MegaRace (1993)

Name:MegaRace
Number:245
Year:1993
Publisher:The Software Toolworks
Developer:Cryo
Genre:Racing
Difficulty:4/5
Time:2 hours
Won:Yes (108W/79L)

I know I said Streets of SimCity, but Streets is one of those games that works when it wants to work. Even if it does have a patch that mostly smooths out the bigger issues. This was not one of the times it wanted to work, so instead, it's time for MegaRace.

Welcome to the future. Reality is boring, which is why virtual reality is the best thing around. And the best thing in virtual reality is MegaRace. A virtual reality show where people like you get to drive in a supped up car against hordes of criminal speedpunks, who have disrespectful manners and threatening hairstyles. Pound them into the pavement!

He's referring to Factory Land, which is shown at night, so the desolate waste looks like water.

This is the way MegaRace's manual describes the game world. The introduction video, because it's 1993 and we get nice, shiny CGI graphics off a CD, shows that world. Not a world which is overtly oppressed. Not a world where jackbooted thugs are marching through the streets stepping on necks. A world where everyone is so bored by life. A world where safety regulations mean you can't actually have someone drive around shooting gangs of punks in supercars, so you have them do it in virtual reality.

It's a more down to Earth dystopia. There's even a joke prize where you're offered a book...until the host reveals its hollow. Which given modern trends and doomsayings feels about right, even if TV stations like the one broadcasting the in-game show are also falling by the wayside. On the other, as reaction channels show, reacting to someone else's shortcomings will never go out of style.

There's some clever worldbuilding going on from the moment you start the game. The framing device is that of a guy coming home from work to watch the show. Except that his personal robot turns the TV on before he's home. At several points the game implies there's genuine concern that there could be a robot revolution. One group of criminals is violently anti-robot, and a robot on the show is insulted, jokingly of course, but it does make me wonder if there's more to it.

He's talking about criminal speed gangs, of course.

But the thing about the guy is, all he does when we see him is watch the show and drink. There's not anything wrong with having some of the hard stuff while watching something, but the fact that he has his robot gets him a drink, and all he does is sit, watch and drink does suggest some unpleasant things about the guy. And I say this, being a member of the similarly sad eat food and watch something crowd.

The star of the show is host Lance Boyle, played by Christopher Erickson, an American actor presumably based in France. (His work is mostly French, so unless he's flying out every year that's a safe assumption) He pops up in the beginning to explain everything and in-between missions to compliment you and explain your next foes. This is his most notable role for reasons that are beyond me. Simply put, while MegaRace is a good game on a technical level, Erickson makes the game highly enjoyable.

Taken in screenshot form, Lance can look quite psychotic...when in motion he looks less psychotic.

For a long while, whenever I played this game, I kept thinking to myself how the portrayal of a game show host felt just a bit too skeevy. There's rumors about Richard Dwason, but in general the skeevier hosts were the kind that hid their skeeviness behind a false veneer of positivity. These days, it isn't uncommon for a game show to be less about the genuine skill of answering a question and more about how dumb they can make people look.

It helps that almost everything that comes out of his mouth is gold. I was spoiled for choice in picking out what I wanted to use as a screenshot from this guy. If I may sound biased against foreign games for a moment, I'm not sure why. French games generally aren't known for their witty dialog. In an era where translation usually fell to the guy who had the best grasp of the language rather than someone who knew what he was doing, this comes off as surprisingly natural. There's no writer listed, so we'll never know.

Now, if Boyle doesn't come off as too witty to you, you can easily skip his dialog with the press of a button. In a sense, this is why the game works so well. Yes, it's a FMV game with CGI graphics the rest of the time, but it knows not to take itself so seriously as to think you can't ever skip anything.

All the cars have Spanish names for some reason.

After the game finishes introducing the first city and gang, you get a selection of one of eight cars. Well, at first one of three. To unlock the other five, you need to defeat the five speed gangs. Each car has various attributes, armor, speed, weight, warning device, shield capability, number of lasers and missile capability.

Armor, speed and lasers are mostly self-explanatory. Damage, speed and how many shots come out when you fire. Guns have ammo, and I'm not actually sure if the car you pick changes how much ammo you have. The warning system tells you where the enemy car is. This is useful when it's behind you, because this isn't a race, you're just shooting other drivers. If a car is behind you, they can ram you from behind.

I'm not sure if weight has an affect on anything. One car ramming an enemy, or pushing it into the sidewall seems to be much the same as another. Guns have a far more dramatic and visible change. See, the last four items I mentioned can be changed by powerups on the track. You can get more or get them taken away. Unfortunately, I never got any shields or missiles. I did get my guns taken away, and that carries over between races.

The GUI depends on which car you use, which is a nice touch.

Once you get to the game, it's dead simple. Accelerate, stop, turn, along with a shoot button. The keys are rebindable, which is good, since by default, it's AZ<>. That's something I expect from a crummy ZX Spectrum game, not a DOS game from the 1990s. Unfortunately, you have to rebind them every time you start up the game. It isn't the worst default key selection ever, but not having them in a simple cluster always annoys me.

In each race you have to take out up to seven enemy drivers in three laps. That's it. Within about five minutes you have everything you could possibly need to finish the game. It's very easy to control and the game just plays so smoothly. It's to the point that until the later levels, I thought you had to work to actually hit the sides of the track.

