For years, there have been several Metroid games that I couldn’t get around to playing due to the systems they were on. Now, since I was lent a Wii, I finally can. And I decided to start not with the games I will surely like (the Prime trilogy), but instead with something that I’ve attempted to play several times before and always got frustrated really quickly – the infamous Other M. Now that I have given it a proper 100% run, is it any better than you might’ve heard?
Haha, no, of course not.
Prey went through some really troubled development times. Original game of the same name has been one of the longest games in development, announced originally in 1995, and finished in 2006, retaining a lot of the original ideas and a lot of core 90s FPS values (and if you can get it, get it, by the way). Then, a sequel Prey 2 was in development as a more action adventure-type game, closer to Deus Ex or, probably even closer, The Darkness in the mentality and design approach, by Human Head Studios. Yet, after years of development, it was quietly cancelled before being re-announced as Prey, now developed by Arkane Studios. And being a completely different game, highly influenced by “Shock” games and immersive sims. Still taking on the topic of alien invasion, but now from a more psychological thriller angle, similar to the cancelled XCOM FPS title (later completely remade into mediocre The Bureau: XCOM Declassified).
It set out to be something amazing – a very freeform “Shock” title, with all the metroidvania/survival horror exploration focus and even more on top, with interesting setup, with aliens who can look like normal items, with multiple approaches to everything, with nicely written small NPC stories and with the music by Mick Gordon. If only all of this worked.
O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
This has been a long time coming. I’ve attempted to play System Shock 2 ever since 2001, when I first got my own modern (for the time) PC. And even back then, just few years after the game release, it already worked with issues. After that for the longest all games on this in-house game engine made by Looking Glass Studios, along with the Thief 1 and 2, were borderline unplayable on most PCs. Until one day a mysterious person (often believed to be one of the ex-Looking Glass employees), released an updated version of the source code of the engine, which made things work again. Ever since then, all 3 games on the Dark Engine have been receiving updates and fixes making games not just playable again, but often better than they were originally. And several years since I had a chance to replay all the Thief titles and a year and a half since I’ve first experienced the innovative undying beauty of the original System Shock, I finally had the chance to finish System Shock 2. And I can sum up my experience in a very short review: Wow…
For more in-depth analysis, read on. :)
It’s been a while since Bulletstorm has been released and yet, no other game since then has tried to successfully combine the best elements of style action titles like Devil May Cry, classic FPS games and modern scripted FPS games in one nice package. The only title which tried to go for at least something similar in speed, but not in tone or stylish action, was the pretty good DOOM (2016). Although, it does feel like the FPS games in general are trying to recapture the speed and simple joys of the earlier days of the genre recently, so maybe things aren’t that bad and we’ll get more fun titles. But for now, we can also finally replay Bulletstorm on PC without the goddamn GFWL in the updated Full Clip Edition. And that’s, mostly, good.
Read more“Happy about: Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition (and a few words on Nex Machina)”
Mirror’s Edge was a complete surprise when I first saw the trailer for it back in 2008 or so. My imagination on the concept pictured it as a highly non-linear adventure, where you follow the bag as different Runners grab it. So you would play levels as different characters, crossing paths with characters you followed before and seeing glimpses of some interesting character lives. No one made game stories like that, to my knowledge (hell, even not a lot of movies attempted this). While I was wrong about that, I actually also had a game idea at the time, which was different overall, but one aspect of which was incredibly close to that of Runners and the movement in Mirror’s Edge, so I was excited to see someone attempt to implement that in a real game. And while it certainly wasn’t great due to numerous frustrating flaws, I loved it and still do, occasionally replaying it. And then a reboot was announced…
As usual for the genre, let me preface by saying that I suck at strategy games, but I like when they have interesting worlds and stories, and play them for that in the first place. Grey Goo is a game by Petroglyph Games, ex-alumni of Westwood plus other talented people. So when they promised a classic RTS experience, even I got interested. Because classic RTS usually meant some good (even when silly) stories. I cannot say that didn’t deliver on the promise.
O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
People who read me for a while now know that I tend to preface my strategy game post with clearly outlining that I absolutely irredeemably suck at those. Yet, there are several franchises that I love, even if I play on easiest difficulties or outright cheat while playing them, just for the sake of their stories, their worlds, the music the style and everything that isn’t gameplay I just fail to be interested in. And for a while I planned to revisit one of the most influential and creative franchises that are no longer with us, because EA. Anyway, I just wanted to take a look at how the series evolved in style and story, with few mentions of gameplay, through its 3 separate sub-series with One Vision, One Purpose.
Hitman series are 17 years old by now. They started out with Codename 47, a PC-exclusive fresh new take on the freeform stealth ideas introduced in Thief: The Dark Project. Where instead of stealth, it focused on “social stealth” and blending in, and instead of stealing, on the art of killing. Despite all the flaws, like unnecessary action-focused missions, incredibly simplistic concept of blending in with no in-between states of suspicion, and less complex AI patterns than the ones you get today, it remains an amazing game, with some of the best missions in the entire series (like “Traditions of the Trade” or “The Massacre at Cheung Chau Fish Restaurant”). Of course, most of the good stuff has been later remade in Hitman: Contracts, which might as well be considered the proper start of the series (Hitman 2 also being rather rough), which finally realized that pure stealth and pure action sequences just don’t fit the series. And Blood Money remains one of the best examples of the stealth games to this day.
Then we had Hitman: Absolution, which was… well… It was a rather cool stealth action game, but a terrible Hitman game. A linear, story-driven game, where social stealth and blending in usually worked against you, since most of the time being dressed as someone you want to blend in with meant higher of getting noticed. But a lot of the ideas and concepts introduced in that game were great, ready to be taken, modified and perfected to work in a proper Hitman game. And that’s what the game, simply called HITMAN, is – best ideas from all the previous games in one package. And then some.
You know, there was a time when “dungeon crawl” felt like something bad and boring for me. Probably more due to disposable boring dungeon quests in RPGs, bad Diablo clones and grindy Japanese action RPGs. I actually didn’t play a lot of classic dungeon crawlers, like Ultima Underworld or even newer titles influenced by it like Arx Fatalis and didn’t get to understand the good bits of this subgenre of action RPGs until Legend of Grimrock 5 years ago. But since Grimrock, I was highly interested. And there haven’t been that many good follow ups to that game, apart from its fantastic sequel. Games usually focus too much on combat, or too much on puzzles, or too much on something else, never really feeling as balanced and as engrossing as Legend of Grimrock games were. Vaporum is one of the better examples so far.
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard has been a fantastic opener for 2017 – a proper, if not the best possible, return of the real survival horror (and not horror+something games that love to misgenre themselves). I rarely replay modern titles, but I replayed RE7 at least 5 times right after completing it for the first time. So, I was unsurprisingly excited for more RE7: there were 2 mini-DLC packs announced and 2 bigger stories, one paid and one free. And after multiple delays, we got the Gold Edition of the game with all this content on top of the main game just earlier this week. Still no VR support for PC, though, so there will be more updates, but content-wise, we probably will not get any more major additions or updates. Is the paid DLC worth the upgrade price?
Read more“Thoughts on: Resident Evil 7. Gold Edition. The DLCs”
