Nachy
410 Reviews liked by Nachy
Ghost Rider
2007
There are some cases where a clone exceeds what its inspiration is. In Ghost Rider’s case that isn’t hard, as Devil may Cry is an atrocious series. In terms of its other inspiration, God of war, it falls short, but impresses with what it has.
Game play is divided into two segments, on foot and bike levels.
Before I begin, I highly advise that you save and reload in the first level over and over to fully max out ghost rider before continuing with your play through, the game is at its best when you are fully upgraded with a full move set.
I also implore you to not play this on anything higher than normal. The damage scaling on hard or higher is ludicrous, you’ll be getting 2-5 shotted nonstop and it will do nothing to instill you in the required rhythm the on foot combat requires, or the quick reflexes of the bike levels.
Combat in Ghost Rider is fun and competent, unlike DMC, you actually have a reason to get a high style rating even after you are maxed out, when you get a B rank, the size of your attacks hit boxes are extended, making it imperative that you maintain a high rank (getting hit resets it to zero). You also only get green orbs for your screen nuke when you have a style ranking on screen, with more rewarded the higher the rank. It’s astonishing but also hilarious how a pathetically shallow mechanic was made genuinely useful here.
As for said screen nuke, don’t be afraid to use it! The game’s waves after waves of enemies are designed around you firing off a link charge once the meter is full to quickly build style, which can then be quickly refilled with green orbs enemies leave behind. This makes combat frantic and tense, and solves the issue most games have with screen nukes where you are never sure when to use it.
You also have this games take on Devil Trigger, named Retribution mode here. It’s best saved for dealing with large brute demons, as they normally don’t stagger when hit. If you are being liberal with your screen nukes and maintaining high style, your spirit gauge will fill very fast and you will never have to worry about being SOL to use it.
As for your regular attacks, they all feel useful. All of them are just fast enough to feel smooth, but not so much that it ruins game balance. Like God of war, there is a heavy emphasis on crowd control. You’ll need to be using strings like triangle X2 > square > triangle to supercharge your style meter to level B, and for solo foes, it’s best to launch them away with basic combos or use strings like squarex2 > triangle X2 to knock them aside so you can pull off a risky taunt that leaves you wide open but fills an entire meter of style, or execute a safe finishing prompt by pressing circle to avoid enemy attacks with I-frames. By using your Nukes, Retribution, Finishers, and crowd controlling regular attacks, the wave after wave of enemies you’ll be dealing with never feels tedious at any point due to the game forcing you to use these well designed tools.
There are also skill check enemies that have barriers around them where you can not damage them unless you have a certain style level, further incentivizing you to learn how combat should be played rather than just whacking the triangle button in a hallway. There is no pretentious, shallow. and pointless mechanical bloat like DMC here. You must learn the game to survive.
In terms of enemy design the game makes up for it’s low budget by expecting you to rely on audio cues snyched to decent animations. Each enemy has a distinct sound you’ll need to memorize so you can block or dodge accordingly. Making combat feel much more involved. All regular enemies aside from brutes only have one attack, which have competent animations and are perfectly synched to audio cues, so memorization comes quickly. Your Dodges also have zero i-frames, so you can not abuse holding the right stick, Your recovery animation is also a little slow, so poor dodging can rightfully punish you as well.
Blocking is the fastest animation in your toolkit, but like God of war the game balances this out by making it so only the first two hits of your strings can be block canceled, meaning that while you must use a variety of moves to maintain high style and keep those larger hit boxes, you also need to know when to use your long, non cancelable and powerful last button inputs, making any instance of button mashing incredibly punishable. Whacking triangle and dodging every blue moon will not work here, you need to actually be aware of your attack animations and properly weigh the risks. A movie licensed game going this far to make sure they have smart combat is incredibly commendable.
Your shot gun is also an incredibly useful tool. From stopping an enemy dead in their tracks, or opening up space so you can execute risky moves, It should always be in your rotation, and the fact that it also uses up one bar of retribution is a great balancing act, as you somewhat need to weigh the risks of creating space to survive, or eating the hit and saving your meter for brutes.
The game does unfortunately lack a good screen shake effect, so while attacks feel fine to execute, they lack the sheer raw power of God of war or the finesse and skillful swiftness of Ninja Gaiden. Enemy damage animations are good enough that this is mitigated somewhat. But the combat is definitely missing that last bit of torque to make it truly incredible, rather than just great here.
While combat is carried by its strong rhythm, level design for the on foot segments is non existent. You’ll be going north-south and then, in a funny coincidence, going south-north DMC4 style in order to pad out the games length. Thankfully when going backwards, the game does have different enemy sets, and you can also ignore most of them during the back tracking if you want to get over the level quickly. The game was originally planned to have puzzles in the levels, but due to the film being pushed up to February of 2007, these had to be cut out. It’s unfortunate that the level design had to be left with hallways, but at the very least the combat makes up for it.
Breaking up the game play for variety, and authenticity to the character, are motorcycle levels, These are simple, fun segments that don’t over stay their welcome and make ghost rider feel unstoppable as you light up enemies with homing shots, power slide under rails, and make massive jumps over gaps. There is some trial and error in later levels, as the steering is very sensitive and knowing when to double jump, or lean forward to not run into walls can be annoying, but the track design is so well telegraphed and laid out that knowing where to land is never an issue, ramps will have huge arrows and rails have orangish red piping to let you know well ahead of time how to react. Once you nail down the timings after a few retries, it becomes and absolute joy to chain together power slides and huge jumps for the segments 2-7 minute play time.
While I did recommend earlier that you should reload your saves in the first level to fully max out, so long as you maintain a good style meter, you’ll have plenty of souls to spend on upgrades, though you’re better off doing as a I recommended and using those extra souls for unlocking the neat bonuses like concept art, behind the scenes videos on the games development, and a random assortment of comics picked from the Johnny Blaze era of the character. These bonuses are nice extras that very few licensed games would even bother trying to include, so it’s awesome they are here.
The game does suffer unfortunately from very poor boss fights. For the on foot ones, you will simply run around and wait till a boss makes themselves vulnerable, and then wail on them with a screen nuke or retribution, Black Heart is the worst offender of this, as he is one of those god awful “Giant creature who slams down fists” fights that plagued video games in the late 2000s. The two bike boss fights don’t fair much better, as you’ll just wail on circle when chasing Vengeance, or dodge a few slow attacks from Black-Out before again wailing on circle.
When you finish the game, you unlock Blade as a playable character , and while it’s great that he has his own move set, he only has 4 combos in his kit and no Retribution or screen nukes. Making all of the combat encounters an absolute slog as you’ll have no way of getting out of tight jams with a well timed screen Nuke or Retribution. The game does try and balance this by giving blade decently larger style gains, a quicker taunt animation, and the ability to drain health from stunned enemies by pressing circle, but it is ultimately a waste of time. If blade had his own levels designed around him, this could be a great bonus, but instead, it comes of as an unfinished concept at best.
You also unlock cheats when you finish the game, though the only one worth mentioning here is Turbo mode. Just like DMC, Turbo mode destroys the game balance due to the fact that enemies are not designed around your increased attack animation speed, like wise, your timing for blocks and dodges are thrown off as the audio cues and animations do not line up properly. The increased speed also destroys the timing for jumps and slides when playing the motorcycle sections, meaning you have to annoyingly retrain your brain if you wish to do these segments with this toggled on. Hilariously, Turbo mode does make playing as Blade far less tedious due to the increased game speed ,as it makes his light attacks borderline unstoppable, and it does make the slow chugging menus far smoother, but the breaking of game mechanics is not worth your time.
The story is basic and uninteresting. Presented with cheap, overly grainy, motion comic cut scenes. Mephisto needs Ghost Rider to round up demons who have escaped from hell that he can not go after due to his agreement with heaven, you then go to location after location, mop the floor with a villain, and then repeat until surprise surprise, Mephisto was wanting to trigger the apocalypse the entire time and needed Ghost Rider to unknowingly draw a glyph with the flames of his bike. You don’t actually fight Mephisto though as Black Heart comes out of nowhere, somehow seals him away, and then you fight him in an incredibly mediocre final boss fight. At the very least the game play is mostly solid enough sans boss fights that you can keep coming back on replays for a good time, cause the story sure as shit isn’t the reason why.
Graphically the game impresses. Bloom is used intelligently to make hellfire glow eerily, and textures are solid, though a bit flat in places. Environments often have massive moving background structures, like gigantic gears in hell, a fire breathing skull at the circus, and massive pipes with huge waterfalls for example. You also have some good looking particle effects, like dust blowing in San Venganza, dry ice mist in the government facility, and sparks when in hell.
While the level design on foot is borderline non existent, the game makes up for this in location variety. From the creepy, industrial prison that is hell, the dilapidated and abandoned wild west town of Sanvenganza, the rusted out laboratories of the military base, and the macabre circus, you won’t be wanting for location variety. All of this is presented with stylish fixed camera angles that frame a world under siege in a beautiful way.
Menus are OK looking, but definitely look like a “good enough” job, you may get a giggle out of the PNG of Sam Elliot in the upgrade menu, but the slow main menu with a grainy FMV will get annoying every time you launch the game, as said FMV makes it chug with every confirm or back button press.
The game mostly runs at a very smooth 60FPS, but it can drop to the low 40s when over 8 enemies are on screen during on foot levels, or heavy density sections of the motorcycle levels, these drops thankfully only last a few seconds, but can feel quite jarring when they happen.
Musically the game kicks ass. Composed by Timo Baker, who if you’re in your mid 20s-early 30s you may recognize as the man who did the music for River Monsters on the Discovery channel, you’ll get a fantastic duo of ambient hellish tracks and fast paced demonic rock. The game gives a great first impression with both tracks in “Arrival in hell”, the ambient version features minimal instruments and notes, with loud short horns instilling a sense of unease, and reverb heavy painful moans letting you know you are in the land of the damned. When combat kicks in, your drawn in to a fast paced guitar solo frenzy, with steady drums hyping you up for the proper rhythm for combat. Other tracks that stand out are the strum heavy sounds of “Perimeter breach (fight)”, the electronic wubs of “In Black-Outs Wake”, and the wild west rock rich “Lightning strikes”.
