What an odd game. Definitely a bit rough around the edges to modern eyes, but really interesting. I sent a good forty minutes or so wandering around Forest 1 wondering when I would get told what to do, and only then did I discover how you actually obtain quests (hint: you have to go talk to the Hunters Guild on the ship, the game doesn’t make this especially obvious).

The rhythmic hack-and-slash combat wasn’t what I was expecting, and took a bit to get used to, but I got there and now I’ve completed a handful of the first couple of waves of quests. I appreciate the comic book style of the cutscene dialogue, and also that the Japanese version has full English support, which makes it a much cheaper game to try out; European and American copies are ridiculously expensive in comparison.

Excited to see more, and hoping to take it Online for real (the Sylverant server is active, and with a DreamPi, a real game key, and a boot disc depending on your copy, you can play pretty easily) when Dreamcast Live are running a game night sometime.

Weird pacing, and a kind of crummy, nationalist plot, making it a shame this is the most technologically advanced of the early series.

The whole Four Shine cabaret club thing was incredibly self-indulgent and I adored it (I would say don’t play this until you’ve played 0, it’s important). The Majima Construction mini game I could not get my head around, and the rest of the game was, the rest of the game.

I would legit pay for a Yakuza cabaret club mobile game.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game work harder to remind you of a different, better game

It’s very clearly drawn a lot of inspiration from Half-Life. It’s got story scenes interleaved with combat sequences, most of which are first person and allow you to wander, and it tries to keep it all contiguous in space and time. It falls down a bit in that it has to contrive a lot of extracanonical conceits to justify a Star Trek first person shooter where you can actually defeat the big bads of Voyager. First up, you’re part of a “Hazard Team” (never seen or mentioned in the show) whose job is to be the militaristic first response to hostile situations both aboard Voyager and elsewhere. Secondly, because you come up against borg and species 8472, and you’re supposed to win, Seven of Nine has conveniently come up with the Infinity Modulator, a weapon the borg simply cannot counter. I guess every time they’ve rotated weapon frequencies it’s been literally rotating rather than random, and someone finally remembered entropy existed? This… does not occur in the show, ever, for obvious reasons.

And you do shoot a lot of these enemies. Encounter design can be summarised as large numbers of enemies spawning out of nowhere for a few minutes and not much else. A shame, because the levels certainly could be used in more interesting ways.

The Half-Life references are all over the game. There’s a “hazardous materials” level which has you leaping from broken catwalks over radioactive water, B’Elanna mentions needing to calibrate the resonance cascade couplings, they wear their inspiration not on their sleeve but as a tired graphic tee. And it’s really rather distracting.

You spend a decent amount of time wandering Voyager, and these sequences are probably my favourites, as exploring the ship is pretty fun. There are plenty of little touches, like a signed photo of your player character with Worf in her quarters, and a segment where you get summoned to the bridge. These parts just make me wish this game hadn’t had such a focus on the out of character combat, I’d have loved a game like this more interested in a story aboard Voyager, and less focused on being a Half-Life-like with a Quake style multiplayer mode.

The Kudos mechanic starts super weird, as the first batch of cars are very difficult to do any sliding in, and that’s just about the only way to rack up Kudos, which you need in abundance in order to advance, and initially that feels really difficult! That being said, the persistence is finally paying off as the requirements to unlock a chapter is based on your total accumulation of Kudos, not completion of all the prior races.

The early mix is very heavy on European compact cars, the presence of the MX-5/Miata/Eunos Roadster being the one exception (I do like that you can choose which region’s badge you want, a nice touch!), and most of them aren’t particularly sporty. For a game with international aspirations as it had, I’d have liked to see more variety early on. It looks like there are some Toyota, Nissan, Ford and Mitsubishi badges further up the unlock tree, but they feel pretty far away at this stage!

