Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/01/mod-corner-kung-fu-3-0-max-payne-mini-review/
The idea for a mod for Max Payne that adds in the ability for Max to use martial arts to take down his enemies might seem absurd (and it is), but the idea for it makes more sense in context. Max Payne was influenced by two things, the high energy and explosive action scenes of John Woo films, and the bullet time from the original Matrix film, which had only come out a few years beforehand. So being able to fight through Max Payne in hand-to-hand combat just like Neo did in The Matrix makes sense considering it’s influences.
Kung Fu 3.0 (The latest version of the mod) is pretty much everything you’d expect from the title. Wall running and jumping, spinning kicks, slow-motion wire-fu for takedowns, a pole weapon for you to use in hand-to-hand combat. The mod comes with a tutorial on how to use all of it’s features, which is appropriately a Dojo, just like the training scene from the first Matrix.
A mod like this doesn’t seem like much, but it was so significant for the Max Payne modding community that it influenced and was incorporated into several other Max Payne mods, mostly Matrix themed mods, along with mods like Katana and Polar Payne. Kung Fu 3.0 is definitely worth checking out if you’re at all interested in the Max Payne modding scene and don’t mind the absurdity of seeing Max leaping around in the name of getting revenge for his family, and it adds enough variety to the gameplay Max Payne that it makes the game worth replaying if you need yet another reason to replay it.
The idea for a mod for Max Payne that adds in the ability for Max to use martial arts to take down his enemies might seem absurd (and it is), but the idea for it makes more sense in context. Max Payne was influenced by two things, the high energy and explosive action scenes of John Woo films, and the bullet time from the original Matrix film, which had only come out a few years beforehand. So being able to fight through Max Payne in hand-to-hand combat just like Neo did in The Matrix makes sense considering it’s influences.
Kung Fu 3.0 (The latest version of the mod) is pretty much everything you’d expect from the title. Wall running and jumping, spinning kicks, slow-motion wire-fu for takedowns, a pole weapon for you to use in hand-to-hand combat. The mod comes with a tutorial on how to use all of it’s features, which is appropriately a Dojo, just like the training scene from the first Matrix.
A mod like this doesn’t seem like much, but it was so significant for the Max Payne modding community that it influenced and was incorporated into several other Max Payne mods, mostly Matrix themed mods, along with mods like Katana and Polar Payne. Kung Fu 3.0 is definitely worth checking out if you’re at all interested in the Max Payne modding scene and don’t mind the absurdity of seeing Max leaping around in the name of getting revenge for his family, and it adds enough variety to the gameplay Max Payne that it makes the game worth replaying if you need yet another reason to replay it.
2008
Orignally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/12/legendary-2008-pc-360-ps3-review/
When I first bought Legendary, I bought it in a “2 for $25” deal with the Collector’s Edition of the 2008 Alone in the Dark game fairly soon after they both got released. Looking back at it, it was a pretty obvious sign as to the quality of both games. Alone in the Dark might have been the bigger disappointment, but Legendary was definitely the worse game.
Legendary is a FPS that was released in 2008 for the 360, PS3, and PC. Previously known as Legendary: The Box, the game was developed by Spark Unlimited, who had only developed a total of 5 games before they eventually shut down. While they did release the well received Call of Duty: Finest Hours, the did released a few middle of the road games, such as Lost Planet 3, Yaiba: Nina Gaiden Z, and Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, which is another game that I want to get to.
You play as Charles Deckard, a professional thief hired by a name called Orlando LaFey to steal an artifact from a New York museum, which turns out to be the real Pandora’s Box. Deckard opens the box with a key given to him, and after putting his hand into a clearly marked part of the box for seemingly no reason, he unwittingly opens to box and unleashes numerous mythological creatures into the world. In doing so, Deckard inherits a strange power in his left hand known as the Signet.
The initial premise for Legendary is a pretty solid one. Having to fight of mythological creatures from destroying the world with modern weapons and technology on an epic scale is a great concept, and could have lead to encounters on a large scale. But unfortunately, Legendary did not have the budget to make something on that scale.
Right from the outset the games low budget is pretty obvious. The graphics are a mixed bag at best. There are a few times where the game has a good sense of scale. Right at the beginning, the game shows what potential had. After unleashing chaos unto the world, you go from the museum to the streets of New York, and you see Griffons flying through the air, attacking people on the street, and flinging cars around. After walking through the city going to hell, you see a giant skyscraper sized golem form out of the debris of the surrounding destroyed buildings before it makes its way through New York.
Not too long after this, the game’s budget clearly rears it’s head. You’ll find yourself spending a good portion of the game going through hallways and absolutely tiny arenas to fight enemies. There are moments scattered throughout the game where something impressive in terms of scale happens or there will be something off in the distance that’s nice to look at, but the games load was clearly blown in the first 15 minutes. Plus the entire game has that brownish muddy look that a lot of lower budgeted Unreal Engine 3 games have, so most of the game is unappealing to look at.
Pretty much all of the weapons are cliched FPS weapons. Handguns, assault rifles/sub-machine guns, shotguns, throwable explosives including Molotov Cocktails and Grenades, a rocket launcher to take out larger enemies quickly, a flamethrower that I never used, and a fire axe as a melee weapon.
The most interesting weapon is the Signet, which is the mark permanently put into your hand when you accidentally opened Pandora’s Box. To use the Signet you pick up energy from the creatures that you kill called Animus, which goes into a reserve. At any point you can either shoot out a small blast of energy that can either kill smaller enemies such as the Blood Spiders or knock over larger enemies allowing you momentarily stun them. The Animus can also be used to restore your health.
On the other hand enemies have enough variation to them both to make them visually distinct from each other but gameplay wise to not just make them versions of each other when you get into the second half of the game. Werewolves are probably the most fun, and they’re the most generic of enemies. Werewolves can feign death, so the properly way to kill them is to shoot their heads off.
Firedrakes are heavily armored lizards that shoot fire. They infinitely spawn out of fire pits that you have to put out with a large amount of water through broken pipes or sprinklers by turning on a nearby valve. Nani, which are pixie looking creatures that fly around and switch between intangible and tangible, attacking you only while they’re tangible. They don’t do much damage, but they’re always in groups and attack together.
Probably the most annoying enemy are the Tsuchichmo’s Children, nicknamed “Blood Spiders.”, that are bright red from all the blood that they’ve consumed. They’re easy to see, but they infinitely spawn out of giant organic sacks and they swarm you. Unlike the Nani, they more frustrating because they’re harder to aim at and kill.
There is one enemy that appears very briefly, called the Echidna. Literally the only time you encounter it is when you’re going through the sewers under New York when you get attacked by giant tentacles. For half a second I thought they might have been the Kraken before it got big, but after doing some reading, it’s a completely different enemy.
And the two boss battles include the Golem and the Kraken. While they’re impressive with the scale of just how big they are, but are a mixed bag. Taking the Golem down requires powering up several EMP machines that blast it with a large amount of energy, and the Kraken is a “hit the enemies weak spot for massive damage” enemy where you have to shoot rockets into it’s mouth.
While most of Legendary was barely passable to begin with, and while it had some mildly interesting things such as the enemies being from mythology and the mix of mythology and modern military, there are several things that drag it from being close mediocre to being terrible. The checkpoint system is poorly thought out. There are stretches of game you can go without hitting a checkpoint, and if you die, you end up going back several minutes. It’s frustrating if you’re playing the game for longer stretches of time.
The controls on the PC aren’t changeable if you’re using a keyboard and mouse. The Xbox 360 controller has several control schemes to choose from, but that’s about it. You have to go into the games files and start modifying stuff to get the controls you want. Half the time I initially kept hitting the CTRL key meaning to crouch but kept bringing up the PDA instead.
Speaking of the PDA, the game has collectables in the form of PDA’s that you pick up throughout the game by going slightly out of the way. Pretty much any information on the creatures you’re fighting is in these PDAs. Surprisingly, as the game goes on the main character has the time to put down his thoughts down in the PDA despite being in the middle of combat and encountering the most horrifying of creatures.
If for some reason, you want to pick this game up, watch out for the PC version. Right before the final boss fight, you’re supposed to take an elevator up to the top of a building. But because the PC version is running at a higher framerate than both the console versions, you fall out of the elevator and the world. The only way to solve this is to go into one of the files and modify a couple of things. So unless you’re willing to fiddle around in the files for half an hour just to play the last 30 minutes of game, don’t buy this version.
Legendary is a frustratingly annoying game that tries to capitalize on it’s premise, but once you get past that it doesn’t have anything going for it. If you want to buy this and add it to your collection of terrible video games, go for the 360 or PS3 versions, since the PC version is absolutely broken. For everyone else, avoid at all cost.
When I first bought Legendary, I bought it in a “2 for $25” deal with the Collector’s Edition of the 2008 Alone in the Dark game fairly soon after they both got released. Looking back at it, it was a pretty obvious sign as to the quality of both games. Alone in the Dark might have been the bigger disappointment, but Legendary was definitely the worse game.
Legendary is a FPS that was released in 2008 for the 360, PS3, and PC. Previously known as Legendary: The Box, the game was developed by Spark Unlimited, who had only developed a total of 5 games before they eventually shut down. While they did release the well received Call of Duty: Finest Hours, the did released a few middle of the road games, such as Lost Planet 3, Yaiba: Nina Gaiden Z, and Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, which is another game that I want to get to.
You play as Charles Deckard, a professional thief hired by a name called Orlando LaFey to steal an artifact from a New York museum, which turns out to be the real Pandora’s Box. Deckard opens the box with a key given to him, and after putting his hand into a clearly marked part of the box for seemingly no reason, he unwittingly opens to box and unleashes numerous mythological creatures into the world. In doing so, Deckard inherits a strange power in his left hand known as the Signet.
