Rejection: Parody of Man

Strap yourself in for this one, because if you thought this game was crazy before, it's gotten crazier.

There are two ways into the "zoo" of Shinjyuku, south, which is where I entered before, and north, which I haven't. Here is quite the array of enemies, two stomach bigfoots, one regular bigfoot and an elephant. Curiously, my knife does a remarkable job of taking care of them all, dealing very good damage. And that "shocked" thing that pops up sometimes? It's me stunning the enemy. It's a good thing, because I need to hurt the elephants a lot to kill them. Although, since elephants sometimes ignore typical enemy behavior and instead stand there, I could be stunlocking enemies. Which begs the question, why not with the guns?

For a little while, it just seems like dead ends and plenty of XP, until I spot a door leading to somewhere that clearly isn't Shinjuku. Keep off area. Sounds friendly. I take a quick jaunt in. We got this cyborg thing called a Ramseed. If I can hit him first I can survive, but 80 damage a hit is way too risky to deal with right now. I also suspect this area is going to be important later, so I'm holding off for now anyway. Let's just say I think that K-Ko isn't going to be happy about where this is going.

An oddity of this area and Shinjuku is that there's an isolated section of the latter only accessible by going through Shinjyuku. Inside, I find some stuff again. Firstly, a Cz 75. Looking it up, I didn't realize it was somewhat famous, since to me it always seemed like one of those handguns that you put in to pump up gun type numbers. I better check it out even if I'm not going to use it. How does it handle? It kicks a little and does slightly less damage than the Mauser, so basically a slight upgrade over both of those, but not really valuable. Then the area actually connects up with an area just outside the camp that I didn't think was possible to enter. Whoops. Still, once I'm level 7 I go back to that door that needs the ID card.

Looking back, I suspect I just wasn't noticing how much damage I was taking.

Even inside this locked door. Nagano is suspiciously quiet. There are some interior rooms, which contain soldiers. All right, I understand how this is going to work, there are just more soldiers I have to kill until I reach a room which gives a cutscene. They even drop ampules. Then in the second room I reach I see a new type of soldier, I kill off his compatriots so I can get close and get a nice screenshot...and I get one-shotted. I quit at this point, deciding I've had enough for the day, which turns into six days. Whether this is because I got my ass kicked or because real life stuff and Aliens interfered with playing this shall be left as an observation to the reader.

Coming back, I immediately go after that guy again, and oh, look, one of his Mustache compatriots dropped a M72. As I'm trying to obtain powers of deduction like Sherlock Holmes does, I immediately determine this means there's a boss soon. So I should toss the M-16, because the M-11 is too powerful. And then I kill the guy without getting close to him. Now I need to track down another one, but apparently he's Rocky too. What's with the name reuse?

The next room over is a Bird, and some soldiers. Wait, the army is working with the Birds? And by extension the Rockys? What?

Getting back to the game not caring about its enemy factions, this area is laid out surprisingly simply, and with a suprisingly lack of enemies. North of the first west-east hallway there's just nothing but empty space, then the third hallway has enemies but also the exits. I backtrack to the rest of the first hallway. More enemies, more ampules, then a Skorpion Vz 68. You know it as that one Eastern European SMG from the '60s. Technically, I would expect it after a M-11. It's a hard decision to decide what to replace, but I can always reload if it proves borked. It seems to be about the same as the M-11, which tracks, but I replaced the Minimi with it.

These guys have an excuse in that they're pretty clearly the same thing, except these guys have a gun and a rocket launcher.

Oh, hey, it's the Rocky guy, finally. Yeah, he is different from the Rockys from the last area. I wonder if someone was accidentally duplicating some names. Right, well...he dropped a rocket launcher, a M47 Dragon. An anti-tank one, which I'm unfamiliar with. I don't really need multiple rocket launchers, unless I can get spare rockets for this one. Well, so much for the magnum.

Finally, before entrances to other areas, I find a M60 off another Rocky. Now this one is an improvement. It's slow to turn, but it hits hard enough that if a burst catches two enemies at a short enough distance, they'll both die. Technically the Minimi did this before, but less noticeably. The M47, meanwhile, is also one-shot, and thus is indistinguishable from the LAW until suddenly the LAW doesn't kill something, not worth it to keep both at the same time.

My final strategy here is to just grab a rocket launcher, then go for the dangerous-looking areas, grabbing the other rocket launcher if needed, then replacing the empty Minimi with the SAW, and if I run out of launchers the Skorpion.

I wonder what happened to these creatures after this?

At this point, I have three exits from here, one locked, one I pass up and one I go through. It's a lab. There are a bunch of zombified girls inside. Quickly, we hear a researcher. They're testing the zombie virus, Kusomoanfitamin. I think this unlocks some of K-Ko's repressed memories, because we then get a wall of text. (This is eavesdropping, not a flashback despite the weird way it appears)

A military task force is using the virus to create mutants. They're looking to put human genes into animals and vice versa with the virus. Both rejected the change. But the task force kept trying various things. K-Ko is the success of that project. K-Ko is naturally shocked and says she needs to think about this. The cutscene then ends awkwardly.