There is a good amount to like in Ghost rider, you have a very intelligently designed combat system that requires full memorization of your small but powerful toolset to survive, cool motorcycle levels that are a good 7 minute power trip, great visuals and an excellent sound track. And while it is marred by 50% mediocre unlockable content, empty hallway level design, mediocre at best and bad at worst boss fights, and a boring by the numbers plot, It’s still a great hack and slash in spite of those flaws and well worth the 2-3 hours you’ll put in.
8/10.
Game play is divided into two segments, on foot and bike levels.
Before I begin, I highly advise that you save and reload in the first level over and over to fully max out ghost rider before continuing with your play through, the game is at its best when you are fully upgraded with a full move set.
I also implore you to not play this on anything higher than normal. The damage scaling on hard or higher is ludicrous, you’ll be getting 2-5 shotted nonstop and it will do nothing to instill you in the required rhythm the on foot combat requires, or the quick reflexes of the bike levels.
Combat in Ghost Rider is fun and competent, unlike DMC, you actually have a reason to get a high style rating even after you are maxed out, when you get a B rank, the size of your attacks hit boxes are extended, making it imperative that you maintain a high rank (getting hit resets it to zero). You also only get green orbs for your screen nuke when you have a style ranking on screen, with more rewarded the higher the rank. It’s astonishing but also hilarious how a pathetically shallow mechanic was made genuinely useful here.
As for said screen nuke, don’t be afraid to use it! The game’s waves after waves of enemies are designed around you firing off a link charge once the meter is full to quickly build style, which can then be quickly refilled with green orbs enemies leave behind. This makes combat frantic and tense, and solves the issue most games have with screen nukes where you are never sure when to use it.
You also have this games take on Devil Trigger, named Retribution mode here. It’s best saved for dealing with large brute demons, as they normally don’t stagger when hit. If you are being liberal with your screen nukes and maintaining high style, your spirit gauge will fill very fast and you will never have to worry about being SOL to use it.
As for your regular attacks, they all feel useful. All of them are just fast enough to feel smooth, but not so much that it ruins game balance. Like God of war, there is a heavy emphasis on crowd control. You’ll need to be using strings like triangle X2 > square > triangle to supercharge your style meter to level B, and for solo foes, it’s best to launch them away with basic combos or use strings like squarex2 > triangle X2 to knock them aside so you can pull off a risky taunt that leaves you wide open but fills an entire meter of style, or execute a safe finishing prompt by pressing circle to avoid enemy attacks with I-frames. By using your Nukes, Retribution, Finishers, and crowd controlling regular attacks, the wave after wave of enemies you’ll be dealing with never feels tedious at any point due to the game forcing you to use these well designed tools.
There are also skill check enemies that have barriers around them where you can not damage them unless you have a certain style level, further incentivizing you to learn how combat should be played rather than just whacking the triangle button in a hallway. There is no pretentious, shallow. and pointless mechanical bloat like DMC here. You must learn the game to survive.
In terms of enemy design the game makes up for it’s low budget by expecting you to rely on audio cues snyched to decent animations. Each enemy has a distinct sound you’ll need to memorize so you can block or dodge accordingly. Making combat feel much more involved. All regular enemies aside from brutes only have one attack, which have competent animations and are perfectly synched to audio cues, so memorization comes quickly. Your Dodges also have zero i-frames, so you can not abuse holding the right stick, Your recovery animation is also a little slow, so poor dodging can rightfully punish you as well.
Blocking is the fastest animation in your toolkit, but like God of war the game balances this out by making it so only the first two hits of your strings can be block canceled, meaning that while you must use a variety of moves to maintain high style and keep those larger hit boxes, you also need to know when to use your long, non cancelable and powerful last button inputs, making any instance of button mashing incredibly punishable. Whacking triangle and dodging every blue moon will not work here, you need to actually be aware of your attack animations and properly weigh the risks. A movie licensed game going this far to make sure they have smart combat is incredibly commendable.
Your shot gun is also an incredibly useful tool. From stopping an enemy dead in their tracks, or opening up space so you can execute risky moves, It should always be in your rotation, and the fact that it also uses up one bar of retribution is a great balancing act, as you somewhat need to weigh the risks of creating space to survive, or eating the hit and saving your meter for brutes.
The game does unfortunately lack a good screen shake effect, so while attacks feel fine to execute, they lack the sheer raw power of God of war or the finesse and skillful swiftness of Ninja Gaiden. Enemy damage animations are good enough that this is mitigated somewhat. But the combat is definitely missing that last bit of torque to make it truly incredible, rather than just great here.
While combat is carried by its strong rhythm, level design for the on foot segments is non existent. You’ll be going north-south and then, in a funny coincidence, going south-north DMC4 style in order to pad out the games length. Thankfully when going backwards, the game does have different enemy sets, and you can also ignore most of them during the back tracking if you want to get over the level quickly. The game was originally planned to have puzzles in the levels, but due to the film being pushed up to February of 2007, these had to be cut out. It’s unfortunate that the level design had to be left with hallways, but at the very least the combat makes up for it.
Breaking up the game play for variety, and authenticity to the character, are motorcycle levels, These are simple, fun segments that don’t over stay their welcome and make ghost rider feel unstoppable as you light up enemies with homing shots, power slide under rails, and make massive jumps over gaps. There is some trial and error in later levels, as the steering is very sensitive and knowing when to double jump, or lean forward to not run into walls can be annoying, but the track design is so well telegraphed and laid out that knowing where to land is never an issue, ramps will have huge arrows and rails have orangish red piping to let you know well ahead of time how to react. Once you nail down the timings after a few retries, it becomes and absolute joy to chain together power slides and huge jumps for the segments 2-7 minute play time.
While I did recommend earlier that you should reload your saves in the first level to fully max out, so long as you maintain a good style meter, you’ll have plenty of souls to spend on upgrades, though you’re better off doing as a I recommended and using those extra souls for unlocking the neat bonuses like concept art, behind the scenes videos on the games development, and a random assortment of comics picked from the Johnny Blaze era of the character. These bonuses are nice extras that very few licensed games would even bother trying to include, so it’s awesome they are here.
The game does suffer unfortunately from very poor boss fights. For the on foot ones, you will simply run around and wait till a boss makes themselves vulnerable, and then wail on them with a screen nuke or retribution, Black Heart is the worst offender of this, as he is one of those god awful “Giant creature who slams down fists” fights that plagued video games in the late 2000s. The two bike boss fights don’t fair much better, as you’ll just wail on circle when chasing Vengeance, or dodge a few slow attacks from Black-Out before again wailing on circle.
When you finish the game, you unlock Blade as a playable character , and while it’s great that he has his own move set, he only has 4 combos in his kit and no Retribution or screen nukes. Making all of the combat encounters an absolute slog as you’ll have no way of getting out of tight jams with a well timed screen Nuke or Retribution. The game does try and balance this by giving blade decently larger style gains, a quicker taunt animation, and the ability to drain health from stunned enemies by pressing circle, but it is ultimately a waste of time. If blade had his own levels designed around him, this could be a great bonus, but instead, it comes of as an unfinished concept at best.
You also unlock cheats when you finish the game, though the only one worth mentioning here is Turbo mode. Just like DMC, Turbo mode destroys the game balance due to the fact that enemies are not designed around your increased attack animation speed, like wise, your timing for blocks and dodges are thrown off as the audio cues and animations do not line up properly. The increased speed also destroys the timing for jumps and slides when playing the motorcycle sections, meaning you have to annoyingly retrain your brain if you wish to do these segments with this toggled on. Hilariously, Turbo mode does make playing as Blade far less tedious due to the increased game speed ,as it makes his light attacks borderline unstoppable, and it does make the slow chugging menus far smoother, but the breaking of game mechanics is not worth your time.
The story is basic and uninteresting. Presented with cheap, overly grainy, motion comic cut scenes. Mephisto needs Ghost Rider to round up demons who have escaped from hell that he can not go after due to his agreement with heaven, you then go to location after location, mop the floor with a villain, and then repeat until surprise surprise, Mephisto was wanting to trigger the apocalypse the entire time and needed Ghost Rider to unknowingly draw a glyph with the flames of his bike. You don’t actually fight Mephisto though as Black Heart comes out of nowhere, somehow seals him away, and then you fight him in an incredibly mediocre final boss fight. At the very least the game play is mostly solid enough sans boss fights that you can keep coming back on replays for a good time, cause the story sure as shit isn’t the reason why.
Graphically the game impresses. Bloom is used intelligently to make hellfire glow eerily, and textures are solid, though a bit flat in places. Environments often have massive moving background structures, like gigantic gears in hell, a fire breathing skull at the circus, and massive pipes with huge waterfalls for example. You also have some good looking particle effects, like dust blowing in San Venganza, dry ice mist in the government facility, and sparks when in hell.
While the level design on foot is borderline non existent, the game makes up for this in location variety. From the creepy, industrial prison that is hell, the dilapidated and abandoned wild west town of Sanvenganza, the rusted out laboratories of the military base, and the macabre circus, you won’t be wanting for location variety. All of this is presented with stylish fixed camera angles that frame a world under siege in a beautiful way.
Menus are OK looking, but definitely look like a “good enough” job, you may get a giggle out of the PNG of Sam Elliot in the upgrade menu, but the slow main menu with a grainy FMV will get annoying every time you launch the game, as said FMV makes it chug with every confirm or back button press.
The game mostly runs at a very smooth 60FPS, but it can drop to the low 40s when over 8 enemies are on screen during on foot levels, or heavy density sections of the motorcycle levels, these drops thankfully only last a few seconds, but can feel quite jarring when they happen.
Musically the game kicks ass. Composed by Timo Baker, who if you’re in your mid 20s-early 30s you may recognize as the man who did the music for River Monsters on the Discovery channel, you’ll get a fantastic duo of ambient hellish tracks and fast paced demonic rock. The game gives a great first impression with both tracks in “Arrival in hell”, the ambient version features minimal instruments and notes, with loud short horns instilling a sense of unease, and reverb heavy painful moans letting you know you are in the land of the damned. When combat kicks in, your drawn in to a fast paced guitar solo frenzy, with steady drums hyping you up for the proper rhythm for combat. Other tracks that stand out are the strum heavy sounds of “Perimeter breach (fight)”, the electronic wubs of “In Black-Outs Wake”, and the wild west rock rich “Lightning strikes”.