See, the game's tracks are all pre-rendered CGI. It's less a movie you're just following along and more a series of images. Which I realize is just what a movie is, but it feels different. It doesn't quite feel on-rails even if it is. They did a very good job of making the game feel like more than what a lot of its contemporaries would do, which is expecting the CGI to do all the effort.

Some tastefully done self-advertisement.

Speed and aggression is the name of the game. The only time you're taking your foot off that pedal is when you've overtaken an enemy or you're on a narrow track. For the most part, the game gives you an incredible feeling of speed. The problem is that sometimes you're playing catch-up with an enemy car, and it feels like it takes forever. Which is a thing for the in-game audience too.

The thrillometer determines how much score you get from attacking things. In-universe, it's supposed to be a representation of how much you're exciting the audience. My issue is that it solely increases based on how fast you kill enemies. In one sense, this can work, seeing two cars going at 200 MPH and one is forcing the other into the side wall is cool. Just shooting the other guy? It's not that it's not action, it's just that it isn't that special.

It should reward tension more. Rather than raw violence, the outcome of the battle should be an unknown. "Is the Enforcer gonna take out Rabies or is he gonna run out of time?" Crashes and violence are cool, but you can't just throw endless, meaningless violence at people. There has to be tension. Victory should not be assured. Nobody remembers the nameless goons the hero fights, they always remember the ones they had epic fights with.

A nice view of an ammo down sign, because bullets are just too obvious!

Enemy cars are not the threat of the game, they're the target. The real threat are the tracks themselves. Not in the usual way. There are various power-up icons all over the track, ranging from mundane speed up/down, give/take points, ammo replenishment, the aforementioned gun, missile and shield dispensers, along with a skid function and various confusion effects. Then there are more exotic and hard to explain ones, like one that speeds you along a certain line.

At first, these are placed in such a way that makes it pure fun, then a bit of a challenge to avoid the bad ones. Once the gun removal starts, you start paying attention to the layout more. Then the game starts turning every icon (outside of the points ones) into traps. Speed ups in front of ammo or gun dispensers. Ammo removals in such a way that you have to go through one specific part of the screen. One particularly nasty level sets up the speed-ups so if you hit one, you'll be halfway through the track before you've stopped.

One of the nastier levels, which is narrow and constantly snakes around.

That said, there is one change to the enemy vehicles, it starts getting harder to ram them. It isn't like before where you could easily pound them into the sidewalk, reaching them gets tricky, and they start doing damage back. Never an amount that is noticeable in the heat of the action, but enough that it was frequent on the last few levels for me to die before reaching the end.

There are two sets of 14 tracks, making for 28 total levels. The game hides this by making the two sets based on difficulty. There's an easy and a hard difficulty, which correspond to how much the game decides you shouldn't have guns. I beat the easy set, and while the game does automatically start you on the hard set afterwards, it feels less like the game continuing and more like the game automatically put you in new game+.

There are two kinds of bonus levels. The first is a points level. The brakes on your car are disabled, you're shot forward at max speed, and oh, enemy cars are driving towards you. There's no penalty for dying, it just feels like filler. There's also one you get where if you lose in the middle of the game, but do so after doing some damage to the gang, you get a second chance. This is easier than the later stages, so chances are you'll see it once or twice.

While I make it sound like the game is complex, in the moment to moment action, most of this really doesn't matter. Unless there's a nasty symbol on the ground, I'm mostly just trying to get to the side of a car and ram it into the side of the wall or just shooting him. You just memorize the trap layout. It's well-designed enough that this doesn't feel too annoying.

In-universe, this is a tribute of NewSan to OldSan, out-of-universe, I can't blame them.

One issue I have with the game is that it constantly, and I do mean constantly, crashes. I sat down to one session and the game would either crash at the end of the first stage or the second I hit an enemy on the second. Or if I forgot to rebind the keys, it would hang on the score screen. These weren't easy crashes either, I had to restart DOSbox. Once you get past the second level, the number of these crashes drops off significantly.

It's been remiss of me to go through all this without mentioning the game's soundtrack, six slick techno tracks made by the same guy who did the Dune soundtrack, Stephane Picq. The six tracks correspond roughly to the six different locales the racetracks are set on. They fit thematically with the tracksets they're on, but I feel like they're lacking just a bit in aggression. This perhaps isn't quite a bad thing, since memorable is better than ear-splitting, but it feels more like a bad commute that fighting for my life.

With that, onto the rating.

Weapons:
You can ram into things, shoot them, or if luck is on your side, hit them with a missile. 2/10

Enemies:
There seems to be some level of AI variation, and gang leaders seem to be tougher than regular thugs. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
There's some decent variety, and difficulty being the only real cause of level reuse is better than a lot of alternatives. 5/10

Player Agency:
Simple, smooth and fun to use. Whether I've meant to or not, this is the game I've been mentally comparing all the racers around it to. 8/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
Despite the absurdities, this feels like its own, full-fledged world, with dozens of little things hiding just behind the corner. I believe that one corporation made an underwater city, and that another company then hired some thugs to move there for entertainment purposes. 8/10

Graphics:
Despite how aged it all looks, for the most part its avoided the weaknesses of the era. Outside of CGI humans in the framing sections. There's still some spectacle here, when you can force yourself to look away from the action. Seeing this game in true, modern 3D would be really cool. 5/10

Story:
The charm here is more in the writing, but the different take on a cyberpunk dystopia is intriguing to me. Rather than overt violence, people seem to be complacent in their own oppression. 5/10

Sound/Music:
The sound design is excellent. I feel the pounding of my car against his, or the slow shredding of the side of a car against a wall. The music is very good too. 7/10

That's 42, which is oddly, the fourth such title I've given that number.

