Jolt Country

So yeah, at my new place, I've been going without internet access, which is part of the reason I'm not posting as much recently (not that I ever post a ton). Besides showing me that I spend way too much time on the net in any case, I use these times to catch up on old games I've never beaten and in some cases never played.

I recently used the opportunity to play some of the Tex Murphy adventure games I've had for a long time. I had played Mean Streets and the Martian Memorandum years ago and had once bought a two-pack with "Under a Killing Moon" and "the Pandora Directive" but never got around to playing them, so that's what was on the agenda.

First off, I ought to say how much I liked the first Mean Streets. I would venture to say that it's among my top five favorite games for the C64, succeeding despite a completely lame speeder simulation portion of the game that was best ignored by using the autopilot (you'd still have to wait for it to fly to the destination and land, of course). You have to love a game that years after playing it, while perusing the Playboy channel at the fraternity house that you're rooming at for college, you find yourself watching a soft porn movie that has stolen its theme song. Anyway, I thought it was a great mix of comedy, cynicism, and fun. I've been meaning to replay it for years although I guess I'm somewhat worried that it'll disappoint me now. Just the same, I have ideas about what kind of kickass Dreamcast homebrew project a remake could be, especially if someone replaced the speeder bits with just a fun skippable flight simulator and maybe expanded the original game's Rolling Thunder-esque bonus money side missions.

Unfortunately, every sequel to that first game always seems to be somewhat lackluster. The Martian Memorandum had its cute bits, but it really didn't touch the things that made Mean Streets excel. Under A Killing Moon, the third game, is probably the poorest showing of them all. This is the first game to introduce the new 3d movement style of play. Welcome to 'find the pixel in 3d.' Now important items will be taped to the undersides of desks and behind plant pots so that finding them involves lots of tricky camera movement. Similar to other Access Software games, there are still tricky 'avoid the guard on a timer' annoyances, but this time escaping involves lowering your camera and walking up to something that doesn't always even seem like it'd offer much shelter.

The first time I started up the game and noticed that Brian Keith was in the game, I quit and looked him up on the internet movie database and was sort of bummed to see that his life and career ended on such a down note, even though I never really watched him in anything, so I really wanted to like his performance in this game. He may be one of the better actors, actually, but that doesn't distract from the writing, plot, or other performances. It's a laugh to see Margot Kidder's credited role, as she's just some bar wench you see for a couple minutes right before the endgame- not that watching her bit really provides much comedy or entertainment in itself. Oh yeah, this game also has the SCARY NATIVE AMERICAN GUY WHO CAN MORPH INTO DIFFERENT PEOPLE. The best thing about this game was that there was a cute reference to 'the Martian Memorandum,' but given that I wouldn't recommend that game to anyone because of what I've already written, that's not saying much.

Now, 'The Pandora Directive' is better than 'Under A Killing Moon' in many ways. Still, the designers bogged the game down with a bunch of bad decisions, like the '7th Guest'-esque approach to gratuitous puzzles. There are a lot of jigsaws, 16-squares, and whatever else that you've seen a thousand times before. Also, there are like 7 different endings to the game. One is the 'yay, everyone's happy' ending, two are sort of neutral, and four are 'everyone hates you.' Of course, I got one of the middle ones but I'll never have the heart to replay the game and catch that best ending, and so far, I haven't found a utility for watching all the movies I missed. Besides the classical puzzles, it has that absurb object manipulation kind of stuff, where you can't use a box of matches until you examine the matchbox and dum dum dum, there's a match inside! Lots of stuff like that and even worse, completely insane object usage logic and all that.

The acting in 'The Pandora Directive' is superior to its predecessor, which is funny considering that one of the major good guy roles is played by that guy who was the bad guy in UHF. Other recognizable faces are Tonya Roberts (Beastmaster, rowr) and the guy who played the military dude in Wargames. The plot and all that is better, too, actually. There were actually a couple parts where the game succeeded in being a little creepy. It's just too bad that the designers made so many bandwagon/catch-the-trend decisions that prevent me from recommending it to anyone. So I'll be interested to see whether or not I ever bite the bullet and try to find the last game in the series, Overseer, for the sake of completion even if I don't really have faith that it'll be particularly good.