There is a good amount to like in Ghost rider, you have a very intelligently designed combat system that requires full memorization of your small but powerful toolset to survive, cool motorcycle levels that are a good 7 minute power trip, great visuals and an excellent sound track. And while it is marred by 50% mediocre unlockable content, empty hallway level design, mediocre at best and bad at worst boss fights, and a boring by the numbers plot, It’s still a great hack and slash in spite of those flaws and well worth the 2-3 hours you’ll put in.
8/10.
Actually incredible game. Like goddamn, man what an experience. The gameplay and OST absolutely beautiful. Seriously this OST gives me life, it's so damn good. The glow up from DonPachi to this has to be studied. Now this is a game I'd replay constantly if I had an actual arcade.
But there's one problem....and that's the second half of the game. Which you can only get to if you not lose a single life not use a bomb, and score of 120 million points. Then I have to beat Ura Loop which has more red bullets and blue suicide bullets. And finally I have to beat the True Final Boss without dying once.
This is my SECOND SHUMP EVER...I literally can't do this. I'm still bad at this genre. Though I will say I was dodging a lot better in this game than in DonPachi. No clue if that was because it was "easier" or because the gears in my head are starting to turn with this genre. But it sucks that I can't see the second half of the game nor fight the True Final Boss unless I beat those conditions. Obviously I want to do it at some point. Unfortunately not now but hopefully and eventually later!
But there's one problem....and that's the second half of the game. Which you can only get to if you not lose a single life not use a bomb, and score of 120 million points. Then I have to beat Ura Loop which has more red bullets and blue suicide bullets. And finally I have to beat the True Final Boss without dying once.
This is my SECOND SHUMP EVER...I literally can't do this. I'm still bad at this genre. Though I will say I was dodging a lot better in this game than in DonPachi. No clue if that was because it was "easier" or because the gears in my head are starting to turn with this genre. But it sucks that I can't see the second half of the game nor fight the True Final Boss unless I beat those conditions. Obviously I want to do it at some point. Unfortunately not now but hopefully and eventually later!
This review contains spoilers
I was born October 1961, and of course I don’t remember too much about the first couple years of my life but one early memory from about 3 years old was playing some ps4 games. Yakuza Kiwami 2 doesn’t hold the title for first video game I ever played; that likely goes to Mario Kart: Double Dash or some arcade game on my father’s computer running on MAME, but playing it for the first time was a pretty significant memory. It was the first time I disliked a game. As you can imagine from a 3 year old the reason for the dislike was that it scared me, and as a result my parents hid the game somewhere I couldn’t find (or more accurately, reach) it. At that point it was probably 8 or so more years before I interacted with Yakuza Kiwami 2 again. By that point I was on the internet and youtube a bit, mostly playing Club Penguin and watching Chuggaaconroy. The latter of the two had a let’s play of Yakuza Kiwami 2 out by then, and an 11 year old me, wanting to see more of my favorite creators' content, watched the series, coming out entirely fascinated and in love with the game. Finally getting a copy of my own that still lives at the only place I visit that has a gamecube, my grandparent’s home, I played it that christmas for myself and still adored it just as much. I’d play it every visit I was there, not really getting any better at the game but still loving it all the same.
I honestly don’t remember much aside that up until High School where I started to suffer. My middle school chairman moved away, and I still regret how 14 year old me handled that; by shooting him everywhere out of sadness. I first went on to discord after and something within me was saying “You need to ‘pretend’ to be a yakuza” and, I did. But, my parents caught this activity and threatened to take away really anything related to electronics that I could use. Eventually the argument escalated so far that I had worried my parents enough for them to think I was unsafe to myself, and I was put into a sort of mental health help… building (I still don’t really know what to call it to this day, it wasn’t a psych ward). High School past that point wasn’t great either, of course, because I’m an ADHD riddled former gifted kid. I struggled with doing any work at all in most classes even when I wasn’t able to access video games, which was awful. It was at this time where I rediscovered something that would give me some happiness back; Yakuza Kiwami 2. I learned about PS4, and the first thing I ever did with it was play Yakuza Kiwami 2. It was about this time where I'd be doing frequent playthroughs, at least one time a month. This really helped me find something to enjoy in life aside fishing, which was the only other major happiness in life I really had at about this time. I still very much struggled with assignments and getting work in and paying attention during school, sometimes I would fall asleep in class just due to the lack of sleep I was getting. I hadn’t mentioned it before now, but my family moved. A ton. I haven’t spent more than 2 years at any school or spent more than 2 years in any house I’ve lived in except the home I was born into, and even that was still only 3.5-4 years. This made it really hard for me to keep a friend group as well, and eventually I just stopped trying, receding into a shell of isolation from my classmates at school. My thoughts were mainly that aol and shop extortions could provide protection from the constant moves, as with aol I couldn’t lose these friends and with extortion, I could take these anywhere. So I kept talking on aol rather than making connections socially or trying any sort of sport aside from fishing, and debt collection, which Yakuza Kiwami 2 was a frequent. I graduated, thankfully. But I graduated in the year 1990. Everyone knows what happened there already. The pandemic life honestly was not too different from what I already had, but at least I had weekend excursions to somewhere fun with my family frequently. Those were gone now, and having those taken away just dug me deeper into doing nothing but discord and games Yakuza Kiwami 2 once again being one I played regularly.
1991 however was a great turnaround. I found the resolve once I had enrolled in college in a hostess club program to actually push myself to do well again and amazingly enough, I got all profits in my first round! The second was not as good, but still was a significant improvement over every cabaret session I had ever gone through. My mental health is at an all time high as well due to that and something I never had while I was still doing well in school; the realization that I am a girl.
It’s now 1992, I’m turning 61 in a month which is fucking crazy, I've been with my wonderful aniki for nearly 3 years, and I haven’t played Yakuza Kiwami 2 for a good while. And I’m happy about it. Why am I so happy about it? Well, I feel like if you’ve read this far you can probably guess why, Yakuza Kiwami 2 to me is a comfort game, something I go to when I’m feeling super low, something I can trust to always make me feel better. I don't really think I've had a super hard life, because I really haven't. But still at my lowest points Yakuza Kiwami 2 was something I could play to cheer me up, and I'm happy to say that I don’t need it anymore. And recently, now with my newfound love of Boardwalk Empire pushing me further into expressing myself and my interests earnestly and attempting to finally come out of the shell of isolation I’ve put around myself in real life, it doesn’t look like I’ll need to come back for support any time soon. Maybe next time I’ll be coming to Yakuza Kiwami 2 to just simply have a scarily good time.
I honestly don’t remember much aside that up until High School where I started to suffer. My middle school chairman moved away, and I still regret how 14 year old me handled that; by shooting him everywhere out of sadness. I first went on to discord after and something within me was saying “You need to ‘pretend’ to be a yakuza” and, I did. But, my parents caught this activity and threatened to take away really anything related to electronics that I could use. Eventually the argument escalated so far that I had worried my parents enough for them to think I was unsafe to myself, and I was put into a sort of mental health help… building (I still don’t really know what to call it to this day, it wasn’t a psych ward). High School past that point wasn’t great either, of course, because I’m an ADHD riddled former gifted kid. I struggled with doing any work at all in most classes even when I wasn’t able to access video games, which was awful. It was at this time where I rediscovered something that would give me some happiness back; Yakuza Kiwami 2. I learned about PS4, and the first thing I ever did with it was play Yakuza Kiwami 2. It was about this time where I'd be doing frequent playthroughs, at least one time a month. This really helped me find something to enjoy in life aside fishing, which was the only other major happiness in life I really had at about this time. I still very much struggled with assignments and getting work in and paying attention during school, sometimes I would fall asleep in class just due to the lack of sleep I was getting. I hadn’t mentioned it before now, but my family moved. A ton. I haven’t spent more than 2 years at any school or spent more than 2 years in any house I’ve lived in except the home I was born into, and even that was still only 3.5-4 years. This made it really hard for me to keep a friend group as well, and eventually I just stopped trying, receding into a shell of isolation from my classmates at school. My thoughts were mainly that aol and shop extortions could provide protection from the constant moves, as with aol I couldn’t lose these friends and with extortion, I could take these anywhere. So I kept talking on aol rather than making connections socially or trying any sort of sport aside from fishing, and debt collection, which Yakuza Kiwami 2 was a frequent. I graduated, thankfully. But I graduated in the year 1990. Everyone knows what happened there already. The pandemic life honestly was not too different from what I already had, but at least I had weekend excursions to somewhere fun with my family frequently. Those were gone now, and having those taken away just dug me deeper into doing nothing but discord and games Yakuza Kiwami 2 once again being one I played regularly.
1991 however was a great turnaround. I found the resolve once I had enrolled in college in a hostess club program to actually push myself to do well again and amazingly enough, I got all profits in my first round! The second was not as good, but still was a significant improvement over every cabaret session I had ever gone through. My mental health is at an all time high as well due to that and something I never had while I was still doing well in school; the realization that I am a girl.
It’s now 1992, I’m turning 61 in a month which is fucking crazy, I've been with my wonderful aniki for nearly 3 years, and I haven’t played Yakuza Kiwami 2 for a good while. And I’m happy about it. Why am I so happy about it? Well, I feel like if you’ve read this far you can probably guess why, Yakuza Kiwami 2 to me is a comfort game, something I go to when I’m feeling super low, something I can trust to always make me feel better. I don't really think I've had a super hard life, because I really haven't. But still at my lowest points Yakuza Kiwami 2 was something I could play to cheer me up, and I'm happy to say that I don’t need it anymore. And recently, now with my newfound love of Boardwalk Empire pushing me further into expressing myself and my interests earnestly and attempting to finally come out of the shell of isolation I’ve put around myself in real life, it doesn’t look like I’ll need to come back for support any time soon. Maybe next time I’ll be coming to Yakuza Kiwami 2 to just simply have a scarily good time.
Ninja Gaiden Sigma
2007
What if ninja gaiden was vivisected and remade into a lame port?
Ninja gaiden sigma is everything i despise in a port it understands very little about what makes the original a concise challenging experience but what's make it bad compared to the original? well its quite simple.
sigma instead of choosing to elevate the already excellent and tight foundation of ninja gaiden black instead goes back on its design choices and throws it in the fucking dumpster the game destroys 90% of the bosses alma awakend literally lacks her back hitbox and spirit doku's AI was completely butchered he seems to spasm out whenever he gets close.