MegaRace is one of those games where what are its arguable positives can function as its flaws just as easily. The amusing commentator, the simple and easy to pick up combat could just as easily be someone else's annoying jerk and depthless spinning of wheels.

Next time, it's time for something else mega, Jill of the Jungle.

Skyfox (1984)

Name:Skyfox
Number:244
Year:1984
Publisher:Electronic Arts
Developer:Raymond E. Toby
Genre:FPS/Flight Simulation
Difficulty:5/5
Time:50 minutes
Won:No (107W/79L)

We've seen quite a few alien invasion games so far. It's a simple enough plot to come up with and provides easy conflict. At first glance, Skyfox does nothing to change up the formula. Oh, sure, it's a first-person flight sim rather than the hordes of side-scrollers and top-down games, and within atmosphere rather than space, but that's not too different from the template.

Skyfox was released on most platforms of the day, from Apple II, C64 and ZX Spectrum, to later Atari ST and Amiga ports. I chose the Amiga port, based on the logic that since it was released later, it probably smooths over the worst parts.

Starting the game up, you get a difficulty selector and a mission selector. The latter can be divided into two categories. Training and the real deal. Training pits you against a limited selection of enemies and you have to take them out. The real deal pits you against an entire invasion, complete with a mothership you have to take out. For future reference, I took the easy way out as far as difficulty is concerned and stayed on Cadet.

At the start of every game, you get a map of the area you're in. In training missions, this just shows where you're going. In an actual battle, this just shows the tanks that have freshly spawned off the ship. Fortunately, you can bring this map up, complete with up to date tactical info, with C. There's a whole bunch of other stuff you can do, but it doesn't matter. At first, all you really do is just click until it brings up a launch mode, select high or low launch, which almost always seems to switch to high, then launch.

When I first managed to flew around, what was brought to mind wasn't a flight sim. This is not even an arcade simulation, it's more like a FPS where you're flying. You move at a constant speed, determined by what number you hit, and up and down causes you to turn up and down. You rise and fall based on that. Hitting the ground doesn't hurt you, you basically just float across it. Moving in any direction doesn't cause constant turning, it moves you a bit then you right yourself automatically.

This actually makes it really annoying to do much of anything. Since you're constantly fighting against your plane going back into the same, standard position, you can't really move around quickly. It's also hard to aim, because you never seem to stop on an enemy. At first I even thought each time you turned, you turned 45 degrees, but no, it's just freeform for that to not be true. It's slightly better with a keyboard joystick over a mouse. The mouse aiming here isn't like regular mouse aiming, it's holding it down, which any joystick does better.

Training is more or less what you expect it to be. Here you are in this situation against these enemies, now take them out. The rub lies in these being training missions. Technically, you are in an actual live fire action, but regular enemies like tanks and planes aren't that difficult to deal with.

But the weird thing is, you never seem to fight the two at the same time, instead, you alternate between the areas they're in. Press U to jump up into the clouds, press D to go back down to ground level. There's a long shift as you automatically move, then a time you wait for the disk to load.

To fight back against enemies, you have three attacks. Your typical gun, in this case an automatic laser. This works well enough, but you can only hit enemies with it when you turn, not when you're just gliding along. Then you get two missiles, a guided missile and a heat-seeking missile. The guided missile seems to have a higher chance of not hitting its target, but otherwise the function of the two are the same.

Once you master training, it's time to deal with an invasion. This removes all enemies from the board at the start, placing you against a giant, floating city which constantly spawns planes and tanks. These go after friendly installations which you can recharge your ship's fuel and heal damage. You're going to need to do that, because unlike in training, those are important concerns. You get three spare fighters, and depending on how things go, you'll need them.

Motherships are far more difficult to kill than anything else. It's not necessarily that they're tougher or more difficult to hit, just that they fire a lot at you. I'm not sure how getting hit works, it seems to just happen based on if there are enemies around, but if you're near a mothership, you're getting shot.

Unfortunately for the mothership, it isn't any stronger against missiles than anything else. So get a lucky missile hit against it and poof. This makes the strategy fairly easy to understand. Rush to the mothership, then hit it with a missile. No more enemies spawn, and you can take out the rest before they clear you out.

This is of course, the small invasion on the easiest setting. A proper invasion consists of multiple motherships. I beat one of them, dubbed Halo. Here, there are five motherships, one in the center, four two tiles away from home base. This is the easiest of the proper scenarios, simply because the motherships don't drop tanks. With less firepower, it's easier to take out a mothership and then you can clear out the planes that launched much quicker.

There are more variations, some based on unorthodox gimmicks, others based on throwing as much as they can at the player. Even on the minimum difficulty, they're throwing groups of five tanks at you, which is very difficult to counter. Higher difficulties don't seem to increase this speed, it just turns them into more dangerous enemies. They actually chase after you a lot more rather than the more casual stroll the lower difficulties have.

Getting away from the big problems of the game, there's a lot of little problems. The game slows down when there are a lot of enemies nearby. Tanks stare at the player with an almost unreal look. It's odd seeing a half a dozen tanks turn in perfect harmony. You basically just speed from place to place and hope your fuel doesn't run out at the worst possible time.

