able to have their own consoles, or their parents allowing them to use the internet like that in 2003.
Each level plays pretty well for the most part, doing a decent enough job of adapting the locations of the movie to work in a video game like this, and I had no real problem with any of them except for one, and that was the Elephant’s Graveyard, which was a little too confusing to navigate, with tunnel entrances feeling like they go to random locations and what feels like areas just randomly shoved wherever. I did learn a large chunk of it through memorization, but if I’m having trouble learning it as an adult, I think kids might have a worse time depending on the kid. Plus some parts of the level could easily be too dark if you’re playing on the intended hardware, and was easily fixed by playing through emulation.
I’ve also noticed that the levels based around humans are a little easier to navigate than the ones centered around animals.
However, there is one brand new location that takes place in the “real world” called Olliewood, although it’s pretty much a cartoony version of the real world, and it features it’s own unique characters for this games, and goals centered around the characters one basic characteristic, like one character being a captain of a boat or a character who is conscientious of the environment.
But these characters are pretty obviously here to advertise to the kids playing these games since they can’t shove the advertising in the levels based on the films. Like how one goal has you delivering McDonald’s menu items to each of the four characters, or how you have to deliver Nokia ringtones to them since this was at a time where phones didn’t have access to the internet and you had to pay for a ringtone since you couldn’t just use whatever songs you had on your phone because the internal storage was tiny and the thing could only play midi files.
Along with the two kid skaters who won the competition, you can unlock Lil’ Romeo, the artist for one of the songs on the soundtrack. Although I have no idea who would be excited for him to even appear on the soundtrack, let along as an unlockable character, even at the time when this game came out. Even the characters made up for this game were more memorable than this real person.
Every time you complete a goal you unlock something. The unlockables range from a piece of clothing or new design for you skateboard for your user created skateboarder or a new skate trick for whatever character you happen to be playing at that time, or some sort or video, mostly music videos of the songs from the soundtrack or clips and trailers of the movies that this game features, you’re always unlocking something. It always feels like you’re making progress, as trivial as that progress might be, so you’ll always have something new to look at or use.
There are even videos to unlock when you clear all of the goals in every level for all of the skaters that have access to that level. These unlockable videos include music videos of some of the songs featured on the soundtrack of this game, a video focusing on the skate competition to get featured in the game that’s pretty much just a montage, and clips from the movies that this game has taken characters from, but they are all edited to the songs from the soundtrack of this game and all come across like AMVs from 2006 – 2009 YouTube.
This soundtrack is so 2003. I don’t know if it’s the most 2003 soundtrack, but you’re not mistaking it for anything other than something that obviously came from the early 2000s. Some songs make sense for the soundtrack like “Grown Up” by Simple Plan, but other songs don’t really fit. Were kids allowed to listen to “Where’s Your Head At?” by Basement Jaxx? It technically doesn’t have anything on the soundtrack that a kid couldn’t listen to, but I wouldn’t say the song is for kids. And this game was released at a time when music videos were still aired on TV, and the music video isn’t something aimed at kids either. It also doesn’t really belong on the same soundtrack as “Live in Stereo” by Newsboys, which is on this soundtrack for some reason.
And if you get the Xbox version, it even lets you use your own music that were ripped onto the hard drive. So you could easily play the soundtracks of the movies that were featured in this game, or maybe some better annoyingly catchy 2000s pop music, like the soundtracks to the English dubs of “Pokemon: The First Movie” or “Digimon: The Movie”. At least those were trying to capitalize on what was popular instead of trying to sell you on a soundtrack.
The best songs on the soundtrack by far, and by best I mean the only good ones, are “Pacific Coast Party” by Smash Mouth along with “Sell Out” by Reel Big Fish. Whoever put “Sell Out” on the soundtrack knew exactly what they were doing considering that this whole game is not only trying to tell kids on Disney products but has advertising for McDonald’s burgers and Nokia phones too.
Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure is mostly harmless, even if it’s entire existence is purely to advertise movies, fast food products, and now incredibly outdated phones to children. It’s competent enough, though that’s because of the engine it’s on, not because of the game itself. I doubt any kid these days is going to want this outside of whatever popular thing is going on, unless they just so happen to really love older Disney and Pixar films.
But there’s just one last thing. Have you found all of the secret Mickeys in this game?
I imagine that not a lot of people have actually played this back when it was first released when they were the right age to play it when growing to have played in the first place. It doesn’t exactly have the most interesting of covers, with an awful looking cartoony character on the front surrounded by mediocre 3D renditions of Disney and Pixar characters, and from the look of both the front and back cover, it was pretty obvious that this was more of a tie-in for multiple popular Disney movies that had come out in the decade before this games release.
I’d be willing to bet that more people have probably heard about this game through the mod for PC version of Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 called T.H.U.G. PRO that takes all levels and characters from every other game that ran on the same game engine that came out on the sixth generation of consoles, which included Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure. Yep, this runs on that same engine as those sixth gen Tony Hawk games, but more about that later.
There is no plot to Skate Adventure, nor is there even an attempt at one. Since the game entirely exists to promote multiple Disney and Pixar movies as easily as possible, along with the product placement that they could shove into the game, as it just gives you a choice between several characters from three different Disney and Pixar characters and lets you ride around in three locations from the movie that they’re from.
These movies include Toy Story 1 and 2, Tarzan, and The Lion King. Why these three movies? I guess it was a mix of their popularity and that they were the easiest films to make a level based on. I have no idea is Disney or Pixar made any demands other than “get a game onto store shelves”, but this reeks of both studios not caring. The characters that are unlocked right from the start are Woody and Buzz from Toy Story, Young Tarzan and Young Terk from Tarzan, and Rafiki and Young Simba from the Lion King.
Unlockable characters include Jessie and Zurg from Toy Story 2, Young Tantor and Young Jane from Tarzan, despite the fact that Jane only ever appeared as an adult in the Tarzan film, but whatever, and Young Nala along with Timon and Pumbaa from The Lion King, with Timon and Pumbaa skating together on the same skateboard.
Locations from said movies include Pizza Planet, Andy’s Bedroom, and Zurg’s planet of Xrghthung from Toy Story 1 and 2, Tarzan’s Treehouse, The Human Camp, and Clayton’s Ship from Tarzan, and Pride Rock, The Elephant Graveyard, and Scar’s Canyon from The Lion King. The game does try to make each location visually distinct enough from every other level and it works well enough, and it’s a decent enough selection.
Although you can only play level only with the character from the movie that the levels is based on, so no Woody skating around Pride Rock or the jungle or Turk skating around any of the Toy Story levels. It’s a tad disappointing, but what are you going to do.
As I mentioned earlier, this game runs specifically on the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 engine, which actually fits with this game way more than it did with THPS 4. Tony Hawk 4 was more focused on giving the player goals than letting you just skate each level with a time limit, which works perfectly for a game like this, as having Disney and Pixar characters tell you want to do is pretty good motivation for a kid who loves those films
The Little Green Men from Toy Story do everything in the name of The Claw and Sarge from the green army men tests you on your abilities, like getting a high score or knowing how to perform a certain trick, or the Gorillas from Tarzan get you to mess up the human’s camp along with the Elephants getting help from you as their friend, or the trio of hyenas from The Lion King making bets with you or Zazu getting you to do jobs that help train you to become king, just to name a few.
Aside from the regular goals that are accessible by all characters, the game also has a few goals which are exclusive to certain characters based on plot points from the films that they’re from, such as having to defeat Zurg as Buzz Lightyear.
The least interesting goals are collecting the 25 tokens throughout a level along with one special collectable, which you have to do for every single character for every single level that they access to. It’s especially tedious and obnoxious on the confusing Elephant Graveyard level and the area in the Human Camp from Tarzan where you have to grind on some vines. It makes the game quickly go from kinda fun to tedious busywork.
Aside from the characters from the Disney and Pixar characters, there are 10 real kids that are playable known as “The Extreme Skate Crew”, and that’s because during the development of this game, Activision decided to do a nationwide casting call search in the US as a promotional tool for this game to put 10 lucky kids into this game. Kids could either show up and skate live or send in footage into the company. You can briefly see footage of the competitions in the opening credits along with a bigger montage of footage in one of the unlockable videos. The top two kids ended up being highlighted on the cover for the game and the ones who were featured the most in the game.
These kids can not only skate in Olliewood, but skate in any of the levels based on the previously mentioned movies, being able to do a few of their own goals exclusive to the level, which are just finding Olliewood tokens and the Disney Extreme Skate Adventure logo.
The game might not be technically impressive, but it does run constantly at a solid 60 FPS, and it uses the art style of multiple Disney movies from the 90s along with the Toy Story films, even if characters faces can dip into the uncanny valley, which has helped it age better than some games from the same console generation. And the lighting in a lot of areas looks good, even if some of the areas are a bit too dark, like the Elephant’s Graveyard.
The controls are pretty much the same as THPS 4 except for one difference. There is both a set of “Basic” controls aimed at children to go along with the “Pro” controls that are just from THPS 4. The “Basic” controls seem to be context based and yet they never seem to work as intended, with tricks seemingly happening when the game feels like letting them happening. Manuals would always just happen and took me by surprise every time. I don’t see how kids could learn to play the game when every time you want to do something and the game just does it with little input. I think kids could put on the “Pro” controls and use them in the more simple levels in Skate Adventure and be fine.
There’s even a split-screen multiplayer if you want to play with your friends. There is no online play for any version of this game or a system link with other consoles, which is probably for the best as I don’t see multiple kids being able to have their own consoles, or their parents allowing them to use the internet like that in 2003.
Each level plays pretty well for the most part, doing a decent enough job of adapting the locations of the movie to work in a video game like this, and I had no real problem with any of them except for one, and that was the Elephant’s Graveyard, which was a little too confusing to navigate, with tunnel entrances feeling like they go to random locations and what feels like areas just randomly shoved wherever. I did learn a large chunk of it through memorization, but if I’m having trouble learning it as an adult, I think kids might have a worse time depending on the kid. Plus some parts of the level could easily be too dark if you’re playing on the intended hardware, and was easily fixed by playing through emulation.