The initial premise for Legendary is a pretty solid one. Having to fight of mythological creatures from destroying the world with modern weapons and technology on an epic scale is a great concept, and could have lead to encounters on a large scale. But unfortunately, Legendary did not have the budget to make something on that scale.
Right from the outset the games low budget is pretty obvious. The graphics are a mixed bag at best. There are a few times where the game has a good sense of scale. Right at the beginning, the game shows what potential had. After unleashing chaos unto the world, you go from the museum to the streets of New York, and you see Griffons flying through the air, attacking people on the street, and flinging cars around. After walking through the city going to hell, you see a giant skyscraper sized golem form out of the debris of the surrounding destroyed buildings before it makes its way through New York.
Not too long after this, the game’s budget clearly rears it’s head. You’ll find yourself spending a good portion of the game going through hallways and absolutely tiny arenas to fight enemies. There are moments scattered throughout the game where something impressive in terms of scale happens or there will be something off in the distance that’s nice to look at, but the games load was clearly blown in the first 15 minutes. Plus the entire game has that brownish muddy look that a lot of lower budgeted Unreal Engine 3 games have, so most of the game is unappealing to look at.
Pretty much all of the weapons are cliched FPS weapons. Handguns, assault rifles/sub-machine guns, shotguns, throwable explosives including Molotov Cocktails and Grenades, a rocket launcher to take out larger enemies quickly, a flamethrower that I never used, and a fire axe as a melee weapon.
The most interesting weapon is the Signet, which is the mark permanently put into your hand when you accidentally opened Pandora’s Box. To use the Signet you pick up energy from the creatures that you kill called Animus, which goes into a reserve. At any point you can either shoot out a small blast of energy that can either kill smaller enemies such as the Blood Spiders or knock over larger enemies allowing you momentarily stun them. The Animus can also be used to restore your health.
On the other hand enemies have enough variation to them both to make them visually distinct from each other but gameplay wise to not just make them versions of each other when you get into the second half of the game. Werewolves are probably the most fun, and they’re the most generic of enemies. Werewolves can feign death, so the properly way to kill them is to shoot their heads off.
Firedrakes are heavily armored lizards that shoot fire. They infinitely spawn out of fire pits that you have to put out with a large amount of water through broken pipes or sprinklers by turning on a nearby valve. Nani, which are pixie looking creatures that fly around and switch between intangible and tangible, attacking you only while they’re tangible. They don’t do much damage, but they’re always in groups and attack together.
Probably the most annoying enemy are the Tsuchichmo’s Children, nicknamed “Blood Spiders.”, that are bright red from all the blood that they’ve consumed. They’re easy to see, but they infinitely spawn out of giant organic sacks and they swarm you. Unlike the Nani, they more frustrating because they’re harder to aim at and kill.
There is one enemy that appears very briefly, called the Echidna. Literally the only time you encounter it is when you’re going through the sewers under New York when you get attacked by giant tentacles. For half a second I thought they might have been the Kraken before it got big, but after doing some reading, it’s a completely different enemy.
And the two boss battles include the Golem and the Kraken. While they’re impressive with the scale of just how big they are, but are a mixed bag. Taking the Golem down requires powering up several EMP machines that blast it with a large amount of energy, and the Kraken is a “hit the enemies weak spot for massive damage” enemy where you have to shoot rockets into it’s mouth.
While most of Legendary was barely passable to begin with, and while it had some mildly interesting things such as the enemies being from mythology and the mix of mythology and modern military, there are several things that drag it from being close mediocre to being terrible. The checkpoint system is poorly thought out. There are stretches of game you can go without hitting a checkpoint, and if you die, you end up going back several minutes. It’s frustrating if you’re playing the game for longer stretches of time.
The controls on the PC aren’t changeable if you’re using a keyboard and mouse. The Xbox 360 controller has several control schemes to choose from, but that’s about it. You have to go into the games files and start modifying stuff to get the controls you want. Half the time I initially kept hitting the CTRL key meaning to crouch but kept bringing up the PDA instead.
Speaking of the PDA, the game has collectables in the form of PDA’s that you pick up throughout the game by going slightly out of the way. Pretty much any information on the creatures you’re fighting is in these PDAs. Surprisingly, as the game goes on the main character has the time to put down his thoughts down in the PDA despite being in the middle of combat and encountering the most horrifying of creatures.
If for some reason, you want to pick this game up, watch out for the PC version. Right before the final boss fight, you’re supposed to take an elevator up to the top of a building. But because the PC version is running at a higher framerate than both the console versions, you fall out of the elevator and the world. The only way to solve this is to go into one of the files and modify a couple of things. So unless you’re willing to fiddle around in the files for half an hour just to play the last 30 minutes of game, don’t buy this version.
Legendary is a frustratingly annoying game that tries to capitalize on it’s premise, but once you get past that it doesn’t have anything going for it. If you want to buy this and add it to your collection of terrible video games, go for the 360 or PS3 versions, since the PC version is absolutely broken. For everyone else, avoid at all cost.
2002
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/01/06/antz-extreme-racing-2002-ps2-xbox-pc-review/
Someone out there thought it was a good idea to release an Antz game in 2002, a whopping 4 years after the movie came out.
If it isn’t obvious from the title and box art, Antz Extreme Racing is a kart racing game based on the film Antz. Original idea, I know. Now you might be asking yourself, “Why are you reviewing a shitty 18 year old video game based on a movie that people only talk about when someone goes ‘Hey, do you remember Antz?'” I have a lot of free time, and very little in the way of dignity.
And to make matters worse, it doesn’t even take advantage of the large time span between the films theatrical release and the game’s release date by having a more polished game. If this was rushed out to come out as the same time as the theatrical or even VHS release for the film, the game being a kart racer would make a lot more sense, or at least a more more excusable as to how and why it ended up the way it did, but somehow this game ended up on the XBOX and PS2, 4 years and a whole console generation later.
It’s not the worst looking game that I’ve seen on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox and the characters do look like their movie counterparts, despite their faces having the exact same facial expression the whole game. Plus it carries of the art style of the movie well enough. But that feels like I’m reaching for compliments when I’m talking about the graphics, which I am.
I’m going to make a comparison to another obvious cash grab, “Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding”, to make a point. That game is literally just the gameplay from Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 but with a Disney and Pixar coat of paint to promote the movies that were big at the time. But the team that developed the game clearly knew that they were making a game that was just a promotional tool, so they jumped on the back on the gameplay of another game to do the heavy work for them, and it ended up being a competent game despite the fact that it was obviously an advertisement. Antz Extreme Racing doesn’t even do that and ends up being a lazily put together cash grab that’s somehow late to promoting it’s own film.
Antz Extreme racing doesn’t even have voice clips from the movie for it’s characters. Not even sound-alikes, something which even Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding did. When you’re getting one-upped by Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding, it’s time to call it quits.
And unlike the game that it’s trying to ape off of, Mario Kart, Antz didn’t exactly have a lot of characters to pick from, and it’s pretty obvious from the fact that the game has 6 total characters to pick from, with 4 of them being unlockables. And what’s annoying is that the game doesn’t even have the two wasp characters from the movie, which could have added some more variety and visual flair, and at least would have padded out the roster to an acceptable amount, despite the fact that one of them is even on the cover of the game. As a result, the game is filled with samey looking characters. And to bring up Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding again, that game has characters with a variety of visually different looking characters, even the ones from the same movie. I would have even loved to see someone like Barbados as an unlockable character.
And to top it all off, the driving is pretty bad. The one thing that had to be good, and it ended up being awful. Everything feels so slippery. It’s unnecessarily difficult to turn corners. And if you collide with something, it can accidentally turn you around, and the slippery controls make it hard to get back in the right direction. Half the time I had to restart a race because I got so turned around. To compound the problem, some of the tracks have incredibly tight turns, meaning that you’re either going to find yourself driving off the track or hitting a wall and finding yourself a few positions behind where you were.
And yes, I know it’s the game and not me because even the AI has trouble with the driving at times. I know this is a game aimed at kids, and they don’t have high expectations, but I feel like something as simple as a kart racer shouldn’t have controls this bad.
The game at least tries to have some variety in it’s gameplay by having multiple different types of races. But for some reason, the game changes the controls depending of the type of race you pick. The first type of race is using the standard kart vehicle. The second type of race has you running on foot. The final type of race, which is a time trial where you have to make it through flag gates without missing them five times, with every time you miss them, the game adds time to your total time at the end of the race.
But for some reason, the developers thought it was a good idea to completely switch up the controls depending on the race. If you’re driving a vehicle, you use the right trigger to accelerate, but if you’re running on foot, or “snowboarding”, you have to use up on the D-Pad to accelerate. I have absolutely no idea why the developers decided to do this. Why not just make the controls the same across the board. It’s not like each race is so drastically different from each other that it needed to be changed.
Which is annoying, because there are some neat course designs, such as a course where a giant kid is stomping around and you having to avoid his feet. If I didn’t have to worry about constantly crashing due to the slippery controls, I could have enjoyed this game at least to some degree, even if only for it being a Mario Kart knockoff.
Each racer has their own career, which is being generous to call it a career. While there is a lot of overlap with the tracks in between the racers, but the tracks usually try to have something different going on, such as different weather like sunshine or fog, or reverse it. While it does it’s best to try and break up the monotony, it all still feels very samey. Even the racers cars show some level of creativity, such as either a kart being made out of rubbish left on the ground by people or is a bug that they ride.
However, the game’s final race is the the exact same with every single racer, where you race another one of the racers up a mound in the middle of the ant hill. This final track even has platforming, which is made doubly worse with the fact that you’re constantly doing tight turns, on top of the slippery driving. Surprisingly, it’s one of the easier races, and I always beat it on the second or third try at most.