Weapons:
A simple blaster and some missiles. 2/10

Enemies:
Tanks, planes and a boss which seems invulnerable. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
Don't let this place get hit. 0/10

Levels:
The game tries to have variety in the number of scenarios it has, but there a few obvious variations. The grouping around a single base and the "chess" motif, in which there are bases on one side and motherships on the other. In 1984, I might have even considered working through them. 2/10

Player Agency:
It's sort of what you expect, but works in enough odd ways that it feels more off than if it was outright unusual. 5/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
Very meh. 1/10

Graphics:
Colorful but not too garish and a decent number of variations, but the ground is one solid color. 3/10

Story:
So little they don't even pretend there's one in the manual. 0/10

Sound/Music:
There's a jaunty intro tune and some soft sound effects. 2/10

That's 17.

While it didn't have much to capture my attention, and I didn't have much fun with it, I see several good points about it. We've got the basic template of any later action game with small-scale, randomized missions, just with a spawn rate that's way too large. Seriously, five tanks at a time?

Tobey had an unusual career afterwards. He had a hand in three other games, Budokan - The Martial Spirit, one of the more notable early fighting games, a chess game and a Sega Saturn adventure game. The later two he does not list on his personal site, instead focusing on graphics programs he worked on. Considering the number of people who seemed to have used them, I can see why.

Next time, in order to get out of this feeling that I've been spinning my wheels here, I've decided to go very out of chronology and play Streets of SimCity, one of Maxis's weirder titles.

Obitus (1991)

Name:Obitus
Number:243
Year:1991
Publisher:Psygnosis
Developer:Scenario Developments/Tech Noir
Genre:Action
Difficulty:5/5
Time:1 hour 30 minutes
Won:No (107W/78L)

For the second time in a row, I've come across a game that really tries my general ethos that there's something of value to any game. That no matter how crappy it is, there's a lesson to be learned from it. Any such lessons that could be learned from Obitus are so obvious as to be a basic building block of the idea of making a game. It's that bad.

The story is, a long time ago, a king was unable to find a suitable bride in all the land. The search went on for long enough that a wizard, who hid himself from the world, heard of it. The wizard hated the king a great deal, and created a bride for him. Not a good bride, but one born with a spark of evil.

The king and the bride meet through convenient circumstances and they fall in love. Four sons are born, and when the king dies, they start to war among themselves. It goes on for a while, and the land becomes a hellhole. A strange device appears in a tower in the middle of the land, and each son takes a piece of it, which allows control over the populace. An uneasy, oppressive peace falls over the land.

In the present of the 1990s, a history teacher by the name of Wil Mason, driving his Volvo, crashes during a thunderstorm. He wanders until he find a glowing light which leads to a strange tower. With nowhere else to go, he sleeps, and finds himself teleported a thousand years in the past.

The first problem with this game is that most of this doesn't really matter as far as the game is concerned. There are supposedly four figures in four castles you need to kill, but this is about all it matters. Mason might as well be a baker for all he matters to the story, since as soon as the game begins he becomes a silent killing machine, capable of shooting a bow with unnerving accuracy.

I'm not arguing that this backstory is bad, it just doesn't matter. The game doesn't have an actual story as much as a series of cryptic statements from people you're probably about to kill. It'd be one thing if Mason being a history teacher was relevant or if the machine is relevant as anything other than a treasure hunt. They aren't, you could say any of a thousand different backstories and they'd be true.

I didn't realize that the game had VGA graphics at first, so I played a bit in EGA.

You start off in the tower with a key on the floor in front of you and four doors around you. Something a text crawl helpfully tells you. The way things work is not obvious. Oh, you get a GUI with information on it, but that information is not necessarily obvious to the player. There are nine actions which are mostly self-explanatory. Mostly.

Info is weird. The manual tells you nothing about it, but obviously you can use it on items to get information. This tells you the various stats of items, from the straight-forward and useful to the more vague. Weight and nutrition have direct effects, you have a weight limit and nutrition is how much an item heals you. Mystic and value don't seem to have much direct effect in gameplay.

For a long while, I didn't figure out that you can use info on characters in the game world. Here, you can trade with people. I want to repeat that the manual mentions nothing about any of this. This is where value sort of comes into effect, because presumably trades are based on the value of items. The theory then, is you trade the most expensive item you can find, then work your way down.

This makes Info the closest the game has to a look function. It's more illuminating than a regular look function in theory, telling you all you'd ever need to know about an item. In practice, a list of statistics with very little to go by beyond that is very unhelpful. Everything requires you to guess as to what it does and how you use it.

Which is a problem with puzzles, which all involve guessing what item you have to use on which hotspot. Hotspots are tricky to click on, which is odd because the mouse cursor doesn't seem like it should cause any issues with this. When you have many keys and don't know if you use them on the door or the lock and have no indication of which is which, you have a problem. When things start getting less blatant, it's very troublesome. There is no indication that you're doing something right or wrong until an action happens, be it a key in the right lock or you accidentally shooting an arrow at nothing.

This leads to a sort of new section, the maze sections. Technically the maze is the same as the section you just came from, except you can actually move forward and backward. Controls are customizable and imitate a single button joystick, but you still need to use the mouse to click on things. You can use an actual joystick to, which seems like it would be interesting for a few moments.