I’ve also noticed that the levels based around humans are a little easier to navigate than the ones centered around animals.
However, there is one brand new location that takes place in the “real world” called Olliewood, although it’s pretty much a cartoony version of the real world, and it features it’s own unique characters for this games, and goals centered around the characters one basic characteristic, like one character being a captain of a boat or a character who is conscientious of the environment.
But these characters are pretty obviously here to advertise to the kids playing these games since they can’t shove the advertising in the levels based on the films. Like how one goal has you delivering McDonald’s menu items to each of the four characters, or how you have to deliver Nokia ringtones to them since this was at a time where phones didn’t have access to the internet and you had to pay for a ringtone since you couldn’t just use whatever songs you had on your phone because the internal storage was tiny and the thing could only play midi files.
Along with the two kid skaters who won the competition, you can unlock Lil’ Romeo, the artist for one of the songs on the soundtrack. Although I have no idea who would be excited for him to even appear on the soundtrack, let along as an unlockable character, even at the time when this game came out. Even the characters made up for this game were more memorable than this real person.
Every time you complete a goal you unlock something. The unlockables range from a piece of clothing or new design for you skateboard for your user created skateboarder or a new skate trick for whatever character you happen to be playing at that time, or some sort or video, mostly music videos of the songs from the soundtrack or clips and trailers of the movies that this game features, you’re always unlocking something. It always feels like you’re making progress, as trivial as that progress might be, so you’ll always have something new to look at or use.
There are even videos to unlock when you clear all of the goals in every level for all of the skaters that have access to that level. These unlockable videos include music videos of some of the songs featured on the soundtrack of this game, a video focusing on the skate competition to get featured in the game that’s pretty much just a montage, and clips from the movies that this game has taken characters from, but they are all edited to the songs from the soundtrack of this game and all come across like AMVs from 2006 – 2009 YouTube.
This soundtrack is so 2003. I don’t know if it’s the most 2003 soundtrack, but you’re not mistaking it for anything other than something that obviously came from the early 2000s. Some songs make sense for the soundtrack like “Grown Up” by Simple Plan, but other songs don’t really fit. Were kids allowed to listen to “Where’s Your Head At?” by Basement Jaxx? It technically doesn’t have anything on the soundtrack that a kid couldn’t listen to, but I wouldn’t say the song is for kids. And this game was released at a time when music videos were still aired on TV, and the music video isn’t something aimed at kids either. It also doesn’t really belong on the same soundtrack as “Live in Stereo” by Newsboys, which is on this soundtrack for some reason.
And if you get the Xbox version, it even lets you use your own music that were ripped onto the hard drive. So you could easily play the soundtracks of the movies that were featured in this game, or maybe some better annoyingly catchy 2000s pop music, like the soundtracks to the English dubs of “Pokemon: The First Movie” or “Digimon: The Movie”. At least those were trying to capitalize on what was popular instead of trying to sell you on a soundtrack.
The best songs on the soundtrack by far, and by best I mean the only good ones, are “Pacific Coast Party” by Smash Mouth along with “Sell Out” by Reel Big Fish. Whoever put “Sell Out” on the soundtrack knew exactly what they were doing considering that this whole game is not only trying to tell kids on Disney products but has advertising for McDonald’s burgers and Nokia phones too.
Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure is mostly harmless, even if it’s entire existence is purely to advertise movies, fast food products, and now incredibly outdated phones to children. It’s competent enough, though that’s because of the engine it’s on, not because of the game itself. I doubt any kid these days is going to want this outside of whatever popular thing is going on, unless they just so happen to really love older Disney and Pixar films.
But there’s just one last thing. Have you found all of the secret Mickeys in this game?
NOTE: This is a review for the Arcade version of the game
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/25/michael-jacksons-moonwalker-review-part-1-arcade/
Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker is a pretty weird film to say the least. For those not in the know, it was an anthology film, several of which were just Michael Jackson’s music vidoes, mostly using music from the ‘Bad’ (1987). Probably the most infamous segment of the film is the “Smooth Criminal” segment in which a drug-dealing mobster called Mr. Big, played by Joe Pesci, kidnaps all of the worlds children to get them addicted to drugs, so Michael Jackson comes to their rescue and defeats Mr. Big by turning into a giant robot. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie.
And then along comes the video game based on the film that the 80s and 90s seemed to be filled with. While Moonwalker seems like it wouldn’t make sense as a video game, it actually makes sense with some contect. Michael Jackson was a giant fan of video games, having a giant arcade in his masnion filled to the brim with both arcade machines and the lastest video game consoles alone with a large video game collection.
He also secretly composed music for some of Sega’s games, including the Sonic series, along with making cameos in Space Channel 5, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2, and he was even the focus for a cencelled MMO called Planet Michael. He even designed the video games based on the Moonwalker movie. Which finally brings us back to Michael Jackson’s Moonwaker for the arcade.
Of course the best version of the game is the version that came out in the arcades. Developed and put out by Sega, Moonwalker is an isometric Beat-Em-Up. You play as Michael Jackson’s character from the previously mentioned “Smooth Criminal” segment from the movie, cut up into 5 different stages. Each stage is filled with Mr. Bigs’s thugs, along with characters exclusive to each stage, and then a boss battle at the finale of each stage.
As you’re going through each stage, you can save the children that have been kidnapped by the thugs. When you save the kids, they often have extra health for you, or give you a dance power-up. That’s right, you get a dance power-up. This power-up, called “Dance Magic”, makes every enemy currently on screen dance in sync with Michael Jaskson before Michael unleashes a wave of green energy, defeating all of the thugs.
The best part of this power-up is that not only does it works with the attack dogs that the thugs, causing them to dance along too, but the thugs controlling giant robots (yes, they have giant robots) to make the robot also dance along with Michael. It’s just as awesome as it sounds.
The second power-up turns Michael Jackson into a robot just like the movie, which results in you being able to run around shooting thugs with powerful lasers. To collect this power-up, you have to collect Bubbles the chimpanzee, based on Michael Jackson’s real life pet of the same name, who appears once per level.
Of course, the soundtrack is made up entirely of Michael Jackson’s music, and is fun listening to midi renditions of Michael’s music. My only problem with the soundtrack is that in the graveyard area, Thriller doesn’t play Not even when you use the dance power-up. How do you have a graveyard level in a Michael Jackson video game and not have the iconic Thriller play. Especially when Michael Jackson himself is working on it and he’s the biggest star at the time.
The game also lets you play the game with up to three players at the same time, and watching 3 Michael Jacksons in three diferrent colored suits fight of thugs, dogs, and robots, all while dancing in unison and themselves becoming robots that fire lasers is a fun thing to witness. The entire thing is onl 30 minutes long, but it was released at a time when arcade games wucked quarters out of people, so this was probably taking at last a couple of dollars out of people for the whole experience.
The arcade version of Moonwalker is easily recommendable for anyone who loves arcade games and Michael Jackson, but there isn’t a lot of places you can find it, especially since arcades don’t really exist any more in a lot of countries. And finding one to buy for yourself is borderline impossible because it would cost an arm and a leg and take up a ton of space, both of which most people don’t have.
And since there is no way to buy this game digitally, probably due to a mix of rights issues for both the music and game, as well as Michael Jackson’s unfortunate history, there is not going to be a way for you to play this unless you download it and emulate it.
But still, it comes highly recommended.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/25/michael-jacksons-moonwalker-review-part-1-arcade/
Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker is a pretty weird film to say the least. For those not in the know, it was an anthology film, several of which were just Michael Jackson’s music vidoes, mostly using music from the ‘Bad’ (1987). Probably the most infamous segment of the film is the “Smooth Criminal” segment in which a drug-dealing mobster called Mr. Big, played by Joe Pesci, kidnaps all of the worlds children to get them addicted to drugs, so Michael Jackson comes to their rescue and defeats Mr. Big by turning into a giant robot. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie.
And then along comes the video game based on the film that the 80s and 90s seemed to be filled with. While Moonwalker seems like it wouldn’t make sense as a video game, it actually makes sense with some contect. Michael Jackson was a giant fan of video games, having a giant arcade in his masnion filled to the brim with both arcade machines and the lastest video game consoles alone with a large video game collection.
He also secretly composed music for some of Sega’s games, including the Sonic series, along with making cameos in Space Channel 5, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2, and he was even the focus for a cencelled MMO called Planet Michael. He even designed the video games based on the Moonwalker movie. Which finally brings us back to Michael Jackson’s Moonwaker for the arcade.
Of course the best version of the game is the version that came out in the arcades. Developed and put out by Sega, Moonwalker is an isometric Beat-Em-Up. You play as Michael Jackson’s character from the previously mentioned “Smooth Criminal” segment from the movie, cut up into 5 different stages. Each stage is filled with Mr. Bigs’s thugs, along with characters exclusive to each stage, and then a boss battle at the finale of each stage.
As you’re going through each stage, you can save the children that have been kidnapped by the thugs. When you save the kids, they often have extra health for you, or give you a dance power-up. That’s right, you get a dance power-up. This power-up, called “Dance Magic”, makes every enemy currently on screen dance in sync with Michael Jaskson before Michael unleashes a wave of green energy, defeating all of the thugs.
The best part of this power-up is that not only does it works with the attack dogs that the thugs, causing them to dance along too, but the thugs controlling giant robots (yes, they have giant robots) to make the robot also dance along with Michael. It’s just as awesome as it sounds.
The second power-up turns Michael Jackson into a robot just like the movie, which results in you being able to run around shooting thugs with powerful lasers. To collect this power-up, you have to collect Bubbles the chimpanzee, based on Michael Jackson’s real life pet of the same name, who appears once per level.
Of course, the soundtrack is made up entirely of Michael Jackson’s music, and is fun listening to midi renditions of Michael’s music. My only problem with the soundtrack is that in the graveyard area, Thriller doesn’t play Not even when you use the dance power-up. How do you have a graveyard level in a Michael Jackson video game and not have the iconic Thriller play. Especially when Michael Jackson himself is working on it and he’s the biggest star at the time.
