Tag: Video Game

A Thousand Words: Chains of Freedom

On By coilerxiiIn A Thousand Words, ReviewLeave a comment

Chains of Freedom

the XCOM-esque game Chains of Freedom is a new turn-based strategy game that I’ve just completed. It’s well, uh, something. So I wouldn’t have finished the game if it was bad , but man is there so much that drags it and keeps it from being what could have been. A lot of it.

The first issue is the story and setting. Do you want Brown Age throwback graphics of one Cyrillic wasteland after another? Do you want a plot and setting that’s what you’d get if you prompted an AI to go “Make me a science fiction setting based on Command and Conquer, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Metro, and throw in a couple of general cliches for good measure”? Do you want characters who are either dull or who you’ll hate from the start?

Then there’s the gameplay. Probably the most distinct thing about it compared to other XCOM-likes is that you have to scrounge and craft for items between battles. This is one of those things that’s a lot better in theory than in practice. Other than that, it’s a pretty standard “cover turn based strategy.” Which is a problem when you get into the final act and the game throws monotonous giant swarm after monotonous giant swarm at you. As if to compensate, the last few encounters and the final boss are anticlimactically easy.

This is a 49% game. And as the last couple of Super Bowls have shown for the team that bears that name, close doesn’t let you win. (Hey, gotta drop a football reference on NFL Draft day!)

A Thousand Words: Buckshot Roulette

On By coilerxiiIn A Thousand Words, ReviewLeave a comment

Buckshot Roulette

A minimalist and creepy horror/puzzle/party (seriously) game, Buckshot Roulette is “what if instead of a revolver, you used a randomly loaded pump-action shotgun in a game of wits with a creepy big-teethed guy?”

While it might sound like a trolling anti-game, it actually works as a combination of luck and skill. Power ups can see which shell is chambered, can eject a shell, and so on. Whoever can get lucky the most wins. While this isn’t the deepest game, it works for what it is.

A Thousand Words: OutRun

On By coilerxiiIn A Thousand Words, ReviewLeave a comment

OutRun

Sega’s legendary car driving game OutRun was an arcade time attack game where you control a couple in a Ferrari trying to make it to the end of a series of branching paths before the clock runs out. That is the least impressive thing about it. The most impressive thing is that a game in 1986, even an arcade game, manages to still look fresh and well animated to this day, and have things like a changeable radio and diverging paths. Remember, the console stuff at this time was the likes of Mach Rider.

It took over a decade to finally be able to make an arcade-quality home port of it. Which speaks to how limit-pushing it was/is. While today its most direct legacy of giant arcade machine driving games with steering wheels and frequently even pedals is viewed as outdated kitsch, every game with vehicles owes a lot to this.

A Thousand Words: Riding Fight

On By coilerxiiIn A Thousand Words, ReviewLeave a comment

Riding Fight

Taito’s Riding Fight is a very unique video game.

It tries to match Mode Seven Style “flat but three dimension” fast movement with brawling. While it doesn’t always succeed, I give it credit for trying, and the presentation and music are excellent. The plot involves superhero-mercs-whoever on hoverboards fighting evil, from Momar Gaddafi (yes the second boss is based on him) to Japanese mystic princesses. The final section involves saving “the young mistress of an important man”, which I really hope was a mistranslation. Otherwise it would be a unique twist on the “Save the princess” (what would his wife think?)

The novelty and ambition alone makes this game worth it.

A Thousand Words: Road 96

On By coilerxiiIn A Thousand Words, ReviewLeave a comment

Road 96

The game Road 96 is an adventure game in the style of the old Telltale ones where you walk around, do dialog choices, and play the occasional quick time/minigame as one of a series of teenage runaways trying to escape the country of Petria in the mid-1990s. You go through one somewhat different set of campaigns which you can change through varying degrees, either by dialogue choices/actions or picking how you’re going to travel (via hitchhiking, transport, a car if available, or if you’re really crazy, walking).

On one hand, I saw basically every plot twist coming and the setting is a little iffy. Not the graphics, which are good for what they are and have an excellent visual design. Petria is a semi-eastern European country (its strongman leader looks like Brezhnev) whose residents have the demographics and style of 21st Century Americans. And for a desperate-to-escape country, it really only resembles a moderately lower-class area of the West.

The characters make up for all of it, as they combine quirks with genuinely hidden depth. While the story is a little janky due to the nature of the gameplay and has the adventure game problem of your choices ultimately not mattering that much to the main plot, it works and more importantly can jump between tones in scenes without it being seeming forced or jarring.

So yeah, I had a lot of fun with this game, even if it’s not normally my style.

A Thousand Words: Wario Land 3

On By coilerxiiIn A Thousand Words, ReviewLeave a comment

Wario Land 3

Wario Land 4 is one of my favorite games of all time. Wario Land 3, coming out on the preceding Game Boy Color not long before, is not. This is one of those games that you could tell the developers really just needed more power and focus and it would click. With the GBA and a clearer focus, it worked. Here it didn’t.

