Runaway suffers from numerous flaws that don't make it worth your time. First and foremost the puzzles are intensely frustrating. Often it comes down to clicking on a single pixel or two within an area to find what you're looking for. For instance, differentiating a gray piece of paper on an equally gray file cabinet. Runaway can't be blamed for this entirely, as it is a common trope in a lot of adventure games. It cannot escape however, that often you'll know exactly what to do with the items you have, but are unable to, unless you go through the contrivances of a specific conversation or do so in a specific place, in a order of clicking. This often means retracing your steps across levels again and again. In one situation for instance (spoiler ahead) you have to fill up a train's boiler with an oil can, a task that requires you to walk across town five times, repeating the same actions. That's lazy game design. Another problem is that you often have to go back and repeatedly click certain things that earlier were useless to you. There is never any indication given as to when or how to do this, so you're left with exhaustively trying every item in every area hoping that finally, the game has given you permission to proceed. So while the puzzles are often logical, they're bound up in so many contrivances that you'll find yourself straying from the right path due to the incompetence of their presentation. The visuals range from striking to exceeding clunky. For instance, the backgrounds and scenes are fantastic, with brilliant art design, and a very unique look. This is helped along by a nice ambient music score. The characters themselves are also well designed until you see them up close that is. It is especially noticeable when characters speak, they're robotic mouth movements, low polygon faces, and stiff movements are laughable. That's not a sign of the game's age either, as there are numerous excellent titles previous to Runaway that surpass it in looks. The plot has some promise to it, but it isn't helped by the fact that the main characters are both intensely unlikeable. The protagonist you play, Brian Basco, is a whiny twerp with no emotional value at all, who is joined by a vapid sidekick that likewise is unable to express anything close to human feeling. The game was translated from Spanish, but that's no excuse for not putting in some good voice acting or scripting work. This is made extra aggravating by the fact that so much of the game is taken up by long, sometimes ten or twenty minute cut-scenes. So much so that I start to wonder if the game designers wanted to simply make a digital cartoon, and were slightly peeved that they had to go the game route. Maybe the puzzles were just their way of inflicting their frustration on the gamer. In any case, avoid Runaway, there are far better adventure titles out there.
Gothic 2 is very similar to Gothic, in fact it picks up only two weeks after the first ended. There have been a lot of improvements to the control scheme, and graphically it's prettier to look at. It still suffers from some of the same issues, namely that the leveling curve is incredibly steep. You'll find yourself being killed by flies for the first few levels, hemmed in by monsters on all sides. By the later levels you'll be a walking death machine, destroying all in your path with a gesture, until the final boss battle. Also the voice acting ranges from decent to laughably bad. That being said, Gothic 2 is a great RPS. The various guilds and factions you can join, and the nearly unlimited freedom you have as to which direction you want to go as a character means that the game has a lot of replayability. Even in the first town you'll be confronted with a huge amount of quests and characters to interact with. If you liked Gothic by all means, give this one a go.
Shogo is a pretty good attempt to copy Mecha anime. It's everything you'd expect giant robots, a convoluted plot involving a giant alien organism, cheesy dialogue and of course, a love triangle. You get the impression that a lot of Shogo is tongue and cheek, including a jokey opening intro set to a midi version of a j-pop song. The gameplay is fairly standard action FPS fair, and that is a bit problematic. There really isn't a lot of difference between the mech levels and the human soldier levels in terms of gameplay. The weapons are different sure, and while you're well-nigh invincible in your mech, you're embarrassingly vulnerable as a soldier. However, you never feel like your giant robot is...well, a giant robot. He moves with the same speed as the human, weilds weapons the same way, and the levels in both scenarios are extremely claustrophobic. Sure your mech can transform on the fly into a hovercraft, but it has no real impact on gameplay. Shogo is fun and diverting for a while, but it hasn't aged well. If you've never played it and like fast-paced fps games, go for it. If you're looking for an engaging story, or another Mechwarrior, give it a miss.
Postal 2 is the much improved sequel to the original RWS murder simulator. Unlike the first, which features utterly mindless mayhem, this game has a plot. The Postal Dude, you, goes about doing various banal tasks for his harpy of a wife over the span of a week as his town goes insane around him. These include returning library books, picking up milk, going to the bank, etc. You can choose to do these tasks as written, which involves a lot of standing in line, or you can get creative: robbing the bank, torching the convenience store (full of ululating arabs of course), etc. To help you have a broad range of weapons, some of which are quite well done, from pistols to napalm rockets to "biological weapons" (a diseased cow's head). RWC made the fatuous claim when this game came out that you could get through it without killing anyone. This is simply untrue, as you'll run into numerous enemies that want to destroy you. These are generally based on ridiculous stereotypes that uninformed bro-magnon white guys like to rail on: left-wing protestors, arab terrorists, rapist hillbillies, etc. Unlike the original, this game features some humor which is actually funny, and has a sandbox feel that rewards exploration with handy tidbits. The game items are fantastic, featuring a crack pipe, or health pipe as the game euphemistically calls it, doggy treats which gives you a companion, and my favorite a tin of catnip that, when smoked, puts you into bullet time with the phrase, "OH YEAH, I am the lizard king!" You'll find yourself chuckling when, for instance you'll start a fire, going into a building and come out a few minutes later to see the utter havoc your actions have caused: burned corpses, exploded cars, police firing at random bystanders, so on. That being said the game suffers from crucial flaws. It is built on the Unreal Engine, and thus, has agonizing load times in between sections of town. This is made all the worse by the fact that many of the objectives of any given day are on opposite sides of the city, and require a lot of traveling. The weapons, for all their creativity tend to be ridiculously over-powered or useless, and you'll often find yourself just switching back to the pistol when you've run out of rockets. Much of the games humor was topical for its time and is now utterly dated: does anyone find references to the 2000 Florida elections humorous anymore? Even so, Postal 2 makes for a fine time-waster. If you've always wanted to see what the hype was about but your mom would never lend you the money for it, pick Postal 2 up. It's a far better buy than it's predecessor.
Chessmaster 9000 is one of the best chess games out there. Unlike so many other games which feature a Hard which is impossible and an Easy that is impossible not to beat, Chessmaster offers an incredible degree of customization designed to make you a better chess player. For the novices, it will guide you step by step through the basics of the game, and get you to start thinking 2 or 3 moves ahead. For the amateurs, you will get strategy guides, including play-throughs of some of the most famous offenses and defenses. And for the pros, you get a very challenging AI that often uses those very same strategies against you. You get a wide variety of boards, styles and feels from the most cut down visual representations to quirky battle chess simulators. I've had this game for a long time, and I highly recommend it.
Postal is a plot-less top down murder simulation. You go around with a variety of weapons killing as many people as possible, until you've satisfied the arbitrary level requirements. The screens vary, you choose between weapons...and that's it. Unlike Postal 2 which at least features the rudiments of a plot, and some jabs at crude humor, there is really nothing to recommend this game after 3 minutes of play time. Postal gained a great deal of notoriety at the time of its release due to its name and content, and Running with Scissors has since taken on the mantle of clown prince martyr of the game industry. Which is an excellent cover for the pointlessness of their products. It's not that it's buggy, or ugly, it's just played out and monotonous. Original Grand Theft Auto did it much better, and with infinitely more class. Are you the kind of person that enjoys massacring people on the street, simply because they are there? If so, seek professional help. But don't buy Postal, because you'll be bored to tears like everyone else. It shouldn't surprise anyone that Uwe Boll found this game worthy of a screenplay.