Now it's time to clear out the massive amount of military guys here. This big fight is somewhat underwhelming. I wonder if it was intended to be, since after all I've killed dozens of them to get to here and I have much better equipment now than I did when I first fought them. Maybe it's the ampules I have now too, the game is far too generous with them. I'm basically only ever in trouble when I try to be too stingy with stuff. Once the military is gone, I get a level up, now I'm level 8. I can look around, there's a computer I can't do anything with and a door with a bad odor behind it.

It's a prison cell, full of dead and presumably experimented upon bodies. Yeah, that smells. The text is basically saying that these are the failed experiments with the virus. After that I'm put inside the room. For no reason, because in-game there's nothing here. Maybe that locked door is unlocked now?

And they're still experimenting on people. There's dialog, but it's unsubtitled and impossible for me to make out over the music. Lame. I guess these guys explain why I'm encountering elephants in a place that shouldn't have them. The bears made sense since, you know, there are bears in Japan. The names on the lower left are professional wrestlers, though the two Japanese ones are translations of usually untranslated parts of the name.

Those shells look about the size of an anime eye, which puts the caliber of it to "do not get hit by it".

This monster, to quote the exact name, though in-game he's Plant, is very talkative and polite in his speech. He's glad K-Ko came here, while she wonders what kind of monster he is. He's not a monster, he's the head scientist. (But as some say, the monster isn't Frankenstein, but Frankenstein is the monster) This shocks K-Ko. He talks about using his biology knowledge to make himself evolve. (I don't think evolution has much to do with the grenade launcher on his left arm) "I am beyond human!" K-Ko calls him a mad scientist and says she'll smash him. I appreciate K-Ko having such a straightforward character. He then says he'll end her and complete his work in the lab...then he'll blow up the nuclear power plant. Then the secret of Kosumoanfitamin will be known. A little more back and forth.

He walks away in the cutscene and then faded clones of him appear. More text, which I don't understand, but it's something about how his bodily fluids contain plants. I actually spot him quickly, so I switch to the rocket launcher, but you have to aim pretty well to hit him, hit the clones and nothing happens. Guess I'm using the rocket launcher another day. And unfortunately, I can't really hurt the clones enough to kill them and trying to get a shot in at the monster himself is tricky. Not sure if I'm getting anywhere hurting the clones or if they can hurt me. I'm not getting hit like multiple guys with massive guns are hitting me, not even one technically.

A few more attempts clears it all up. Each time you hit the right Plant, he changes places with one of his clones. His clones do nothing except block you, and any time I thought I was damaging them, I was really shooting through them. The strategy, therefore, is to get him close to you, then hit him with the rocket launcher. Anything else will burn through way too many ampules and you just can't keep up with him with the automatic weapons...until I realize that multiple Plants are sometimes solid at the same time. I don't know if that's a glitch or intentional, but it doesn't change my plan. What does is I figure I need another level up.

So I optimize my weaponry here. The M60, of course. For some reason the guy who drops it continually drops it even after you get it, which means free ammo without having to go to base. But I decide to change the M-11 for the Skorpion, the former kicks too much and it's damage drops off so steeply I have to be one tile away for it to work.

I also take a quick jaunt back, I really don't need to since I'm getting plenty of ampules and infinite M60 ammo, but just to top off everything. This triggers a new dialog with the camp leader. K-Ko tells him about what just happened, which was at the National War College. (A fictious place apparently, might as well be a zoo in Shinjuku anyway) He's as shocked as she is that they're experimenting with the virus. It's horrible that humans are capable of things like that, she won't stand for it. He says something about not knowing about a politician inside the military and about how a coup is being planned. I remember someone mentioning a coup before, does that mean that the military is acting against the interests of the government? Seems slightly odd as a plot development, at least not without the military becoming a bunch of thugs rather than mad scientists. (As I got this bit confused with later developments, this may just be an error on my part)

Back against the head researcher Plant, I finally get him dead center with my LAW. Nothing. Crap. Worse still, my levelup has done nothing as far as increasing the amount of shots he needs to kill me. Well...maybe a little. There's nothing I can really do outside of just pumping him full of lead and hoping for the best, and this time I do it.

The text says he's down. She needs to reach the nuclear power plant, because when the time comes they're still going to blow it up. Guess his plan is still in motion. She's got to stop it. On his corpse she finds an ID card and more ampules. I think 5, I had 72, used 8, ended with 69. Finally, I get another level up, to level 10. And now I can explore this room. There's another desk. It says something about parts for K-Ko's suit, but I don't get an upgrade, must be an invisible item like the cards I have. There's another door, it's locked. I see another one. Wait, inner chamber?

Speaking of how weird they look, why keycards on their chest?

Oh, it's more unsubtitled dialog under music. I hear an isolated everybody is here, so I'm assuming K-Ko is glad to see these people. I think they might be the refugees. Who look like they're victims of experiments themselves. Just the eyes, how they seem to be short, and not in a natural way. Seriously, they look like human Furbys or something.

K-Ko now talks to a random girl, asking if she's okay. The girl isn't, because her older sister has gone somewhere and her father has become a demon. I think he killed someone. K-Ko tells her not to worry, he's probably still alive and thinking and to be strong.