Using SCUMMvm, I've been replaying some old Lucasarts games lately, too. Played through all of one of the paths of Maniac Mansion (although I was disappointed to find that the crack that disabled the copy protection also made it so one didn't have to find the proper code to the final combination for the door in the dungeon) and about halfway through Zak McKracken (when I found that the version I was playing wasn't cracked at all and didn't feel like digging out the game's docs) and all of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. It wasn't as enjoyable returning to Fate of Atlantis as I thought it'd be. I played through all three paths and even though it was good to be reminded how neat some of the game design is at parts, it also reminded me how annoying it can be and just basically shows how the adventure genre can still be developed. Yeah, Lucasarts has released a bunch of adventure games since then, and some, like Grim Fandango, I consider classics, but there are things in Fate of Atlantis, like finding the ways to get out of certain fights in the action route, that are types of gameplay that I think still can be honed. I thought one of the newer James Bond games was great in that respect until I realized that the player is judged by how many of these things he finds and that took away some of the fun, for some reason. Playing both Fate of Atlantis and the Tex Murphy games are somewhat like playing old text games, where you still get 'You can't do that here.' and 'That's nothing special.' type of messages way more than you'd like. I think Lucasarts was correct in making their later adventures simpler to control, but in that respect, I think there's a lot that adventure game designers can strive to perfect. Since most of the genre is in the hands of hobbyists these days, one can only hope that there's someone out there with some great ideas.

Besides those adventure games, I also recently beat 'No One Lives Forever 2.' I put off purchasing that for a super long time as I wasn't completely impressed with the demos and the first game was enough of a mixed bag to make me skeptical. I ended up loving the game, thinking it's much better than the first one, except that I'd still recommend that one plays through the first one just for some of that 'ha ha wink wink' factor. The cooperative multiplayer missions are a good time, too, telling another side of the story. For instance, in the first mission in single player, it ends with Cate Archer getting poisoned, then she wakes up back at headquarters. The cooperative multiplayer mission for the first board involves finding and rescuing her. So um, yeah, fun stuff.

Welp, that's it for now. Possible future reviews: Hitman 2, Evil Dead: Fistfull of Boomstick (x-box), Syberia...

Also, okay, some of these 'reviews' aren't very retro, but I figure I have to kick the usage up in this base just for the next time pinback declares that one of the bases will be eliminated.

Anyway, I beat Evil Dead : Fist Full of Boomstick for X-Box the other day, and I have to say, this is the best Evil Dead game yet. True, the previous game wasn't much competition, and even though in the 'making of' video included the designers sound like morons who are more interested in cashing in on the franchise than doing actual justice to it, the game still has enough humor and style to pull through. I beat the game on normal and while it was difficult at parts, it's mainly difficult just because you wander around levels trying to figure out what the hell to do (there are some puzzle-ish type things) while enemies respawn. If someone knows where to go and what to do, the game probably isn't that hard at all. When I started the game, I just thought it was pretty decent (and therefore well ahead of 'hail to the king'). As I stuck with it, though, it grew on me and the little jokes here and there started becoming rather satisfying. This game may not be classic, but I do think it's worth the $20 bargain price you can already find it for.

So, in my last entry, I spoke of how I longed for a remake of Mean Streets. Turns out that I had forgotten that or not known that the one Tex Murphy game I hadn't played, Overseer, actually was a remake of Mean Streets already, this time with the same gay 3d levels and puzzles-for-their-own-sake used in the previous two games. I actually bought it off of ebay for $8. The FMV clips are now on DVD so the quality isn't as bad, but then again, I think these games are better used as examples why FMV went out of style so quickly, as opposed to a game like Gabriel Knight 2, which is hailed by many as one of the best uses of FMV.

I don't think I'm going to be playing it long enough to give it a more detailed review. It is one of those lose-all-respect-for-the-game-designers moments, though, just knowing that they thought there was something wrong with the only game they actually got right.

Hit Man 2, so far, is eh. In these games, you play someone like Jean Reno in the Professional except without any loveable plant-toting quirks or anything of interest at all, really. Even though there is a plot, they're basically just silly set-ups that aren't very involving. I think I might have even had more fun with the first one even though I hit a bigger wall when I got to a level that was just crazy large and I just couldn't motivate myself to care anymore.

That's it for now.

This is a placeholder message to remind myself to write something here later on.

I didn't realise there were other Tex Murphy games before Under a Killing Moon; how're you getting the modern TM games to run?

