Whoever wrote the dialog definitely has zero social skills. The game looks really nice, but I couldn't get past the dialog options: "Approach him on all fours", "roll away in a ball, laughing", "Shout BOO! into her ear and run away." WTF kind of bs is that? These are dialog options you're intended to use WITH YOUR CREW, you know, the people you're supposed to learn how to be friends with. I mean, some of these might be funny if you had 2 or 3 other options that are normal to counter-balance them, but just in the very first scene of the game, ALL of the 6 possible characters you can dialog with are like this: you are faced with a list of 3 choices of what to say to a person, and no Escape/Cancel option to avoid it, and ALL THREE of the options are trash, just awful things that no one with a properly functioning brain would ever come up with to talk to another person. No wonder gen-z is so ff-d up, they're wiring has all gone screwy. I feel for you, but am not hopeful.
Wow, this is an unexpected blast from the past. I had this game once upon a time around 2001, perhaps even earlier: 1999-2000 time-frame maybe. I remember what apartment I was in when I played it. I think I stayed there for two years. And yes, it was around ~2000. Blade Runner. Of course I bought this on a whim because of the film. I didn't know Westwood. I didn't know if it would be good. I only know that I saw it and thought to give it a try. I suppose this sort of thinking harkens back to a time when I was excruciatingly uneducated about such things, (to give you an example of how many people think now). I just bought it, but I remember that I finished the game. I remember that it was very beautiful, a little long to play, but worthwhile. and that's all I remember. The game is such a love letter to the film itself. It faithfully recreates the world down to the lighting, the sounds, they even have a long Vangelis piece of music that I am convinced is not Vangelis, but some studio musician, hired to create a 5 minute piece of ersatz vangelis that sounds as close to the original as possible. And its beautiful as well. The craziest part of the game for me is standing on the balcony of his apartment. This is the part I remember from TWENTY YEARS AGO. More than anything from the game. In fact its the only thing I remember from the game excepting my general overall impression of it. There is this part, where you walk around your apartment. There really are relatively few options available to you the player which to guide the in-game character. You can go to bed, use your photo machine, go to the bathroom, feed your dog and that's about it. One of the things you can do is walk out and stand on your balcony. It is an utterly pointless gesture. There is NOTHING out there for you to do. Nothing whatsoever, except to stand, and listen to the rain and view the city in all of its hauntingly beautiful dystopian acid-rainy dream-like nightscape. So good.
This is how I and many of us first discovered the brilliance of the Fricional people. Penumbra was a indie darling way back when most people didn't know what Indie games were yet. They made their own 3D engine, and not only that but it has object physics and it looks really good. Sure, two guys couldn't do all the stuff that the huge studios can, but they could do 80% of it. Fill in the rest with some excellent voice acting (Black Plague is off the hook good), brilliant scene envisaging, interesting puzzles and the occasional shock/horror masterpiece (getting chased around in the sewers) and you have some of the most interesting PC games ever released IMO. Amnesia is good. It's the mainstream sequel to these games. Check these out if you want to see the same kernel of creativity in its most original and unvarnished incarnation.
UnderRail is the best a videogame I have seen in quite some time. This is coming from someone who is an ardent fan of RPGs. I have played almost everything going back to the early 1980s, and I currently works in the industry. I seldom leave reviews, but this morning after over 40 hours of game play I discovered "Core City" in the game and was so awed by this I felt compelled to write a review. UnderRail's dialog and story is superlative. Quite simply, there is so much minutia they have gotten right. For instance, there are weird characters who speak in strange, made-up languages, with no apologizing or explanation. They just do it. It adds spice and realism. There are characters who are mean to you because they are ornery. There speed-freaks and tweakers and drunks. There are husband-and-wife pairs who playfully toss each other crap in the middle of a conversation you're having with one of them. There are story elements that are planted around major events and all the dialog options perfectly reflect this, from the lowliest NPC to the most major conversationalist who has dozens of dialog-tree avenues to explore. It is very much a game made for someone who appreciates Fallout 1 & 2 and Baldur's Gate. If you like those games, this is every bit as good as them. Anyone who knows those realizes saying something like this is quite a statement. Realistically, in today's market, nothing else is as good as those 4 games in terms of rpg purity. Sure, there is Arcanum and a few others, but apart from those close siblings, if you are looking for something new, with a fresh take made by different developers and not done in Unity, this is it. I love Pillars of Eternity, but UnderRail is better. It is more spiritually in tune with the original vibe. The original thrill of creation the game creators had when they were young and knew few boundaries. All of us, as we get older, incur some knowledge and experience about the world that both informs us but it also limits us, in our ability to see outside of the paper veneer we have become comfortably captured in. The UnderRail team are young and fresh, and this game is really really good. Inspired even. Also--and this goes a long way--its not self conscious. The latest gen of kickstarters seems to suffer from self-consciousness to an overwhelming degree. UnderRail gives us a whole new mythos and world that is realistic and futuristic, but is also gritty and exceptionally realized. In the tradition of the very best world-imaginers, you can actually conceive that this scenario could happen at some distant date if the right set of circumstances were to happen. Instead of magic there are psionics, as well as some mutation thing that I have only begun to explore. The world feels very very large. I have no indication of what its boundaries are yet, or experienced the feeling that I am running out of areas to adventure in to gain XP which I am sorely in need of. The balance is good if a little on the "hard" side. Challenges as you come to them always feel fairly impossible at first, but after a bit of poking around you can usually discover another way to face it that works well. I haven't run