They return to the camp, where K-Ko talks to the camp leader again. Just in-game. He asks about the people she brought, she tells him that they were captured at the National War College, could they please let them stay? He says it's all right, he's obligated. Then the conversation ends.

This is a pretty good place to stop for now. I have three new objectives, stop the nuclear power plant from exploding, which is probably related to the new ID card I have, and a person to find. I may have to kill him, but that's okay, if I can't shoot him, I can hit him with a rocket launcher. I do have to wonder how much longer the game is going to last though. We're not really fighting zombies anymore, and there's nowhere you can reasonably go after stopping a nuclear explosion and determining if you can cure the zombie virus. I guess the real answer is that we need to find K-Ko's father, or "father", I guess.

This Session: 2 hours 50 minutes

Total Time: 15 hours 30 minutes

Aliens (1986)

There's a nice little title animation where the letters fade in from some sort of hole.

Name:Aliens
Number:222
Year:1986
Publisher:Activision
Developer:Activision
Genre:Action
Difficulty:4/5
Time:3 hours 50 minutes
Won:Yes (93W/70L)

Aliens is one of those films I hope needs no introduction, considering how many times I've brought up something related to it in passing over the years, recently calling Xenomorph another unofficial adaptation of the game. It's one of those things that I sort of just expect the audience interested in someone yapping about old shooters and survival horror games to know about enough that I don't need to explain.

Naturally, given the number of unofficial titles, it was inevitable that I'd play an official game based off it eventually. They're not all strategy games and Pac-Man-clones. This brings us to 1986's Aliens, the US one by Activision as opposed to the EU one by Electric Dreams. It's funny to think about two different companies being able to make games on the same license, but imagine telling someone in 1986 about Fortnite.

It would be really cool if at the end of the game you got to see the same image, but minus whoever you lost. Instead they don't really matter.

We start with a recap of the movie, told through walls of text and then a shot of the marines talking on the ship. Ridley is recovered from the Nostromo's escape pod, they don't believe her when she talks about the Xenomorph, and they penalize her. But uh-oh, the space marines contact her since they've lost contact with the colony after a report of something exactly like Ridley described.

Actually, I don't think that even if you haven't seen the movie you'd have too much trouble with this, since most are fairly obvious.

This is one of those mini-game games that were popular around this time. To start with, we get an identification game, which may be copy protection. If it is, it's the worst copy protection I've ever seen, because I could easily solve it and I don't necessarily recognize any Alien equipment outside of the pulse gun.

Then we get...a series of rings I have to navigate into. Holy crap, it's the Superman 64 thing. It's less crap, but the general concept means that this was never going to be anything but an annoyance. I say less crap in the sense that this isn't some absurd maze the game expects you to make in a certain amount of time, but a series of increasing hard to follow rings that just aren't fun. While it may control better with a joystick, with the keyboard it can be hard to build up the momentum to make the sharper turns the game asks for. Even if you hit the rings, the game may decide you fail anyways because you didn't hit them well enough. Infinite attempts or not, I'm glad there are codes for later levels.

I don't know if the scale on the Xenomorphs is right, but it certainly feels right, towering over my guys like that.

The story cuts ahead somewhat, with some of the group having gone off...somewhere I don't remember, and now I have to recover them. (In retrospect, this might be the part where they find the cocoons) I screw this up the first time, which ironically enough makes this section really, really boring. I didn't know you could change characters by pressing the function key below their lifesigns, which in retrospect was stupid of me. So instead of a tense scene fighting off aliens, I'm slowly walking with just the sounds of my footsteps as my squad slowly die, before I end up fighting the aliens in vain. Rather than with the flight thing, this automatically advances to the next stage. We'll do these in order though.

What I also didn't get the first time was that the controls are ideal for 1986. The joystick moves and the fire button shoots. Hold down the fire button and you strafe. It's hard for the Xenomorphs to kill you while you're shooting, since you just hit things in front of you. The motion detector tells you where more Xenomorphs are coming from. Once I got that down, or half my squad on the inital attempt, it becomes boringly easy. The endless occasional hordes are quite boring to shoot. It's an endless maze with no real way to navigate it outside of guessing.

However, the key point here is that paradoxically, you need to go the area that's been built up by the Xenomorphs to get out, as that's where the APC is. This area also has them coming out from areas you can't walk across, but this isn't that tricky. The only thing that killed one of my guys was that for a time before I could finish one fight against them, another group was approaching another. You can save a guy who gets captured, but it's such a brief window of opportunity that you have no chance of doing it unless you can specifically set it up.

Next, we get something that looks like a weird game of Tapper. Not quite the best comparison, but when you're sliding up and down giving someone something, even if they're aliens and flames, it's what comes to my mind. We're waiting for the guys at the bottom to cut through a steel door, and I'm preventing them from getting kidnapped by the Xenomorphs who have to get past my guy, either by dashing up and down causing the Xenomorphs to retreat or by shooting them with the laughably short-ranged flamethrower. Unsurprisingly, I die here straight away.

This one isn't really fair. Sure, there's the illusion of fairness, for a while even with the fast Xenomorphs you can reach them from the opposite side of the screen before they go to the right. But quickly this doesn't seem true even if they're alone. With how many are thrown at you, there's no getting past it, you're losing a guy unless you get lucky. This is even knowing that there are two tricks, that it's about causing them to retreat when you're forced to, and that you can cause groups of two to retreat even when one is past you. I think this is a preset pattern, but even if it isn't, I hate it. I looked up a longplay after a while and saw that even someone that good at this game was screwing up.