The game also lets you play the game with up to three players at the same time, and watching 3 Michael Jacksons in three diferrent colored suits fight of thugs, dogs, and robots, all while dancing in unison and themselves becoming robots that fire lasers is a fun thing to witness. The entire thing is onl 30 minutes long, but it was released at a time when arcade games wucked quarters out of people, so this was probably taking at last a couple of dollars out of people for the whole experience.
The arcade version of Moonwalker is easily recommendable for anyone who loves arcade games and Michael Jackson, but there isn’t a lot of places you can find it, especially since arcades don’t really exist any more in a lot of countries. And finding one to buy for yourself is borderline impossible because it would cost an arm and a leg and take up a ton of space, both of which most people don’t have.
And since there is no way to buy this game digitally, probably due to a mix of rights issues for both the music and game, as well as Michael Jackson’s unfortunate history, there is not going to be a way for you to play this unless you download it and emulate it.
But still, it comes highly recommended.
2007
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.
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.
1993
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/12/07/skyroads-1993-ms-dos-review/
I don’t think there are too many sci-fi themed racing games set in space. There are plenty of racing games set on other planets, but a track actually set in the middle of space with nothing around? The only other thing I can think of is Rainbow Road from the Mario Kart franchise. How the physics of it work, I have absolutely no idea, but Imagine it was funded by someone who had a lot of time, money, and boredom who thought it was a good idea to set one of the tracks in the middle of an asteroid field.
Released in 1993 only for MS-Dos, SkyRoads was developed by Bluemoon Software and published by Creative Dimensions.
The game is a remake of the companies previous game, Kosmonaut, which was, from what I could find, was the first commercially released game from Estonia, which is a country you don’t hear a lot from in the game development world. It was even successful enough for one of the developers to buy his own car. Due to it’s success, we now have SkyRoads.
The gameplay is simple, you control a Skycar. I don’t know why it’s called a Skycar, since we’re in space, not the sky. Maybe it was a bit more catchy than Spacecar, but whatever. Left steers left, right steers right, up makes you faster, and holding down makes you slower. The Skycar will stay at whatever speed you leave it at, which I guess is the advantage of driving in space, once you’ve started accelerating, you don’t need to press the pedals and waste gas.
And finally, the space bar makes your car jump, which is needed for when you’re jumping from platform to platform. If you miss a platform or don’t jump in time, you either crash into a part of the skyplatform and explode and I’m assuming either die or get critically injured, or float off into space, and I’m assuming to wait for someone to collect you, all while speeding off at hundreds of miles an hour into space or a possible asteroid belt.
The tracks are mostly flat surfaces floating in space, so no having to worry about overly complicated turns or course design. Apparently you can just put platforms wherever you want in space. My guess is that there aren’t any laws in this part of the universe (physical and governmental) and this is out of the way for the Space Cops to find you. Like this is the space equivalent of back roads or maritime law.
The goal of each course is that you have to jump from platform to platform on each track before driving through a small tunnel at the end of the road. And if you don’t accidentally crash into one of the obstacles and blow yourself up or fall or jump off of one of the platforms to be lost in the emptiness of space, doomed to float away forever, you have the Oxygen (O2) and Fuel meters to worry about. If you run out of fuel, you can’t control your skycar and you’re either going to crash into something or fly off into space, and if you run out of Oxygen, you just explode. I don’t know how you would explode in space if there isn’t any oxygen. I guess the developers have decided to take some liberties with science as a whole.
The Oxygen meter doubles as a time limit, in that you have to make it to the end of the course before you use it all up, and the fuel meter only depletes when your Skycar is accelerating. If you run out of either, you’ll lose. There is also a bar on the dashboard that shows how far you are on the course, but it doesn’t really matter much, since you’re going to spend your time concentrating on the track, and the speed meter that i mentioned earlier.
Certain surfaces on the course have different effects on your whip. Blue increased your O2 and Fuel, Light Green rapidly increased your speed, Dark Green rapidly decreases your speed, Grey is slippery like oil and if you either drive left or right on the surface, your stuck going in that direction, and Pink causes your ship to explode when you land on it. I’m not sure how friendly this is to color blindness, so you might want to watch a couple of videos before playing.
Some stages also have a higher or lower gravity, with 500 being normal gravity. The game has 10 worlds, with each having 3 stages each. All this really means is that each has a different background, which is nice having some variety in visuals. You can play any of the stages in any order, but it would be best if they were played in order, since it would be easier for beginner players.
The only thing to show for the completion of tracks is that each track gives you a gold medal when you win, each track giving you 7 gold medals total. This is really only for show though. The earlier game that his is a pseudo remake of, Kosmonauts, had a scoring system, which was a nice was of showing up your friends with a higher number.
Following the success of SkyRoads, Bluemoon released the SkyRoads Xmas Special the following year with another 10 worlds. and I threw that game into this review because I couldn’t justify another review for something that’s just regular SkyRoads but with more levels and a Christmas coat of paint. Not only that, I could also claim this as a Christmas review despite it not being the main focus. Only 4 of theme are Christmas themed though, with new artwork for the backgrounds, all of which are obviously Christmas inspired. The rest use backgrounds from the original SkyRoads. I guess the development team just wanted to capitalize on SkyRoads popularity by rushing something new onto the market with minimal effort. How weirdly predictive of modern gaming companies.
All of the gameplay mechanics are the same, so the is pretty much only counts as a level pack. The only real difference is that all of these levels are more difficult, so this is more for the skilled SkyRoads players. Still, it’s still nice to get more levels, because playing the first game could get boring pretty quickly for some players who like a challenge.
Bluemoon didn’t go on to do much else. They released a few more games and a couple of other projects. The only other think related to SkyRoads they released was a tech demo called Stellar Xpress that was meant to to be a 3D version of SkyRoads, and it even got sold to a VR gear manufacture as a demo to be bundled with their headsets, but further plans were abandoned due to the gameplay not being able to be reproduced in 3D. It was also released for free, and it’s a neat little experience.
Since the game is officially freeware released by the company itself, you can easily find a copy on the internet without having to worry about it. And as a result, there have been user created versions of SkyRoads along with games with similar gameplay.
There is a version of SkyRoads called ‘OpenRoads’ that plays the game in a web browser. Unfortunately, the original Kosmonaut or the VR Stellar Xpress isn’t playable through the web browser, but ‘OpenRoads’ does come with a VR enabled version of both SkyRoads and the X-Mas special, which is a neat little addition. But it’s limited to the DK1 and DK1 from what I can get from the website.
There is even a SkyRoads clone called ‘Tasty Static’ (epilepsy warning for that game), which is a fantastic name for a game, and the soundtrack for that game is also free.
And the soundtrack is even free, so if you can’t get those beeps and bloops out of your head, feel free to click the link below to throw them onto whatever devices you listen to your music from.
Bluemoon actually went on to help in the development of the peer-to-peer software behind file sharing programs Kazaa, Grokster, and iMesh and the audio and video communicator software Skype, so Bluemoon not only has had an interesting foray into video games, but an interesting history in tech overall to say the least.
Skyroads managed to leave a little legacy of it’s own, achieving cult status. But it was never popular enough to make it big, but it did entertain a few people along the way. Best of all, all of the games mentioned in this review are freeware that you can download from Bluemoon’s site, which is surprisingly still up. So go download it and have fun.
I don’t think there are too many sci-fi themed racing games set in space. There are plenty of racing games set on other planets, but a track actually set in the middle of space with nothing around? The only other thing I can think of is Rainbow Road from the Mario Kart franchise. How the physics of it work, I have absolutely no idea, but Imagine it was funded by someone who had a lot of time, money, and boredom who thought it was a good idea to set one of the tracks in the middle of an asteroid field.
Released in 1993 only for MS-Dos, SkyRoads was developed by Bluemoon Software and published by Creative Dimensions.
The game is a remake of the companies previous game, Kosmonaut, which was, from what I could find, was the first commercially released game from Estonia, which is a country you don’t hear a lot from in the game development world. It was even successful enough for one of the developers to buy his own car. Due to it’s success, we now have SkyRoads.
The gameplay is simple, you control a Skycar. I don’t know why it’s called a Skycar, since we’re in space, not the sky. Maybe it was a bit more catchy than Spacecar, but whatever. Left steers left, right steers right, up makes you faster, and holding down makes you slower. The Skycar will stay at whatever speed you leave it at, which I guess is the advantage of driving in space, once you’ve started accelerating, you don’t need to press the pedals and waste gas.
And finally, the space bar makes your car jump, which is needed for when you’re jumping from platform to platform. If you miss a platform or don’t jump in time, you either crash into a part of the skyplatform and explode and I’m assuming either die or get critically injured, or float off into space, and I’m assuming to wait for someone to collect you, all while speeding off at hundreds of miles an hour into space or a possible asteroid belt.
The tracks are mostly flat surfaces floating in space, so no having to worry about overly complicated turns or course design. Apparently you can just put platforms wherever you want in space. My guess is that there aren’t any laws in this part of the universe (physical and governmental) and this is out of the way for the Space Cops to find you. Like this is the space equivalent of back roads or maritime law.
The goal of each course is that you have to jump from platform to platform on each track before driving through a small tunnel at the end of the road. And if you don’t accidentally crash into one of the obstacles and blow yourself up or fall or jump off of one of the platforms to be lost in the emptiness of space, doomed to float away forever, you have the Oxygen (O2) and Fuel meters to worry about. If you run out of fuel, you can’t control your skycar and you’re either going to crash into something or fly off into space, and if you run out of Oxygen, you just explode. I don’t know how you would explode in space if there isn’t any oxygen. I guess the developers have decided to take some liberties with science as a whole.
The Oxygen meter doubles as a time limit, in that you have to make it to the end of the course before you use it all up, and the fuel meter only depletes when your Skycar is accelerating. If you run out of either, you’ll lose. There is also a bar on the dashboard that shows how far you are on the course, but it doesn’t really matter much, since you’re going to spend your time concentrating on the track, and the speed meter that i mentioned earlier.