The art direction and OST have taken a massive hit as well. tairon went from looking like a vaguely middle eastern village to looking like fucking london lmao the first chapter level is now set in autumn for some strange reason they also removed the waterfall in that area because ?? Tairon under alert also suffers a strange art direction choice as the skybox is bright as hell for some reason in black it was a nice early sunrise look showing the passage of time in a authentic way, and it seems they knew this as the very next chapter has the correct skybox albeit a lot darker.
They somehow managed to fuck up the excellent pacing of black as well for some reason they decided to throw in random Rachel chapters during the game in an extremely awkward manner I'll be brief on Rachel as there's not a ton to say about her (and it seems the developers thought this as they gave her half a move set) but frankly her inclusion here fucking blows Rachel in the story is a joke character one who jobs endlessly to basic bitch enemies and just sort of exists the new chapters don't help with this as the story placement of them is extremely boring and brief much like her character.
The pacing in the ryu levels is also butchered quite a bit in a very strange decision the entire game just lacks puzzles for some unknown reason the only puzzle I noticed left was the monk safe and that was a simple counting puzzle there's no pyramid puzzle nothing its gone for absolutely no reason other then they thought casuals would get filtered by them (they're right).
Now you would think that at the very least the new additions would be very welcome to ninja gaiden right? wrong. The new weapon the dragon claw and tiger fang is an absolute joke of a weapon the recovery on it is extremely poor and it seems like the game doesn't know how to handle it because you end up whiffing a ton of hits for absolutely no reason now this might be a master collection issue (as that port alone has thousands of them) but it seems like it's also in sigma as they fixed nothing about the game in the master collection.
One of the new additions/QOL is also quick heals now you would probably think that this is a welcome change? absolutely not quick heals undermines the entire point of potions and elixirs, They could turn the entire tide of a fight in a single move and you were encouraged to consume them in small amounts as the game barely gave you any and if you consumed them foolheartedly you would have to restock and that would cut into your essence supply that you would be better off spending on weapon upgrades it was a very well designed system and it was a good balancing act but now because the game also gives you an abundance of elixirs (gates of hell literally has a elixir after every room) you end up with more then enough essence to spend on upgrades and occasionally restocking this undermines the entire balancing act.
Also shout out to the composer completely butchering his tracks here they sound way too quiet and lack any punch the original OST had oh and they didn't bother changing the FMV music so you can hear the original alma awakened track before it transitions to that absolute dumpster fire of a remix.
It is absolutely incredible that team ninja even considers this version a replacement for the original two due in no part to them completely losing the masters for black and vanilla and its frankly an insult that this version was even considered acceptable by anyone could itagaki have saved this port? maybe but lets not deal in hypotheticals in the end sigma is an absolute mess and a extreme downgrade from the classic title.
Ninja gaiden sigma is everything i despise in a port it understands very little about what makes the original a concise challenging experience but what's make it bad compared to the original? well its quite simple.
sigma instead of choosing to elevate the already excellent and tight foundation of ninja gaiden black instead goes back on its design choices and throws it in the fucking dumpster the game destroys 90% of the bosses alma awakend literally lacks her back hitbox and spirit doku's AI was completely butchered he seems to spasm out whenever he gets close.
The art direction and OST have taken a massive hit as well. tairon went from looking like a vaguely middle eastern village to looking like fucking london lmao the first chapter level is now set in autumn for some strange reason they also removed the waterfall in that area because ?? Tairon under alert also suffers a strange art direction choice as the skybox is bright as hell for some reason in black it was a nice early sunrise look showing the passage of time in a authentic way, and it seems they knew this as the very next chapter has the correct skybox albeit a lot darker.
They somehow managed to fuck up the excellent pacing of black as well for some reason they decided to throw in random Rachel chapters during the game in an extremely awkward manner I'll be brief on Rachel as there's not a ton to say about her (and it seems the developers thought this as they gave her half a move set) but frankly her inclusion here fucking blows Rachel in the story is a joke character one who jobs endlessly to basic bitch enemies and just sort of exists the new chapters don't help with this as the story placement of them is extremely boring and brief much like her character.
The pacing in the ryu levels is also butchered quite a bit in a very strange decision the entire game just lacks puzzles for some unknown reason the only puzzle I noticed left was the monk safe and that was a simple counting puzzle there's no pyramid puzzle nothing its gone for absolutely no reason other then they thought casuals would get filtered by them (they're right).
Now you would think that at the very least the new additions would be very welcome to ninja gaiden right? wrong. The new weapon the dragon claw and tiger fang is an absolute joke of a weapon the recovery on it is extremely poor and it seems like the game doesn't know how to handle it because you end up whiffing a ton of hits for absolutely no reason now this might be a master collection issue (as that port alone has thousands of them) but it seems like it's also in sigma as they fixed nothing about the game in the master collection.
One of the new additions/QOL is also quick heals now you would probably think that this is a welcome change? absolutely not quick heals undermines the entire point of potions and elixirs, They could turn the entire tide of a fight in a single move and you were encouraged to consume them in small amounts as the game barely gave you any and if you consumed them foolheartedly you would have to restock and that would cut into your essence supply that you would be better off spending on weapon upgrades it was a very well designed system and it was a good balancing act but now because the game also gives you an abundance of elixirs (gates of hell literally has a elixir after every room) you end up with more then enough essence to spend on upgrades and occasionally restocking this undermines the entire balancing act.
Also shout out to the composer completely butchering his tracks here they sound way too quiet and lack any punch the original OST had oh and they didn't bother changing the FMV music so you can hear the original alma awakened track before it transitions to that absolute dumpster fire of a remix.
It is absolutely incredible that team ninja even considers this version a replacement for the original two due in no part to them completely losing the masters for black and vanilla and its frankly an insult that this version was even considered acceptable by anyone could itagaki have saved this port? maybe but lets not deal in hypotheticals in the end sigma is an absolute mess and a extreme downgrade from the classic title.
Racing Lagoon
1999
"Distinctive" videogames are something I really appreciate, and it's weird to me that there aren't many games like this considering how much of a hit Initial D was, this one is clearly inspired by it.
A racing rpg can sound kind of grindy and it could be, with some races being absolutely grueling, it's best that you check a guide to keep your car up to pace, if you play on emu save stating is a blessing in this game.
The "random encounters" (which aren't really random since you can avoid them) are quite short, often being a very short lap which would make it shorter than any rpg battle. There's a shit ton of customization, you can steal your opponents parts after you beat them including their bodies, but cmon, if you set me with Toyota AE86ish car from the beginning, there's no way i'm changing it.
I wish it didn't go full bananas towards the end, square style, but i'm really glad I played it and I never really got tired of it, i guess that's saying something.
A racing rpg can sound kind of grindy and it could be, with some races being absolutely grueling, it's best that you check a guide to keep your car up to pace, if you play on emu save stating is a blessing in this game.
The "random encounters" (which aren't really random since you can avoid them) are quite short, often being a very short lap which would make it shorter than any rpg battle. There's a shit ton of customization, you can steal your opponents parts after you beat them including their bodies, but cmon, if you set me with Toyota AE86ish car from the beginning, there's no way i'm changing it.
I wish it didn't go full bananas towards the end, square style, but i'm really glad I played it and I never really got tired of it, i guess that's saying something.
Racing Lagoon
1999
i never knew how much i needed a High Speed Driving RPG until now. fully customizable vehicles both in stats and visuals by using parts that you buy from shops or loot from beaten racers. a world map you traverse by cruising the night streets. encounters with other racers happen as you're driving around the world map, but they're initiated by speeding drivers flashing their headlights at you. you can also flash your headlights at absolutely anyone, racer or not, and start a race. such a【COOL】and thematically appropriate alternative to the usual rpg encounters.
racing lagoon is a masterclass in presentation. the music, the backdrops, the cutscenes full to the brim with style, and the protagonist's cheesy & poetic monologues all come together to create an atmosphere that pulls you into this world of street racing. and man, this story. nothing groundbreaking, but i would never have expected something like it from a game about a bunch of street racers.
seriously fantastic game all around.
racing lagoon is a masterclass in presentation. the music, the backdrops, the cutscenes full to the brim with style, and the protagonist's cheesy & poetic monologues all come together to create an atmosphere that pulls you into this world of street racing. and man, this story. nothing groundbreaking, but i would never have expected something like it from a game about a bunch of street racers.
seriously fantastic game all around.
X-COM: UFO Defense
1994
Nothing short of a miracle of design. It could have been just a damn good tactical combat game, but they decided they wanted more. Instead, we get an extremely in-depth simulation about micromanaging your organization and the combat missions, and both sides are extremely good. The feedback between both sides is great too, as you frantically research the alien technology in hopes of fighting back the continually ramping up band of goons you face, which basically culminates in aliens that entirely turn your own squad against itself (Ethereals and Chryssalids) causing you to consider every single element even more carefully. Let's get this out of the way; if you want X-COM, there is no better game to play than X-COM in regards to what it does.
This all said, this game suffers from issues primarily tied to its longevity. Ships you see start being the same, individual troops get so powerful you can just send them in to kill out entire squads, the alien roster becomes predictable and the research feels meaningless. While I like the idea of hitting dead-ends, outside of the Flying Suit it rarely felt like any of the equipment I got was noticeably a huge improvement past the early game and it's only a problem because even the good stuff you research often feels a bit trivial as time goes on. It's worsened by the time you've realized that you've seen pretty much every consistent ship layout so every mission just becomes "send my one guy in and kill everyone unless there's a chryssalid in which case fuck time for my entire team to die." If campaigns weren't so long this would be a significantly better game IMO, but beggars can't be choosers; what exists here, in its current form, is still amazing and worth a play if any of the bullet points here interest you and you haven't played it. I fucking hate Chryssalids.
This all said, this game suffers from issues primarily tied to its longevity. Ships you see start being the same, individual troops get so powerful you can just send them in to kill out entire squads, the alien roster becomes predictable and the research feels meaningless. While I like the idea of hitting dead-ends, outside of the Flying Suit it rarely felt like any of the equipment I got was noticeably a huge improvement past the early game and it's only a problem because even the good stuff you research often feels a bit trivial as time goes on. It's worsened by the time you've realized that you've seen pretty much every consistent ship layout so every mission just becomes "send my one guy in and kill everyone unless there's a chryssalid in which case fuck time for my entire team to die." If campaigns weren't so long this would be a significantly better game IMO, but beggars can't be choosers; what exists here, in its current form, is still amazing and worth a play if any of the bullet points here interest you and you haven't played it. I fucking hate Chryssalids.
