I played the DOS, SNES and Megadrive version so far. The DOS-Version has intensive parallax-scrolling ... in the WRONG DIRECTION! Instead of leaving the world behind, it moves forward, faster than the player even. I don't know if this is a bug or "artistic freedom". Also DOS computers were never really good when it comes to scrolling in general, other than the optimized chips in the Amiga and 16Bit consoles. Of course we are talking about emulation here, but the limitations are still the same. Even on a really fast computer you can see how the blocks are being moved one by one. The game supports sound blaster, but you need to change the dosbox config file for digital soundeffects. sbtype=sb16 sbbase=220 irq=7 dma=1 hdma=5 Since this game is based on a console version and not the Amiga original, it plays the music through the FM synthesizer. Would have been cool if they did the same trick as sunflower and reproduced the Amiga soundtrack through the wave channels, but no such luck. The Megadrive version hatd a few changes in level design and controls, the smart bomb works completely different for example and the first boss actually shoots now. After seeing these 3 ... Usually I would say that the Megadrive has the best version, but here I would pick the SNES version. It stays close to the original game when it comes to controls and level design and it has a surprisingly good soundtrack (while the Megadrive version sounds just as bad as most Megadrive games do). If you have the chance, grab the Amiga version, which has by far the best soundtrack and requires more precision, it's best played with a digital joystick, not with a gamepad. I hope that at some point we will get that one as well. Commodore's hold on the kickstart roms makes it difficult however.
I've been following the development of this game for 5 years now. It started as a fun little experiment and evolved into something bigger. Other than your usual VN this has no big elaborated storyline. Instead there are multiple short stories in the vanilla game. It's about a group of excentric people on a party, most of them need some convincing to drop their pants for you. The gameplay resembles the one of old style adventure games. Why 'old style'? Because other than in modern point and click adventures you can die, either as a consequence of a fistfight or you meet dead ends because you used items which you would need later. Also some of the mini quests exclude each other. For example: you can get stephanie drunk, so she dance topless which you need for one story. But then she won't be sober to help you on another. For many stories there are also multiple ways to get to the goal. You can give all the beer in the house to the guy who watches the alcohol, so he will trust you and you can grab an item for a girl. But if you use the beer for something else, you can convince others to help you knock out that guy for the same result or distract him otherwise. The game has nice humor and a lot of fun stuff going on. It doesn't take itself seriously at any moment (with one exception: A blackmail event was removed from the game at some point). The versions which were released around certain holidays also came with some according decorations. I don't know however, if those are always in the game and shown depending on the date or if they were removed after those holidays. The one downside is that you have to buy an additional DLC if you want to have censor bars removed. Also due to some regulations one character would not be involved in any intimate interaction in the Steam version. I still have to test if that's the case in the GOG version as well. In any case the game worth the money, the content of the original uncensored DRM free version can be restored via mod.
I almost forgot the headaches this game gave me when I played it for the first time, but now the memory comes back. After Star Treak Armada 1 - which was a bit on the short side - I was really looking forward to this game. I can't say that I like all the changes tho. In STA1 every a of 8 ships was a force to be reckoned, one would position his ships strategically, repair them when they got damaged. STA2 has a whle new approach. Ships can't take by far as many hits as they used to, you can easily loose several of your biggest ships when going against one single stationary cannon, if you didn't research enhanced shields yet (ship enhanncements are a very unnecessary technology tree). There are a LOT more units on a map as in STA1 and they just keep dying. Now one might enjoy that or he won't. The game also has some advancements, like the use of the z-position, even if stationary objects can still not occupy the same 2D location. What really causes headaches and one to yell at the computer is the AI. Even with low movement autonomy parked units keep rushing across haf the map (at least if feels like that) to throw themselves into a battle where they have no chance to survive. It happened all too often that I resolved a conflict, then wanted to get my long range ships to take out a base or a cannon and they were all gone, even if they were positioned behind a base cluster. At some point they decided it would be fun to jump over a cliff as a group. Also if a ship is in combat it's very hard to reposition it and let it recover behind its companions. Movement autonomy causes it to ignore commands and let the AI do what it thinks is right. If you are lucky it will at least fly to the location you told him to go, but most of the time it will just stand still and get massacred. The only real solution to this is to command it to fly home and repair. I still gave the game 3 stars because it's a nice old fashionet RTS and these are hard too find these days.
In short: It's a good remake. The adaptation of the scenes for widescreen monitors has gone well, it runs smooth and - other than the original - it won't change the desktop resolution, which is always a pain in the a** I am not a big fan of one click interfaces, I usually prefer to have the choice between "look", "pick up" and "use" at least. But these days with tablets and mobile phones becoming more and more popular for games like this, I guess you have to do it that way. It works well enough however, doesn't really dumb down the gameplay. The game itself is as good as ever, sometimes Kathy tries a bit too hard to be the "lost case" as she puts it, but overall the characters are well designed, the puzzles not all too fancy. The storytelling seems heavily inspired by the first Gabriel Knight game, which is good, the setting reminds of Twin Peaks. The tension keeps buiding towards the end. I don't really like the finale however, it somehow doesn't fit in. Oh ... and Kathy can now afford different bikes.