Certain surfaces on the course have different effects on your whip. Blue increased your O2 and Fuel, Light Green rapidly increased your speed, Dark Green rapidly decreases your speed, Grey is slippery like oil and if you either drive left or right on the surface, your stuck going in that direction, and Pink causes your ship to explode when you land on it. I’m not sure how friendly this is to color blindness, so you might want to watch a couple of videos before playing.
Some stages also have a higher or lower gravity, with 500 being normal gravity. The game has 10 worlds, with each having 3 stages each. All this really means is that each has a different background, which is nice having some variety in visuals. You can play any of the stages in any order, but it would be best if they were played in order, since it would be easier for beginner players.
The only thing to show for the completion of tracks is that each track gives you a gold medal when you win, each track giving you 7 gold medals total. This is really only for show though. The earlier game that his is a pseudo remake of, Kosmonauts, had a scoring system, which was a nice was of showing up your friends with a higher number.
Following the success of SkyRoads, Bluemoon released the SkyRoads Xmas Special the following year with another 10 worlds. and I threw that game into this review because I couldn’t justify another review for something that’s just regular SkyRoads but with more levels and a Christmas coat of paint. Not only that, I could also claim this as a Christmas review despite it not being the main focus. Only 4 of theme are Christmas themed though, with new artwork for the backgrounds, all of which are obviously Christmas inspired. The rest use backgrounds from the original SkyRoads. I guess the development team just wanted to capitalize on SkyRoads popularity by rushing something new onto the market with minimal effort. How weirdly predictive of modern gaming companies.
All of the gameplay mechanics are the same, so the is pretty much only counts as a level pack. The only real difference is that all of these levels are more difficult, so this is more for the skilled SkyRoads players. Still, it’s still nice to get more levels, because playing the first game could get boring pretty quickly for some players who like a challenge.
Bluemoon didn’t go on to do much else. They released a few more games and a couple of other projects. The only other think related to SkyRoads they released was a tech demo called Stellar Xpress that was meant to to be a 3D version of SkyRoads, and it even got sold to a VR gear manufacture as a demo to be bundled with their headsets, but further plans were abandoned due to the gameplay not being able to be reproduced in 3D. It was also released for free, and it’s a neat little experience.
Since the game is officially freeware released by the company itself, you can easily find a copy on the internet without having to worry about it. And as a result, there have been user created versions of SkyRoads along with games with similar gameplay.
There is a version of SkyRoads called ‘OpenRoads’ that plays the game in a web browser. Unfortunately, the original Kosmonaut or the VR Stellar Xpress isn’t playable through the web browser, but ‘OpenRoads’ does come with a VR enabled version of both SkyRoads and the X-Mas special, which is a neat little addition. But it’s limited to the DK1 and DK1 from what I can get from the website.
There is even a SkyRoads clone called ‘Tasty Static’ (epilepsy warning for that game), which is a fantastic name for a game, and the soundtrack for that game is also free.
And the soundtrack is even free, so if you can’t get those beeps and bloops out of your head, feel free to click the link below to throw them onto whatever devices you listen to your music from.
Bluemoon actually went on to help in the development of the peer-to-peer software behind file sharing programs Kazaa, Grokster, and iMesh and the audio and video communicator software Skype, so Bluemoon not only has had an interesting foray into video games, but an interesting history in tech overall to say the least.
Skyroads managed to leave a little legacy of it’s own, achieving cult status. But it was never popular enough to make it big, but it did entertain a few people along the way. Best of all, all of the games mentioned in this review are freeware that you can download from Bluemoon’s site, which is surprisingly still up. So go download it and have fun.
1997
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/06/17/mod-corner-alien-quake-quake-review/
The moment that a lot of of early First Person Shooters gave users the ability to mod the game, such as Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, etc, became the moment that a lot of people saw the opportunity to make a video game version of their favorite franchise. One of the most popular ones to make into a First Person Shooter is the Alien franchise, probably due to Aliens being heavily action focused and already being the inspiration for a lot of games, such as Contra and Metroid. One of the earliest and more infamous examples of an Alien mod is Alien Quake, obviously for Quake 1.
Mild spoilers for Aliens ahead in this plot summary, but if you’re clicking a mod for Aliens, you’ve probably already seen it.
Taking place 50 years after the original incident on LV-426, you play as a hardened mercenary hired by a rival company to investigate a rumor that Weyland Yutani has begun to rebuild Hadley’s Hope. Going in alone, your job is to sniff out the details of what they’re up to. While sneaking in, you were captured and placed in a holding cell awaiting interrogation. A week after sitting in your cell, one of the guards interrogating you has something rip it’s way out of his chest, killing him instantly, before running off into the darkness. Before you can take in what you’ve seen, you hear an inhuman sound before being knocked out. You wake up an undetermined amount of time later, with the door to your cell open. Now knowing that Weyland Yutani is definitely up to something involving the Xenomorph, you grab the gun from the now corpse and head out to figure out exactly whats going on before you escape from this hell hole.
None of this plot shows up in the actual game, all of this is in the Readme file that comes with the mod. I’ll give it a pass since this was the early days of Quake modding and expecting even the most basic cutscenes from modders is a tall order.
Being developed in 1997, about a year after the release of Quake, the game is obviously a bit rough around the edges to what Quake mods are being released more than 20 years later, and looks very much of it’s time. Even looking past this, the mod does look pretty good in some areas for when it was released, such as Hadley’s Hope looking accurate to the movie and the parts of the base being transformed by the Xenomorphs look good, along with the Xenomorphs themselves looking exactly like the movie version.
There’s even a secret hidden level that takes place on the Nostromo from the first film that looks really accurate to that movie.
Unfortunately, there is some bad level design to go along with the good game design. Some parts of levels are insanely dark, making it incredibly hard to navigate, and along with one enemy being an insta-kill making a few areas a bit frustrating to get through. Even turning up the brightness and contrast do very little to make the levels navigable. The levels aren’t confusing, just incredibly dark. It puts Doom 3 to shame with how dark it is. Muzzle flashed are going to be how you will get through an area or two of this game.
Maybe the modders wanted it to be dark to make it more scary, but they just over did it and getting through some of the darker areas can be frustrating.
This problem is compounded at the boss battle right at the end of the game where that part of the level is incredibly dark, what little light there is is flashing in and out, and to top it all of, there are large parts of the floor that are rising up, causing you to either slide down the side of them, or stop you in your tracks when you hit them, making the boss battle way more difficult than it needed to be.
All of the iconic monsters from the first three films make it into the game, 4 variations of the Xenomorph that all act the same, the Facehugger, which is a one hit kill enemy, and you know when it kills you, because all of a sudden you’ll have the Facehugger attached to your face, covering your screen, the Chestburster, which bursts out of dead bodies with Facehugers on them, and the Xenomorph Queen, which is obviously the end boss of the game.
For some reason, whenever you get into the proximity of a Xenomorph, it will play a music stinger from the movies, and it does this whenever you get near on of them, no matter if you’re coming across one for the first time or the seventeenth time, and if you end up in a situation where you’re running away from the Xenos, it can repeat numerous times. It’s probably just fan service to the films, but it’s still a weird design decision, and I don’t know why they didn’t just do it the one time when you first encounter a group of Xenomorphs.
Along with the Xenomorphs there are a few human and android enemies that are just reskins of Grunts and Enforcers, and they occasionally shout “Game over man!” when shot at. There is a new enemy called a Search Droid, but it’s just annoying. It shoots lightening at you and can take huge chunks out of your health, and the first time you come across one, you’re bound to die, and destroying one is going to take a couple of tries.
The mod does come with some music, but for some, it doesn’t play through a level or even in a certain area or situation. For some reason it seems to emanate from certain areas. It’ll be loud when you’re next to the area it’s coming from, but trail off when you leave.
The thing that makes this mod infamous in the Quake modding scene is that 20th Century Fox sent a cease and desist to the mod maker and told them to take it down from their website, since, of course, it has content from their films. This was so infamous that it coined the term “Foxed”, for when a company tries to take down a fan mod or project that contains their content. The following message was posted to their website following the takedown:
“The Alien Quake project has been discontinued by 20th Century Fox. I received an email on April 11th, 1997, from a 20th Century Fox representative that ordered us to cease all activity. The Alien Quake project was using copyrighted material without permission and this makes Alien Quake an unauthorized and illegal production. Therefore, you are hereby ordered to remove all your Alien Quake files from your computer storage. You must also remove all references to Alien Quake from any WWW pages or internet sites you keep or maintain. All distribution of Alien Quake is illegal and you should know that the Alien Quake team are under obligation to report the name and URL of any distributor to 20th Century Fox. Please let us know if you know the URL of a distributor or potential distributor.
Thank you for your co-operation.”
Since then, of course, it’s ended up on other websites such as MODDB, so it’s not difficult to find yourself a copy of this mod.
Weirdly enough, this mod got an unofficial port to the Dreamcast, and it’s a decent port for what it is. So if you’re looking for another homebrew game to pad out your Dreamcast library, Alien Quake isn’t a half bad choice.
This mod works perfect with the sourceports I’ve tried, such as Darkplaces and QuakeSpasm, so getting it running isn’t a problem. The whole mod is short and shouldn’t take you more than 45 minutes to an hour to complete, even with it’s bad lighting in areas and frustrating boss battle, and for what it’s worth, is an interesting footnote in the history of Quake mods to check out.
The moment that a lot of of early First Person Shooters gave users the ability to mod the game, such as Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, etc, became the moment that a lot of people saw the opportunity to make a video game version of their favorite franchise. One of the most popular ones to make into a First Person Shooter is the Alien franchise, probably due to Aliens being heavily action focused and already being the inspiration for a lot of games, such as Contra and Metroid. One of the earliest and more infamous examples of an Alien mod is Alien Quake, obviously for Quake 1.
Mild spoilers for Aliens ahead in this plot summary, but if you’re clicking a mod for Aliens, you’ve probably already seen it.