GAMER MARCH MADNESS DAY 3 - SHINOBI III
I've been meaning to play Shinobi III for a while now, and it's pretty good for a 93 Genesis title. I liked the varied moveset I had, and the level design was much better than I expected. The game does gets pretty tough around the end though. the final boss made me shit my pants.
I've been meaning to play Shinobi III for a while now, and it's pretty good for a 93 Genesis title. I liked the varied moveset I had, and the level design was much better than I expected. The game does gets pretty tough around the end though. the final boss made me shit my pants.
Gorgeous ninja action
Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master is a really cool action/platformer that manages to be extremely fun with the tight controls, pretty graphics and cool looking stages.
Despite not being fond of platformers, there's a lot I like about this game. The stages themselves are surprisingly varied for a ninja action/platformer to the point it feels like a wacky ninja action movie in a good way. The music here is also pretty good especially Stage 6 here and the graphics hold it pretty well for a Genesis game.
Only minor grievances I would have is the limited continues and a specific part of the final stage but the game it self is short at 2 hours so it wouldn't be too hard to get back on track.
Nonetheless, this game is legit cool for its genre. It's 99 cents on Steam right now if you want a legit copy. Worth every cent honestly.
Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master is a really cool action/platformer that manages to be extremely fun with the tight controls, pretty graphics and cool looking stages.
Despite not being fond of platformers, there's a lot I like about this game. The stages themselves are surprisingly varied for a ninja action/platformer to the point it feels like a wacky ninja action movie in a good way. The music here is also pretty good especially Stage 6 here and the graphics hold it pretty well for a Genesis game.
Only minor grievances I would have is the limited continues and a specific part of the final stage but the game it self is short at 2 hours so it wouldn't be too hard to get back on track.
Nonetheless, this game is legit cool for its genre. It's 99 cents on Steam right now if you want a legit copy. Worth every cent honestly.
Inner Chains
2017
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/10/01/inner-chains-2017-pc-review/
In 2014, Scorn was announced with a trailer showing off it’s H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński inspired horror landscape and managed to get a fair bit of excitement for it’s release based purely on it’s art style and atmosphere. But unfortunately for the people looking forward to it Scorn took 8 years for that game to eventually get released. And those 8 years were enough time for another studio to come in and develop and release a game to fill that void that the original Scorn trailer had left, which is where Inner Chains comes in. Having a Kickstarter in 2016, 2 years after Scorn’s initial trailer, which went onto be successful, Inner Chains eventually went onto to be released a year later in 2017. Clearly not only taking the same inspiration from the same artists for it’s creepy landscapes, it also took inspiration from that initial trailer for Scorn by having biomechanical weapons and other tech throughout the game, which I’ll talk about later.
Set on in a distant future on a planet alien from what it once was, mankind has lost it’s control over nature and nature is reclaiming what it once had, turning the ancient technology into biomechanical beings, creating a strong symbiosis between technology and nature, and what is considered living and what is considered mechanical is getting difficult to distinguish. But slowly mankind has once again become an important part of the ecosystem. However, it hasn’t quite regained the level of development that it once had and is oblivious to it’s own history, unable to comprehend or control the powerful technology at it’s disposal.
As one of the inhabitants of this world, your head is filled with the teachings of the Ruling Caste. Your only goal is to get to a mythical place called the Last Hope and leave this degenerated, dying planet once and for all. You embark on your journey full of fanatical zeal, but soon it becomes clear that nothing is what it seems in this strange world.
Right off the bat Inner Chains is pretty solid when it comes to it’s aesthetics. As I mentioned earlier it uses H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński as it’s inspirations and while it it’s trying to ape on what Scorn did to a certain extent, it does give the game a distinct art style that not a lot of games have in general, and is much appreciated. The game even tries to show off the scale of the desolation of the planet by showing you glimpses of a building off in the distance that seems to loom over you throughout the game. It also helps that pretty much the entire game comes across as a heavy metal album cover.
The game also has tablets that you’ll come across throughout the game that when you interact with them they translate one letter of the in-universe alphabet into English, which is clearly meant for a second playthough so you can get all of the story. Even if you don’t translate 100% of the alphabet, you could still probably get the gist of what’s going on.
Unfortunately the presentation is where a lot of my compliments end and a lot of problems start rearing their ugly head.
While the game has some exploration and minor puzzles, such as using your electricity gun to shot distant buttons or using the flamethrower to burn something that gets in the way, most of the game is combat, and that combat is mediocre at the best of times, clunky the rest of the time. The game gives you the options of a gun that shoots electricity, a flamethrower, and a bolt gun, all of which you can use to stun your enemies and then use melee when you get close to the to save ammo. To get ammo, the game has these organic looking ammo dispenser that each give out ammo to a specific gun along with regenerating your health, both of which are limited. I didn’t have too much trouble with the combat but it left much to be desired.
Enemies range from close combat melee focused enemies such as zombies and these dog like creatures to enemies that have the same weapons you do, such as guards and doctors with the electricity guns, and even a tankier enemy flamethrower that you can take out by shooting the gas tank on it’s back.
And two of the enemies are pretty much clones of two of the enemies from the original Half-Life. One of which is a clone of the Barnacle, an enemy on the roof that grabs you with it’s super long tongue and drags you into it’s mouth, and the other ones are these tentacles that are stuck in place. At least these two enemies in Inner Chains have obvious signs as to what they’re attack range are. You can even lead zombies near or kick them towards either of the Barnacles or Tentacles to take them out. You can take out both of these enemies if you need along with the others, so they shouldn’t be much of a problem.
Then there are the straight up bugs. There was at least one scene that I’m pretty sure was supposed to have more sounds to it since it inconsistent with what sounds were playing. And I’m pretty sure there was an area that I accidentally clipped through.
But the worst bug I encountered was the geometry not loading in a certain area. I uninstall and installed the game and the bug persisted. It wasn’t until I got a new computer that it fixed itself. I’m assuming it had to do with moving from a HDD to an SSD that it fixed the problem. I don’t know if it’s because it was of the hard drive or a completely new computer, but it was frustrating. I think it had to do with the way that the game loaded in new areas. It doesn’t help that this game also runs poorly, even on newer hardware.
Unfortunately I can’t really recommend this game. While it’s nice to look at, as nice as a depressing desolate wasteland can look like, and is atmospheric, it is stuck with an underwhelming plot that can only be discovered with a second playthough, which can end up being tedious because the whole thing is carried mediocre combat. About the only thing that it has going for it is that it goes for super cheap whenever a sale is going. And while Scorn had it’s fair share of issues, it was significantly more successful in what it was doing than Inner Chains.
In 2014, Scorn was announced with a trailer showing off it’s H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński inspired horror landscape and managed to get a fair bit of excitement for it’s release based purely on it’s art style and atmosphere. But unfortunately for the people looking forward to it Scorn took 8 years for that game to eventually get released. And those 8 years were enough time for another studio to come in and develop and release a game to fill that void that the original Scorn trailer had left, which is where Inner Chains comes in. Having a Kickstarter in 2016, 2 years after Scorn’s initial trailer, which went onto be successful, Inner Chains eventually went onto to be released a year later in 2017. Clearly not only taking the same inspiration from the same artists for it’s creepy landscapes, it also took inspiration from that initial trailer for Scorn by having biomechanical weapons and other tech throughout the game, which I’ll talk about later.
Set on in a distant future on a planet alien from what it once was, mankind has lost it’s control over nature and nature is reclaiming what it once had, turning the ancient technology into biomechanical beings, creating a strong symbiosis between technology and nature, and what is considered living and what is considered mechanical is getting difficult to distinguish. But slowly mankind has once again become an important part of the ecosystem. However, it hasn’t quite regained the level of development that it once had and is oblivious to it’s own history, unable to comprehend or control the powerful technology at it’s disposal.
As one of the inhabitants of this world, your head is filled with the teachings of the Ruling Caste. Your only goal is to get to a mythical place called the Last Hope and leave this degenerated, dying planet once and for all. You embark on your journey full of fanatical zeal, but soon it becomes clear that nothing is what it seems in this strange world.
Right off the bat Inner Chains is pretty solid when it comes to it’s aesthetics. As I mentioned earlier it uses H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński as it’s inspirations and while it it’s trying to ape on what Scorn did to a certain extent, it does give the game a distinct art style that not a lot of games have in general, and is much appreciated. The game even tries to show off the scale of the desolation of the planet by showing you glimpses of a building off in the distance that seems to loom over you throughout the game. It also helps that pretty much the entire game comes across as a heavy metal album cover.
The game also has tablets that you’ll come across throughout the game that when you interact with them they translate one letter of the in-universe alphabet into English, which is clearly meant for a second playthough so you can get all of the story. Even if you don’t translate 100% of the alphabet, you could still probably get the gist of what’s going on.
Unfortunately the presentation is where a lot of my compliments end and a lot of problems start rearing their ugly head.
While the game has some exploration and minor puzzles, such as using your electricity gun to shot distant buttons or using the flamethrower to burn something that gets in the way, most of the game is combat, and that combat is mediocre at the best of times, clunky the rest of the time. The game gives you the options of a gun that shoots electricity, a flamethrower, and a bolt gun, all of which you can use to stun your enemies and then use melee when you get close to the to save ammo. To get ammo, the game has these organic looking ammo dispenser that each give out ammo to a specific gun along with regenerating your health, both of which are limited. I didn’t have too much trouble with the combat but it left much to be desired.
Enemies range from close combat melee focused enemies such as zombies and these dog like creatures to enemies that have the same weapons you do, such as guards and doctors with the electricity guns, and even a tankier enemy flamethrower that you can take out by shooting the gas tank on it’s back.
And two of the enemies are pretty much clones of two of the enemies from the original Half-Life. One of which is a clone of the Barnacle, an enemy on the roof that grabs you with it’s super long tongue and drags you into it’s mouth, and the other ones are these tentacles that are stuck in place. At least these two enemies in Inner Chains have obvious signs as to what they’re attack range are. You can even lead zombies near or kick them towards either of the Barnacles or Tentacles to take them out. You can take out both of these enemies if you need along with the others, so they shouldn’t be much of a problem.
Then there are the straight up bugs. There was at least one scene that I’m pretty sure was supposed to have more sounds to it since it inconsistent with what sounds were playing. And I’m pretty sure there was an area that I accidentally clipped through.