And just like every other Mario Kart clone, there are several power ups that you can collect during a race. There are the usual power-ups where you can leave something on the track for a racer to accidentally hit, or something to fire at another racer. The worst power-up is the speed power-up, which is just completely useless. Not because it doesn’t give you a decent boost, but because just how poorly the driving is. By the time you could have used it, you’ve probably accidentally picked up another power-up that’s more useful.
The game does come with some unlockables, all of which are located under the “Secrets” menu.
The best one is “Infinite Missiles”. Which at least makes the races slightly more fun, but just barely. Another one is “Time Change”, which just turns the current track that you’re playing from day to night. I don't know why this isn't just an option when picking tracks outside of the "campaign".
There’s also “Wobble Cam”, which turns the camera 360 degrees in the direction that you’re turning, “Freaky Vision”, which just makes the screen blurrier, and “Speedy Play”, which makes the race faster, making it more difficult to turn. All three make the game more unplayable. But hey, it's neat that they're here.
And finally, there is “Select-a-car”. This one has to be the most confusingly implemented extra. Instead of bringing up a menu where you can select a car like any other racer with cars that you can unlock during the Career Mode, you have to unlock the “Select-a-car” mode. And instead of letting you pick a car like any other racer, when you pick one of the races in the Single Player mode, you have to hit up or down on the D-Pad to select the vehicle race order, which instead of just changing the car, you get switched to whichever place the other racer was.
This is so poorly implemented that I had no idea what I was doing the first time I tried it.
Surprisingly, the game came out on the PC, PlayStation 2, and XBOX, but not the Gamecube. Maybe the developers knew that it couldn’t compete with the Mario Kart franchise, so they didn’t even try. But it still came out on the same consoles that several Crash Team Racing games came out on, so there were still better kart games that came out on those platforms. But it still got a Gameboy Advance port, and that version was alright, so there’s that.
Hilariously, the game can be played in four-player split-screen multiplayer. I want to know what kid tried to convince their friends to play Antz Extreme Racing over literally any other racing or party game. There has to be that one kid, right?
Antz Extreme Racing might not be the worst licensed video game, as low as that bar is, but that doesn’t stop it from being yet another bad licensed video game in the every growing pile of bad licenced video games. This wasn’t even the best licensed kart game at the time, with Mickey’s Speedway USA being released on the Nintendo 64 the year before, and Shrek: Swamp Kart Speedway coming out the same year on the Gameboy Advance. Even the GBA got a version of this game which was at least a step up over this game.
Imagine being third place to a Mickey Mouse and Shrek.
If there’s a moral to this review, it’s don’t waste your time playing awful video games that no one has heard of. You only have so much time to live, go out and do something with your life.
Someone out there thought it was a good idea to release an Antz game in 2002, a whopping 4 years after the movie came out.
If it isn’t obvious from the title and box art, Antz Extreme Racing is a kart racing game based on the film Antz. Original idea, I know. Now you might be asking yourself, “Why are you reviewing a shitty 18 year old video game based on a movie that people only talk about when someone goes ‘Hey, do you remember Antz?'” I have a lot of free time, and very little in the way of dignity.
And to make matters worse, it doesn’t even take advantage of the large time span between the films theatrical release and the game’s release date by having a more polished game. If this was rushed out to come out as the same time as the theatrical or even VHS release for the film, the game being a kart racer would make a lot more sense, or at least a more more excusable as to how and why it ended up the way it did, but somehow this game ended up on the XBOX and PS2, 4 years and a whole console generation later.
It’s not the worst looking game that I’ve seen on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox and the characters do look like their movie counterparts, despite their faces having the exact same facial expression the whole game. Plus it carries of the art style of the movie well enough. But that feels like I’m reaching for compliments when I’m talking about the graphics, which I am.
I’m going to make a comparison to another obvious cash grab, “Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding”, to make a point. That game is literally just the gameplay from Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 but with a Disney and Pixar coat of paint to promote the movies that were big at the time. But the team that developed the game clearly knew that they were making a game that was just a promotional tool, so they jumped on the back on the gameplay of another game to do the heavy work for them, and it ended up being a competent game despite the fact that it was obviously an advertisement. Antz Extreme Racing doesn’t even do that and ends up being a lazily put together cash grab that’s somehow late to promoting it’s own film.
Antz Extreme racing doesn’t even have voice clips from the movie for it’s characters. Not even sound-alikes, something which even Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding did. When you’re getting one-upped by Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding, it’s time to call it quits.
And unlike the game that it’s trying to ape off of, Mario Kart, Antz didn’t exactly have a lot of characters to pick from, and it’s pretty obvious from the fact that the game has 6 total characters to pick from, with 4 of them being unlockables. And what’s annoying is that the game doesn’t even have the two wasp characters from the movie, which could have added some more variety and visual flair, and at least would have padded out the roster to an acceptable amount, despite the fact that one of them is even on the cover of the game. As a result, the game is filled with samey looking characters. And to bring up Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding again, that game has characters with a variety of visually different looking characters, even the ones from the same movie. I would have even loved to see someone like Barbados as an unlockable character.
And to top it all off, the driving is pretty bad. The one thing that had to be good, and it ended up being awful. Everything feels so slippery. It’s unnecessarily difficult to turn corners. And if you collide with something, it can accidentally turn you around, and the slippery controls make it hard to get back in the right direction. Half the time I had to restart a race because I got so turned around. To compound the problem, some of the tracks have incredibly tight turns, meaning that you’re either going to find yourself driving off the track or hitting a wall and finding yourself a few positions behind where you were.
And yes, I know it’s the game and not me because even the AI has trouble with the driving at times. I know this is a game aimed at kids, and they don’t have high expectations, but I feel like something as simple as a kart racer shouldn’t have controls this bad.
The game at least tries to have some variety in it’s gameplay by having multiple different types of races. But for some reason, the game changes the controls depending of the type of race you pick. The first type of race is using the standard kart vehicle. The second type of race has you running on foot. The final type of race, which is a time trial where you have to make it through flag gates without missing them five times, with every time you miss them, the game adds time to your total time at the end of the race.
But for some reason, the developers thought it was a good idea to completely switch up the controls depending on the race. If you’re driving a vehicle, you use the right trigger to accelerate, but if you’re running on foot, or “snowboarding”, you have to use up on the D-Pad to accelerate. I have absolutely no idea why the developers decided to do this. Why not just make the controls the same across the board. It’s not like each race is so drastically different from each other that it needed to be changed.
Which is annoying, because there are some neat course designs, such as a course where a giant kid is stomping around and you having to avoid his feet. If I didn’t have to worry about constantly crashing due to the slippery controls, I could have enjoyed this game at least to some degree, even if only for it being a Mario Kart knockoff.
Each racer has their own career, which is being generous to call it a career. While there is a lot of overlap with the tracks in between the racers, but the tracks usually try to have something different going on, such as different weather like sunshine or fog, or reverse it. While it does it’s best to try and break up the monotony, it all still feels very samey. Even the racers cars show some level of creativity, such as either a kart being made out of rubbish left on the ground by people or is a bug that they ride.
However, the game’s final race is the the exact same with every single racer, where you race another one of the racers up a mound in the middle of the ant hill. This final track even has platforming, which is made doubly worse with the fact that you’re constantly doing tight turns, on top of the slippery driving. Surprisingly, it’s one of the easier races, and I always beat it on the second or third try at most.
And just like every other Mario Kart clone, there are several power ups that you can collect during a race. There are the usual power-ups where you can leave something on the track for a racer to accidentally hit, or something to fire at another racer. The worst power-up is the speed power-up, which is just completely useless. Not because it doesn’t give you a decent boost, but because just how poorly the driving is. By the time you could have used it, you’ve probably accidentally picked up another power-up that’s more useful.
The game does come with some unlockables, all of which are located under the “Secrets” menu.
The best one is “Infinite Missiles”. Which at least makes the races slightly more fun, but just barely. Another one is “Time Change”, which just turns the current track that you’re playing from day to night. I don't know why this isn't just an option when picking tracks outside of the "campaign".
There’s also “Wobble Cam”, which turns the camera 360 degrees in the direction that you’re turning, “Freaky Vision”, which just makes the screen blurrier, and “Speedy Play”, which makes the race faster, making it more difficult to turn. All three make the game more unplayable. But hey, it's neat that they're here.
And finally, there is “Select-a-car”. This one has to be the most confusingly implemented extra. Instead of bringing up a menu where you can select a car like any other racer with cars that you can unlock during the Career Mode, you have to unlock the “Select-a-car” mode. And instead of letting you pick a car like any other racer, when you pick one of the races in the Single Player mode, you have to hit up or down on the D-Pad to select the vehicle race order, which instead of just changing the car, you get switched to whichever place the other racer was.
This is so poorly implemented that I had no idea what I was doing the first time I tried it.
Surprisingly, the game came out on the PC, PlayStation 2, and XBOX, but not the Gamecube. Maybe the developers knew that it couldn’t compete with the Mario Kart franchise, so they didn’t even try. But it still came out on the same consoles that several Crash Team Racing games came out on, so there were still better kart games that came out on those platforms. But it still got a Gameboy Advance port, and that version was alright, so there’s that.
Hilariously, the game can be played in four-player split-screen multiplayer. I want to know what kid tried to convince their friends to play Antz Extreme Racing over literally any other racing or party game. There has to be that one kid, right?
Antz Extreme Racing might not be the worst licensed video game, as low as that bar is, but that doesn’t stop it from being yet another bad licensed video game in the every growing pile of bad licenced video games. This wasn’t even the best licensed kart game at the time, with Mickey’s Speedway USA being released on the Nintendo 64 the year before, and Shrek: Swamp Kart Speedway coming out the same year on the Gameboy Advance. Even the GBA got a version of this game which was at least a step up over this game.