Taking place 50 years after the original incident on LV-426, you play as a hardened mercenary hired by a rival company to investigate a rumor that Weyland Yutani has begun to rebuild Hadley’s Hope. Going in alone, your job is to sniff out the details of what they’re up to. While sneaking in, you were captured and placed in a holding cell awaiting interrogation. A week after sitting in your cell, one of the guards interrogating you has something rip it’s way out of his chest, killing him instantly, before running off into the darkness. Before you can take in what you’ve seen, you hear an inhuman sound before being knocked out. You wake up an undetermined amount of time later, with the door to your cell open. Now knowing that Weyland Yutani is definitely up to something involving the Xenomorph, you grab the gun from the now corpse and head out to figure out exactly whats going on before you escape from this hell hole.
None of this plot shows up in the actual game, all of this is in the Readme file that comes with the mod. I’ll give it a pass since this was the early days of Quake modding and expecting even the most basic cutscenes from modders is a tall order.
Being developed in 1997, about a year after the release of Quake, the game is obviously a bit rough around the edges to what Quake mods are being released more than 20 years later, and looks very much of it’s time. Even looking past this, the mod does look pretty good in some areas for when it was released, such as Hadley’s Hope looking accurate to the movie and the parts of the base being transformed by the Xenomorphs look good, along with the Xenomorphs themselves looking exactly like the movie version.
There’s even a secret hidden level that takes place on the Nostromo from the first film that looks really accurate to that movie.
Unfortunately, there is some bad level design to go along with the good game design. Some parts of levels are insanely dark, making it incredibly hard to navigate, and along with one enemy being an insta-kill making a few areas a bit frustrating to get through. Even turning up the brightness and contrast do very little to make the levels navigable. The levels aren’t confusing, just incredibly dark. It puts Doom 3 to shame with how dark it is. Muzzle flashed are going to be how you will get through an area or two of this game.
Maybe the modders wanted it to be dark to make it more scary, but they just over did it and getting through some of the darker areas can be frustrating.
This problem is compounded at the boss battle right at the end of the game where that part of the level is incredibly dark, what little light there is is flashing in and out, and to top it all of, there are large parts of the floor that are rising up, causing you to either slide down the side of them, or stop you in your tracks when you hit them, making the boss battle way more difficult than it needed to be.
All of the iconic monsters from the first three films make it into the game, 4 variations of the Xenomorph that all act the same, the Facehugger, which is a one hit kill enemy, and you know when it kills you, because all of a sudden you’ll have the Facehugger attached to your face, covering your screen, the Chestburster, which bursts out of dead bodies with Facehugers on them, and the Xenomorph Queen, which is obviously the end boss of the game.
For some reason, whenever you get into the proximity of a Xenomorph, it will play a music stinger from the movies, and it does this whenever you get near on of them, no matter if you’re coming across one for the first time or the seventeenth time, and if you end up in a situation where you’re running away from the Xenos, it can repeat numerous times. It’s probably just fan service to the films, but it’s still a weird design decision, and I don’t know why they didn’t just do it the one time when you first encounter a group of Xenomorphs.
Along with the Xenomorphs there are a few human and android enemies that are just reskins of Grunts and Enforcers, and they occasionally shout “Game over man!” when shot at. There is a new enemy called a Search Droid, but it’s just annoying. It shoots lightening at you and can take huge chunks out of your health, and the first time you come across one, you’re bound to die, and destroying one is going to take a couple of tries.
The mod does come with some music, but for some, it doesn’t play through a level or even in a certain area or situation. For some reason it seems to emanate from certain areas. It’ll be loud when you’re next to the area it’s coming from, but trail off when you leave.
The thing that makes this mod infamous in the Quake modding scene is that 20th Century Fox sent a cease and desist to the mod maker and told them to take it down from their website, since, of course, it has content from their films. This was so infamous that it coined the term “Foxed”, for when a company tries to take down a fan mod or project that contains their content. The following message was posted to their website following the takedown:
“The Alien Quake project has been discontinued by 20th Century Fox. I received an email on April 11th, 1997, from a 20th Century Fox representative that ordered us to cease all activity. The Alien Quake project was using copyrighted material without permission and this makes Alien Quake an unauthorized and illegal production. Therefore, you are hereby ordered to remove all your Alien Quake files from your computer storage. You must also remove all references to Alien Quake from any WWW pages or internet sites you keep or maintain. All distribution of Alien Quake is illegal and you should know that the Alien Quake team are under obligation to report the name and URL of any distributor to 20th Century Fox. Please let us know if you know the URL of a distributor or potential distributor.
Thank you for your co-operation.”
Since then, of course, it’s ended up on other websites such as MODDB, so it’s not difficult to find yourself a copy of this mod.
Weirdly enough, this mod got an unofficial port to the Dreamcast, and it’s a decent port for what it is. So if you’re looking for another homebrew game to pad out your Dreamcast library, Alien Quake isn’t a half bad choice.
This mod works perfect with the sourceports I’ve tried, such as Darkplaces and QuakeSpasm, so getting it running isn’t a problem. The whole mod is short and shouldn’t take you more than 45 minutes to an hour to complete, even with it’s bad lighting in areas and frustrating boss battle, and for what it’s worth, is an interesting footnote in the history of Quake mods to check out.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/11/21/double-s-t-e-a-l-the-second-clash-2005-xbox-review/
The plot description contains slight spoilers for the first game (ENG: “Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions”, JP: “Double S.T.E.A.L.”), but they are minor.
After arresting Tiger Takagi and loosening the grip of the Yakuza on Hong Kong, the Dragons of the Hong Kong Police Force fly to America to hand off Tiget Takagi to the CIA. But not even 5 minutes after landing in Chicago, the Yakuza gang working in the USA break Tiger Takagi out of police custody, allowing Tiger Takagi to wreak chaos throughout the city of Chicago. It’s up to the Dragons to reign in Tiger Takagi and the Yakuza before it’s too late.
I don’t think there is even 5 minutes of cutscene total throughout the game. But it’s not like it matters much since the gameplay is the thing holding this game together.
I guess that the first game didn’t do too well outside of Japan, because ‘The Second Clash’ stayed in it’s home country of Japan. And on top of that, this game remained an exclusive to the original Xbox unlike the first game. And considering that the original Xbox wasn’t flying of the shelves like the PlayStation 2 and GameCube were in Japan unlike it was in the Western countries, I guess it was doomed to obscurity, even in it’s own country.
But despite the fact that it’s a game exclusive to Japan the game is entirely in English. And I don’t just mean the game has English menus and subtitles, but the whole thing is dubbed in English, which means that anyone from an English speaking country could play though this game with ease. Maybe the original game sold well enough in English speaking countries that the company developing or it publishing it thought that it could sell just as well enough in those countries, but pulled out at the last minute because it didn’t sell quite enough to justify the release. I didn’t even know that this game existed until I was doing some research on the first game for my review. And if you were a fan of the original outside of Japan, you probably wouldn’t have know that a sequel would have even came out because of the different name. Also, that cover isn’t exactly an eye catcher.
The most amusing thing about the English voice acting is that Tiger Takagi, the bad guy, is voiced by someone from the UK, in a game set entirely in Chicago, playing a member of the Yakuza, who was previously working in Hong Kong. It’s the most mismatched accent and I wouldn’t change it because of just how perfectly silly it is.
But the most obvious, and best, change to the game is that it automatically saves all of your progress the moment that you complete a mission. I still don’t know why this wasn’t a feature in the Xbox version of the first game. I didn’t expect it in the PlayStation 2 and GameCube ports because those use Memory Cards, but the original version was developed for a console with a permanent hard drive, which means you could save any time.
The driving feels much better this time around. While the cars can still feel a little too ‘bouncy’, for a lack of a better word, for my liking, it feels like it was refined from the fist one, making it feel much better. It also help that the roads are wider, allowing the cars to make wide turns without making you feel like you’re about to hit into a wall every time you make a turn around a corner. Although, there was still the odd moment when I crash and my cars still ended up bouncing around like a pinball, which is still annoying, but it didn’t happen often, and was still be amusing in it’s own way. There are still a few times where you have to drive on tighter spaces, and while it isn’t as tedious as it was in the previous entry in the series, it’s probably still the worst part of the game.
Most of the cars now have a turbo boost that lets you catch up to your objective if you’re falling behind. You can earn extra turbo boosts by destroying propery and traffic, most of which get knocked around as you’re car is the unstoppable force looking for an immovable object. It’s pretty fun watching a tiny car make a giant bus, or even a train, fly off into the distance. But when the booster bar is maxed out however, then it will be expelled out all at once and time stops briefly.
‘Second Clash’ also toned back some of the graphical effects from the original Xbox version of the game, which is good because that version of the game, despite still being the best looking out of all the versions of the game, went wild with the bloom and particle effects. It’s still pretty good looking ang gets across the look and feel of Chicago, even if it’s not the most accurate portrayal of the city. A couple of the areas feel a little barren, but I’d still prefer that than the developers feeling the need to shove as much stuff as they can into the game. And to top it all off the game can run in 720p at 60 fps, which is pretty nice considering just how good the game looks.
Just like the first game, you’re tasked with completing a series of missions where you stop the Yakuza from causing chaos across the city, but instead of Hong Kong, it’s Chicago. Objectives can range from destroying cars, such as Yakuza members chasing someone or a group of people performing an illegal street race, or you having to get something from ‘Point A’ to ‘Point B’ without being hit too many times. It does feel varied enough that it doesn’t get too tedious or repetitive.
Missions have fare more generous time limits compared to the first game, but almost to compensate for that, each mission now has a rating, and earning a high rating on a mission can unlock extra mission in the free roam mod and extra cars. The game even came with leaderboards so you can see how well you did compared to other people. They don’t work any more, obviously, but it’s a neat feature to see in the game.
And surprisingly, the free roam mode from the PS2 and CGN versions make a return for sequel on the Xbox, which is nice to see. But instead of just being able to drive around the city having to make up your own fun or just to admire the look of the game, you can now do extra missions that are unlocked when you get a good enough rating in a Story Mission. These extra missions can include racing in a dirt race, reaching all of the checkpoints as quickly as possible, or as something simple as delivering a pizza.