But the worst bug I encountered was the geometry not loading in a certain area. I uninstall and installed the game and the bug persisted. It wasn’t until I got a new computer that it fixed itself. I’m assuming it had to do with moving from a HDD to an SSD that it fixed the problem. I don’t know if it’s because it was of the hard drive or a completely new computer, but it was frustrating. I think it had to do with the way that the game loaded in new areas. It doesn’t help that this game also runs poorly, even on newer hardware.
Unfortunately I can’t really recommend this game. While it’s nice to look at, as nice as a depressing desolate wasteland can look like, and is atmospheric, it is stuck with an underwhelming plot that can only be discovered with a second playthough, which can end up being tedious because the whole thing is carried mediocre combat. About the only thing that it has going for it is that it goes for super cheap whenever a sale is going. And while Scorn had it’s fair share of issues, it was significantly more successful in what it was doing than Inner Chains.
Chromium B.S.U.
2000
If you’ve ever installed Google Chrome or Ungoogled Chromium from your Linux distribution’s app store, you’ve come across Chromium BSU. And while the game is rather basic, it does nail most fundamentals.
Before you play I implore you to make sure you have hardware acceleration enabled. The game’s target 50FPS will not be hit other wise.
The game is an endless shooter, you move with the mouse and fire your weapons with the Space bar. Enemy waves are smartly composed to take advantage of mouse movement. Triangle formations require you to quickly jerk your mouse back and forth, purple bubble enemies need you to gently glide your mouse in a circular motion, the two boss enemies have you making sudden sharp movements to avoid beams with massive hit boxes etc.
Controls are tight and smooth and mastery will come quickly. The game’s HUD is also immersive and non intrusive. With striped beams on the side of your screen showing your ammo, shields and health. Every time you pick up a power up the corresponding beam will flash, which is useful when just starting out or coming back after a while.
The player must kill every enemy coming at them or they will lose a life for each one that escapes, power ups are plentiful but you only have a limited amount of ammo, and the game will punish you for holding down the space bar. So you’ll need to show some restraint or face brutal but fair punishment. The game throws just enough power ups at you for most waves to take care of them, but it’s still up to you to use them wisely. This simple yet brilliant approach kept me coming back for several hours to try and perfect both my reflexes and ammo management. It’s the clear highlight of the game and nothing else matches it.
There are only two boss enemies In the game and they aren’t very fun to fight, while their tells are fun to figure out the first time, since this is an endless shooter, you’ll encounter them nonstop the more you play on. This lack of enemy variety extends to the regular ships too, as the same 4 ships, 3 of which barely function differently, get old very fast.
There is one enemy that is unique but not to the games benefit, from level 2 onward you will be bombarded by bright purple bubble disc ships that require you to gingerly make a circular motion with your mouse to avoid their fire, the issue is that they are almost always paired with the other 3 types, meaning you’ll be eating attacks nonstop most of the time, they even show up during boss fights to make them artificially harder, which is just eye rolling.
The game also lacks sound effects when enemies take damage, while you do get a nice stock explosion sound with regular mooks that go down quickly, this lack of sound effects makes bosses feel much more bloated then they actually are, and gives them even more of a chore like feeling when fighting them non stop the further you play.
Visually the game is pleasant, you get a solid standard 90s sci-fi look with heavy piping, scuffed metal surfaces on ships, and circuitry heavy UI. The game lacks graphical options, and the resolution caps out at 960p, so jaggies are unfortunately everywhere.
There are only two music tracks and they aren’t very good, track 1 is a generic cyberpunk beat and track two repeats the same 3 chords nonstop during game play. It gets grating fast and since the game lacks damage sound effects anyway, I muted subsequent runs as it made no difference.
Chromium BSU is a decent time waster should you choose to install it from your distro’s app store, but there are far better Foss games out there.
5/10.
Before you play I implore you to make sure you have hardware acceleration enabled. The game’s target 50FPS will not be hit other wise.
The game is an endless shooter, you move with the mouse and fire your weapons with the Space bar. Enemy waves are smartly composed to take advantage of mouse movement. Triangle formations require you to quickly jerk your mouse back and forth, purple bubble enemies need you to gently glide your mouse in a circular motion, the two boss enemies have you making sudden sharp movements to avoid beams with massive hit boxes etc.
Controls are tight and smooth and mastery will come quickly. The game’s HUD is also immersive and non intrusive. With striped beams on the side of your screen showing your ammo, shields and health. Every time you pick up a power up the corresponding beam will flash, which is useful when just starting out or coming back after a while.
The player must kill every enemy coming at them or they will lose a life for each one that escapes, power ups are plentiful but you only have a limited amount of ammo, and the game will punish you for holding down the space bar. So you’ll need to show some restraint or face brutal but fair punishment. The game throws just enough power ups at you for most waves to take care of them, but it’s still up to you to use them wisely. This simple yet brilliant approach kept me coming back for several hours to try and perfect both my reflexes and ammo management. It’s the clear highlight of the game and nothing else matches it.
There are only two boss enemies In the game and they aren’t very fun to fight, while their tells are fun to figure out the first time, since this is an endless shooter, you’ll encounter them nonstop the more you play on. This lack of enemy variety extends to the regular ships too, as the same 4 ships, 3 of which barely function differently, get old very fast.
There is one enemy that is unique but not to the games benefit, from level 2 onward you will be bombarded by bright purple bubble disc ships that require you to gingerly make a circular motion with your mouse to avoid their fire, the issue is that they are almost always paired with the other 3 types, meaning you’ll be eating attacks nonstop most of the time, they even show up during boss fights to make them artificially harder, which is just eye rolling.
The game also lacks sound effects when enemies take damage, while you do get a nice stock explosion sound with regular mooks that go down quickly, this lack of sound effects makes bosses feel much more bloated then they actually are, and gives them even more of a chore like feeling when fighting them non stop the further you play.
Visually the game is pleasant, you get a solid standard 90s sci-fi look with heavy piping, scuffed metal surfaces on ships, and circuitry heavy UI. The game lacks graphical options, and the resolution caps out at 960p, so jaggies are unfortunately everywhere.
There are only two music tracks and they aren’t very good, track 1 is a generic cyberpunk beat and track two repeats the same 3 chords nonstop during game play. It gets grating fast and since the game lacks damage sound effects anyway, I muted subsequent runs as it made no difference.
Chromium BSU is a decent time waster should you choose to install it from your distro’s app store, but there are far better Foss games out there.
5/10.
Myst
1993
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/01/11/a-look-back-at-myst-1993/
With so much time passing since it’s release, it’s hard to get across just how big Myst was back in 1993. It became the highest selling video game at the the time, selling over 3 million copies world wide, and was only surpassed by the original Sims 9 years later in 2002. And while the series has unfortunately gone to the wayside since it’s original game, it still has a place in gaming history.
When Myst was first released, it was so popular that it was the thing that finally got people to move on from the old 3 and a half inch Floppy Disks, which contained a meager 1.44 megabytes, to the then brand new format of CDs, which contained up to 700 megabytes on a single disc, hundreds of times bigger than what a Floppy Disk could ever hope to achieve, and Myst was the flagship title that really showed off what that extra space could do. High quality music, better looking graphics, characters being able to have voice acting that gave the characters more of a personality, and it even allowed for videos.
The version of Myst that I’ll be checking out is Myst: Masterpiece Edition because it’s the version that is the most widely available version of the game. It’s a remastered and updated version of the original game that came out 7 years after the release of the original version with remastered graphics and sound. Plus there isn’t any real reason to go back to the original version beyond nostalgia, curiosity, or if your a mega Myst fan.
In Myst, you play as “The Stranger”, a nameless person who is a stand in for anyone playing the game, who comes across a book with the word MYST on it’s cover. After reading through the book, which describes a fantastical island, you come across the final page, which, to your surprise and confusion, contains a moving picture of the island that was described in the book.
After touching the image, you find yourself being teleported to the island. Now stuck there, you have no choice other than to explore the island. Located in the center of the island is a library that contains shelves of mostly burned books, which a few have survived and contain a brief history of the island, along with two other shelves containing one book each, a Red Book and a Blue Book.
When opening these books, you come to find that each has someone trapped inside them. Sirrus, who is stuck in the Red Book, and Achenar, who is stuck in the Blue Book. Both tell you to not trust the other one and to find the corresponding missing colored pages from their books and to bring them back to them. And this is where the game picks up.
You’re not only left to explore the island, but across the island are similar books to the one you originally came across called MYST, called “Ages”, in which colored pages are located. To gain access to each Age, you have to solve a puzzle to get to the book linking to that Age. Hints to these puzzles are not only located in the few normal books that survived being burned in the library in the middle of the island.
Myst is a first person point-and-click adventure game and it’s gameplay is about as basic as you would expect from a game likes. You point and click on certain parts of the screen to make your way through each location. It can be more accurately be described as interactivity than gameplay. There are a few spots that are a little confusing to navigate because it places you a direction that doesn’t always do a good job of setting up where you can and can’t go, but it’s few and far between. The game also comes with a feature called ‘Zip Mode’, which lets you quickly move around whatever location you’re in by hovering over where you’ve previously big and pressing a hot spot on the screen that’s indicated with the cursor changing from a hand to a lightening bolt. It can come in handy for those who don’t have the patience to click through each screen.
You can complete each Age in whatever order you want, who is both a burden and a blessing, which I’ll get into in a minute. You can read up on each Age in the previously mentioned library on Myst Island, so you don’t have to go into each new location blind.
But despite the fact that Myst is so simple in it’s gameplay and concept, it’s execution is where it starts to waver a bit. For starters, you can’t pick up both the Red Page and Blue Page at the same time. I don’t know if this was a deliberate design decision or a limitation of the software and/or hardware, but it effectively means you have to ‘complete’ each Age twice to get both pages to see what both Sirrus and Achenar have to say. Thankfully the game seems to leave all of the puzzles how you left them from when you played through each Age, so replaying them isn’t too bad.
A few of the Ages are easy to get through on a second play. The Channelwood Age (The one with all the trees) isn’t too bad since it’s just flipping a couple of switches and you’re back out of the Age in less than 2 minutes with the second page, but other Ages are a lot more aggravating. Thankfully, Myst also places you right back at the beginning of whatever Age you play no matter how many times you’ve played it before, which means that you can just skip replaying some puzzles, which helps speed the process along.