The big draw of the game is the shiny, first-person parallax graphics. It's very nice, some of the best first-person 2D work you could find. Except that it's also quite confusing. Turn and you track in one of eight directions. It's enough distance that you would turn in real life, except that when turning it doesn't feel like you're properly turning, just sort of side-stepping.

So you have to rely on the GUI to tell you where you're pointing. The most obvious problem is that looking at the GUI to figure out where you're at kind of ruins it, even if it has a compass. You're looking at a map, not the game, in a game where the graphics are the selling point. The less obvious is that the way thing on the compass is a man, so the two ends of it? Those are the sides. Took me a while to figure that out.

Moving is no less confusing. Unlike turning, there's no locking, you just keep moving until you hit a wall. To help, there's no turning unless you're on an octogon, to name a tile. If, say, there's a octogon you can turn around on in-between the octogon you started on and the octogon that's at the end of your walk, the only way you can find out is by looking at the GUI.

This gives the game a very empty feeling. Not as if they forgot to populate the game world, just that you're doing the bare minimum for it to be called a game. You walk around, click on things, pick up items, then use them when relevant. It's just a game, not anything you could actually do with that, nothing special.

In order to navigate around the game, you either need to make a map yourself or take a map someone else made. I'm thankful that maps already existed, because that's just not a rewarding process. To start with, you're mapping eight-sided tiles, which is something you're going to have to figure out how to do yourself rather than take advantage of anything preexisting. So you have to figure out how you're going to map it, then actually go through the large and confusing area of the game, in a game that has more trouble than the usual dungeon crawler in making areas feel distinct.

Combat is dead simple. Have a weapon selected, and if you're in a first person section, click on what you want dead. Then keep clicking until it dies. Strategy consists of using a different weapon if it doesn't die and you have to reload. Side-scrolling sections add a little strategy, sometimes you can jump into an enemy to kill it.

But there is a curious aspect of this. Some enemies don't attack you. You can talk to them. They're obviously hostile, because this game doesn't do subtle. If this game had clever writing, you might think this was foreshadowing that the player isn't a good guy. Then the game makes you kill an obviously non-evil NPC to advance.

I'm not saying that a game can't allow you to kill innocent characters, but I expect it to be acknowledged. Tell me I'm evil for doing it. Acknowledge that it's not the act of a hero. I can believe that a British history professor, when push comes to shove, will kill someone trying to kill him. I do not believe that one is going to kill a defenseless old woman. Especially not when he could just walk around her!

Eventually, there's a path out of this area, leading to another new type of gameplay. A side-scroller section. It's dead simple, you go from left ro right until you reach a dead end or another area. Enemies occasionally pop up to stop you, but as far as I got, they weren't much trouble. Hell, you can just jump into them and they die.

Much later, there's yet another style of gameplay, sort of like the side-scroller, except designed like a game with more traditional screens. It's built off part of the last game from the lead developer, The Kristal, most visibly with being able to go into the background and the foreground to simulate depth. It's the part that most feels like a game, though this could be because this is a boss dungeon, at least in theory.

It's at this point that I gave up. Oddly, this is because the game finally throws something at me I feel like isn't just me randomly clicking and things happen, because there are traps. Traps that are very hard to avoid. Up until this point, the difference between getting hit and not getting hit felt very small. You have a lot of health and most enemies don't do that much damage. Traps are different, they take a big chunk of health and it seems almost impossible to dodge them.

Which means I've been playing it wrong and I need to do everything right in order to make it to the end. Since the difference between dodging and getting hit is barely noticeable, that's not very easy or fun. Healing is limited to items. Sleep is just busywork, a fatigue bar periodically fills and you need to rest lest you lose more health.

I did look up the ending afterwards. Wil just sort of ascends the opening tower, and then goes on further adventures in other worlds? I mean, that is a valid idea. A history teacher who is suddenly capable of fighting monsters and wizards like some sort of knight? Yeah, I'd want further adventures too. But considering everything else the game has, I'm just left wondering about it all. To the rating.

Weapons:
They differ in power, but otherwise they might as well be the same thing. 1/10

Enemies:
It's a bit odd that the only real difference between enemies is if they attack you when you get close to them or if they attack you after you attack them. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
The difference between and enemy who doesn't attack you and a NPC is usually how fast they die. 1/10

Levels:
Mazes intended to extend the length of an already questionably long game. 1/10

Player Agency:
Outside of hotspot issues, I had zero problems with the mouse and keyboard setup. It could have used some quick select keys for actions, but otherwise I can't see how this aspect could be improved. 7/10

Interactivity:
Only the most important actions do anything, otherwise you might as well be clicking into the void. 1/10

Atmosphere:
It's certainly an alien and mysterious fantasy world, but this quickly disappears when it becomes clear that they just didn't make much of anything. 3/10

Graphics:
The parallax is nice, but the spritework seems quite limited in many ways. Most characters just move to attack, so animation is extremely limited. It's also very samey within an area. 4/10

Story:
A barely important wall of text which could have added so much if the developers actually had some writing in-game. 1/10

Sound/Music:
Passable music and some forgettable sound effects. 3/10

That's 23, which is what the numbers add up to, yet it isn't anywhere near the passing grade that would describe. With a wave of the magic wand of boredom, I shall call it 13. Still feels like a higher number than it should get, but I guess between the graphics and the way I had no complaints with controls, it has something.