Plus there are hidden car parts scattered around the city in free roam that you can find, and for every 5 car parts you collect, you unlock a car. There’s no way to choose which car that you want to unlock first, they just unlock in a specific order. You can also unlock cars by completing the story missions.
Some of these unlockable cars include various sports cars, muscle cars, a monster truck, a toy car, and even a tank that lets you fire the barrel, which is not only fun to use in the free roam mode, but cut down the time of a few missions where you have to take out Yakuza cars from roughly 2 and a 1/2 minutes to about 10 seconds.
Is Double S.T.E.A.L.: The Second Clash worth tracking down and buying? Only if you’re an avid collector of retro video games. While I did have a lot of fun with it, it would be hard to justify to someone to not only drop the money on both buying and importing the game but having to import a Japanese Xbox. There are other means to get it, but that's a whole other level of being able to play the game. I would still recommend it, even if it's to a select few who would actually go out of there way to play it.
The plot description contains slight spoilers for the first game (ENG: “Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions”, JP: “Double S.T.E.A.L.”), but they are minor.
After arresting Tiger Takagi and loosening the grip of the Yakuza on Hong Kong, the Dragons of the Hong Kong Police Force fly to America to hand off Tiget Takagi to the CIA. But not even 5 minutes after landing in Chicago, the Yakuza gang working in the USA break Tiger Takagi out of police custody, allowing Tiger Takagi to wreak chaos throughout the city of Chicago. It’s up to the Dragons to reign in Tiger Takagi and the Yakuza before it’s too late.
I don’t think there is even 5 minutes of cutscene total throughout the game. But it’s not like it matters much since the gameplay is the thing holding this game together.
I guess that the first game didn’t do too well outside of Japan, because ‘The Second Clash’ stayed in it’s home country of Japan. And on top of that, this game remained an exclusive to the original Xbox unlike the first game. And considering that the original Xbox wasn’t flying of the shelves like the PlayStation 2 and GameCube were in Japan unlike it was in the Western countries, I guess it was doomed to obscurity, even in it’s own country.
But despite the fact that it’s a game exclusive to Japan the game is entirely in English. And I don’t just mean the game has English menus and subtitles, but the whole thing is dubbed in English, which means that anyone from an English speaking country could play though this game with ease. Maybe the original game sold well enough in English speaking countries that the company developing or it publishing it thought that it could sell just as well enough in those countries, but pulled out at the last minute because it didn’t sell quite enough to justify the release. I didn’t even know that this game existed until I was doing some research on the first game for my review. And if you were a fan of the original outside of Japan, you probably wouldn’t have know that a sequel would have even came out because of the different name. Also, that cover isn’t exactly an eye catcher.
The most amusing thing about the English voice acting is that Tiger Takagi, the bad guy, is voiced by someone from the UK, in a game set entirely in Chicago, playing a member of the Yakuza, who was previously working in Hong Kong. It’s the most mismatched accent and I wouldn’t change it because of just how perfectly silly it is.
But the most obvious, and best, change to the game is that it automatically saves all of your progress the moment that you complete a mission. I still don’t know why this wasn’t a feature in the Xbox version of the first game. I didn’t expect it in the PlayStation 2 and GameCube ports because those use Memory Cards, but the original version was developed for a console with a permanent hard drive, which means you could save any time.
The driving feels much better this time around. While the cars can still feel a little too ‘bouncy’, for a lack of a better word, for my liking, it feels like it was refined from the fist one, making it feel much better. It also help that the roads are wider, allowing the cars to make wide turns without making you feel like you’re about to hit into a wall every time you make a turn around a corner. Although, there was still the odd moment when I crash and my cars still ended up bouncing around like a pinball, which is still annoying, but it didn’t happen often, and was still be amusing in it’s own way. There are still a few times where you have to drive on tighter spaces, and while it isn’t as tedious as it was in the previous entry in the series, it’s probably still the worst part of the game.
Most of the cars now have a turbo boost that lets you catch up to your objective if you’re falling behind. You can earn extra turbo boosts by destroying propery and traffic, most of which get knocked around as you’re car is the unstoppable force looking for an immovable object. It’s pretty fun watching a tiny car make a giant bus, or even a train, fly off into the distance. But when the booster bar is maxed out however, then it will be expelled out all at once and time stops briefly.
‘Second Clash’ also toned back some of the graphical effects from the original Xbox version of the game, which is good because that version of the game, despite still being the best looking out of all the versions of the game, went wild with the bloom and particle effects. It’s still pretty good looking ang gets across the look and feel of Chicago, even if it’s not the most accurate portrayal of the city. A couple of the areas feel a little barren, but I’d still prefer that than the developers feeling the need to shove as much stuff as they can into the game. And to top it all off the game can run in 720p at 60 fps, which is pretty nice considering just how good the game looks.
Just like the first game, you’re tasked with completing a series of missions where you stop the Yakuza from causing chaos across the city, but instead of Hong Kong, it’s Chicago. Objectives can range from destroying cars, such as Yakuza members chasing someone or a group of people performing an illegal street race, or you having to get something from ‘Point A’ to ‘Point B’ without being hit too many times. It does feel varied enough that it doesn’t get too tedious or repetitive.
Missions have fare more generous time limits compared to the first game, but almost to compensate for that, each mission now has a rating, and earning a high rating on a mission can unlock extra mission in the free roam mod and extra cars. The game even came with leaderboards so you can see how well you did compared to other people. They don’t work any more, obviously, but it’s a neat feature to see in the game.
And surprisingly, the free roam mode from the PS2 and CGN versions make a return for sequel on the Xbox, which is nice to see. But instead of just being able to drive around the city having to make up your own fun or just to admire the look of the game, you can now do extra missions that are unlocked when you get a good enough rating in a Story Mission. These extra missions can include racing in a dirt race, reaching all of the checkpoints as quickly as possible, or as something simple as delivering a pizza.
Plus there are hidden car parts scattered around the city in free roam that you can find, and for every 5 car parts you collect, you unlock a car. There’s no way to choose which car that you want to unlock first, they just unlock in a specific order. You can also unlock cars by completing the story missions.
Some of these unlockable cars include various sports cars, muscle cars, a monster truck, a toy car, and even a tank that lets you fire the barrel, which is not only fun to use in the free roam mode, but cut down the time of a few missions where you have to take out Yakuza cars from roughly 2 and a 1/2 minutes to about 10 seconds.
Is Double S.T.E.A.L.: The Second Clash worth tracking down and buying? Only if you’re an avid collector of retro video games. While I did have a lot of fun with it, it would be hard to justify to someone to not only drop the money on both buying and importing the game but having to import a Japanese Xbox. There are other means to get it, but that's a whole other level of being able to play the game. I would still recommend it, even if it's to a select few who would actually go out of there way to play it.
2015
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.
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.
2006
This review contains spoilers
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/mod-corner-poke646-vendetta-half-life-2006-review/
WARNING: This review contains mild spoilers for Poke646, please play the first mod first.
NOTE: This is a review of the Anniversary Edition of this mod.
After the unanimous praise the first Poke464 mod from magazines, websites, and players, the creators decided to return 5 years later to develop and release a sequel. Poke646: Vendetta puts you once again in the shoes of Damien Reeves, now driven by revenge for all of the suffering he had to go through in the original mod and goes after the people who put him in this situation.
This time around, instead of getting messages from Dr. Fuller or reading notes, this time around you’ll be getting all of your information from laptops laying around each area from the Poke646 team members. This way makes it easier to know where to collect 4-digit codes, goals, and plot points from. I guess enough people complained about the first mods that it was changed with this one.
Graphically, this mod is a step up over the last mod. It really seems to push what the engine was capable of at the time. While it’s great to see that the team behind the last mod managed to learn a couple of things, not only is Vendetta shorter than the first mod, it reuses several models and even the odd location from the first mod. It does do enough with these reused locations that it doesn’t bring the mod down in anyway and they’re incredibly brief. Two levels from another well known Valve IP also makes a brief cameo.
Most of the signature weapons return, such as the Pipe, the Pipebomb, the CW-LW Bow Rifle, and the Double Barreled Shotgun. Unfortunately, the two nailguns down return, but instead we get a brand new gun, the PAR-21 Assult Rifle. It’s pretty much the standard Assault Rifle you see in every game, with a high rate of fire and secondary fire that shoots grenades. Yeah, it looks nice, but it doesn’t quite have the personality of a makeshift nailgun weapon does.
Poke646: Vendetta is a step up over the first mod in a lot of ways and is a worthy sequel, even if it’s only half the length of the first one, and just like the first one, this also got an “Anniversary Edition” update to run on the modern version of Half-Life. If you liked the first mod, this is definitely worth checking out.
WARNING: This review contains mild spoilers for Poke646, please play the first mod first.
NOTE: This is a review of the Anniversary Edition of this mod.
After the unanimous praise the first Poke464 mod from magazines, websites, and players, the creators decided to return 5 years later to develop and release a sequel. Poke646: Vendetta puts you once again in the shoes of Damien Reeves, now driven by revenge for all of the suffering he had to go through in the original mod and goes after the people who put him in this situation.
This time around, instead of getting messages from Dr. Fuller or reading notes, this time around you’ll be getting all of your information from laptops laying around each area from the Poke646 team members. This way makes it easier to know where to collect 4-digit codes, goals, and plot points from. I guess enough people complained about the first mods that it was changed with this one.
Graphically, this mod is a step up over the last mod. It really seems to push what the engine was capable of at the time. While it’s great to see that the team behind the last mod managed to learn a couple of things, not only is Vendetta shorter than the first mod, it reuses several models and even the odd location from the first mod. It does do enough with these reused locations that it doesn’t bring the mod down in anyway and they’re incredibly brief. Two levels from another well known Valve IP also makes a brief cameo.