This is actually a good situation, I'm about to get out of their sight and they're all behind me.

Somehow I manage to win with two guys left. I can believe someone can win with everyone remaining, but damn, you'd have to be insanely good to pull that off. This is followed up by a maze of ducts, which makes the last section look reasonable. Xenomorphs randomly spawn in, but only chase after you if they see you. Your defense seems to be your remaining soldiers, who function like explosives killing one of the Xenomorphs. Oh, and they automatically make turns based on which direction it is to you. Hope you saved more than two guys like I did.

I never actually needed the flares, honestly, you get enough time to make it out anyway.

Next up, another shooting section, this time without the soldiers acting as lives, this time you're Ripley, finding Newt. Ninety-nine bullets and eight flares. Or not in my case, because the joystick button is the space bar. It's not that difficult though, since you can just walk past most of the Xenomorphs owing to them no longer blocking you. This is actually wiser, since they respawn on the same screen. It is more difficult to stand and fight now.

I started with 17 minutes, and this is how long it took the first time to reach Newt, it's not that tricky.

Eventually, I find Newt, and she follows me back. Before I can return to the ship, I have to outwit the Xenomorph Queen. I try it a couple of times, first by shooting it, then by trying to trick it with movement somehow. Neither works. Aha! I think, this must be a job for the flares. Because I've figured out how to make save states in Denise, I've been using that. (Neither Denise nor WinVICE are Linux-native or have good screenshot functions, so Denise gets the edge now, and those are the two emulators I've found that work the best) Because of it being in Windows, there's an issue where sometimes the configuration menu doesn't work properly which causes it to not save changes. Fortunately, I can manually change the keycode to something other than space. Oh, flares don't work, must be an issue with my emulator, I'll just see how it works in a longplay...oh damn it, I've done it all for nothing.

After considerably more time spent fixing the issue than I'd like, I take the plan into action. It's simple and clever, but surprisingly difficult to figure out. Move to one side and wait for her to reach that side, turn sideways, then shoot from that way. She won't move while you're shooting. Hope you saved enough ammo for it. It's beautiful really. After that, it's simply a matter of getting back to the elevator you started from. The Queen comes back on the ship and it's time for us to fight.

The power loader section is one of those from the back fighting game sections that were common around this time. Left and right move in that direction, while up and down move the arms of your power loader. Hit the queen with the arms while not letting her reach the bottom of the screen. Only one hit for you, of course. She meanwhile, gets a massive health bar that regenerates. One mistake on your part, and death. I suppose it's been the same the entire game, but it really hits when it's a genre known for pretending to be fair even if it isn't at all.

The manual's advice is somewhat terrible, because while it's both true, it's also seemingly false. Hit her as often as you can. This seems false because, again, massive health bar, but at first it doesn't even seem like you're damaging her. When I actually had a strategy, it didn't seem like I was dealing any damage at all despite several good hits. No, you need to be hitting her often, otherwise she regenerates it all back. You need to get her into a loop where you constantly hit her, but not the kind of loop where if she gets out of it she runs away from you until her health restores. Which is probably related to where your prongs are.

And then it sort of just falls into place. I guess once you get into a proper loop of hitting the queen it all just falls into place. To finish her off, you need her health bar to be entirely green, then bring the prong down, then towards her, before pressing the button, then drag her into the middle of the airlock.

Did someone object to the white blood?

Then we get the ending of Aliens. They put a lot of effort into it, it's nice. But, that's not something that will be nice in the rating.

Sweet dreams, because when you wake up you're all going to die horrible deaths...

Weapons:
The pulse rifle is something I enjoy, but not particularly interesting of itself. Oddly, despite my frustrations with the level it was in, I felt the flamethrower had some depth to it. 2/10

Enemies:
Just Xenomorphs, no facehuggers, and two fights with the queen. The former is more of a puzzle, while the latter is tedious. Still, the whole package was nice. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
Tricky, because the non-player characters are your lives, and in their first appearance, a squad of sorts, though not even pretending to have the depth of even the crudest AI you'd see down the line. Since they stand there getting killed if you aren't playing as them. 0/10

Levels:
Six levels of varying quality and difficulty. Obviously my favorites were where you were moving around shooting things, despite their shortcomings. The others just sort of mixed things up and were there because they were in the movie. A lot of my more disliked missions made obvious how random enemies spawn and act sometimes. 3/10

Player Agency:
Everything is very smooth, it's telling that my complaints are all about randomness, not the controls. The top-down shooting sections were absolutely perfect for the era, and would be worth imitating today. I do think the fighting controls in the last section take a bit to get used to, since moving the joystick up and down to do something happening sideways is unintuitive. 6/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
It's Aliens and feels like it. 5/10

Graphics:
Very smooth and well-animated, with lovely backgrounds. Obviously some of the smaller sprites lack detail and some uninteresting objects are made very uninteresting because of the low resolution. 5/10

Story:
It is recognizably Aliens, and you'd be able to follow the story even if you didn't see the movie, with a few things happening out of game. 3/10

Sound/Music:
Pretty good. Most things sound like a good enough imitation, outside of what I presume was a Xenomorph screeching. The sole music track is nice, but because of how many times you'll restart a mission, it can get slightly grating. 3/10

That's 29, somehow, pretty high up in the ratings for now, but feels more generous than I should be giving it. Eh, let's go with 27.