There are also a few other minor problems that scattered throughout the game, such as the telescope in the Stoneship Age (the one on the boat) being a bit finicky because in order to move it around you have to drag the screen to the left or right and there were a few times that I rushed and I accidentally clicked away from it a few times.
But the low point of the game for me is the Selenitic Age (the one with the rocket ship). A portion of The Selenitic Age has you playing through a maze. And for the players who might have picked this as their first Age to try and complete probably weren’t expecting to have to revisit locations on their first play through, resulting in some people not having mapped it out or not have it memorized. Unless you were one of the few who actually thought to map it out first time around, it just becomes a tedious slog. Having yo navigate a maze through sound cues sounds is a neat idea, but there has never been a good maze, even in the best of games.
It does actually fit with the rest of the Age, with there being noises for clues on how to get through the maze. It is telegraphed with sounds from the Mechanical Age, but I doubt most people would even notice after hours of playing the first time around, or even on a replay, and it was one of the rare times that I had to look up a guide for a game. I wasn’t going to spend hours of my life to grind out the maze or try to map it out, and I know it wasn’t just me because when I look up reactions to this game, it’s the only section for the game that other people used a guide for.
So the game does help guide you through the maze, but because mazes suck even in the best of games, it was still the worst section of a pretty enjoyable experience.
Myst: Masterpiece Edition also added a general map for whatever location you’re in that highlights anything that you need to pay attention to, which is great for those who are struggling to remember whats located where.
Myst was not the first game to make use of pre-rendered CGI stills for it’s graphics, with games such as ‘Alice: An Interactive Museum’ (1991) and ‘L-Zone’ (1992) coming out the previous years, and ‘The Journeyman Project’ (1993) and ‘Gadget Invention, Travel, & Adventure’ (1993) coming out the same year. But unlike those games, which go for more complex CGI and distinct art styles, Myst instead goes for both a more simplistic art style and more basic with it’s CGI. I’m pretty sure this was due to Myst having a smaller team size that reigned in the scope a bit, but it ends up working in Myst’s favor. And that’s not to say that the other games from the same time period looked bad or aged worse.
Douglas Adams, author of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ and eventual writer of his own pre-rendered adventure game ‘Starship Titanic’, was quoted as calling Myst a “Beautiful Void”, naming the trope in the process, when the game originally came out and it’s easy to see why. Interactions with other characters are kept to a minimum and in very specific circumstances, so you’re entirely left to exploring places that empty and have even been abandoned, essentially creating something akin to the feeling of kenopsia, having an eclectic aura, or being a liminal space a few decades before those terms took off and giving it this really distinct feeling.
This was also around the same time that polygons were starting to finally take off more on home computers and consoles. 1993 also had games like the original Star Fox for the Super Nintendo, which was also graphically impressive, and the previous year had the likes of the original Alone in the Dark. But as impressive as they were, no game at the time was going to come even remotely close to showing off what Myst was doing in real time. So the trade off is that while it wasn’t running in real time, it did make the game look impressive in other ways.
It looked so good that Cyan, Inc. released a screensaver with screens from the game, which was back when screensavers were a thing because computers didn’t go into a standby mode that turned the screen off, preventing the image to be burned into the monitor. And this screensaver even has exclusive images that didn’t make it into the game along with behind the scenes content. It’s the equivalent of a company today releasing a 10 hour video onto their YouTube video that’s just game ambiance.
1993 even had ID Software’s Doom, but it wasn’t until 3 years later in 1996 with Quake that having games running smoothly with polygons in real time that it was even feasible for both developers and consumers to work with, so Myst’s graphics were making the best of a very limited situation in multiple ways.
And to add to the other worldly feeling of the game is the memorable soundtrack of the game. Done by Robyn Miller, one of the two brothers who founded Cyan, Inc, a lot of the tracks from the soundtrack adds to the ambiance of each location you’ll visit as well as add to some emptiness that some of the levels create. But it’s not a constant throughout the game, as there are times where it pulls back and lets you just take in the ambient noises of each location, which includes the wind blowing through the trees, water lapping up on the shore, and whatever wildlife resides in a location to walking through some empty caves or through the empty corridors of abandoned buildings.
Both the music and ambient soundscapes show just how alone you are in these locations. Don’t worry, it’s not as creepy as I’m making it sound.
If you want to track down a copy of this game, I would recommend getting the GOG version since it comes with a program called SCUMMVM that means you don’t have to fiddle with anything to get the game running on modern systems. Just boot it up and play.
The original Myst is from a unique period of time where the technology of video games were making giant leaps, which Myst help to make popular. It might be a little rough around the edges compared to more modern games and somewhat limited by the technology of the time, but it’s an enjoyable little adventure game that clearly has the markings of a small team who had some big ideas.
Due to the previously mentioned success, Myst managed to become a franchise, with multiple sequels, remakes, and spin-offs, along with a book series, a comic series that was cancelled half way through its run, and a potential TV mini-series and movie projects that never seemed to get off the ground. After looking back at the original Myst, it’s pretty obvious that it was never really intended to be a franchise, but the developers took advantage of the success that they were given and ran with it.
It even spawned a trend of what were called “Myst Clones”, which all involved going through a series of pre-rendered images, or even worlds made up of photographs of actual locations or real-world sets, in a similar style to Myst. Adventure fans thought that Myst’s popularity would kill the adventure genre by making it “dumbed-down” and making the genre more accessible to more people, along with Doom, which came out the same year, which, according to adventure game fans at the time, required no thought at all to play. The irony is that Myst making it more accessible to people probably made it better because you didn’t have to deal with the genre’s non-stop use of awful logic for puzzles.
Considering that a lot of previous adventure games required brute forcing your way through a game, either because you could easily screw yourself over, wasting hours and even days of your life (I’m looking at you Sierra), or because it only made sense in the designers head and they didn’t take in consideration that that other people would be playing it, or both at the same time, both could mean that you could end up wasting tens of hours of time only to get frustrated and often confused, so a game that made logical sense was a warm welcome.
Myst was even popular enough for Disney to get in contact with Cyan to build a Myst themed island as Disneyland Florida, in which only a limited amount of people would have been allowed onto the island in any given day, with park goers having to figure out what happened to the islands last inhabitants over 11 acres of land, with the whole thing being non-linear, meaning that no two people would have had the same experience. But alas, that never came to be. But from the sounds of it, it probably would have had more success in the modern world of geo-caching and escape rooms.
The library from Myst Island even made it’s way onto an episode of The Simpsons, in the background of the ‘Homer3’ segment of ‘Treehouse of Horror VI’ along with a snippet of the soundtrack, which in turn was featured in the IMAX film Cyberworld 3D, which was the film used to promote the then new IMAX cinemas. Unfortunately, you can’t see the film anymore since it only gets used to test out new IMAX theater before they’re opened to the public.
Looking back at the original Myst, it’s quaint compared to other games that have come out since it’s release, not only on a technical level, with games being able to easily be rendered in real time that look much better than even some of the later Myst games, but with how adventure games are now designed to be more accessible roughly 30 years later (as of this look back at the original Myst), which the original Myst helped to some degree, even with it’s own series, with it’s sequels leaning from the mistakes made in the original.
With so much time passing since it’s release, it’s hard to get across just how big Myst was back in 1993. It became the highest selling video game at the the time, selling over 3 million copies world wide, and was only surpassed by the original Sims 9 years later in 2002. And while the series has unfortunately gone to the wayside since it’s original game, it still has a place in gaming history.
When Myst was first released, it was so popular that it was the thing that finally got people to move on from the old 3 and a half inch Floppy Disks, which contained a meager 1.44 megabytes, to the then brand new format of CDs, which contained up to 700 megabytes on a single disc, hundreds of times bigger than what a Floppy Disk could ever hope to achieve, and Myst was the flagship title that really showed off what that extra space could do. High quality music, better looking graphics, characters being able to have voice acting that gave the characters more of a personality, and it even allowed for videos.
The version of Myst that I’ll be checking out is Myst: Masterpiece Edition because it’s the version that is the most widely available version of the game. It’s a remastered and updated version of the original game that came out 7 years after the release of the original version with remastered graphics and sound. Plus there isn’t any real reason to go back to the original version beyond nostalgia, curiosity, or if your a mega Myst fan.
In Myst, you play as “The Stranger”, a nameless person who is a stand in for anyone playing the game, who comes across a book with the word MYST on it’s cover. After reading through the book, which describes a fantastical island, you come across the final page, which, to your surprise and confusion, contains a moving picture of the island that was described in the book.
After touching the image, you find yourself being teleported to the island. Now stuck there, you have no choice other than to explore the island. Located in the center of the island is a library that contains shelves of mostly burned books, which a few have survived and contain a brief history of the island, along with two other shelves containing one book each, a Red Book and a Blue Book.
When opening these books, you come to find that each has someone trapped inside them. Sirrus, who is stuck in the Red Book, and Achenar, who is stuck in the Blue Book. Both tell you to not trust the other one and to find the corresponding missing colored pages from their books and to bring them back to them. And this is where the game picks up.
You’re not only left to explore the island, but across the island are similar books to the one you originally came across called MYST, called “Ages”, in which colored pages are located. To gain access to each Age, you have to solve a puzzle to get to the book linking to that Age. Hints to these puzzles are not only located in the few normal books that survived being burned in the library in the middle of the island.
Myst is a first person point-and-click adventure game and it’s gameplay is about as basic as you would expect from a game likes. You point and click on certain parts of the screen to make your way through each location. It can be more accurately be described as interactivity than gameplay. There are a few spots that are a little confusing to navigate because it places you a direction that doesn’t always do a good job of setting up where you can and can’t go, but it’s few and far between. The game also comes with a feature called ‘Zip Mode’, which lets you quickly move around whatever location you’re in by hovering over where you’ve previously big and pressing a hot spot on the screen that’s indicated with the cursor changing from a hand to a lightening bolt. It can come in handy for those who don’t have the patience to click through each screen.
You can complete each Age in whatever order you want, who is both a burden and a blessing, which I’ll get into in a minute. You can read up on each Age in the previously mentioned library on Myst Island, so you don’t have to go into each new location blind.
But despite the fact that Myst is so simple in it’s gameplay and concept, it’s execution is where it starts to waver a bit. For starters, you can’t pick up both the Red Page and Blue Page at the same time. I don’t know if this was a deliberate design decision or a limitation of the software and/or hardware, but it effectively means you have to ‘complete’ each Age twice to get both pages to see what both Sirrus and Achenar have to say. Thankfully the game seems to leave all of the puzzles how you left them from when you played through each Age, so replaying them isn’t too bad.