Most of the signature weapons return, such as the Pipe, the Pipebomb, the CW-LW Bow Rifle, and the Double Barreled Shotgun. Unfortunately, the two nailguns down return, but instead we get a brand new gun, the PAR-21 Assult Rifle. It’s pretty much the standard Assault Rifle you see in every game, with a high rate of fire and secondary fire that shoots grenades. Yeah, it looks nice, but it doesn’t quite have the personality of a makeshift nailgun weapon does.
Poke646: Vendetta is a step up over the first mod in a lot of ways and is a worthy sequel, even if it’s only half the length of the first one, and just like the first one, this also got an “Anniversary Edition” update to run on the modern version of Half-Life. If you liked the first mod, this is definitely worth checking out.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/02/15/dear-esther-landmark-edition-pc-os-x-linux-ps4-xbone-review/
The phrase “Walking Simulator” gets thrown around a lot when talking about games such as Dear Esther in a derogatory manor since these games have very little in the way of “gameplay”. I do think that stuff consisting of exploring an environment while the plot happens in an unconventional manner does have a place, regardless of popularity, which was originally an unpopular opinion, but has gained a lot of appreciate over the decade or more since the release of Dear Esther.
Dear Esther was originally a first person exploration mod for Half-Life 2 in 2008 by a small group of modders called The Chinese Room. 4 years later, in 2012, the game got remade into it’s own entity on a newer version of the Source engine with significant graphical upgrades. For it’s final version, released in 2017, Dear Esther was ported to the Unity engine with a few extra bills and whistles, and is called Dear Esther: Landmark Edition.
The game is told through narration as the player explores an uninhabited island with the narrator reading from a series of letter fragments to a woman named Esther, who is implied to be the wife of the person writing the letter.
Even though Dear Esther is incredibly linear, certain aspects of it are randomized, allowing for multiple playthroughs. The most obvious randomized part of the game is the narration, with the narrarator giving new information about what happened to the characters involved with the story from their perspective.
Other randomized parts of the game include an underwater highway and several ghosts that appear throughout the game as you make your journey across the island. Some apear off in the distance, others briefly appear in front of you, and one only appears on the beach in the reflection of the water. I’ve played the game twice just to get the general idea of how these segments work.
Although if you’ve played the game once, you’ve pretty much got the gist of the game and have already seen 90% of it. Although I’m pretty sure that most of the audience buying this game know immediately wether or not they like it from the trailer, images, and plot synopsis, so it’s not like most people are goign to wander into this game knowing nothing about it.
The Landmark Edition even comes with developer commentary, explaining the process from when it was first conceived and made a mod to becoming a game. Even if you’re not at all into the type of experience that Dear Esther is, the developer commentary might be a highlight for aspiring developers who want to get into game development or at least want to try something different from what they’ve previously made.
Despite the whole game being drab and grey as well as being set on a depressing and baron island, it is quite beautiful to look at and listen to. The soundtrack is haunting, adding onto the feeling of lonliness that was already there from having to wander such a lonely place. Ironically, what it intends to do it does with flying colors. It’s just that it does little outside of what it presents and could have easily been a bunch of randomized video and audio playing for 30 minutes, and that’s going to be the determining factor for a lot of people.
Dear Esther isn’t pretending to be anything else other than what it clearly is, which is a short experimental narrative game trying to invoke a very specific emotion and atmosphere. It could have easily been a more engaging experience, with more for the player to do. Not necessarily with puzzles, but definately with something else, but that would have gone against what the game is. And I can’t get annoyed at what the game isn’t trying to be.
The game is a love it or hate it experience. If you have no interest in it, I doubt anything will convince you to try it out. And if you’re not interested in it, you’ve probably already played it for yourself and like discussing it’s ideas, or have at least put it in your wishlist for when a sale inevitably comes along. But after playing it, I didn’t find any real depth beyond filling it a few cracks with a story that was already pretty obvious with where it was going.
The phrase “Walking Simulator” gets thrown around a lot when talking about games such as Dear Esther in a derogatory manor since these games have very little in the way of “gameplay”. I do think that stuff consisting of exploring an environment while the plot happens in an unconventional manner does have a place, regardless of popularity, which was originally an unpopular opinion, but has gained a lot of appreciate over the decade or more since the release of Dear Esther.
Dear Esther was originally a first person exploration mod for Half-Life 2 in 2008 by a small group of modders called The Chinese Room. 4 years later, in 2012, the game got remade into it’s own entity on a newer version of the Source engine with significant graphical upgrades. For it’s final version, released in 2017, Dear Esther was ported to the Unity engine with a few extra bills and whistles, and is called Dear Esther: Landmark Edition.
The game is told through narration as the player explores an uninhabited island with the narrator reading from a series of letter fragments to a woman named Esther, who is implied to be the wife of the person writing the letter.
Even though Dear Esther is incredibly linear, certain aspects of it are randomized, allowing for multiple playthroughs. The most obvious randomized part of the game is the narration, with the narrarator giving new information about what happened to the characters involved with the story from their perspective.
Other randomized parts of the game include an underwater highway and several ghosts that appear throughout the game as you make your journey across the island. Some apear off in the distance, others briefly appear in front of you, and one only appears on the beach in the reflection of the water. I’ve played the game twice just to get the general idea of how these segments work.
Although if you’ve played the game once, you’ve pretty much got the gist of the game and have already seen 90% of it. Although I’m pretty sure that most of the audience buying this game know immediately wether or not they like it from the trailer, images, and plot synopsis, so it’s not like most people are goign to wander into this game knowing nothing about it.
The Landmark Edition even comes with developer commentary, explaining the process from when it was first conceived and made a mod to becoming a game. Even if you’re not at all into the type of experience that Dear Esther is, the developer commentary might be a highlight for aspiring developers who want to get into game development or at least want to try something different from what they’ve previously made.
Despite the whole game being drab and grey as well as being set on a depressing and baron island, it is quite beautiful to look at and listen to. The soundtrack is haunting, adding onto the feeling of lonliness that was already there from having to wander such a lonely place. Ironically, what it intends to do it does with flying colors. It’s just that it does little outside of what it presents and could have easily been a bunch of randomized video and audio playing for 30 minutes, and that’s going to be the determining factor for a lot of people.
Dear Esther isn’t pretending to be anything else other than what it clearly is, which is a short experimental narrative game trying to invoke a very specific emotion and atmosphere. It could have easily been a more engaging experience, with more for the player to do. Not necessarily with puzzles, but definately with something else, but that would have gone against what the game is. And I can’t get annoyed at what the game isn’t trying to be.
The game is a love it or hate it experience. If you have no interest in it, I doubt anything will convince you to try it out. And if you’re not interested in it, you’ve probably already played it for yourself and like discussing it’s ideas, or have at least put it in your wishlist for when a sale inevitably comes along. But after playing it, I didn’t find any real depth beyond filling it a few cracks with a story that was already pretty obvious with where it was going.
2017
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2020/05/24/echo-2017-ps4-pc-review/
ECHO was developed and published by the Danish indie studio Ultra Ultra, and was released on the 19th of December of 2017. Unfortunately, the game was not a financial success, and ended up being the only game released by Ultra Ultra before they shut down.
After spending a century in stasis, En arrives at her destination call “The Palace”, an enormous technological construct the size of a planet that bears a resemblance to the Palace of Versailles. En is a designer baby called a “Resourceful” that was freed from her Bread and Circuses life by a man named Foster. Foster was heavily injured during the rescue, and En was forced to “translate” him into a small, red cube. In an attempt to pay him back, En plans to traverse “The Palace” to find a way to restore him to his original body.
Soon after entering “The Palace” and turning it on, En finds that “The Palace” is seemingly alive and filled with numerous clones of her, all attempting to kill her, that she gives the title of “Echoes” And this is where the gameplay loop of Echo comes in.
Because of the power that “The Palace” takes in having the “Echoes” AI learn from your movement, “The Palace” runs on five-minute cycles in which every 5 minutes, “The Palace” shuts down and then reboots. Whatever moves you make during these 5 minutes, the AI will have learned to use, and then apply after the reboot. Thankfully, they only learn the moves you used in the last cycle, and it’s not a cumulative learned experience, which means if you did something last cycle, but didn’t use it in the current cycle, the “Echoes” won’t use it the next cycle.
In between cycles, the is a blackout where “The Palace” is teaching the “Echoes” what you did during the last cycle. During this down period, “Echoes” won’t learn from your actions, but it’s short, so you should plan your actions in advance and use your time wisely.
Graphically, the game looks great. Like I mentioned earlier, each area involving the “Echoes” resembles the Palace of Versailles, and have quite the sense of scale to them, even if the gameplay area isn’t as big as the visuals give off. Graphically, the game looks great, even if it ends up looking a bit samey by the end of it. The soundtrack is also pretty good, also does a good job of adding a haunting empty feeling to the large halls of the “The Palace”, and is quite nice in a lot of places.
The game is on the shorter side, and unfortunately, does feel a tad underwhelming by the end of it. I don’t know how much you can expand on the game without the gameplay loop getting tiring after a while, but there is a universe here and I wouldn’t minded more of it. Sadly, the development company behind this game, Ultra Ultra, shut down not too long after this game came out, so there’s not much of a chance of a sequel coming out. Here’s hoping that if there is a chance of a sequel coming ever coming out, it keeps the low-scale story of the first game.
Apparently a film adaptation is in the works too, but I don’t think it will ever see the light of day.
Unfortunately, Echo is just OK. While I can recommend it, it’s a lukewarm recommendation. If you’re eying this game, you should probably wait for a sale.
ECHO was developed and published by the Danish indie studio Ultra Ultra, and was released on the 19th of December of 2017. Unfortunately, the game was not a financial success, and ended up being the only game released by Ultra Ultra before they shut down.
After spending a century in stasis, En arrives at her destination call “The Palace”, an enormous technological construct the size of a planet that bears a resemblance to the Palace of Versailles. En is a designer baby called a “Resourceful” that was freed from her Bread and Circuses life by a man named Foster. Foster was heavily injured during the rescue, and En was forced to “translate” him into a small, red cube. In an attempt to pay him back, En plans to traverse “The Palace” to find a way to restore him to his original body.