Imagine being third place to a Mickey Mouse and Shrek.
If there’s a moral to this review, it’s don’t waste your time playing awful video games that no one has heard of. You only have so much time to live, go out and do something with your life.
2008
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/mod-corner-7th-serpent-crossfire-genesis-max-payne-2-the-fall-of-max-payne-review/
Two years after the release of 7th Serpent: Crossfire got released for Max Payne, 7th Serpent: Genesis came out.
In Genesis, you play as Vincent Pretro, the 7th prototype of the Serpent Industries serpent agent program, on a mission with Abraham O’Conner, the 3rd prototype, as they infiltrate the H.A.B.I.T. Conference center to assassinate the Chairman of the H.A.B.I.T. Organization at their meeting, after destroying the security server to make sure you’re not identified.
Like the first mod, Genesis is pretty short. It doesn’t have the larger scale of the first game or the length, being only about 30 minutes long, but what’s there is still pretty solid highly polished level design. There isn’t much to elaborate on since it’s so short and talking about anything would spoil it, but it is worth checking out like the first mod.
And just like the first one, the second team couldn’t get everything they wanted into the mod, so they just released what they had. It seems a bit unfortunate, since the team behind the 7th Serpent mods clearly had a universe in mind, but just couldn’t fully realize it, considering how much backstory there was in the manuals.
Both mods are great glimpse into what could have been, and you can complete both of them in an afternoon too. 7th Serpent and 7th Serpent: Genesis are both worth checking out.
Two years after the release of 7th Serpent: Crossfire got released for Max Payne, 7th Serpent: Genesis came out.
In Genesis, you play as Vincent Pretro, the 7th prototype of the Serpent Industries serpent agent program, on a mission with Abraham O’Conner, the 3rd prototype, as they infiltrate the H.A.B.I.T. Conference center to assassinate the Chairman of the H.A.B.I.T. Organization at their meeting, after destroying the security server to make sure you’re not identified.
Like the first mod, Genesis is pretty short. It doesn’t have the larger scale of the first game or the length, being only about 30 minutes long, but what’s there is still pretty solid highly polished level design. There isn’t much to elaborate on since it’s so short and talking about anything would spoil it, but it is worth checking out like the first mod.
And just like the first one, the second team couldn’t get everything they wanted into the mod, so they just released what they had. It seems a bit unfortunate, since the team behind the 7th Serpent mods clearly had a universe in mind, but just couldn’t fully realize it, considering how much backstory there was in the manuals.
Both mods are great glimpse into what could have been, and you can complete both of them in an afternoon too. 7th Serpent and 7th Serpent: Genesis are both worth checking out.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/mod-corner-7th-serpent-crossfire-genesis-max-payne-2-the-fall-of-max-payne-review/
The Max Payne games might have a smaller modding community than most games, but they are definitely a dedicated bunch, still releasing some pretty good stuff every now and again. One of the best mods for Max Payne 2 is 7th Serpent: Crossfire.
The story for both mods are actually fairly lengthy, since there is a bit of backstory going on. I’ll try to summarize whats necessary to understand for both mods, but if you want to go check it out, it does come in the manual for both mods.
In Crossfire, you play Damon, the first prototype of the Serpent Industries serpent agent program, and your first assignment was the assassination of the CEO of a company called Hryfter Armament Technologies. The mod begins right after the assassination, right when you are making your escape. The rest of the mod is you escaping through the city, trying to get to the extraction point, as a city-wide emergency alert has been issued and the local authorities have promptly deployed.
Crossfire is a good looking mod considering that the team behind it was pretty small, definitely pushing what the mod tools were possible of. Most of the game is going through the streets of a futuristic sci-fi city, but the mod does have a larger scale to it, making the fact that it’s fairly detailed more impressive.
Gameplay wise, it’s pretty much the base game from Max Payne 2, nothing has really changed. But when the gameplay is as solid as Max Payne 2’s was, there isn’t really a need to change it.
The mod is on the shorter side, being about 45 minutes long, but that isn’t really a complaint since it’s free and has a lot of effort put into it. My only real complaint is that it’s a tad too hard, which might cause some people to struggle with it, but it’s not unreasonable, and it’s nothing that a bit of quicksaving couldn’t help.
At some point after Crossfire’s development, the team meant to release a second episode for Seventh Serpent, but life got in the way and people got busy, and what the team was working on couldn’t be finished. So the series was giving to another team, and just over 2 years later, that team released the second mod, Genesis. But that's for another review.
7th Serpent: Crossfire is a great time and is well worth checking out if you're into playing mods.
The Max Payne games might have a smaller modding community than most games, but they are definitely a dedicated bunch, still releasing some pretty good stuff every now and again. One of the best mods for Max Payne 2 is 7th Serpent: Crossfire.
The story for both mods are actually fairly lengthy, since there is a bit of backstory going on. I’ll try to summarize whats necessary to understand for both mods, but if you want to go check it out, it does come in the manual for both mods.
In Crossfire, you play Damon, the first prototype of the Serpent Industries serpent agent program, and your first assignment was the assassination of the CEO of a company called Hryfter Armament Technologies. The mod begins right after the assassination, right when you are making your escape. The rest of the mod is you escaping through the city, trying to get to the extraction point, as a city-wide emergency alert has been issued and the local authorities have promptly deployed.
Crossfire is a good looking mod considering that the team behind it was pretty small, definitely pushing what the mod tools were possible of. Most of the game is going through the streets of a futuristic sci-fi city, but the mod does have a larger scale to it, making the fact that it’s fairly detailed more impressive.
Gameplay wise, it’s pretty much the base game from Max Payne 2, nothing has really changed. But when the gameplay is as solid as Max Payne 2’s was, there isn’t really a need to change it.
The mod is on the shorter side, being about 45 minutes long, but that isn’t really a complaint since it’s free and has a lot of effort put into it. My only real complaint is that it’s a tad too hard, which might cause some people to struggle with it, but it’s not unreasonable, and it’s nothing that a bit of quicksaving couldn’t help.
At some point after Crossfire’s development, the team meant to release a second episode for Seventh Serpent, but life got in the way and people got busy, and what the team was working on couldn’t be finished. So the series was giving to another team, and just over 2 years later, that team released the second mod, Genesis. But that's for another review.
7th Serpent: Crossfire is a great time and is well worth checking out if you're into playing mods.
2015
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/10/
Speed dating is not my thing. Being forced into getting to know someone enough to start a possible relationship with them in a couple of minutes sounds frustrating, Pugs however are one of my things. So maybe speed dating a pug will convince me that speed dating as a whole isn’t so bad.
Hot Date was released on PC, MAC, and Linux on the 28th of May, 2013, and was later released on the iOS on the 16th of December. It was entirely designed by one man, George Batchelor, except for the soundtrack, which was by Levi Pack.
The game is so simple that there isn’t even a main menu, you just jump right into the gameplay. The game starts just as you sit down at a speed dating event, and you’re sitting right across from a pug. You start up a conversation by picking from a list of greetings, and soon you’re going down a rabbit hole of asking a weird series of questions.
From them, the game is seeing what amusing answers you’ll get. Each date is pretty short, which is to be expected, so it’ll take several playthroughs to see all, if not most of the content. The game takes 30 to 45 minutes to see all of the content. So it’s playable in an afternoon or a couple of lunchbreaks, and is worth checking out on a rainy day.
Even though there isn’t much here, I’d say check it out. The PC, Max, and Linux versions of the game are pay what you want, but i recommend throwing in a dollar or two to the creators. The iOS version however requires money upfront, and costs $1.99USD/1.49.
Speed dating is not my thing. Being forced into getting to know someone enough to start a possible relationship with them in a couple of minutes sounds frustrating, Pugs however are one of my things. So maybe speed dating a pug will convince me that speed dating as a whole isn’t so bad.
Hot Date was released on PC, MAC, and Linux on the 28th of May, 2013, and was later released on the iOS on the 16th of December. It was entirely designed by one man, George Batchelor, except for the soundtrack, which was by Levi Pack.
The game is so simple that there isn’t even a main menu, you just jump right into the gameplay. The game starts just as you sit down at a speed dating event, and you’re sitting right across from a pug. You start up a conversation by picking from a list of greetings, and soon you’re going down a rabbit hole of asking a weird series of questions.
From them, the game is seeing what amusing answers you’ll get. Each date is pretty short, which is to be expected, so it’ll take several playthroughs to see all, if not most of the content. The game takes 30 to 45 minutes to see all of the content. So it’s playable in an afternoon or a couple of lunchbreaks, and is worth checking out on a rainy day.
Even though there isn’t much here, I’d say check it out. The PC, Max, and Linux versions of the game are pay what you want, but i recommend throwing in a dollar or two to the creators. The iOS version however requires money upfront, and costs $1.99USD/1.49.
2018
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2020/10/17/oakwood-2018-review/
You are going up to Oakwood, an abandoned campground, to meet up with your friends and spend the weekend having fun. Arriving late, you find your friends campsite abandoned, clothes and items strewn across the ground. As you head a scream in the distance, you run to find out what happened to them, and you soon find yourself trying to escape from the deadliest creatures from history.
I don’t quite know why you would go to an abandoned campground of all places to camp when there are probably a lot of other nicer places to camp with a lot of similar activities, but I guess that wouldn’t be as interesting as going to an abandoned place where no body would find you.
While the game has you spend most if walking through the dark with a flashlight, thankfully it doesn’t include needing to collect batteries for your flashlight like a lot of these games have. At some point, you move over to Night Vision Goggles, but that’s almost immediately after your flashlight breaks.