So, wait, the third-and-final FMV-laden one is a remake of the original? Now I have to go back and look at all this stuff.

I love how all the guys who worked on the TM games felt that, now there weren't going to be any games, and they were so pissed they couldn't finish the storyline, they actually wrote a short radio-series featuring all the developers and "actors" that rounds the series off. I'll try and dig it up.

Well, I'm using Windows 98 SE so compatibility is not as bad as it could be, plus for 'under a killing moon' and 'pandora detective,' I copied all the cds to the hard drive and used fakecd to emulate cd drives so I didn't have to do any disc swapping.

You can find the radio shows here: http://www.unofficialtexmurphy.com/patc ... ties.shtml

Hey, why the fuck is my custom title changed? My CRIME IS STILL IN PROGRESS, baybee.

I just started Sacrifice tonight. I can't say I'm very good at these games so I don't think I'll get very far, but I have to say, I'm pretty impressed. I've never been interested in RTSs (mainly because every time I dabbled in one, I'd get my ass kicked), but this one is interesting on a couple levels. The graphics and music are pretty impressive, but what's really got me is the story and voice work and general fun of it. For each mission, you can choose to help out one of five battling gods, ranging from the nature-ific peace goddess to the destruction-loving bad boy. As you get a couple levels in, though, options of gods to serve become limited as you burn your bridges with this one or that one.

That doesn't necessarily sound inherently fantastic; I'm sure that description isn't why I bought the game in the first place (it was mainly because of a dying loyalty to Interplay and the fact that the demo for it that came with Messiah seemed pretty decent), but I have to say that the element is executed a lot better than I imagined. Ideally, I'd like to beat the game then play it again to catch some of the other angles.

Of course, what will probably happen is that I'll just give up at some point then work on coercing my younger brother (who is much better at these games) into playing it for me.

I'm pretty sure you can get it for $10 at stores that have pretty decent bargain bin selections, so I'd recommend it to anyone who might be interested.

Alright, I haven't touched Sacrifice since I ordered and received the strategy guide weeks ago, but here I am to talk about my other gaming exploits. A couple weeks ago, my brother was replaying through Final Fantasy Tactics a third time, and I figured it'd be good to try to turn him onto Fallout Tactics. Even though I had never successfully gotten into any of the Fallout games, I figured that Fallout Tactics has to be better than one of those Japanese rpgs, as even the best ones are annoyingly dumbed down for children and are usually hampered by language and culture translation. I also thought it'd be a good investment, just in case the Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel action game turns out to be good fun.

Anyway, finding the tactics game ended up requiring a visit to Interplay's website, as it was no longer available at the other online stores I tried and my local Gamestop whose selection is going to crap. The plus side of this was that Interplay is selling it for $5. Despite the fact that Brian Fargo is no longer there, they're still doing things like that which endears myself to them. Too many companies seem to throw away old stock instead of offering them for bargain prices. After my pleasant experience with Sacrifice, I thought I'd give some more Shiny games a try and also picked up both MDK games for $10.

The MDK discs were in one of those dual-jewelcase packages, although a free mouse pad was included. The Fallout game was the full original box, which was nice.

I haven't given the Fallout game a try yet, as I thought I should play through the earlier games first (and my brother has to wait until he gets a better computer before he'll be able to play it) so I started off playing MDK.

Despite how much all the reviews I read raved about the configurability of the controls, it still took a bit of fiddling before I found a control scheme that I could use (it ended up being similar to how I played Mafia, where I switched between gamepad and keyboard as needed). I still found the game instantly charming and pretty addictive. At normal difficulty, levels weren't especially hard except for parts where just figuring out what to do is a puzzle and since the levels are timed, this sometimes resulted in having to start from the beginning of the level a fair amount. Although clever and doing some neat technical things for the time that it was released (including a bullet eye-view when firing weapons in sniper mode, which is especially entertaining when you fire a mortar that bounces around a fair amount), it is still very fluffy. One can see why it did fairly well on consoles (I believe).

The ending is pretty anti-climatic, and the overall story isn't very important. The end result, for me, made the game feel king of like an early Apogee game on steroids. Like almost every other Shiny Entertainment game I've played, it's very creative and one only wishes he were there in the game design meetings to help push it that 10% further and make it into a perfect game. As it is, the flaws in these games are that much more disappointing and make the gaming experience that much more unfullfilling.