Everyone likes this, which makes my distaste of some parts feel more pronounced. It's all fair once you figure out the trick, but it can take a while before you're any good at some parts. You really need to get a perfect way through the first two missions with the marines before you can make it through the ducts, in which you are completely at the mercy of the RNG. That first one isn't too tricky, but man, oh, man, is that second one ever.

I feel like it's probably worth it if you like the movie and the period, but if not, you aren't going to be pressed for a game that feels like the movie. And if you are, you don't really need to hear what I have to say about the game, now do you?

Next up, you know what's the best game to play after one inspired by Aliens? Another game inspired by Aliens.

Rejection: Of Typical Enemy Design

There are four doors in the area I start in, outside the camp. One, the southwestern one, is empty. The southern one is where I went last time and has all the stuff. Another, northeast, is just an empty room. The third, southeast, is just a shortcut to the area before the boss fight. So, if I'm going to be doing any grinding, it's going to be against a single soldier with a knife, because some of these soldiers names are kind of lame. Why not Soldier Knife, Soldier SMG and Soldier Machine Gun instead of Soldier Japan, Soldier Mustache and Soldier Alice?

Since I'm starting this one off on a bad note, what's the deal with this music track? It sounds like someone noodling on a keyboard trying to be atmospheric? Right, well, I'll just turn the music off while I'm doing this and listen to something else. Which doesn't really help when you have a constant beeping going on. Sigh...

About thirty minutes and twenty dead soldiers later, I'm a level higher. I don't seem that much better. Maybe I took the wrong bit of advice from the bossfight and I should have tried something else, but still, a level is a level. I'm handily taking out Soldier Japans with the knife now, so maybe it is better than I give credit for.

I take into effect my plan, rush for the two guns and all the goodies, then save back outside the camp. Really hoping those refills and heals aren't limited. As I go towards the boss, I spot two side areas. One just has a single soldier, but the other is another corridor with the odd sniper and three side areas inside it. Two contain weapons. The second, which I enter first, gives me a Minimi, with 500 shots of ammo, but it burns through about 14 per trigger pull, the other has a rocket launcher. (About is probably accurate, since it does seem like these weapons burn through variable amounts of ammo)

Which gives me a difficult choice of which weapon to throw out. Do I toss the magnum? They both serve the same purpose, except that with the magnum I can fire 30 times versus 1. I need to test the rocket launcher again W to fully understand my choice, so I'll gamble that I need both and say farewell to the P90. So I go over back to the area I was just in, since I'm about to die, I figure I'll get more ammo for it from the chief. Turns out it's one of the disposable rocket launchers, serves me right for not remembering that the M72 is the one nicknamed LAW.

This isn't because I killed W, this is because the LAW hits everything on the screen.

The LAW definitely works as I hoped, basically a screen nuke. Upon shooting the rocket, everything within sight dies and I get this message, which I don't quite understand, except that my target scanner has been entered.

It's pretty clear what has happened afterwards though, which is that there are a million soldiers I need to kill. And that I now have an upgraded version of my system OS. Thankfully, this area has been all about grabbing ampules, so I have a good amount to restore whatever damage I take. I run out of ammo in both the M16 and the Minimi, which forces me to rely on the revolver. I end up reloading because I thought it would be better to take the P90 instead of the Python, but decide to keep it as is anyway.

In the actual fight, enemies respawn here until you take out the leader, who is naturally behind twenty soldiers, so you need to get lucky with W and save the rocket launcher or just rush then retreat once he's dead. Pick off the stranglers and then there's more dialog. First we get an in-game message telling me that K-Ko killed the leader's entire squadron.

This guy's chin sure has increased in size.

Then we get this. He's actually happy that a child beat him. K-Ko, asks why he did this terrible thing before he's going to send him to hell. The leader asks if she thinks anyone in the world would take them when they could turn into zombies at any moment. (Possibly will be turn into zombies, given the next sentence) K-Ko asks what he means, and he talks about how important people were evacuated to Tokyo, whereas the rest have been abandoned. K-Ko asks about the message she heard about protecting the refugees.

He says something like "That one, Colonel Kihara's daughter", which suggests a plot twist or that Colonel Kihara's daughter is responsible for this. Then something about "the cabinet ministers putting up with cheap-looking humans" and finally something about her fathers and the ilk being but a small fraction of the groups around. K-Ko doesn't believe this, because he's a murderer. He says that because she killed the army, the government will no longer see them as just a nuisance. K-Ko says that her father is a good person who contributed to the rebuilding of Tokyo.

He then says something about a rebuilding project, with K-Ko's response implying this is suspicious. The rebuilding of Tokyo is apparently a threat to the plans of the world. How so? The dying leader says something a bit tricky, since he might have said a double negative, but seems to be that this is a blessed era for the unliving. I still have no idea what's so strange about the project, but I guess the implication is it's related to the zombies. He dies and K-Ko talks to herself, about what the meaning of what he said was (So it is confusing?), and gets a keycard.