Even though the game doesn’t quite have the budget to make the visuals live up to it’s ambition, the game tries it’s hardest to add a few bits here and there to make it seem as creepy as possible. Outside of the few jump scares that a lot of horror games have, you can hear the occasional scream in the distance or see a pool of blood that leads off into the distance as one of your friends was dragged of, there is enough to keep this game afloat in terms of scares. There’s even a few sections where you have to run through long grass as dinosaurs run passed you out of the corner of your eye. Sure, it’s all predictable, but it’s more effort than some other bigger games have put in.
It does have notes that you can pick up throughout the game, but they all make sense as to why they’re there, with most of the notes done by your friends located at where their camp site is, and the ones featuring the history of the park located in draws in the campground building. It adds a bit of flavor to an otherwise forgettable short horror game.
Throughout the game, there are collectable totems, and if you collect all of them through one of your playthroughs, there is a slightly out of the way door you can find and open. I won’t ruin the surprise, but it’s a nice little addition that adds some replayability and variety to the game, despite the fact that the game is incredibly short, only being about ~45 minutes long.
There was even a Halloween event where the developers placed 10 pumpkins around the game for you to find for a surprise, so it’s obvious that the developers actually cared about the game that they were making, even if was a low budget game that got lost under the torrential pour of unknown games on Steam.
My only real complaint is that the game runs a bit sluggish for what it is. There are a lot of other games out there done by small studios (and I mean small) that look better and run smoother than this game. I don’t expect a graphical powerhouse out of such a small project, but It would nice if it the game was at least hitting 60 FPS.
Is Oakwood going to win any “Game of the Year” awards? No. But then again, it’s definitely a step up over the glut of cheap asset flips. At least Oakwood has some personality. If anything, this game will end up being cheap during a Steam sale, and probably be worth picking up for whatever price it’s on sale for.
You are going up to Oakwood, an abandoned campground, to meet up with your friends and spend the weekend having fun. Arriving late, you find your friends campsite abandoned, clothes and items strewn across the ground. As you head a scream in the distance, you run to find out what happened to them, and you soon find yourself trying to escape from the deadliest creatures from history.
I don’t quite know why you would go to an abandoned campground of all places to camp when there are probably a lot of other nicer places to camp with a lot of similar activities, but I guess that wouldn’t be as interesting as going to an abandoned place where no body would find you.
While the game has you spend most if walking through the dark with a flashlight, thankfully it doesn’t include needing to collect batteries for your flashlight like a lot of these games have. At some point, you move over to Night Vision Goggles, but that’s almost immediately after your flashlight breaks.
Even though the game doesn’t quite have the budget to make the visuals live up to it’s ambition, the game tries it’s hardest to add a few bits here and there to make it seem as creepy as possible. Outside of the few jump scares that a lot of horror games have, you can hear the occasional scream in the distance or see a pool of blood that leads off into the distance as one of your friends was dragged of, there is enough to keep this game afloat in terms of scares. There’s even a few sections where you have to run through long grass as dinosaurs run passed you out of the corner of your eye. Sure, it’s all predictable, but it’s more effort than some other bigger games have put in.
It does have notes that you can pick up throughout the game, but they all make sense as to why they’re there, with most of the notes done by your friends located at where their camp site is, and the ones featuring the history of the park located in draws in the campground building. It adds a bit of flavor to an otherwise forgettable short horror game.
Throughout the game, there are collectable totems, and if you collect all of them through one of your playthroughs, there is a slightly out of the way door you can find and open. I won’t ruin the surprise, but it’s a nice little addition that adds some replayability and variety to the game, despite the fact that the game is incredibly short, only being about ~45 minutes long.
There was even a Halloween event where the developers placed 10 pumpkins around the game for you to find for a surprise, so it’s obvious that the developers actually cared about the game that they were making, even if was a low budget game that got lost under the torrential pour of unknown games on Steam.
My only real complaint is that the game runs a bit sluggish for what it is. There are a lot of other games out there done by small studios (and I mean small) that look better and run smoother than this game. I don’t expect a graphical powerhouse out of such a small project, but It would nice if it the game was at least hitting 60 FPS.
Is Oakwood going to win any “Game of the Year” awards? No. But then again, it’s definitely a step up over the glut of cheap asset flips. At least Oakwood has some personality. If anything, this game will end up being cheap during a Steam sale, and probably be worth picking up for whatever price it’s on sale for.
2018
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/01/26/stone-2018-pc-review/
Self-described as an “Hip-Hop Stoner Noir”, the story begins with the titular character Stone, a hungover koala detective, finding out that his lover, Alex, has been kidnapped. Stone then spends the next few days desperately looking for Alex, trying to make sure nothing bad has happened to him.
STONE is pretty short, taking roughly 90 minutes to play, and no more than 2 hours at the absolute most. It’s hard to talk about anything in depth without spoiling the game due to how short it is, but I’ll try.
For most of the game, you go around town and ask everyone you know if they know anything about Alex’s whereabouts. This is done through using a map screen made up of roughly 4 or 5 locations at most, but the game ends up being pretty linear for the most part, being pretty obvious where you have to go next, making it kinda redundant. If you’re even confused as to where you should go, there are only three locations that you’ll ever end up going to anyway and you end up talking to the same three characters over and over until you’ve found a clue about where Alex might be, only for you to repeat the whole process the next day.
However, the when you’re interacting with people, you do get a few dialogue options that allow for some minor replayablity, but it’s very basic.
And for some reason, there is no run button, or even to speed up the character at all. I know that there are only 4 locations in the whole game, they’re all small, and the game is pretty short, but a run button would have been nice to have it.
The game is not without it’s merits. It’s art style is nice. While it is a bit simple, but it is relatively nice to look at. The game also has a cinema you can go to on the map screen where you can watch old black-and-white Australian shorts from the early days of cinema, but point stuff like this out feels like I’m grasping for straws to say something positive about the game.
Unfortunately, Stone is an underwhelming game in a lot of aspects, and I hate to say that because it’s rare to have a decent Australian themed game where Australia is the main focus. With the underwhelming plot and incredibly slow pace, it’s hard to recommend this to anyone.
Sure, it might gain a cult status down the line for a few people who like the Australian aesthetic or the game’s odd and unique characters and plot, but it’s a lukewarm recommend from me even with the most optimistic outlook.
Self-described as an “Hip-Hop Stoner Noir”, the story begins with the titular character Stone, a hungover koala detective, finding out that his lover, Alex, has been kidnapped. Stone then spends the next few days desperately looking for Alex, trying to make sure nothing bad has happened to him.
STONE is pretty short, taking roughly 90 minutes to play, and no more than 2 hours at the absolute most. It’s hard to talk about anything in depth without spoiling the game due to how short it is, but I’ll try.
For most of the game, you go around town and ask everyone you know if they know anything about Alex’s whereabouts. This is done through using a map screen made up of roughly 4 or 5 locations at most, but the game ends up being pretty linear for the most part, being pretty obvious where you have to go next, making it kinda redundant. If you’re even confused as to where you should go, there are only three locations that you’ll ever end up going to anyway and you end up talking to the same three characters over and over until you’ve found a clue about where Alex might be, only for you to repeat the whole process the next day.
However, the when you’re interacting with people, you do get a few dialogue options that allow for some minor replayablity, but it’s very basic.
And for some reason, there is no run button, or even to speed up the character at all. I know that there are only 4 locations in the whole game, they’re all small, and the game is pretty short, but a run button would have been nice to have it.
The game is not without it’s merits. It’s art style is nice. While it is a bit simple, but it is relatively nice to look at. The game also has a cinema you can go to on the map screen where you can watch old black-and-white Australian shorts from the early days of cinema, but point stuff like this out feels like I’m grasping for straws to say something positive about the game.
Unfortunately, Stone is an underwhelming game in a lot of aspects, and I hate to say that because it’s rare to have a decent Australian themed game where Australia is the main focus. With the underwhelming plot and incredibly slow pace, it’s hard to recommend this to anyone.
Sure, it might gain a cult status down the line for a few people who like the Australian aesthetic or the game’s odd and unique characters and plot, but it’s a lukewarm recommend from me even with the most optimistic outlook.
2016
This review contains spoilers
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/10/10/spoilers-obscuritas-pc-2016-review/
When Sarah inherits her great-uncle’s old country house, she has no idea about the dark secret she has stumbled upon and into what obscure world it will take her to.
There isn’t really too much more to the premise beyond that, or there shouldn’t be, but we’ll get to the plot later. But let’s get into the gameplay first.
Unfortunately, the game also has those dreaded game mechanics that every horror game at the time had, collecting batteries and notes. Apparently in this universe, the batteries only have 2 minutes worth of charge to them for some reason. And when the flashlight is running out of power, it flickers, making having it on annoying. Do we really still have to have this mechanic in horror games? I feel like Outlast did the whole batteries thing the best.
Although, you don’t have to dig through ever draw in a dresser to find notes like other games such as every other Amnesia: The Dark Descent clone, as there are very few of them and they’re always on a table and highlight when you look at them.
But weirdly, there are also matchboxes that you can collect to light candles, along with flicking a light switch on if you’re in the mansion to light up whatever room you’re in. Why have all three of these mechanics at once? Why not have the lights in the mansion stop working, forcing you to use the flashlight and candles? It would at least make sense as to why the game has all three mechanics.
For the first half of the game, you’re solving puzzles that your great-uncle has left for you to prove that you’re a worthy heir. It’s slightly silly, but there wouldn’t be much of a game otherwise, and there have been sillier plots and executions of a story. But at some point the game begins introducing puzzles with traps that can kill you. After you move from the house to the greenhouse, there is a trial-and-error maze with traps that can kill you if you go the wrong way. That’s not much of a test for if someone is a worthy heir if they can be killed by simply picking wrong. That’s one hell of a way to ramp up the stakes.