Even though I had a good deal of fun with the game and it was quite addictive, I wouldn't go out and recommend it to anyone because of the nagging flaws. Although I beat the first one, I have yet to start the second one for these same reasons.

After that, I thought I'd give the first Fallout another try. After two or three unsuccessful starts, I finally created a decent enough character and successfully triggered a quest (to rescue Tandi) that had been eluding me up until that point. After that hump, the rest of the game was much smoother, although there was plenty of restoring constantly in difficult battles (partly because I let Ian die in his first fight) and several parts where I had to restore because some character had moved and trapped me (yeah, this is fixed in the second game).

The game was fun, yeah, but overall, it felt sort of like a flawed Fallacy of Dawn. FoD's only disappointment was that there wasn't a handful more missions to let you play the game for that many more hours (but completely understandable given the difficulty of writing a big text game alone) while Fallout has references to unimplemented quests and in ways feels like a jumble of ideas that aren't completely self-contained. I kind of blame the way skills and such is handled. Of course, earlier this year, I think I said something about how I wondered if I would ever be able to play a game where you choose your own stats again (as I haven't really enjoyed that since 80s rpgs, where you keep on creating characters until you get a good roll and all that). While I think having gameplay based on chosen skills is a nice ideal, I just wonder if it keeps the product from feeling polished as the designers try to both make it so that the game isn't so picky that a player misses the majority of quests and perks and that it may help turn the quest-creation process into a confusing bog of ideas that are more likely to be semi-implemented as they were. So yeah, it felt like playing a good text game which aspires higher than its own capabilities.

The same thing can be said of Fallout 2 so far, although I'm having a harder time maintaining a decent character. After several all-nighters, I've given the game a rest and left it at my parents' where I was housesitting all week. The last several hours of gameplay have been spent wandering around after beating most of the important quests in Vault City, hoping to level up to a point that I may have a chance against that raider camp. I thought the lack of wandering around powering up was one of the reasons modern crpgs are supposed to be better than console-styled games.

My prediction is that I'm going to enjoy playing through the rest of the game and the other ones a fair amount but I won't consider them a holy grail of gaming that I'll feel the need to direct my siblings and friends to. Hopefully, this experience will allow me to get into Planescape: Torment and I'll like it as much as the people that recommend it to me.

Roody_Yogurt wrote:A couple weeks ago, my brother was replaying through Final Fantasy Tactics a third time, and I figured it'd be good to try to turn him onto Fallout Tactics.

A few friends had recommended FF Tactics, but I found the game to be very shallow when compared to the original X-COM. I didn't get very far with it, so for all I know it really gets deep and it really has a lot more combat options later on, but if a game doesn't grab me at the start I stop playing.

(Actually, even if they do I stop playing, usually. I remember spending a bunch of nights in the middle of the summer a couple years back playing Half-Life and I was enjoying the hell out of it. Then, I missed a few nights, stopped playing and haven't been back. It's a great game. It scared the hell out of me. It was very compelling? Why did I suddenly stop playing it and/or get bored with it?)

Well, of course, there's the fact that we're not the young kids we once were, where spending weeks on a game seems like a reasonable idea. Despite how much we enjoy certain aspects of a game, if the mechanics of actually playing it aren't
completely engaging, it's just much to easy to put it aside with the intent to get back to it one day.

Roody_Yogurt wrote:Well, of course, there's the fact that we're not the young kids we once were...

Ah, but those were the days, weren't they, Roody? When the doors of perception were cleansed and we saw things how they truly were -- infinite? Do you remember, Roody? Those times, those games, those conversations, those discussions. Do you remember when we used to dance? And incidents arose from circumstance? One thing led to another, we were young -- and we would scream together songs unsung?

Shut up, Barry Manilow.

And, MDK (and, MDK 2 possibly even more so) fucking RULES. Talk shit about Shiny all you want, but they fucking delivered in that game. And the sequel, which feels sort of like three games since you play as three different characters, and some are better than others, but it sure ain't boring.

Remember, before MDK, sniper rifles were virtually unheard of in modern gaming. PAY YOUR DUES, BITCHES.

At the moment, I'm trying to finish one game before starting another, for a number of reasons, but a big one being that (even with 240+ gigs of storage) games take up a shitload of room nowadays, and don't want to tie up a bunch of space with ten half-finished games. (Though, I do have a "game saves" directory with tons of RARs of game saves from various abandoned games.)

