My friend recommended me it long time ago. But I didn't want it. The box art package showed ugly clown poking at balloon eye. Even the title art chosen on this store page shows a protagonist about to suffer, perhaps being insane. It just made me think it was going to be 'experimental' FMV game in vibes, creepy, with IM Meen tier animation and cultural chaos. That and heard about cliffhanger. BUT THIS IS ACTUALLY LIKE REALLY GOOD?! Holey moley, it is good. It just had the most terrible promo ever. The game is a love letter to 90s cartoons of all the types. It's sincere without too much self-aware humor. Characters are absolutely fantastic and go all the way. The locations are separated among the cultures and there is some mixing and migration going on, keeping it orderly enough yet fun. I like that top villains are played 100% straight, made me feel overjoyed I would take them down. And I love the adult humor build in. Ending is also fine, like Monkey Island 2 and Simon the Sorcerer 2 tier. Puzzles are modern enough to make sense, albeit some pull off misdirection of abstraction and another are just time wasters. Very lovely. But pixel-hunting is a problem, I would often get lost because I haven't noticed "smaller active area inside bigger active area" deal. Man, all toon lovers have to check this one out! It has all the fun cutscene animations. Haven't felt this joy in a while. And there won't be another like this ever, because of all the acting talents and classic hand-drawn animations!
Epic wolf action and thrilling experience. Good sense of choice of approach and roleplay. Cheapened by inventory system being underutilized and disappearing between episodes. And by certain lack of conclusions, all to stay canon to comics they are based on.
90s Western adventure game. 2/5. ...Yea, this was more charming in my childhood memory. Graphics still hold up to this day. Can't say the same for the rest. Bare plot of teen parody book humor. Weird puzzles. Death and dead ends while game design is rough. Backtrack for randomly placed items. A bloody maze, of cooooourse. Malcolm, the clown villian, is truly the highlight of the game, he is just lovely, along with graphics. The rest is.... 90s Western adventure games alert! What should I even do with these games backlog now that I've outgrown my blind nostalgia??
I have played Diggles: The Myth of Fenris before this and Evil Genius, which I put in mind as same genre. I thought that this genre is just not for me, at all. Then I played Dungeon Keeper, favourite childhood friend of my furrrrry friend. Yep, good game is a good game it turns out. Build dungeons and destroy other keepers or get invaded by heroes. Pretty fun too, for most parts. The pacing is fast too. I don't know what makes this more enjoyable than other, but I suspect that it's because other games I've played them were continous with bad worker AI. This one has good enough fast worker AI while sticking to small levels one after one, also keeping the pace going. Of course it's problematic at times. Campaign is a bit too old-fashioned like with most strategies, albiet it still keeps progression going by introducing new elements over time. You can be great FPS player by possessing creatures and having fun but almost every fight devolvers to a clusterquack at a single spot with everyone being thrown there. Not everything feels balanced, albeit there is nothing that is too broken, just a lot of fun stuff that sometimes is not effective at all. And I still got tired of it. But hey, still can be surprisingly fun. Also, style gets A+. Very 90s dark fantasy with focus on cool. With that CGI but awesome feel. Violence is on spot too, lotsa blood and meaty hits. Unique environment where it's not boringly strictly cubic but isn't too cartoonishly wacky. And great music as well. Please use Dungeon Keeper FX fan mod for fixes.
Static unfocused worlds where the progress is gated by cryptic non-systematic puzzles usually with only one solution. Like many others of this genre and periot, it's more fun as a longplay to watch on YT. Can't put any more energy in explaining than that. 1-3 also come with deaths and dead ends. 6 has deaths but you can retry on the spot so is fun. 4 does not exist. 1 and 6 are more non-linear but they are actually linear with only one solutions usually. 5 is "Oh, you want 'less cryptic puzzles'? Maybe you also want your videogames to be an autoplay cartoon for toddlers???" typical Internet argument but in a form of a videogame. And yea, it does include both VGA and SVGA versions of Larry 6 and EGA and VGA versions of Larry 1, along with Softcore. At least they ARE funny at times.
Fresh Supply is pretty awesome and won't make you angery unless you are a hypernerd. Now, Blood itself also has content in order to be an awesome game with phantasmatic fun physics and controls but there is one big problem: lack of balance, big time, even to the point where the early levels of the first episode are the hardest in the whole game. It boils down to common enemies that are cultists being hitscanners with instant reaction and harmful damage, while the rest of the monsters are push-over more often than not. The only flaw they have is how they sometimes may not notice you at the corners of geometry and you can throw dynamites around corners. Game gets a bit more often on replays, once you memorize most of the painful spot and get a gut feeling for how map designers would place enemies, then make a YouTube video on your fav game proclaiming that it requires no memorization, clearly being a valid person to make such claim. Anyway, I was looking toward port's custom difficulty, but eh. I can decrease accuaricy of cultists, turning them it into Russian Roulette. Decreasing aggression seemed to make no changes to cultists AI. And there is no way to directly lower cultists-only damage, only of every monster, which would just turn the rest of enemies reduntant. Mmmm, nice flare gun but no cigar.