This is less linear than Wario Land 4 and has the gimmick in that Wario can’t actually get killed (but can get knocked back and cost the player time that way). The problem with losing time instead of losing health is obvious, especially since WL4 didn’t have any absolute game overs. In fact, this game can be described as slow, slowly moving and slowly backtracking in the semi-open world. A lot of this is probably due to the 8 bit GBC’s limitations, but that only makes it dated.

Thankfully, the graphics are very good for the hardware limitations and do not feel dated, and the chiptune soundtrack is beautifully quirky and excellent. The game just doesn’t really gel and has the “misfortune” of being followed up by a classic.

A Thousand Words: Mach Rider

On By coilerxiiIn A Thousand Words, Review1 Comment

Mach Rider

Like many video games, Mach Rider was a minor hit for Nintendo in the mid-1980s and then languished forgotten until Smash Bros. revived it. The game is a pretty crude but impressive-for-the-time ride along a twisting track and dodge and destroy the evil giant tricycles until you eventually fail, but it has a couple of quirks.

The first is that it was one of the first games to have a level editor, even if it was only in Japan and very limited in practice there. The second is that it has a vague story (there’s minor justifications for you fighting back against an alien invasion in the various track missions) but no ending. The third and most interesting is that the titular rider has been alternately depicted as male and female (the former being in screens showing a helmeted but clearly male figure and the Smash Bros. Melee trophy using ‘he’ while the latter is a female biker in a piece of official art and a woman in the arcade version that’s implied to be a Mac Rider). I guess the different color riders are different people.

Of course, back in the day I remembered the Mach Rider theme as an alternate stage track in Smash Bros. that I loved and nothing else. Which can be said about a lot of things.

Wither GTA?

On By coilerxiiIn EssayLeave a comment

With the official trailer for the next Duke Nukem Forever Grand Theft Auto 6 finally being out and the game having a vague ‘sometime next year’ release date as of this post, I’m reflecting on how uh, “meh” a lot of people are about it. Since it’s been over a literal decade since the release of the previous installment, which is about as much time between GTA III and V. Back in the day, when we had to walk uphill both ways, for people’s consensus to be “ok, something to look out for” at best and dread at worst would be as unthinkable as the Cubs winning the World Series. But here we are.

So what happened?

  1. Diminishing returns in graphics making it harder to razzle-dazzle people with its visual brilliance.
  2. A decade of both seeing the issues in the series and seeing more open world games to the point where it’s arguably played out.
  3. GTA Online, a monkeys paw that brought Rockstar piles of money at the expense of reputation. GTA V was able to continue getting griefers and Xbox Live Kids to buy shinier and shinier gimzos with real money, at the same time making it a joke to everyone else. And not the good kind.
  4. The issue of what tone to adopt, where a mixture of blended ChatGPT-made (ok, I might be a little hard on the AI) scrambled crime drama mixed with juvenile ‘shocking’ Bart Simpson meets Dennis Rodman antics that were a little edgy in 2001 that the series previous had has aged horribly…. but with reasonable confidence that what’s left of Rockstar might not be able to do something differently better.

I still think it’ll be playable, make a gargantuan amount of money, and look good. But the old-time hype is just gone.

A Thousand Words: BeamNG Drive

On By coilerxiiIn A Thousand Words, ReviewLeave a comment

BeamNG Drive

One reason why Fuldapocalypse hasn’t been updating much is BeamNG Drive. It is an automobile sandbox with realistic physics that allows someone to do so much. Now on its own the game does not look like much. You can drive around maps that range from tiny to several virtual square kilometers, do some challenges like races or time trials or seeing how far you can get on an almost empty fuel tank, etc…

But that is like saying like sports is just throwing/kicking a ball around. With just the stock game (and the mods for this are numerous and excellent), you can control everything from big truck fronts to tiny old cars. The seemingly mundane can turn into fun, like towing a trailer with cargo many times the weight of the car pulling it, and doing so on a dirt mountain road without mishaps (easier said than done).

You have to make your own fun in BeamNG, but there’s a lot of it.

Fake Mobile Game Ads

On By coilerxiiIn EssayLeave a comment

Most video game advertisements naturally show the gameplay at its most exciting, thrilling, and successful. Yet there is one common type that doesn’t. Imagine an ad for a platformer where the character misses an easy jump and falls into a pit, a fighting game where they try and fail to pull off a single special move, and so on. That is the changing but obvious world of fake mobile game ads, where the ‘player’ engages in either simple puzzles or a Space Invaders style descending enemy wave game and almost invariably loses pathetically.

See, there’s a reason for this and that’s because the actual game is nothing like the ads. Most of the games depicted in these commercials are city builders with everything taking forever unless you speed the process up with real money. Not very photogenic. The actual ad mode is relegated to a small minigame so that it’s not technically false advertising.