Working on beating Halo at the moment, but the sheer repetition is fucking killing me, and taking a lot of the fun out. If I don't get a vehicle to drive soon, I might just delete the fucking thing and move on to Max Payne 2.

Jethro Q. Walrustitty wrote:Shut up, Barry Manilow.

=(


The disco halls must hold no fun for you.

><

Hey, disco made me what I am today, and don't you forget it.

Disco leads to scientology?

Guess it really is the root of all evil.

"That's a good fssshhhaaaucking milkshake!" -- J. Travolta, _Pulp Fiction_

Bought Max Payne 2 yesterday, and I just beat it now. Anyway, I only really enjoyed one level in the whole game; I don't recommend it.

In honor of this place going belly-up before the year is out, I am bringing this thread back from the dead. Now that I don't have to worry about any posters showing up to disagree with anything I've said, it is right time to chronicle my thoughts on the games I am playing.

First off, Mafia 2(!!!)-
(The original game is covered here)

I enjoyed the first Mafia game, for all its frustrations and flaws. Despite those things, the score and graphics (for its time) helped make it seem like were playing an event.

Initially, the trailers for the sequel intrigued me. I thought they looked fantastic. Then I started reading articles about Playboy collectible tie-ins, and I tried the eventual demo on the 360 (since the first game, I have moved over to mainly-console gaming) and found it lacking. I decided not to get it, and reviews from friends validated that decision.

Fast forward many months to "a couple weeks ago" where I found myself looking at a Mafia 2 Game of the Year edition at Target, priced at $20. I figured, as mediocre as the game probably is, $20 (with all of that DLC) is a pretty good price for mediocrity.

All in all, I'd say that was a good call.

The game does do some things right. While the first game's protagonist was a basically-good-guy who gets seduced by the Mafioso lifestyle (and whose tragic downfall is the result of good decisions), the protagonist in Mafia 2 is not burdened with the same sense of morals and, pleasantly, is not destined for a cookie-cutter ending. In fact, to both its strength and detriment, there are unexplored (and misleading) plot elements, probably due to the fact that the game originally was supposed to have four different endings. The resulting plot, while not perfect, is also something that you can't completely put your finger on and is somewhat better for it.

Still with us are the ponderous commutes to and during almost every mission. At least through some of this, characters talk and the game uses this time to develop things, and I found this to be a sort of nice change of pace from the games I've played lately. Also, the game takes place later than the first game, so cars are faster.

I can't say if if's the same way with the pc version, but the 360 version cops (and reactions to things like speeding) are way more forgiving than in the first game. One gets the feeling that they are dumbing things down for the console market, but maybe that's not a bad thing.

Unfortunately, among the dumbed down things are the guns. The inaccuracy with a gamepad is extremely frustrating when compared to 360 games that handle gamepad aiming much better, and instead of doing scoped weapons properly, they have a crappy non-zoom thing that mainly frustrates.

The first game had some particularly memorable missions, like a sniper mission and a riverboat one (can't remember if they were the same mission). This second one doesn't reach the same the heights, but it does get more imaginative with some of the DLC.

The DLC sort of brings back the feel of the post-main-game Free Ride (or whatever) mode of the original. Loosely connected missions that, once completed, can be played as many times in whatever order you'd like. Some of these missions bring back the head-bashing frustration associated with the first one, admittedly.

As far as the Playboy magazines go, sure, when I heard about them, I thought it was pretty annoying product placement. Playing the game, though, I have to admit that I do not hate boobs in games. This gets a pass.

Concerning the 360 version itself, graphically, I found the game just fine. It wasn't until Joe's Adventures, the third DLC, that things like magically-appearing-objects-as-you-get-closer-to-them really was noticeable. While there would be some novelty to playing the game on a nice pc, the affordability of the 360 (and presumably, the PS3 version) is more important.

Final thoughts- Mafia 2 is lacking in some areas to the extent that I can understand the frustration of the early adopters. Even now, I'd recommend avoiding the pc version, as they are still selling the DLC for more than it's worth. Just the same, I'd give the thumbs-up to console owners. It won't be the best game you play all year, but it's a great distraction and is the perfect thing for when you just want to swim in a new world (or sandbox) for a while.

Mafia 2 mayhem

I tried to line up the music with the video. Sort of like the Pink Floyd/ Wizard of Oz thing....only with DEATH!



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