I played a little bit of this and, what a weird game. First person mind control adventure whose reputation for wonky voice acting is perhaps only partly deserved. Some of the voice actors are doing fine and some have clearly been given no direction. Definitely ambitious for the time in its delivery of cutscenes and dialogue. The actual gameplay is very odd, and the difficulty seems to waver wildly; an optional boss I elected to fight was a pushover, while the main story has some much more difficult parts.

There’s also a body-swapping mechanic, “brainjacking,” which while poorly explained initially in-game, robs the people you take over of their “psi,” putting them in a vegetative state whilst outside of your control. One early point sees you deciding whether to accept a mission given to you by a character, and if you accept they offer for you to use their body to do so, knowing full well that it robs them of life. If you don’t accept, they just sort of stand there awkwardly, and it seems that you can either decide to kill them and take their body anyway (which the character you’re sharing a mind with chastises you for) or possibly walk away (I only just thought of that possibility, the game doesn’t make the next objective clear in that case, might have to see what happens there…)

Your first opportunity to brainjack as the player is presented as the only obvious means of progression, but it appears that none of them are actually mandatory, and the character you get there as might in fact be a better choice for the next few missions?

The actual combat is kind of neat, you have a lock on, which makes the single-stick controls vaguely workable. I’d have appreciated a quick 180º turn button, but no such thing is present. Most enemies will take critical damage from behind, so if your character can jump high enough, you can leap over them and attack from there. Once you’re in the rhythm of this it’s pretty fun. Some enemies know what you’re up to and will spin around quickly. There’re also some enemies whose pattern I’ve yet to work out, they attack twice in a row, which your block can’t handle, and they’re very difficult to hit without a ranged attack otherwise. There’s a trick I’m missing there for sure.

Anyway, it’s interesting, and I seem to be doing okay so far. I’m curious where it’s going.

A bit of a downgrade. Lots more technical issues than the original.

On my machine the sound subsystem is malfunctioning, so half the effects don’t play or play out of time. Cutscenes play locked to 22fps with no vsync, and if you force the issue with an external tool you get 60fps cutscenes with tearing all over the place. It sounds like this isn’t an issue on consoles, so I don’t understand why it’s fucked up on PC?

The extra shiny graphics are nice but also make it way harder to actually perceive the shape of your player character as you futz with the sliders. You’re just way too shiny. The “farmer tan” option just makes your skin even more reflective for some reason. The supporting cast all have higher detail textures and models and they look pretty good, but this just contrasts further with the player character as there isn’t much more detail to your facial features. There’s an even shinier HDR mode but it’s just broken.

They added some creamy depth of field effects but the engine clearly doesn’t care so when aiming it’s based on the single pixel your reticle is on, which makes aiming at a distance a very blurry affair.

You also get all the DLC (except for the absolutely awful TF2 hats) which means you start the game with a bunch of overpowered vehicles and the stores are all littered with the boring costumes from those packs.

IDK, for $0 it’s workable but if you’re paying for it with money the original release (thankfully still available on steam for ¼ the price) feels like better value lmao

Solid little game which starts a bit too slowly for its own good - the first couple of levels of the campaign get kind of bogged down by choosing only a small number of tracks and game type variations, but once you get to the third and fourth levels it really opens up and starts to feel like a real smorgasbord of fun, messy racing.

The AI is so variable it's kind of incredible, it'll fight you doggedly right to the end, or sometimes it'll spin off and total its car in the first lap. Not entirely a positive, but when it's feeling like it it's very fun to race against.

Music-wise, the choices aren't great, and it only seems to have a handful of tracks, prompting me to just turn down the music volume almost entirely. There's plenty of other stuff to focus on.

The menu system is a mess, and it's missing some quality of life stuff which feels important, like the ability to buy an appropriate car for a race which has specific requirements directly, rather than having to back out - you can buy appropriate cars from the race menu if you own one already, which seems like an oversight.

Works okay with a wheel, but you might want to turn down the force feedback strength, and you'll want to set the wheel to 300º of rotation.