Soon after entering “The Palace” and turning it on, En finds that “The Palace” is seemingly alive and filled with numerous clones of her, all attempting to kill her, that she gives the title of “Echoes” And this is where the gameplay loop of Echo comes in.
Because of the power that “The Palace” takes in having the “Echoes” AI learn from your movement, “The Palace” runs on five-minute cycles in which every 5 minutes, “The Palace” shuts down and then reboots. Whatever moves you make during these 5 minutes, the AI will have learned to use, and then apply after the reboot. Thankfully, they only learn the moves you used in the last cycle, and it’s not a cumulative learned experience, which means if you did something last cycle, but didn’t use it in the current cycle, the “Echoes” won’t use it the next cycle.
In between cycles, the is a blackout where “The Palace” is teaching the “Echoes” what you did during the last cycle. During this down period, “Echoes” won’t learn from your actions, but it’s short, so you should plan your actions in advance and use your time wisely.
Graphically, the game looks great. Like I mentioned earlier, each area involving the “Echoes” resembles the Palace of Versailles, and have quite the sense of scale to them, even if the gameplay area isn’t as big as the visuals give off. Graphically, the game looks great, even if it ends up looking a bit samey by the end of it. The soundtrack is also pretty good, also does a good job of adding a haunting empty feeling to the large halls of the “The Palace”, and is quite nice in a lot of places.
The game is on the shorter side, and unfortunately, does feel a tad underwhelming by the end of it. I don’t know how much you can expand on the game without the gameplay loop getting tiring after a while, but there is a universe here and I wouldn’t minded more of it. Sadly, the development company behind this game, Ultra Ultra, shut down not too long after this game came out, so there’s not much of a chance of a sequel coming out. Here’s hoping that if there is a chance of a sequel coming ever coming out, it keeps the low-scale story of the first game.
Apparently a film adaptation is in the works too, but I don’t think it will ever see the light of day.
Unfortunately, Echo is just OK. While I can recommend it, it’s a lukewarm recommendation. If you’re eying this game, you should probably wait for a sale.
2007
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/10/10/mod-corner-paranoia-half-life-2007-review/
When you have a dedicated fan base that are willing to spend a lot of time making and playing mods for your game, eventually a lot of these mods will eventually push the limits of your game and it’s engine. One of the mods that pushed what the Half-Life modding tools were capable of was Paranoia.
You play the role of a Russian officer of the Secret Service. You are called out on a mission, and your first impressions are that it will just be like any other. But you find yourself facing the dark secret side of military experiments that want to bring the dead back to life. It’s pretty much a horror B-movie, and it does a pretty decent job at being one.
Like a lot of Half-Life mods, Paranoia takes a note from it, and the first ~20-30 minutes of Paranoia is going around a Russian military base, teaching you how the game works and showing people going about their lives before shit hits the fan.
It’s here where you can see how Paranoia really pushes the GoldSRC engine for the time it was released, with all of it’s locations looking incredibly accurate to it’s real world counterpart. The team behind this mod took a ton of references from real world Russian architecture and environments, and it really shows how much work the mod team put into the small details. Every location feels run down, grimy, and gloomy.
The game even adds in a few new shiny visual effects that the GoldSRC engine didn’t have, such as bump mapping and gloss on top if it’s detailed textures as well as better lighting effects, which makes the flashlight more useful than Half-Life’s, really highlighting the incredibly run down and sometimes claustrophibic levels. The team behind this mod, appropriately named Paranoia Team, spent 3 years developing this mod, and it clearly shows.
It does show it’s age a little bit in that a few things have a lower polygon count than more recent games. Especially with other characters faces, which use real peoples faces as the in game faces.
Going into combat does have some strategic elements to it. Your character has a Ballistics Helmet that you can use to protect yourself from getting more easily killed. The down side is that it’s harder to see and you can’t view down the scope on certain weapons. There is also the Gas Mask, but is used twice in the entire mod, and one of those times is to teach you how to use it.
Maybe the developers intended to have it be used more, but didn’t have the time or man power to have more areas use it, so they left it in just to have another bullet point to show off. All of the weapons all look great and sound really satisfying to use. There is also the ability to use iron sights, which was getting popular in games at the time. Hand-to-hand combat isn’t exactly a viable option since enemies could easily kill you if you get too close to them. Although, when you kill your enemies, you can loot ammo and other stuff off of their bodies. This is how you’d get most of your ammo.
Aside from picking up medkits throughout the game that immediately give you health, you pick up Painkillers too, which are an item in your inventory you can activated at any time. On the easiest difficulty there are so many of them that I maxed out the amount i could carry and never ran out of them, but I’m pretty sure on higher difficulties they’re a lot rarer.
The AI enemies and companions are actually a lot better than the ones in Half-Life. Friendly companion AI can actually hold it’s own fairly well. You do get a game over when one of them dies, so you’ll have to take care of them to some extent, but it never feels like you’re babysitting them. The only problem I have with them is waiting for them to get in position, and I was never quite sure if I was the one who was supposed to open a door or they were until one of them moved their way in front of a door. On harder difficulties, the enemy AI is a bit hard for my liking, but I never had any problems with it.
Surprisingly, this mod’s soundtrack was done by a Russian metal band called “Slot” along with their own original music. I’ve never heard of them before, probably because they’re a Russian band, but from what I’ve heard looking them up, they seem to be pretty good. The games mix of dark ambient music for slower atmospheric moments and higher energy tracks when the action gets started really add to the tone that the mod was going for.
Paranoia eventually got a version called “Paranoia: The Game Version”, which runs on something called Xash3D, a reverse engineered version of the GoldSRC engine. This was done so that the people behind this mod didn’t have to continually have to update the mod every time Valve updated Half-Life. Plus it gives the added bonus of not needing Half-Life installed.
Probably the most interesting thing about this mod is that it got a port to the Dreamcast using the leaked unreleased port of Half-Life. I didn’t have the chance to test this myself since I don’t have a Dreamcast, but from the videos I’ve seen, it seems to work pretty well.
Should you play Paranoia? Hell yes. It’s one of the best mods for Half-Life out there, and it even has some of that loveable jank that Russia games tend to have.
When you have a dedicated fan base that are willing to spend a lot of time making and playing mods for your game, eventually a lot of these mods will eventually push the limits of your game and it’s engine. One of the mods that pushed what the Half-Life modding tools were capable of was Paranoia.
You play the role of a Russian officer of the Secret Service. You are called out on a mission, and your first impressions are that it will just be like any other. But you find yourself facing the dark secret side of military experiments that want to bring the dead back to life. It’s pretty much a horror B-movie, and it does a pretty decent job at being one.
Like a lot of Half-Life mods, Paranoia takes a note from it, and the first ~20-30 minutes of Paranoia is going around a Russian military base, teaching you how the game works and showing people going about their lives before shit hits the fan.
It’s here where you can see how Paranoia really pushes the GoldSRC engine for the time it was released, with all of it’s locations looking incredibly accurate to it’s real world counterpart. The team behind this mod took a ton of references from real world Russian architecture and environments, and it really shows how much work the mod team put into the small details. Every location feels run down, grimy, and gloomy.
The game even adds in a few new shiny visual effects that the GoldSRC engine didn’t have, such as bump mapping and gloss on top if it’s detailed textures as well as better lighting effects, which makes the flashlight more useful than Half-Life’s, really highlighting the incredibly run down and sometimes claustrophibic levels. The team behind this mod, appropriately named Paranoia Team, spent 3 years developing this mod, and it clearly shows.
It does show it’s age a little bit in that a few things have a lower polygon count than more recent games. Especially with other characters faces, which use real peoples faces as the in game faces.
Going into combat does have some strategic elements to it. Your character has a Ballistics Helmet that you can use to protect yourself from getting more easily killed. The down side is that it’s harder to see and you can’t view down the scope on certain weapons. There is also the Gas Mask, but is used twice in the entire mod, and one of those times is to teach you how to use it.
Maybe the developers intended to have it be used more, but didn’t have the time or man power to have more areas use it, so they left it in just to have another bullet point to show off. All of the weapons all look great and sound really satisfying to use. There is also the ability to use iron sights, which was getting popular in games at the time. Hand-to-hand combat isn’t exactly a viable option since enemies could easily kill you if you get too close to them. Although, when you kill your enemies, you can loot ammo and other stuff off of their bodies. This is how you’d get most of your ammo.
Aside from picking up medkits throughout the game that immediately give you health, you pick up Painkillers too, which are an item in your inventory you can activated at any time. On the easiest difficulty there are so many of them that I maxed out the amount i could carry and never ran out of them, but I’m pretty sure on higher difficulties they’re a lot rarer.
The AI enemies and companions are actually a lot better than the ones in Half-Life. Friendly companion AI can actually hold it’s own fairly well. You do get a game over when one of them dies, so you’ll have to take care of them to some extent, but it never feels like you’re babysitting them. The only problem I have with them is waiting for them to get in position, and I was never quite sure if I was the one who was supposed to open a door or they were until one of them moved their way in front of a door. On harder difficulties, the enemy AI is a bit hard for my liking, but I never had any problems with it.
Surprisingly, this mod’s soundtrack was done by a Russian metal band called “Slot” along with their own original music. I’ve never heard of them before, probably because they’re a Russian band, but from what I’ve heard looking them up, they seem to be pretty good. The games mix of dark ambient music for slower atmospheric moments and higher energy tracks when the action gets started really add to the tone that the mod was going for.
Paranoia eventually got a version called “Paranoia: The Game Version”, which runs on something called Xash3D, a reverse engineered version of the GoldSRC engine. This was done so that the people behind this mod didn’t have to continually have to update the mod every time Valve updated Half-Life. Plus it gives the added bonus of not needing Half-Life installed.
Probably the most interesting thing about this mod is that it got a port to the Dreamcast using the leaked unreleased port of Half-Life. I didn’t have the chance to test this myself since I don’t have a Dreamcast, but from the videos I’ve seen, it seems to work pretty well.
Should you play Paranoia? Hell yes. It’s one of the best mods for Half-Life out there, and it even has some of that loveable jank that Russia games tend to have.