I expected myself to be the apologist for MK4 for I had it in childhood, but replaying it again I can see that it was pretty meh. Well, aside from singleplayer due to improved AI compared to the first three MK games but it's still not even as fun as Street Fighter 2 there. GOG version really is excellent. FMVs are there, redbook music is working and loops properly, worked out of box. Tho you will need to use software to map gamepad input to keyboard otherwise you will have to use analog stick for movement and that's just gross. PC version is the best version that isn't Gold. Obviously better than PS1 and N64. Compared to Arcade, home ports had Goro which is more of a flaw cus screw old cheap fighting games bosses, plus one new arena and uhh extra menu fluff and FMV. Aside from graphics, they were awfully nerfed. Floor polygons often disappear from view and one arena has lost alpha channels for windows, showing you opaque purple color instead of sky. Gold on Dreamcast is still superior however, with 6 new chars and 3 more arenas and supreme graphix. As for how it plays, it's like MK3, run fast in and quickly mash dial-combos in. But this time around they went and and made everyone have same combos. And back to only have fatalities without other finishers. I don't know, MK4 for some reason felt empty. Many new chars were one-dimensional reskins of oldies, even with cool visual desings. Gets to the point where Jarek has laser-eye fatality from Kano despite not having his vision augmented. Lore and plot in MK4 makes no sense and is based on plot-holes. They added weapons to combat system. It works like super-short powerup, you lose them in a single hit. Can pick up but takes time. What most people don't know is that you will pull out weapon instantly and do an auto-hit if you input weapon call during dial-combo. Doing same weapon call move makes you throw it, too. MK4 is fast and punchy yet feels empty and cold. Best gibberish voicelines in fighting games.
A game that attempts to make RPG more about playing a role and less about hack and slashing, making you grow spiritualy with it's (picked randomly out of all the smart wisements) chosen set of virtues to abide to, replacing the grand quest of fighting against villian with a grand fetch quest of wisdom words and uhs. Pretty much the first real Ultima game, which throws away the shaky canon of previous games. Ok, there is still some of it but it's merely a nightmare. Overall, I like how you improve you virtues and avatarhood through the way you interact with the world. Really like town exploration and keyword-based conversations are also great , especially for it's time. NPCs speak very short lines but those lines are punctual and have obvious keywords, thus it avoids the feeling of artificiality of having too many words that NPCs won't recognise. But then despite all the post-modernism (compared to hack'n'slashing of a day) it's still 80s RPG so that means grinding, exploring huge empty maps, encounters everywhere, clumpy controls that suck joy out, basic combat, lack of artistic pleasures for your ears and eyes, yada-yada-ya-da-da. Thus reading about game system is still a better use of one's time and energy than putting dozens of hours into actually trying to beat it. Just play to the point where you get a vision out of any shrine, that ought to be enough of a game feel sample. Verdict: while hidden genocide of fuzzies from Ultima 3 is an unforgivable sin which proves that Ultima's avatarhood was always a mistake, the skeleton NPCs inclusion does rustle my funny bones. Ask them about their health.
I mean from design standpoint, not technical. It does launches and work. With 15fps at times, strangely enough. None the less, I did expect to find a linear shooter which would have squad mechanic. Just some light tactics that still matters, while teammates don't really die, getting revived by medic. I did enjoy Rainbow Six Vegas games. But this one just doesn't work. Squad tactics? Yea, tactics where "forward" command makes them rush into the tower behind you which they refuse to leave until forced to teleport back to your back once you leave them behind. Too passive too. Linear level design really doesn't give you any approach styles, just forward onward. Teammate AI is so bad and inaccurate, enemy weeb actually was able to rush past three teammates in order to put a bullet in my head when I was laying down. So once again, squad tactics feel useless. For a game where you are supposed to take cover the huge collision around object will often stop your bullets and grenades dead. And for a game taking place in a jungle they sure didn't bother to program AI vision to take foilage into account, allowing them to see you perfectly through opaque bushes while you can't, not unlike Allied Assault. And on top of that, shooting damage was nerfed heavily along with sound design not giving any satisfaction to the gunplay and movement is extremely clumsy on top of that. Add in amazing things such as AI teammate standing calmly in front of my turret as I was shooting; soldier standing on thin air, alive and shooting, when wooden tower got blown off; teammate standing and blocking my way out of hut when I went to check it out, forcing me to shoot into his face; hearing that the game has unforgiving plane minigame later on and it was just hiasndpqndqw. None of the game mechanics were developed and pushing through them just gives you generic WW2 FPS. Pop-up facts suck too, it's like having a troll giving you random unsystematical facts when you are busy.
I am a big confused about how I feel about this game. This one was the main game of 3DO console and is quite a quality 2D game in graphics, music and gameplay from what appears to be errr from 'objective' gamedesign rules standpoint. Somewhere on a level of one step above the 16 bit era generation. It has gameplay centered around gecko who can crawl over walls and background layer, can either eat powerups to get powerup or smash them to get +1 health, main hero has fun attitude until he spews out three lines in a row in five seconds. But eh, not really feeling it. Camera often doesn't show obstacles or what may harm you. It's one of those silly 90s games where you are given a speed up powerup which is only good at crashing into enemies and spikes headfirst. And it has a silly system where in order to unlock the next level you have to not only finish the level but to also find TV remote and then finish the levels... not only remotes, but items that give you passwords too! Yep, no saves, you have to find passwords. At least you are given one automatically when you beat bosses. I am probably just frustrated because I loaded my game with password and found out that I don't have remote to unlock the third world, despite clearly remembering getting needed remote in previous levels. Either password didn't save or maybe I actually died in that level after getting the remote and beat the level without getting it again. And yes, I only play games in short bursts nowadays. After getting frustrated with such situation and not wanting to rebeat these a bit-longer-than-should-be levels and search for level key, I went to YouTube and looked at game longplay. It seems that the worlds after the first two are pretty generic and aren't as fun, neither is music as catchy, so I am satisfied with only beating horror and toonland worlds anyway. Even bosses suddenly lose expression that the first two had. Oh well! At least toonland was funnnnn.