into an unsurpassable challenge yet. But they nearly always make me earn it. Which leads me to one more salient and important point as to lending realism to world-building: There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of areas in game that you are not supposed to venture into. These are wholly imagined as well. And if you go into them the characters immediately respond by attacking you. This happens if you accidentally search someone's locker you're not supposed to or go into private areas you're warned to avoid. This is awesome! These guys usually cream you in a matter of seconds with weapons and abilities far above your own. Remember how encountering the Enclave felt in Fallout?, that you were this twerp running around the desert and they had energy weapons and power-armor? You knew these items were out there but never got the chance to get them yourself. And they could cream you so you had to be sneaky and clever -- this is like that, only there are all sorts of factions like that. There are punk-rock subway dwellers with bitchen psionics who will just cream you if you wander through their camp. I love it. It doesn't stop progression from happening, but only forces you to consider other ways to getting what you're after. In short, Its MORE LIKE REAL LIFE IS. There are boundaries and you dont cross them and there are always people more powerful than you. Instead of being some linear RPG where there is only ever one way to go and difficulty is calibrated according to your stats in some disingenuous manner, but its all fine as long as you keep clicking and are mesmerized by the pretty purple color-glow spells. I hate those. It's not realism, it's bad design, which is a meaningless experience. Underrail, by contrast, is a gorgeous story couched in a top-down, Cavalier-Orthographic projection (isometric to most) turn-based combat, and equipment gathering progression. The ambient soundtrack is marvelous, definitely in my top-5 game soundtracks, along-side Mark Morgan's Fallout and a few others. In this day and age where so many new games stumble over seemingly simple design decisions, it's a miracle that a game like this ever got made at all. It is the perfect rpg game. 10/10
I just finished Gothic 3. I'm new to the series and have never played 1, 2, or Risen, so I can't speak much to that. But I fell madly in love with this one and plan to conquer G2 & Risen next. There is so much to tell, but I'll try to stick to the main themes that stuck out in my mind. In short, Gothic 3 definitely made my top 3 gaming experiences of all time. Starting off was a bit lack-luster. The engine needed work, something that I'm sure the devs were aware of, and you could tell. There are a few tweeks that they could've made which would have broughten it up to Oblivion-level beauty, if only they had made them. The draw distance looked silly and spackled together versus the immediate beauty of the landscapes nearer to the camera. After a while, luckily, your mind begins to tune them out. Not to mention that it gets much more beautiful the further along you get. Gothic 3 is a huge open world. The battles are difficult, and no matter how powerful your character gets, you can still be killed by petty creatures; I recommend saving often. Learn your F5 and F9 quicksave keys well. The combat is difficult in the beginning, but not impossible. Tackle tough foes from a distance with the bow for a while until you gain experience. There is one maddening bug that persisted to goad me throughout the game, which is that there literally is a bug in how the endurance meter functions. Your endurance level is what determines if you can sprint or walk, and often means the difference between life or death in many encounters. At first it runs out quickly and you find that you move very slowly everywhere you want to go. But watch the color: if it's grey that means you're affected by weakness which can be cured by a cure disease potion. If it's yellow, you're good, but there is still a bug that randomly changes how fast it replenishes. It never gets better. So stock up on endurance potions, and make sure to get the Run Like The Wolf trait from the hunter in Silden. That's probably the most important trait in the whole entire game because it changes a barely bearable experience into a wonderful one. The other thing that is a must, is to set Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic filtering by hand to 8x or 16x in your Nvidia control panel. (usually it says Application-controlled). Once you do this, you wind up with graphics that are Oblivion-level, and often better. (in my opinion). Other areas that shined were the story writing, voice acting, creature animations, and plethora of creature types, and just the vastness of the world. All of which are best-in-class I would say. Oh and I almost forgot the absolutely breath-taking music by Kai Rosenkranz. It's miraculous that such care and craft went into making this game. The dialogs often made my belly-laugh, as well as masterful tidbits like the Nordmar Nogginfog. I can't believe I missed this gem and have become an ardent supporter of the devs and look forward to playing all their games.
I have been playing this game on and off for 13 years. I still have a saved game backed up somewhere that represents 3-4 months of continuous game play, and I could still never beat it, or even get close really. I continuously built up better and better squads until I could pretty much over-power most parts of the map, but the SAM sites and other treachery (and bugs) were too much to handle. Still, for all it's difficulty, and strange archaic interface, I think this is one of the greatest game experiences I've ever had. It's a difficult game and you have to put your time in but it pays you back by challenging you and treating you like an adult who wants a deep strategic challenge. The hand-written interfaces are priceless and wonderful. Calling the graphics "dated" just isn't the correct way of going about it. I've read the code. This is the old days when things were blitted into DirectDraw buffers using brute force assembly language, before hardware acceleration. That basically means that the original devs wrote the graphics engine along with the masterful gameplay, story, design and everything else. and it's wonderful! It wouldn't be done that way now, where current devs rely on lots of 3rd party solutions, engines, etc, and write to APIs, then they just wrote the whole thing lock-stock and barrel for the IBM PC system which seemed to be the market leader at the time. Consequently, I think you get a better product in the end. Something that probably represents the blood and sweat and life-essences of tens of thousands of man hours of pouring over code and other nerdy goodness. Pretty unconventional review as I never addressed the game itself, but I'll leave that to others. Jagged Alliance is as great as they come for classic games.