And now I guess I go back to camp. Level-up to level 6, which seems to put me up to fairly impressive, for now, stats. I briefly worried about my health, but the battle gave me ampules afterwards, and now I have twenty. More than enough to sacrifice so I don't die getting back to camp. Only...there aren't any enemies hanging around. At all. So it's a straight shot.

Uh...this isn't good. She says something unsubtitled, which I don't quite understand but comes off as you'd expect someone returning to see their friends slaughtered. This is...a problem. Remember, I don't have much ammo and now my health is limited to how many ampules I can get. Outside of friendlies and hostiles, nothing in this area has given me either. The music, oddly, is back to the standard music that played in non-water areas earlier. Guess I should go through whatever was behind the army.

It's the area of Shinagawa I first arrived at. Guess I'm going to Shinjuku now, but first I should pick up that Glock. It's quite lucky for me that I tried to avoid picking up ammo, since now I have no choice. Enemies on the other hand, prove somewhat easier. The Obasan and Tobi zombies are easy to kill, but Hells Angels tank knife and M-16 bullets still unless I'm real close. On the positive side, unless I'm real close I'm invulnerable to it's attacks.

The radar says there's something to the left, but there's another enemy here.

What about Meguro? Does the improved OS with it's fancy targetting system help? Not really, just in a general, you get a warning if something is next to you. The "radar" (?) system at the top kind of offers something helpful, since it does tell you the general direction. Warnings on the right however, tell you when an enemy is within range, which is very useful. I go to the old camp to look it over then go onto Shinjuku.

Seeing as there's no enemy behind me here, "WARNING RAID" apparently means someone is close to me.

I forgot that there weren't Hells Angels here, but rather Metals. I can grind this guy out if need be, which is good because I may need to. I've got 28 ampules which I believe corresponds to about 7 full heals. That said, I need to explore first. There's another area not too far to the left of the transition into Shinjuku.

I wonder if I should give this game credit for having several newer zombie archetypes while also having several that aren't a thing outside of it.

And we get this guy. He expands his stomach to attack. An Otaku? Fat guy? No...it's a bigfoot. I must have missed that part of the bigfoot lore. There's another kind, more fitting just a bit of the way in. This seems to be a maze, a part I figure out when I get turned around and go out the way I came, finding another door to an area full of enemies.

Well, the knife isn't as effective as I thought against Metals, I guess I'm going to have to grind Bigfoots. So against the other enemies I've discovered that my M-16 is very effective. What are they guarding? A M-11, or the 9mm cousin of the MAC-10. You know, the crappy SMG that gangsters in '80s action films carry around. This is the lower caliber version of that. I wonder if I was supposed to gamble on this area earlier to grab that rather than get it now, since this SMG progression seems like the exact opposite it should be. Better it than a Glock though.

Let's explore that maze...and OH, CRAP, AN ELEPHANT. This may have been slightly underwhelming, since I then kill it, dealing over 100 damage a shot, with the M-11. As I quickly discover in my experiments wandering around, that's because the M-11 is functioning how the P90 should be functioning. Er, should be functioning as if this were a Stargate game. It shreds enemies. It's dealing more damage than the Python, which I can't quite wrap my head around.

Random chance serves me well in getting through this area, but even though I make it through and don't have a reason to return, I reload and make a proper map. (Not to mention running out of ammo) Because ammo is now at a premium, it's time to see what's going on with the Glock. It does good damage for a pistol (18 against a Metal), but better yet, it has no recoil. If I had a reason to have a non-magnum pistol, I'd carry this one around. I still have a problem with it being unreliable as far as hitting things go, but that's probably just because enemies in this area move around too much.

Items in this area are often given at the end of a long tunnel, with plenty of enemies. I find my replacement for my Glock in a Mauser. Weird change...and it only has 41 bullets? So it's another magnum...? No, it's just a pistol. It does more damage, but that's about it. It's not exactly a high amount, and damage per carrying capacity is lower. If I were planning on keeping it, I would be greatly disappointed in it.

Seemingly to make up for the loss of basically any infinite health restorative, the north part of Shinjuku has a lot of medical supplies lying around, without any enemies nearby, and I mean a lot. And then I see Shinjuku camp pop up as I'm about to enter a door. Interesting...

There's a doctor and the leader, everything is back to infinite supplies. The leader talks about it more in a musing way, they had more safety in the past. And of course shocked that the government would do this. Which isn't as absurd as in some examples where people don't know that the government is looking out for its own interest in a zombie film, since the average person wouldn't know much about it. K-Ko then says it isn't the army but a division of it. I wish I had K-Ko's optimism about it.

My actual objective at this point seems to be to find K-Ko's father. Seems, because I'm getting little direction. Eh, so long as I map things out I won't have a problem. Speaking of which, the area is oddly divided up into two areas, the area leading to the camp and Shibuya, and areas called to "Shinjyuku", which I don't think is a thing, but I've never been to Tokyo. (Then again, an Elephant implies the presence of a Zoo, which I also believe is lacking from Shinjuku)

Now free to knife enemies without burning through supplies, I discover that the Redames are actually weaker than the Bodycons. I guess since the latter are "body conscious", that means they work out? Have I said this game has weird logic? This game has weird logic. This area seems to be pretty consistent, Redames sometimes don't deal damage up close and die quickly, Bodycons can deal damage, and Metals are dangerous.