Obitus, as a game, is terrible in every regard. It does three genres, each so poorly that you have to wonder what the primary focus was. Having tech demo visuals is a selling point for a tech demo, a game needs something more. This is just nothing, a black stain on Psygnosis's library.

The only thing interesting about it is how some enemies only attack you if you attack first. If it was used by someone more clever, it could make for some interesting gameplay. A different take on getting around some enemies. Or perhaps make it so that attacking an enemy who isn't hostile has consequences.

And the reviews, back in the day, well, quite a few praise the game. I can only hope the check cleared. There are a few reviews that point out that the game is boring and pointless. The SNES version was actually named one of the ten worst games of 1994 by some magazine I've never heard of.

From a technical standpoint, the DOS version I've just played is the worst version. Other versions of the game include lighting mechanics, where you have to use torches and lanterns to see in the dark. Technically, it still exists here, but because the game is in 16 colors even in VGA mode, it never changes.

The SNES version is the best, since apparently resting actually heals you there, even if it comes at the cost of random battles and having to do mouse tasks with a gamepad. It's still not good, but at least you can win without feeling like you're torturing yourself.

Next time, we'll see Skyfox, one of the games I've been looking forward to in 1984.

Obitus: Lost

Something I didn't realize when I was playing the game the first time is that there actually is a VGA mode, which looks nicer, but is still 16 colors. It also has an animated intro. Which is not very informative.

The mines are still very visually nice, and it makes the whole limited number of possible exits from any given section a lot easier to swallow. Since it's basically just a passage carved out of rock. A new enemy type are dogs, which actually attack as opposed to waiting for you to come around.

I wander around for a while, finding more ammo and food, along with a rope, a light key and a gold bar, until I meet this guy. He says some cryptic stuff, which I am supposed to parse as, give me a silver bar and I'll give you a heavy key. Since I'm not making my own maps and using ones that I've found online, it mentions the whole trade thing. Except there is no trade option, and I can neither use nor drop items to perform an exchange.

After flailing around for a bit, I assume that I'm going to have to call this one lost, until in a fit of insanity I use info on him. It works. It freaking works. The manual says nothing about this at all. To trade you cycle through your items, then click trade, then on the item you want. I'm not sure how you're supposed to figure any of this out except through trial and error.

Going through more of the area, I then end up talking to this guy, who is in the way for one of the other areas. He has a lantern, but that isn't what's interesting here. Instead, you're supposed to just kill him. This random, inoffensive and non-violent guy. In order to continue through the game, kill an innocent guy. This is a level of unawareness that I haven't seen in a while.

There are two ways out of this place. The first is through a hole, which seems to be a one-way trip. The rope is used here, except that you actually use it when you're on the other side. Figure that out. This leads to the catacombs, a giant place under all four castles. It's a very large and confusing place full of more items which I collect just for the sake of collecting.

There are more enemy types, which of course, are not at all very different. They're just sort of there. It's basically just more and more busy work until at one point, I find that my stamina is rapidly draining. Not because of any hostiles, but because I just picked up too much stuff. Not really sure how I'm supposed to work around that considering how obtuse this game is so far and how picking up items and killing hostiles is the only gameplay this game has.

I do discover that if I click on the left side of the GUI I get this screen. Not sure how helpful it is or how I was supposed to figure out out. I can't sleep yet and eating doesn't really do much, so, uh, that probably would have been helpful.

The other way out is to Drakehurst Castle, which is like the side-scrolling sections, except with the adventure GUI. I've seen other games like this before, pretty sure those are a lot better than this one. It's easier to spot when an enemy is going to pop out, but there's not much looking around. If it isn't part of the wall, chances are you can pick it up or shoot it.

Oh, I didn't realize this was built off The Kristal's codebase. You can go to the foreground and the background. Not sure why we needed that. So, the whole puzzle aspect of this section is basically, use the right key on the door. Only in order to reach the boss there are six doors, and I seem to only have six keys to open that kind of door. Go the wrong way and you've lost. The worst thing about this, there are items in some of these places.

The correct path is full of unavoidable enemies and traps, to the point that once again I get pretty low on health. So, healing, food items heal you, as well as potions you can find. Sleep meanwhile, doesn't seem to do much of anything. It just lowers a fatigue meter which has been gradually filling since I started the game. So, health items are very limited and there's not much you can do to heal yourself.

This is about as far as I'm going to get. I can't make it to the proper end of the area without getting dangerously low on health. And that's with using all my health items. There's no boss fight in this version, but there is in the SNES version, apparently. At the end of it are some magic powders, one of which kills the knight from the opening forest.

At this point, there's nothing for me to do but restart and try to optimize the hell out of my actions, or chest. As I'm not enjoying this, I'm doing neither and just ending it here. A disappointing ending to a disappointing game. Which just leaves a disappointing rating.

This Session: 40 minutes

Final Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

Obitus: Intro

A very impressive EGA image of the Psygnosis logo.

Welcome to Obitus, a quasi-RPG published by Psygnosis and developed by Tech Noir. Psygnosis needs no introduction, being the very model of cool and mystical Amiga games which don't always stick the landing. Tech Noir, meanwhile, is known for this game and an unproduced sequel. The developers had a hand in The Kristal, a game I played over at TAG, which was terrible. I do not blame them for that, since they were being led by someone who lied about himself to make it sound like his work wasn't trash. It's possible they could make something good unshackled by a madman.