The greenhouse soon leads to an underground maze, which is just as dark and grey as the house (or is it the other way around?), which involves you solving a puzzle involving pressure plates and large rock statues. So this puzzles involves a tiny 80 pound woman lugging giant statues around that must weight at least a few hundred pounds. I guess she must have been really working out.
To be fair, I never had any problems solving the puzzles throughout the game. They all make logical sense to some extent. Some other levels have you finding items, like keys for doors or items to use on other items such as fuses or gears.
And thankfully the character talks to herself when either something happens or you come across something that you should be paying attention to so that you know what’s going on, which is more than I can say for a lot of bad games that have puzzle solving. Although, there are still a few moments where the character should have said something out loud as a hint to what is going on.
And while I’m giving out compliments, you can actually see your own body if you look down, even if it’s only when I’m running around, and you can see your shadow, which is another thing that a lot of first person games don’t do. But I feel like I’m grasping at straws here.
But to bring the review back down, there are still a few problems, like sometimes there are multiple doors in a level that claim that they require a key, but there is only one key and you have to go to each individual door to figure out if the key goes to it, filling the game out with more pointless busy work
Also, there is no way to manually save the game. There are checkpoints scattered throughout the levels, but these aren’t saves, they’re just so that if you die or fail, you can load back to a certain point of the level and just try over again. If you quit the game, you have to start the level all over again. It made me dread coming back to the game if I had to quit for whatever reason.
Graphically, the game is mediocre at best. Everything is so grey and flat. Also, I don’t have a beast of a machine, but I’ve been able to play more resource intensive games at higher framerates, or at least similar framerates than this game. It’s roughly 30fps when the graphics settings are set to high and everything is on, and just over 60fps when everything is on low and turned off. I’m no graphics snob, but there is no reason that a game that looks like this should be running this badly.
And it’s not like I’m the only one to have this complaint, as there are a few people with similar complaints on the Steam forums.
It also doesn’t help that the game is pretty dark for it’s entirety, needing me to constantly have the flashlight constantly on. I know it’s supposed to be a horror game, but even when I have the flashlight on, lit some candles, and have the lights in the room on, it still looks pretty dark. I had to turn up the brightness all the way in the options just to see anything and not strain my eyes.
Which makes it even hard to find objects in a room, and there have been times where I’ve accidentally walked passed something that I was trying to find. Thankfully all items highlight when you’ve moused over them, but it’s annoying.
The store page also claims that the game has a “fear recognition mechanic”, which is PR speak for “this game has jump scares and spooky things happening randomly throughout the game depending on how you’re playing”. How this is supposed to work is that the game will randomly pick ‘scary moments’ and just play them randomly throughout the game, much like the insanity system from Eternal Darkness (2002).
I’m pretty sure that the game plays the same scares at the same points no matter what you do. And frankly, I didn’t feel like playing the game multiple times or spending hours trying to replay a level to see if it worked. The game was a tedious slog the first time.
Random scares include phones randomly ringing as you walk passed them, a clock alarm going off, piano keys being pressed by an unseen force, a statue head moving to look at you, a fly appearing to crawl across your screen, a ghostly apparition appearing at the end of a hallway, sometimes exploding when you get closer, bleeding walls, and shadows of something disappearing around a corner, only for nothing to be there. It even plays some creepy noises to make you think that there is something else following you.
All of these scares happen over and over again, it’s just gets so repetitive. And I’m pretty sure that some of the ghostly shadows are of medical equipment. So spooky.
And the thing is, I’ve spent over 1000 words talking about this game and I haven’t even talked about the plot yet. I know that I briefly mentioned the premise, but the plot is another thing into itself.
WARNING: SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT.
At some point you discover that your great-uncle has a portal in his personal underground labyrinth, and once you figure out how to operate it, it takes you to another dimension. I think? I’m honestly surprised that the plot turned out to be something other than a haunted house with puzzles in it. And the death trap puzzles and the portal that looks like a Stargate is just what happens in the first third of the game.
And this is where the game starts to go off track.
The portal takes you to a house in a field in what looks to be the middle of the mountains, and you have to enter what you think is the basement, only to randomly enter an asylum located under the house, which has an area where you have to dodge spinning blades on moving poles. And this is where it becomes blatantly obvious that the developers clearly tried to stitch together the pre-made assets that they bought off the Unity store. And it doesn’t work.
Soon you come across a whole theme parks worth of levels. I’m being serious here. You come across a Roller-coaster that you have to turn on and remove a log off the tracks, otherwise you die while riding it, then a fun house with flashing lights, a hall of mirrors, and clown jump scares, then a Ferris Wheel that has a brief section with bumper cars that move when you don’t look at them, before moving onto a haunted house with mannequins that only spin in place or disappear instead of moving when you don’t look at them.
Later sections ruin the atmosphere and consistency that the game is trying to have. One area is an homage to the film Cube (1997), one of the creepy dolls looks exactly like Jeff Dunham’s Grandpa character, and there’s even a stupid giant skull that you would see in a cheesy pirate movie from the 50s or a 90’s children’s game show. There’s even a scare that is a balloon coming out of a bathroom sink that’s just an homage to the 1990 version of Stephen King’s IT.
The middle of the game also introduces patrolling monster dogs that can kill you in one shot, are transparent and hard to see, only made harder to see by how dark the game is. Thankfully they have a per-determined patrolling route so you can avoid them. But they aren’t exactly the best of enemies, since half the time I accidentally walked right through them or passed them without realizing it because they didn’t spot you.
At some point I even learned that I could just slowly walk behind them and they won’t notice me.
I don’t even know why these creatures are here, as they just make the game take longer. At east with the puzzles, you can take your time to complete them. The animals just add an extra layer of frustration to the game. And there is a brief moment before the monster dog kills you where the monster dog stops making sound, making you think that you lost the dog, only for the dog to instantly kill you, making that whole experience that much more annoying.
My biggest problem with the game is the amount of levels. I know that variety is the spice of life, but there is such a thing as too much spice.
At some point you have to go through a maze.. At this point in the game I gave up and looked for help to get through the maze. There are hints on how to get through it posted by the developer on the Steam forums, so it’s not like I’m the only one who had trouble here. And one trap was so confusing on how it worked. Plus mazes are always some of the worst levels in a video game. At least the developer prevents backtracking and getting lost to a certain extent by cutting off previous parts of the maze by having walls appear. I was still confused by the maze though.
The last level has you backtracking slightly into the level that came before it, or at least part of it despite the fact that the game hasn’t done that before. I was so confused as to what was going on until I realized what the game was doing.
Another level has you going through a cave that contains a pool of water that makes your character walk so slow that I thought that I was going in the wrong direction and that this was the games way of telling me to not go that way.
And to top it all off, there is a level of the game where you just walk for a while before finding a key in a small house that opens a nearby gate. And that is what the whole level is. The walking to the house was so long that the game has to put a checkpoint after the walk before you get to the house so if you die to the monster dog, you don’t start the whole level again. Why is this level here?
That’s the worst thing about this game. Half of the time I was questioning why something was in the game. Half the levels could have easily been cut out and the game would have lost nothing.
This game is one of the worst that I’ve played. It’s execution is tedious and annoying at the best of times, and that’s me being polite. If it wasn’t for the fact that I bought this for incredibly cheap on a sale and made this review, I wouldn’t have given this game the time of day. Especially when there are better games out there for free.
When Sarah inherits her great-uncle’s old country house, she has no idea about the dark secret she has stumbled upon and into what obscure world it will take her to.
There isn’t really too much more to the premise beyond that, or there shouldn’t be, but we’ll get to the plot later. But let’s get into the gameplay first.
Unfortunately, the game also has those dreaded game mechanics that every horror game at the time had, collecting batteries and notes. Apparently in this universe, the batteries only have 2 minutes worth of charge to them for some reason. And when the flashlight is running out of power, it flickers, making having it on annoying. Do we really still have to have this mechanic in horror games? I feel like Outlast did the whole batteries thing the best.
Although, you don’t have to dig through ever draw in a dresser to find notes like other games such as every other Amnesia: The Dark Descent clone, as there are very few of them and they’re always on a table and highlight when you look at them.
But weirdly, there are also matchboxes that you can collect to light candles, along with flicking a light switch on if you’re in the mansion to light up whatever room you’re in. Why have all three of these mechanics at once? Why not have the lights in the mansion stop working, forcing you to use the flashlight and candles? It would at least make sense as to why the game has all three mechanics.
For the first half of the game, you’re solving puzzles that your great-uncle has left for you to prove that you’re a worthy heir. It’s slightly silly, but there wouldn’t be much of a game otherwise, and there have been sillier plots and executions of a story. But at some point the game begins introducing puzzles with traps that can kill you. After you move from the house to the greenhouse, there is a trial-and-error maze with traps that can kill you if you go the wrong way. That’s not much of a test for if someone is a worthy heir if they can be killed by simply picking wrong. That’s one hell of a way to ramp up the stakes.
The greenhouse soon leads to an underground maze, which is just as dark and grey as the house (or is it the other way around?), which involves you solving a puzzle involving pressure plates and large rock statues. So this puzzles involves a tiny 80 pound woman lugging giant statues around that must weight at least a few hundred pounds. I guess she must have been really working out.
To be fair, I never had any problems solving the puzzles throughout the game. They all make logical sense to some extent. Some other levels have you finding items, like keys for doors or items to use on other items such as fuses or gears.
And thankfully the character talks to herself when either something happens or you come across something that you should be paying attention to so that you know what’s going on, which is more than I can say for a lot of bad games that have puzzle solving. Although, there are still a few moments where the character should have said something out loud as a hint to what is going on.