Not the exact same spot, there are just a lot of rooms that look like this.

Onto Shinjyuku, as the entrance south is full of Metals, I'm just going to break out on the entrance next to the camp, which is full of Shinjyuku's weirder enemies. Bears, who look like giant wolves, rock monsters and birds. Bird-women...with guns. They're clearly the toughest of the enemy selection, since sometimes they tank M-16 rounds and they don't take much damage from the knife. Bears are the weakest of this group, since they actually die to a couple M-16 bursts. Which, ironically enough, is now my weakest gun since I picked up the M-11 again.

But as I continue to fill out the map, I notice that some Birds are dying to my knife quickly. So there's a very extreme gap in damage output, which I knew, but sometimes happens even when you seem to be close. Or perhaps there's a variation in an enemy's strength within a group? Oddly, I feel like being more RPG-like under the hood might be to its detriment considering that on the surface it's all about getting levels for me. Something the game seems to be blocking off, as I seem to not be getting any new XP at this point. Possibly not, but the game was giving me strange messages about the monsters getting shocked which didn't seem to have any other purpose.

I stop after having filled out Shinjyuku, rather, the part of Shinjyuku that's east of the camp. It doesn't connect to the part near Shibuya, so we'll find out what's the deal with the elephant later. That doesn't mean that this wasn't a useful bit of exploration. There are no items, but this gives me two paths out, one east, which is Shinjyuku sewers. That's surprisingly like Meguro from a glance, albeit the enemies have increased in strength. The other, is Nagano, which has no enemies, but does have a door that my keycard can open. Obviously, I'm going to get a nasty fight when I open that door, so I'm going to prepare for that, which in the only method I currently can prepare for, getting another level.

This Session: 4 hours 50 minutes

Total Time: 12 hours 40 minutes

Pharaoh's Tomb (1990)

The man apparently misspelled his own name, which is something I've never seen before.

Name:Pharaoh's Tomb
Number:221
Year:1990
Publisher:Apogee Software
Developer:Micro F/X
Genre:Side-Scroller
Difficulty:5/5
Time:6 hours
Won:Yes (92W/70L)

There's something deeply unsettling about firing up a game and getting a jump sound effect that sounds like a fart.

Pharaoh's Tomb is another one of those games from the weird days of Apogee where everything is in CGA even though VGA is becoming a viable platform. It's also one I skipped over at first because I didn't know what exactly this was. Looking at the controls, I wonder if I wouldn't have been better off skipping it. Ctrl and Alt to move left and right? What the hell? It actually does have the arrow keys, but how bizarre.

The story is, you play as Nevada Smith, a research assistant to a professor of archaeology at a major university, who hopes to go on a treasure hunt soon, but the professor never brings you with, having you do research. Deciding against this treatment, you go off to the treasure hunt anyway, preventing your professor from doing so.

The first level is actually quite generous, you can go anywhere from the bottom, but you'll have to wait for the native to get out of the way.

I regret not playing this soon after Monuments of Mars, because I'm genuinely not sure what's new and what isn't. Both are games centered around a single screen a level, which I previously described as puzzlish design. Everything is block-based, including hit detection. Hope you weren't planning on cutting across some spikes, because even if you didn't touch it, because both blocks occupied the same space at the same time, you are dead. Oddly, parts of the game rely on some blocks not taking up a whole block.

What's weirder is that according to sources online is that not only is this not using the same engine as Monuments of Mars, it came out before it. I assume I had good reason to put Monuments in 1990. It's incredibly bizarre, did Replogle get inspired by this game, or did he come to the conclusion that this was somehow the way to design a platformer? Or some sort of strange forced consistency across products. I can believe that this was made before Monuments, since it certainly plays a lot worse.

This one gave me trouble starting out, but it was hard to see why in retrospect, since it isn't actually a cruel version of any of it's tricks.

Basically, Nevada walks, jumps awkwardly, two high and across, and can throw spears because having a gun would be too generous for this game. You can only carry five spears, and presumably five lives. Not that it matters since saving is unrestricted. There are also five masks, which you get a bonus for collecting five of. (I think) Collect 100 of the other thing and you get another life.

In addition to those things, you get keys, two different kinds, red and brown, which I didn't realize were different until I couldn't open one door. A freeze icon, which freezes traps and enemies, which can backfire. There are secrets, either you just naturally open some areas or reveal some platforms by walking somewhere, or you bump your head on a brick and get points. Sometimes the former is more obvious with a scroll which makes changes.

This level's big trick are the two enemies in the middle, otherwise it's completely straight-forward.

There are the requisite traps and enemies. Spikes, moving spikes, and a particularly nasty dart gun which is one black pixel on a normal wall. I have died several times to this. Enemies come in many flavors but they basically just move along certain lines, either on the ground or in the air. Not really enemies, we have moving blocks, which seem to stop if they'll hit you, and the occasional stage with a wind effect.