Oddly, this is the first Psygnosis game I've played here that fits into the classic image of Psygnosis, previous titles I've played, including another FPS I couldn't get past the opening screen of. I've played several before off-blog, of course, but this is, in my mind at least, the first proper Psygnosis game.

There are Amiga, Atari ST, DOS and SNES versions. I'll be playing the DOS version because the Amiga version is a bit tricky to get working and the SNES version is a bit odd. Especially since this is a game that makes extensive use of the mouse. The DOS version is EGA only, but has Adlib music. I have played the opening bits of this before and found it to be a video game of general description.

The backstory is, once there was King Cirkassia, who was a great ruler and the kingdom of Middlemere was doing great. Alas, he couldn't find a suitable wife, so he had no heir. The evil wizard DomaKk [sic] hated the king and the land, so he snuck into the castle as a loyal member of the realm and cast spells promising the king a wife and children. The wizard gave him a wife and soon there were four sons. Because the wizard spawned the wife, the children were full of envy. When their father passed away, the four brothers engaged in a war, tearing the land apart. DomaKk left for another plane, his evil complete.

One day, a mysterious machine appeared in the center of Middlemere. Everyone feared the machine, even the four sons. Nothing happened, it just existed. The sons began to explore the machine, soon realizing they could take the parts of it, which allowed them to rule their subjects easier. They feared the machine, even a small part that the sons had. A truce was made, and the land was divided into four.

In our modern day, Wil Mason, history professor and Volvo owner is driving in the rain, crashes his car trying to avoid a branch. Leaving to find someone who knows how to fix a car, he finds a mysterious light and heads towards it. Finding himself in a strange tower with four doors, he enters. Protected from the rain, he sleeps, and finds himself in another world.

The game gives you a message telling you you're in a tower with four stone doors and then throws you in it. The backstory does at least feel important even if it isn't likely to mean much. The game is controlled by a combination of mouse and keyboard/joystick. The keyboard controls are entirely selected by the player, movement in four directions and a fire button. In this case, the arrow keys duplicate the directional marks on that dial. In addition, we get nine actions. There's no looking, what you see is what you can use.

There's a key here, which opens the northwest door. Note that the while the compass itself on the GUI is nice and large, the direction it points is not entirely obvious. Because it's showing a person from an upward view. The direction you're pointed in lights up, at least.

This leads to Falcon Wood, a maze if ever there was one. A maze with a purpose, as the game's claim to fame on Amiga is the incredible parallax graphics, which is still incredible in EGA. It's some of the smoothest and incredible pixel art in motion. The inevitable but here is that you turn around in eight directions and move slowly around in a circle. Movement forward, while smooth, gives you an unnecessary amount of freedom.

That's the key word, freedom. It's still technically tile-based, but every tile is eight-sided. In motion, you have to turn around a lot, and while it is accurate to how little you would turn to go from east to northeast, in a video game that's too short. It's disorienting, especially since while the parallax is nice, it's about all you're getting visually. Forward and back slowly glides along, and I'm just left wondering why it couldn't be tile-based.

The starting area around the town consists of a loop with two exits, one inside and out outside. There's some arrows and an apple. The arrows function as a weapon, use while you have it equipped and you shoot whatever's in front of you. Each quiver gives you more ammo, no bow required. Apple is food, which I think is somewhere between health and a hunger meter. I haven't seen the later, the former's on the lower left.

A knight is the first enemy you meet. You can try talking to any character you meet, but some are less helpful than others, like this knight. I don't have enough arrows for him, unfortunately, so I die and restart. When I returned later, he was still too tough for me, probably a puzzle enemy.

Killing an archer, who doesn't actually start shooting me until I get close, I make my way to this random guy. Or woman, I'm not sure, I started looking at online maps pretty quickly and it called the sprite a woman. Either way, she gives you a key when you talk to her. It's at this point that I discover that talking works in weird ways. Some characters have more than one piece of dialog, but to get it working, you need to save and reload to get it.

Exploring the rest of the area is more or less just going around and clearing it out. Most enemies outside of the archers involves you attacking first, sometimes you can even talk to them. I feel like if this game had any sign of a decent story, this would be foreshadowing that you aren't the good guy. At the end I've gotten a page, a red potion, a silver bar, a flask (food), a roll, "Firebrand" (a stick), and a blue gem.

There's a gap in the woods leading to another area, where this guy blocks it. He, like everyone else so far, gives a cryptic message, this one about the knight I couldn't kill yet. The knight is someone I'm going to have to come back to later, even though I have daggers now, I'm not sure how dangerous they are.

Going into the gap leads to a side-scrolling area. Enemies hide either in the bushes or in the branches above. Bump into them or shoot them, and they die. You lose a little health from bumping into them, but it's more economical to do so that to shoot them. There are a lot of guys. Also, if you run past some, they just randomly die. This is very weird.

There is a bit of a pattern to it all, since you can jump at the right moment to dodge. There is an obvious pattern to it, you're not just frantically doing it against razor sharp margins. It's probable that this is going to change at some point, but for now these sections seem to be easy.

At the other end of the straightforward side-scrolling section are the Eldon Mines. I'll stop here for now despite not having gone through much. It's a very point and click approach to FPS, if I could say that. There's just not much of anything going on here. Be it as an adventure game, a FPS/RPG or as a side-scroller. To say there's style over substance so far would be to imply there's substance.

This Session: 50 minutes

Strontium Dog and the Death Gauntlet (1984)

Nothing screams Strontium Dog like whatever this is.