And while I’m giving out compliments, you can actually see your own body if you look down, even if it’s only when I’m running around, and you can see your shadow, which is another thing that a lot of first person games don’t do. But I feel like I’m grasping at straws here.
But to bring the review back down, there are still a few problems, like sometimes there are multiple doors in a level that claim that they require a key, but there is only one key and you have to go to each individual door to figure out if the key goes to it, filling the game out with more pointless busy work
Also, there is no way to manually save the game. There are checkpoints scattered throughout the levels, but these aren’t saves, they’re just so that if you die or fail, you can load back to a certain point of the level and just try over again. If you quit the game, you have to start the level all over again. It made me dread coming back to the game if I had to quit for whatever reason.
Graphically, the game is mediocre at best. Everything is so grey and flat. Also, I don’t have a beast of a machine, but I’ve been able to play more resource intensive games at higher framerates, or at least similar framerates than this game. It’s roughly 30fps when the graphics settings are set to high and everything is on, and just over 60fps when everything is on low and turned off. I’m no graphics snob, but there is no reason that a game that looks like this should be running this badly.
And it’s not like I’m the only one to have this complaint, as there are a few people with similar complaints on the Steam forums.
It also doesn’t help that the game is pretty dark for it’s entirety, needing me to constantly have the flashlight constantly on. I know it’s supposed to be a horror game, but even when I have the flashlight on, lit some candles, and have the lights in the room on, it still looks pretty dark. I had to turn up the brightness all the way in the options just to see anything and not strain my eyes.
Which makes it even hard to find objects in a room, and there have been times where I’ve accidentally walked passed something that I was trying to find. Thankfully all items highlight when you’ve moused over them, but it’s annoying.
The store page also claims that the game has a “fear recognition mechanic”, which is PR speak for “this game has jump scares and spooky things happening randomly throughout the game depending on how you’re playing”. How this is supposed to work is that the game will randomly pick ‘scary moments’ and just play them randomly throughout the game, much like the insanity system from Eternal Darkness (2002).
I’m pretty sure that the game plays the same scares at the same points no matter what you do. And frankly, I didn’t feel like playing the game multiple times or spending hours trying to replay a level to see if it worked. The game was a tedious slog the first time.
Random scares include phones randomly ringing as you walk passed them, a clock alarm going off, piano keys being pressed by an unseen force, a statue head moving to look at you, a fly appearing to crawl across your screen, a ghostly apparition appearing at the end of a hallway, sometimes exploding when you get closer, bleeding walls, and shadows of something disappearing around a corner, only for nothing to be there. It even plays some creepy noises to make you think that there is something else following you.
All of these scares happen over and over again, it’s just gets so repetitive. And I’m pretty sure that some of the ghostly shadows are of medical equipment. So spooky.
And the thing is, I’ve spent over 1000 words talking about this game and I haven’t even talked about the plot yet. I know that I briefly mentioned the premise, but the plot is another thing into itself.
WARNING: SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT.
At some point you discover that your great-uncle has a portal in his personal underground labyrinth, and once you figure out how to operate it, it takes you to another dimension. I think? I’m honestly surprised that the plot turned out to be something other than a haunted house with puzzles in it. And the death trap puzzles and the portal that looks like a Stargate is just what happens in the first third of the game.
And this is where the game starts to go off track.
The portal takes you to a house in a field in what looks to be the middle of the mountains, and you have to enter what you think is the basement, only to randomly enter an asylum located under the house, which has an area where you have to dodge spinning blades on moving poles. And this is where it becomes blatantly obvious that the developers clearly tried to stitch together the pre-made assets that they bought off the Unity store. And it doesn’t work.
Soon you come across a whole theme parks worth of levels. I’m being serious here. You come across a Roller-coaster that you have to turn on and remove a log off the tracks, otherwise you die while riding it, then a fun house with flashing lights, a hall of mirrors, and clown jump scares, then a Ferris Wheel that has a brief section with bumper cars that move when you don’t look at them, before moving onto a haunted house with mannequins that only spin in place or disappear instead of moving when you don’t look at them.
Later sections ruin the atmosphere and consistency that the game is trying to have. One area is an homage to the film Cube (1997), one of the creepy dolls looks exactly like Jeff Dunham’s Grandpa character, and there’s even a stupid giant skull that you would see in a cheesy pirate movie from the 50s or a 90’s children’s game show. There’s even a scare that is a balloon coming out of a bathroom sink that’s just an homage to the 1990 version of Stephen King’s IT.
The middle of the game also introduces patrolling monster dogs that can kill you in one shot, are transparent and hard to see, only made harder to see by how dark the game is. Thankfully they have a per-determined patrolling route so you can avoid them. But they aren’t exactly the best of enemies, since half the time I accidentally walked right through them or passed them without realizing it because they didn’t spot you.
At some point I even learned that I could just slowly walk behind them and they won’t notice me.
I don’t even know why these creatures are here, as they just make the game take longer. At east with the puzzles, you can take your time to complete them. The animals just add an extra layer of frustration to the game. And there is a brief moment before the monster dog kills you where the monster dog stops making sound, making you think that you lost the dog, only for the dog to instantly kill you, making that whole experience that much more annoying.
My biggest problem with the game is the amount of levels. I know that variety is the spice of life, but there is such a thing as too much spice.
At some point you have to go through a maze.. At this point in the game I gave up and looked for help to get through the maze. There are hints on how to get through it posted by the developer on the Steam forums, so it’s not like I’m the only one who had trouble here. And one trap was so confusing on how it worked. Plus mazes are always some of the worst levels in a video game. At least the developer prevents backtracking and getting lost to a certain extent by cutting off previous parts of the maze by having walls appear. I was still confused by the maze though.
The last level has you backtracking slightly into the level that came before it, or at least part of it despite the fact that the game hasn’t done that before. I was so confused as to what was going on until I realized what the game was doing.
Another level has you going through a cave that contains a pool of water that makes your character walk so slow that I thought that I was going in the wrong direction and that this was the games way of telling me to not go that way.
And to top it all off, there is a level of the game where you just walk for a while before finding a key in a small house that opens a nearby gate. And that is what the whole level is. The walking to the house was so long that the game has to put a checkpoint after the walk before you get to the house so if you die to the monster dog, you don’t start the whole level again. Why is this level here?
That’s the worst thing about this game. Half of the time I was questioning why something was in the game. Half the levels could have easily been cut out and the game would have lost nothing.
This game is one of the worst that I’ve played. It’s execution is tedious and annoying at the best of times, and that’s me being polite. If it wasn’t for the fact that I bought this for incredibly cheap on a sale and made this review, I wouldn’t have given this game the time of day. Especially when there are better games out there for free.
2013
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/race-the-sun-pcmaclinuxps2ps4psvitaios-review/
Endless runners exploded when the iPhone’s App Store was introduced. They all have an easy to understand concept, easy to use controls, and low barrier of entry for both developer and user, so It’s easy to see why. Trying to get the onscreen character as far as possible through an environment as far as possible without hitting any of the obstacles makes for a pretty good and addictive time waster. But due to the low barrier of entry when developing for this genre, endless runners are a dime a dozen. But every now and again, a game breaks through and really grabs your attention.
In Race The Sun, you control a solar-powered spacecraft through a pseudo-procedurally-generated landscape, and your objective is to get as far as possible before the sun sets and your spacecraft runs out of power or you accidentally crash into one of the obstacles. The landscape is broken up into regions, each region increasing in difficulty and having a new and increasing difficult variety of geometry to avoid.
Visually, the game foes for a simplistic style that is effective in it’s simplicity, keeping everything in grey-scale, leaving the few colors that the game does use for power-ups and collectibles, making them stand out from the landscape. The game foes for flat-shaded polygons and keeps everything low-poly to match it’s art style. Mixed with some nice shadowing, the game does looks quite nice. Overall, the game graphics do come across as a prettier version of Cube Runner.
To keep the game play interesting, a newly generated level appears every 24 hours, so if you enjoy memorizing a level and love getting through a lever through memorization alone, you’d probably be a bit disappointed by this. The leader boards also reset every 24 hours, so if you like having the top spot on the leader boards, you have your work cut out for you. There is however a feature that allows users to create their own levels and upload them, so that might be a feature worth checking out for both people who like level memorization or creating their own levels.
The goal of the game is to get the highest score you can and to try and get on the leader board, or to just try and beat your personal best. To get a high score, you fly your spacecraft as far as possible as well as collecting Tri’s. The Tri’s add to a score multiplayer as well as add to the overall score. Collect 5 Tri’s and the score multiplayer increases by 1. Accidentally knock against any of the obstacles, your score multiplayer loses a few multipliers and you have to build it up again.
Another game play feature is keeping your solar-powered spacecraft out of the shadows of both obstacles and clouds. Flying through shadows for too long and your spacecraft slows down as it’s battery is drained. Being in the shadows for too long or or crashing into geometry head on and your spaceship explodes and it’s game over for you.
Being something a bit more advanced than the average endless runner, Race The Sun’s game play is a bit more complicated than usual. The game has power-ups which are unlocked by completing challenges while racing. They range from something as easy and simple as completing a region without colliding with obstacles or collecting a certain amount of Tri’s to something a lot more difficult like getting a 25x multiplayer in one run.
The more the difficult the challenge, the more points the challenge is worth. Each challenge is worth 1, 2 or 3 points depending on it’s difficulty. Get 6 points and you level up. After leveling up, you get an upgrade. You don’t really pick your upgrades so much as they’re given to you. You’ll start out with attachment for upgrades, so you’ll have to carefully pick and choose which upgrade to put on your ship and make a strategy around it.
There are two types of upgrades, unlockable items and ship upgrades. Items include Energy/Speed Boost, which gives you a temporary speed boost, Jump, which allows your spacecraft to jump, and Emergency Portals, which activate when you collide with an obstacle that would have normally kill you, and re-positions your spacecraft over where you crashed into and you glide back down to the planet. Both Jump and Emergency Portals don’t trigger when you fly over them. Instead you pick them up and use them whenever you see fit.