A few of the Ages are easy to get through on a second play. The Channelwood Age (The one with all the trees) isn’t too bad since it’s just flipping a couple of switches and you’re back out of the Age in less than 2 minutes with the second page, but other Ages are a lot more aggravating. Thankfully, Myst also places you right back at the beginning of whatever Age you play no matter how many times you’ve played it before, which means that you can just skip replaying some puzzles, which helps speed the process along.
There are also a few other minor problems that scattered throughout the game, such as the telescope in the Stoneship Age (the one on the boat) being a bit finicky because in order to move it around you have to drag the screen to the left or right and there were a few times that I rushed and I accidentally clicked away from it a few times.
But the low point of the game for me is the Selenitic Age (the one with the rocket ship). A portion of The Selenitic Age has you playing through a maze. And for the players who might have picked this as their first Age to try and complete probably weren’t expecting to have to revisit locations on their first play through, resulting in some people not having mapped it out or not have it memorized. Unless you were one of the few who actually thought to map it out first time around, it just becomes a tedious slog. Having yo navigate a maze through sound cues sounds is a neat idea, but there has never been a good maze, even in the best of games.
It does actually fit with the rest of the Age, with there being noises for clues on how to get through the maze. It is telegraphed with sounds from the Mechanical Age, but I doubt most people would even notice after hours of playing the first time around, or even on a replay, and it was one of the rare times that I had to look up a guide for a game. I wasn’t going to spend hours of my life to grind out the maze or try to map it out, and I know it wasn’t just me because when I look up reactions to this game, it’s the only section for the game that other people used a guide for.
So the game does help guide you through the maze, but because mazes suck even in the best of games, it was still the worst section of a pretty enjoyable experience.
Myst: Masterpiece Edition also added a general map for whatever location you’re in that highlights anything that you need to pay attention to, which is great for those who are struggling to remember whats located where.
Myst was not the first game to make use of pre-rendered CGI stills for it’s graphics, with games such as ‘Alice: An Interactive Museum’ (1991) and ‘L-Zone’ (1992) coming out the previous years, and ‘The Journeyman Project’ (1993) and ‘Gadget Invention, Travel, & Adventure’ (1993) coming out the same year. But unlike those games, which go for more complex CGI and distinct art styles, Myst instead goes for both a more simplistic art style and more basic with it’s CGI. I’m pretty sure this was due to Myst having a smaller team size that reigned in the scope a bit, but it ends up working in Myst’s favor. And that’s not to say that the other games from the same time period looked bad or aged worse.
Douglas Adams, author of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ and eventual writer of his own pre-rendered adventure game ‘Starship Titanic’, was quoted as calling Myst a “Beautiful Void”, naming the trope in the process, when the game originally came out and it’s easy to see why. Interactions with other characters are kept to a minimum and in very specific circumstances, so you’re entirely left to exploring places that empty and have even been abandoned, essentially creating something akin to the feeling of kenopsia, having an eclectic aura, or being a liminal space a few decades before those terms took off and giving it this really distinct feeling.
This was also around the same time that polygons were starting to finally take off more on home computers and consoles. 1993 also had games like the original Star Fox for the Super Nintendo, which was also graphically impressive, and the previous year had the likes of the original Alone in the Dark. But as impressive as they were, no game at the time was going to come even remotely close to showing off what Myst was doing in real time. So the trade off is that while it wasn’t running in real time, it did make the game look impressive in other ways.
It looked so good that Cyan, Inc. released a screensaver with screens from the game, which was back when screensavers were a thing because computers didn’t go into a standby mode that turned the screen off, preventing the image to be burned into the monitor. And this screensaver even has exclusive images that didn’t make it into the game along with behind the scenes content. It’s the equivalent of a company today releasing a 10 hour video onto their YouTube video that’s just game ambiance.
1993 even had ID Software’s Doom, but it wasn’t until 3 years later in 1996 with Quake that having games running smoothly with polygons in real time that it was even feasible for both developers and consumers to work with, so Myst’s graphics were making the best of a very limited situation in multiple ways.
And to add to the other worldly feeling of the game is the memorable soundtrack of the game. Done by Robyn Miller, one of the two brothers who founded Cyan, Inc, a lot of the tracks from the soundtrack adds to the ambiance of each location you’ll visit as well as add to some emptiness that some of the levels create. But it’s not a constant throughout the game, as there are times where it pulls back and lets you just take in the ambient noises of each location, which includes the wind blowing through the trees, water lapping up on the shore, and whatever wildlife resides in a location to walking through some empty caves or through the empty corridors of abandoned buildings.
Both the music and ambient soundscapes show just how alone you are in these locations. Don’t worry, it’s not as creepy as I’m making it sound.
If you want to track down a copy of this game, I would recommend getting the GOG version since it comes with a program called SCUMMVM that means you don’t have to fiddle with anything to get the game running on modern systems. Just boot it up and play.
The original Myst is from a unique period of time where the technology of video games were making giant leaps, which Myst help to make popular. It might be a little rough around the edges compared to more modern games and somewhat limited by the technology of the time, but it’s an enjoyable little adventure game that clearly has the markings of a small team who had some big ideas.
Due to the previously mentioned success, Myst managed to become a franchise, with multiple sequels, remakes, and spin-offs, along with a book series, a comic series that was cancelled half way through its run, and a potential TV mini-series and movie projects that never seemed to get off the ground. After looking back at the original Myst, it’s pretty obvious that it was never really intended to be a franchise, but the developers took advantage of the success that they were given and ran with it.
It even spawned a trend of what were called “Myst Clones”, which all involved going through a series of pre-rendered images, or even worlds made up of photographs of actual locations or real-world sets, in a similar style to Myst. Adventure fans thought that Myst’s popularity would kill the adventure genre by making it “dumbed-down” and making the genre more accessible to more people, along with Doom, which came out the same year, which, according to adventure game fans at the time, required no thought at all to play. The irony is that Myst making it more accessible to people probably made it better because you didn’t have to deal with the genre’s non-stop use of awful logic for puzzles.
Considering that a lot of previous adventure games required brute forcing your way through a game, either because you could easily screw yourself over, wasting hours and even days of your life (I’m looking at you Sierra), or because it only made sense in the designers head and they didn’t take in consideration that that other people would be playing it, or both at the same time, both could mean that you could end up wasting tens of hours of time only to get frustrated and often confused, so a game that made logical sense was a warm welcome.
Myst was even popular enough for Disney to get in contact with Cyan to build a Myst themed island as Disneyland Florida, in which only a limited amount of people would have been allowed onto the island in any given day, with park goers having to figure out what happened to the islands last inhabitants over 11 acres of land, with the whole thing being non-linear, meaning that no two people would have had the same experience. But alas, that never came to be. But from the sounds of it, it probably would have had more success in the modern world of geo-caching and escape rooms.
The library from Myst Island even made it’s way onto an episode of The Simpsons, in the background of the ‘Homer3’ segment of ‘Treehouse of Horror VI’ along with a snippet of the soundtrack, which in turn was featured in the IMAX film Cyberworld 3D, which was the film used to promote the then new IMAX cinemas. Unfortunately, you can’t see the film anymore since it only gets used to test out new IMAX theater before they’re opened to the public.
Looking back at the original Myst, it’s quaint compared to other games that have come out since it’s release, not only on a technical level, with games being able to easily be rendered in real time that look much better than even some of the later Myst games, but with how adventure games are now designed to be more accessible roughly 30 years later (as of this look back at the original Myst), which the original Myst helped to some degree, even with it’s own series, with it’s sequels leaning from the mistakes made in the original.
How do I tell people that I learned to get better at typing by killing zombies?
Batsugun
1993
Batsugun is the last shoot 'em up by Toaplan before they went defunct. It is considered the first real bullet hell, or at least an early prototype of one. Toaplan eventually formed into the CAVE. You can really tell, because the bees in DoDonPachi, the stage 3 boss in Mushihimesama, and probably a lot more, were ideas that were likely conceived by Batsugun, whether artistically or more gameplay-oriented. It is a short game. You have a big hurtbox as well. I used Type B, but on the player 2 side, as I liked Alteeno's design more.
You have an experience bar, you increase it by killing enemies and destroying environmental objects. You fill it to level-up, with a max level of 3, and get a power increase each level. Each time you fill it up after level 3, you get a bomb. Stage 4 was my favorite level, requiring a mix of memorization and reflexes, and sporting some very, very cool background work, as well as an awesome tune that just keeps you going. This game's soundtrack is all adrenaline. I enjoyed every minute from start to finish.
You have an experience bar, you increase it by killing enemies and destroying environmental objects. You fill it to level-up, with a max level of 3, and get a power increase each level. Each time you fill it up after level 3, you get a bomb. Stage 4 was my favorite level, requiring a mix of memorization and reflexes, and sporting some very, very cool background work, as well as an awesome tune that just keeps you going. This game's soundtrack is all adrenaline. I enjoyed every minute from start to finish.
Twin Tiger Shark
2014
A very respectable Toaplan-style shooter by some talented swedes. It's as straightforward as they come--shoot, dodge, collect medals. (It feels just a bit TOO stripped back and 80's for what I'm enjoying personally, atm; however, I do think it pretty much nails what it's going for.)
Though backlogged doesn't note it, it also released for PC, on itch.io; although regrettably it runs through java, and 1) it couldn't launch on my g-sync monitor, and 2) it has a not-unnoticeable bit of input lag.
No matter though, really -- it's a fun game for an afternoon, whether for a casual player with some vague nostalgia for shmups, or for a genre enthusiast who wants a quick-but-satisfying 1-ALL under their belt. (A 'Hard' 2-ALL feels doable, but with zero training options I just can't commit to it).
Though backlogged doesn't note it, it also released for PC, on itch.io; although regrettably it runs through java, and 1) it couldn't launch on my g-sync monitor, and 2) it has a not-unnoticeable bit of input lag.
No matter though, really -- it's a fun game for an afternoon, whether for a casual player with some vague nostalgia for shmups, or for a genre enthusiast who wants a quick-but-satisfying 1-ALL under their belt. (A 'Hard' 2-ALL feels doable, but with zero training options I just can't commit to it).