Name:Strontium Dog and the Death Gauntlet
Number:242
Year:1984
Publisher:Quicksilva
Developer:Argus Press Software
Genre:Shoot 'em Up
Difficulty:2/5
Time:40 minutes
Won:Yes (107W/77L)

The last Strontium Dog game was interesting, but absurdly difficult. Undoubtedly suffering for being an action game on the ZX Spectrum. So, what does the broadly superior C64 game do? It's a shoot 'em up. Only, it kind of isn't. It's an endless runner, sort of.

The story, as told by a pirate intro, is that our hero, Johnny Alpha, crash landed on a planet full of renegades (bad guys, presumably) while being pursued by the Stix Brothers. Run until Johnny gets to the ship where his partners are waiting. The death gauntlet of the title is him just walking across the desert to survive.

This, in contrast to the last game, is not based on any story, but just uses characters. The Stix Brothers, which is actually an entire family, are a group of mutants who all look and dress the same way. Very convenient for a video game adaptation.

The controls are weird if you don't play them on an emulator. Basically, space shoots and the joystick moves. What makes this really weird is that because I'm generally emulating my joystick, space is the joystick button. A whole lot of effort just to get back where it all started. Function keys deploy a timebomb, which sends you forward. I never really had need of it.

At first, the game is insanely confusing, bordering on insane. Randomly running into things, not understanding why you've suddenly died, and things just happening. There's very little visual clarity, the most detailed objects on-screen are Johnny and random rocks. Everything else is somewhat detailed but one bit. It's odd, visually.

Very quickly, things become clear. The first part is that the game runs weirdly. Up and down move up and down, but left and right control your speed. This is different from plain old moving left and right. No, going faster depletes your strength, while going slowly allows it to slowly restore. Oddly, when you move very slowly, it's basically impossible for any significant amount of damage to happen.

When Johnny inevitably crashes into something or gets shot, he loses a life and starts flailing around on the ground like he's screaming about life not being fair. The other game didn't exactly put a big mental image of the guy in my mind, but at least I can attribute that one down to forced choices. This just feels like it's mocking the guy while he's down.

The inevitability of getting knocked down and how low amount of damage and quick regeneration actually creates a weird effect. It's not quite an endless loop, but it comes off as something where you have to put in very little effort to play. It's almost like the player is useless in the equation. There are powerups scattered around which increase strength, but why break what's a winning strategy?

This creates a weird loop. Playing it as slowly as possible is fairly simple to play, but it isn't very fun. Speeding it up kind of makes it interesting, but adds in danger. The thing is, I never quite figured out why one form of injury resulted in Johnny's death and another just resulted in him flailing around for a bit.

While it is difficult to fully avoid getting knocked down, individual pieces of scenery are easy to dodge. Johnny's hitbox is just his feet and all the scenery is surprisingly small. It's very generous, the game just throws a lot at you. That, along with the enemies is what gives the challenge, such as it is.

Enemies too, have a hitbox that seems to just be their feet. While this makings dodging most a cinch, it also makes hitting them trick. You only get one shot on-screen and most duck and weave enough that hitting them is rare. The ones you're most likely to hit are the ones that are most likely to cause you trouble if you don't, ones that slowly move to where Johnny is.

After a while, they start shooting back. It's not difficult to avoid. I never got shot once and I wasn't exactly putting 100% in at that point. All of the shooting in this game felt superficial. It's there because it's supposed to be there. I think the cracked version I played had an issue with the infinite ammo cheat, because I suspect ammo was supposed to drop down at one point and it never did. It didn't really matter that much, but it might have affected things a little bit.

As you gradually move through the area, scenery begins to change. This is the only obvious indication that you're moving. Yes, there's a bar at the bottom that shows how much progress you're making, but it uses white to show where you are. In case you haven't noticed, there are parts of the bar that are white. Which means you can't see precisely where you are.

That said, visually, most of the later screens are uglier than the earlier ones. The rocks looked nice, the trees less so, and then it seems like it degenerates into random pixels. I guess it's a ruined city, but it sure seems like it's a lot more ruined than the worst bombs designed by man could ever do.

At the end, the game stops, two figures pop up. Is this a boss fight? No, I've won. The game ends with two figures popping up and then the game just loops. If I'm charitable, my winning playthrough took a half an hour. Which is kind of embarassing, even in this era, since there's basically no point to replaying it since it wasn't fun the first time. To the rating.

Weapons:
Your basic blaster, the time bomb isn't really a weapon. 1/10

Enemies:
A mass of vaguely humanoid and robotic creatures with some variation in behavior. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Rocks and tress slowly move towards you. 1/10

Player Agency:
Very smooth and easy to understand as far as movement goes.  5/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
Nothing positive. 0/10

Graphics:
Detailed, but as a whole, feels unfocused. Johnny has considerable animation, but feels oddly smooth for the action around him. 2/10

Story:
None.

Sound/Music:
Blips and bloops. 1/10

Just going to subtract 2 points before finalizing for a total of 10.

There's no going around it, this game is bad. I try to see the good in creative matters, but no, this game is just bad. The kind of bad where you question why the developers chose to pick a creative field and charge money for the end result. Which usually is something we all ignore, but tends to hit harder in licensed media, because this is a character people like getting turned into a joke.

Next time I'll pull out something a bit off beat in Obitus, a game which is of many genres and nobody can quite agree on which one it truly is.