Getting back to the reason why I thought it would have been better to play this after Monuments of Mars, is that I genuinely don't know if I was in a really good mood for that, if my current personal issues are affecting my enjoyment of this game, or if this is genuinely worse. The collision in this game is so bad that I genuinely thought that you could walk on enemies for a few stages. Yeah, it's that bad.

This was probably my most hated level, since you have to dodge the darts while not really being in control of your movement thanks to the platforms.

The thing is that playing through these four episodes and I have no idea what Broussard was thinking when he placed levels where they are. The difficulty curve of this game feels poorly thought out. The first level is fairly simple, but the second suddenly requires you to start figuring out how enemy collision works. (These are the first two level screenshots) Your spears are limited, so wasting them is extremely unwise. You have to take advantage of the half-tile roof to jump over them, you have to watch out for dart guns and you have to figure out how to walk across sliding tiles.

The dart guns are a more obvious and non-obvious threat. They're obvious because as a threat they are constant, annoying and deadly. They're non-obvious because they are a single tile in otherwise normal-looking brick walls. I feel the need to reiterate this point because they were by far the most constant threat that killed me. Every level with them felt like a gotcha, and by golly this game has gotchas up the ass. They're very easy to miss, and often placed where if you don't notice them ahead of time you can die.

Half-tile roofs quality as the second nastiest hazard. It shouldn't, after all, you just get a half-tile more of ceiling, right? Yes and no, because the game really expects you to take advantage of these roofs to dodge enemies and dart guns. This trick was used so many times it was practically a guarantee that you'd see the two together. It sounds easy, but remember, collision in this game is awful, the controls stick sometimes. So even though you'll do it a hundred times, it's still risky.

Sliding tiles are interesting, from a technical perspective they're like the enemies, they go left and right on certain places, just not killing you. You can even see it in action when they collide with something, they go in the opposite direction. (You can do this with enemies sometimes, it's bizarrely merciful) But going across the tiles is tricky, you seem to have to fight against the movement of the tile if you go in the same direction it goes, and there's a small window of opportunity to get across something. Jumping up can be tricky because of the collision, but it's usually less dangerous than the simple over to another block sideways, more spikes below.

This one is completely straight-forward.

There's an important point to be gotten from these three things, the worst aspects of the game. It's all related to the collision. It's like if The Incredible Machine had its physics designed around screwing the player over as much as possible. Another common but not as nasty trick the game commonly has is a jump over two tiles of spikes, you basically go as far to the edge and jump, hoping to reach the other side. Platformers are allowed to have such strict jumping, but this game does it often and badly. Most bad platformers aren't so bad as to have such a bizarre platforming challenge and do it so often.

This feels like at complete odds with what should logically be the trouble with this game, something like the enemies or the spike elevators, as I took to calling them. They're basically something that only ever killed me because of something else, be it dodging a dart gun, the collision, again, or just plain carelessness on my part. Hey, I can't blame the game for everything! In particular, the spike elevators are weird, because you can touch the pole/rope that moves them, but not the piece itself, and there are very tight corridors.

I note that because I was back and forth on my two computers, I didn't do a good job of keeping my screenshots for this clear, so I used the level select cheat to take them. Hence the weird score.

I think the fundamental problem with this game is that it expects you to do things that the controls aren't really built for. Precision platforming is fine in Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia, it's not fine in a game that seems like it's barely holding together, and it's really not fine here. Because whenever I reached the end of some episode and had to grab a treasure, it didn't feel like the episode was ending as much as suddenly stopping like it was left off in the middle.

It ruins your subtle reference when you make it non-subtle...

Story begins and ends each episode, but even as far as excuse plots go, this feels unnecessary. "You are now in this part of the tomb", blah, blah, blah. Even the big ending cutscene which basically just tells you that your boss is Indiana Jones and that there's going to be another game, where Jones will take some credit on while you do all the work. Which I guess is fitting for an Indy-clone.

Weapons:
An awkward to use spear. 1/10

Enemies:
Obstacles rather than enemies, really. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
An inconsistent series of puzzles which requently require precision platforming. Some are okay, but far too often require performing difficult tasks with the game's controls. 3/10

Player Agency:
Every single bad thing I could say about controls I could say here. It sticks and it doesn't register at different times. It's loose and too tight. You have no control over the height of your jump, just the distance. Shooting doesn't work half the time. At least the save and pause functions work perfectly. 1/10

Interactivity:
None

Atmosphere:
It does feel fitting that a long forgotten pyramid feels miserable and desolate. 2/10

Graphics:
Simple, with decent animation. A point removed for the well-disguised dart gun. 2/10

Story:
Overly complicated for something that could be cut down to, find lost treasure. 0/10

Sound/Music:
You fart when you jump, and there are some other PC speaker effects. 1/10

That's 11. Which is the same as The Thor Trilogy. I think that's fitting. Both felt promising at the start, but both screwed themselves over by janky controls and poor level design. Both reminded me of better games. But I think there were times when I truly enjoyed myself playing Thor, whereas this is just sort of meh at it's best.

We'll see Journey to the Center of the Earth...I mean Arctic Adventure after Halloween, I want to alternate between Rejection and whatever it is I decide to play for October.