The ship upgrades include a Magnet, which allows your ship to collect Tri’s from further away, the Battery, which increases your battery capacity and allows you to fly through shadows for longer, and the Turning Jets, which increase your spacecrafts turning speed, allowing you to avoid obstacles a whole lot faster. Other ship upgrades include increased Jump and Emergence Portal storage, up to 3 slots, making the more difficult regions a bit easier.
The final unlockable is another mode called Apocalypse Mode, where the difficulty is cranked up to 11. Good reflexes even with the Turning Jets upgrade are need here, since there are non-stop obstacles popping up.
Another gameplay feature of Race The Sun are Portals that appear randomly throughout the regions that’ll warp you into different user created worlds as a sort of replacement for the current region. The game does come with a default region to show off how the Portals work. So your user created levels are bound to be seen someone.
Since the games release, it has been updated with a first person view, showing what its like from the ships view. If the game ever gets VR support, i can see people easily getting nauseous very easily, but it still would be pretty fun to try out once.
Race The Sun is a simple but effective game that i would definitely recommend. At USD$10, it is a tad expensive, but on sale i can definitely recommend it. There is piece of DLC called “Sunrise” that has a new mode that lets you fly through a level without having to worry about leader boards or the sun setting, creating a xen-like experience. The DLC goes for a purple color instead of the regular games grey scale. It’s nice, but at USD$2, i don’t know if i can recommend it. I wish it would have been an update to the base game instead of DLC. A definite pick up when on sale.
Endless runners exploded when the iPhone’s App Store was introduced. They all have an easy to understand concept, easy to use controls, and low barrier of entry for both developer and user, so It’s easy to see why. Trying to get the onscreen character as far as possible through an environment as far as possible without hitting any of the obstacles makes for a pretty good and addictive time waster. But due to the low barrier of entry when developing for this genre, endless runners are a dime a dozen. But every now and again, a game breaks through and really grabs your attention.
In Race The Sun, you control a solar-powered spacecraft through a pseudo-procedurally-generated landscape, and your objective is to get as far as possible before the sun sets and your spacecraft runs out of power or you accidentally crash into one of the obstacles. The landscape is broken up into regions, each region increasing in difficulty and having a new and increasing difficult variety of geometry to avoid.
Visually, the game foes for a simplistic style that is effective in it’s simplicity, keeping everything in grey-scale, leaving the few colors that the game does use for power-ups and collectibles, making them stand out from the landscape. The game foes for flat-shaded polygons and keeps everything low-poly to match it’s art style. Mixed with some nice shadowing, the game does looks quite nice. Overall, the game graphics do come across as a prettier version of Cube Runner.
To keep the game play interesting, a newly generated level appears every 24 hours, so if you enjoy memorizing a level and love getting through a lever through memorization alone, you’d probably be a bit disappointed by this. The leader boards also reset every 24 hours, so if you like having the top spot on the leader boards, you have your work cut out for you. There is however a feature that allows users to create their own levels and upload them, so that might be a feature worth checking out for both people who like level memorization or creating their own levels.
The goal of the game is to get the highest score you can and to try and get on the leader board, or to just try and beat your personal best. To get a high score, you fly your spacecraft as far as possible as well as collecting Tri’s. The Tri’s add to a score multiplayer as well as add to the overall score. Collect 5 Tri’s and the score multiplayer increases by 1. Accidentally knock against any of the obstacles, your score multiplayer loses a few multipliers and you have to build it up again.
Another game play feature is keeping your solar-powered spacecraft out of the shadows of both obstacles and clouds. Flying through shadows for too long and your spacecraft slows down as it’s battery is drained. Being in the shadows for too long or or crashing into geometry head on and your spaceship explodes and it’s game over for you.
Being something a bit more advanced than the average endless runner, Race The Sun’s game play is a bit more complicated than usual. The game has power-ups which are unlocked by completing challenges while racing. They range from something as easy and simple as completing a region without colliding with obstacles or collecting a certain amount of Tri’s to something a lot more difficult like getting a 25x multiplayer in one run.
The more the difficult the challenge, the more points the challenge is worth. Each challenge is worth 1, 2 or 3 points depending on it’s difficulty. Get 6 points and you level up. After leveling up, you get an upgrade. You don’t really pick your upgrades so much as they’re given to you. You’ll start out with attachment for upgrades, so you’ll have to carefully pick and choose which upgrade to put on your ship and make a strategy around it.
There are two types of upgrades, unlockable items and ship upgrades. Items include Energy/Speed Boost, which gives you a temporary speed boost, Jump, which allows your spacecraft to jump, and Emergency Portals, which activate when you collide with an obstacle that would have normally kill you, and re-positions your spacecraft over where you crashed into and you glide back down to the planet. Both Jump and Emergency Portals don’t trigger when you fly over them. Instead you pick them up and use them whenever you see fit.
The ship upgrades include a Magnet, which allows your ship to collect Tri’s from further away, the Battery, which increases your battery capacity and allows you to fly through shadows for longer, and the Turning Jets, which increase your spacecrafts turning speed, allowing you to avoid obstacles a whole lot faster. Other ship upgrades include increased Jump and Emergence Portal storage, up to 3 slots, making the more difficult regions a bit easier.
The final unlockable is another mode called Apocalypse Mode, where the difficulty is cranked up to 11. Good reflexes even with the Turning Jets upgrade are need here, since there are non-stop obstacles popping up.
Another gameplay feature of Race The Sun are Portals that appear randomly throughout the regions that’ll warp you into different user created worlds as a sort of replacement for the current region. The game does come with a default region to show off how the Portals work. So your user created levels are bound to be seen someone.
Since the games release, it has been updated with a first person view, showing what its like from the ships view. If the game ever gets VR support, i can see people easily getting nauseous very easily, but it still would be pretty fun to try out once.
Race The Sun is a simple but effective game that i would definitely recommend. At USD$10, it is a tad expensive, but on sale i can definitely recommend it. There is piece of DLC called “Sunrise” that has a new mode that lets you fly through a level without having to worry about leader boards or the sun setting, creating a xen-like experience. The DLC goes for a purple color instead of the regular games grey scale. It’s nice, but at USD$2, i don’t know if i can recommend it. I wish it would have been an update to the base game instead of DLC. A definite pick up when on sale.
2010
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/02/14/dinner-date-pc-review/
Dinner Date was developed and distributed by Stout Games, and was developed by a single person, Jeroen D. Stout, who also voices the protagonist’s subconscious. The only other person involved was Than van Nispen tot Pannerden, which is a mouthful, who specifically did the music for this game.
Dinner Date is an experimental video game told entirely from the protagonists point-of-view, as a man named Julian Luxemburg, as we hear his inner thoughts during a date as he slowly realizes that he’s been stoop up. The only control that the game gives you is interacting with what Julian has set up for his date and the dining room of his apartment. Essentially being in control of his subconsciousness.
You interact with these items by looking around the room and pressing whatever button the item corresponds with. The keys are laid out the same way one of your hands fingers rests on the keyboard, meaning that there isn’t much interactivity. The game lasts about 25 minutes total. There is some reputability in what you pick, but the majority of the content is limited to one playthrough.
Julian is a very unlikable character. I don’t know if that’s supposed to be intentional or not, but it makes playing through the game annoying. All he does is complain about work, thinks about how he wants to get laid, and how he wants to do more cycling. He comes off as incredibly shallow and selfish. If you’ve consoled a friend after they’ve been dumped or stood up, you’re pretty much experienced this game.
The game has a pleasant presentation. Graphically, the game looks pretty nice. Which is surprisingly nice since it was all done by one guy. The soundtrack is nice to listen to and sets the mood.
I can’t recommend Dinner Date. It’s short, has little replayability, and it doesn’t have much depth. Plus the main character is unappealing and I wouldn’t want to spend any time with him. Maybe that was the point, and I could see that argument, but no one outside of a few people wanting to analyze something like this, there’s no reason to go play this.
Dinner Date was developed and distributed by Stout Games, and was developed by a single person, Jeroen D. Stout, who also voices the protagonist’s subconscious. The only other person involved was Than van Nispen tot Pannerden, which is a mouthful, who specifically did the music for this game.
Dinner Date is an experimental video game told entirely from the protagonists point-of-view, as a man named Julian Luxemburg, as we hear his inner thoughts during a date as he slowly realizes that he’s been stoop up. The only control that the game gives you is interacting with what Julian has set up for his date and the dining room of his apartment. Essentially being in control of his subconsciousness.
You interact with these items by looking around the room and pressing whatever button the item corresponds with. The keys are laid out the same way one of your hands fingers rests on the keyboard, meaning that there isn’t much interactivity. The game lasts about 25 minutes total. There is some reputability in what you pick, but the majority of the content is limited to one playthrough.
Julian is a very unlikable character. I don’t know if that’s supposed to be intentional or not, but it makes playing through the game annoying. All he does is complain about work, thinks about how he wants to get laid, and how he wants to do more cycling. He comes off as incredibly shallow and selfish. If you’ve consoled a friend after they’ve been dumped or stood up, you’re pretty much experienced this game.
The game has a pleasant presentation. Graphically, the game looks pretty nice. Which is surprisingly nice since it was all done by one guy. The soundtrack is nice to listen to and sets the mood.
I can’t recommend Dinner Date. It’s short, has little replayability, and it doesn’t have much depth. Plus the main character is unappealing and I wouldn’t want to spend any time with him. Maybe that was the point, and I could see that argument, but no one outside of a few people wanting to analyze something like this, there’s no reason to go play this.
2014
