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.

Rejection: Bloodshot Eyes

And we're back, after a frankly far too long delay that was out of my control. Believe me, I've been eager to get back to this the whole time, and now we're finally going to get to see what lies in the section I've been neglecting...Which means figuring things out again and getting used to how my usage of the save system went. It only took a few minutes, which is good. (Note, I forgot how the screenshot function worked for a bit, so the early part is missing anything)

There's an obasan guarding a medikit, then a Hell's Angel guarding some kind of danger box. You can knife the former, but not the latter, possibly just this stage of the game. The box is an ammo box, and since ammo boxes reload regardless of how much ammo you used, like say, if you've only used one magnum bullet to kill a zombie guarding it, I reload. Glad I've kind of got the hang of the Python's recoil though. More medikits, first a Tobi then another Hell's Angel.

Suspicious, there's a box in a room all by itself. It's a shotgun. A 12L shotgun? 12 liter, laser? Don't tell me the guys who made this don't understand gauge? I didn't for the longest time, but then I never really made anything that depended on the measurement. Counter intuitively, higher gauge is actually smaller, it's referring to how many items you can make out of a certain amount of material, which I believe originated with wiring. Here at least, that's actually a surprisingly important part of our electrical grid that nobody really thinks about. As to the gun, they didn't know, because it's a SPAS-12, which I place where my old shotgun was. I'm getting all the classic cool guns.

That said, I'm going to do a bit of grinding, since I'm about to get rid of an old gun, and that one has 31 shells I haven't used, why not take out some Hell's Angels? Answer, because you can't hurt Hell's Angels with my old shotgun. I can kill the obasans with it, but man does this gun have a poor chance of hitting something outside of the range it can attack you. Maybe there's something else around? I find the path to the next area, but I can't go there yet because K-ko wants to find the camp. Oh, right, I had an actual objective here. Also, level 4 now.

The log on the left stays on-screen so long as the game continues, so any time you see it like this you know I recently loaded a save.

Once I fill in the map, it's clear there's nothing I need to activate, I just need to get out of here. Back through the sewers of Meguro. Doing what I should have done the first time and map the area out. It's not something I mind, this is the first game since Dungeon Master with nothing but fun in mapping. The game is also giving me motivation by making it so that enemies here drop too little experience to level up in any meaningful amount of time, while also being a pain to fight.

"I see! We'll go there as soon as possible!"

After a long trip back, I'm finally past the sewers, I did Shibuya at the start, but not the camp. This proves tricky when I get confused by the camp entrance dialog, but I'm back. K-Ko informs him that the route is secured. The commander says they'll go to Shinagawa Pier. Then, in a dialog box K-Ko brings the group to the pier, but...

"Rescue boat? You won't escape from here, the Tokyo Purification Force won't let you. You will all die here."

They're greeted by a military officer who's glad they arrived. (This dialog is all voiced) The refugees ask if they can get on the rescue boat. The officer says they can't leave. The purification of Tokyo means they can't leave, they'll die here. They're zombies, which the refugees object to, since they're still alive. The military isn't there to protect the refugees, says the refugees. Another says that they're taxpayers, surely they wouldn't kill taxpayers. The commander says that the time has come to receive the orders of the purification force. There's some more screaming and more dialog, this time not subtitled.

If everything is animated, it's not impressive that it's animated, if it usually isn't, it is impressive.

Holy crap, they animated them getting gunned down. I wasn't expecting that. I was expecting them to kill them, because zombie media has a pathological aversion to competent military forces, but this is a surprise.

"H-how awful...what causes this to be normal for humans?"

K-Ko is apparently watching this, because she says how horrible it was that a human would do that to someone else. The officer says that their work is not done, for how many have escaped to the underground? Search for all of them. K-Ko, who is apparently actually talking to the officer, says she won't do that, she'll protect them. Then the cutscene fades away.

My controller has been loose in my hands, and this startles me. I'm not gunned down, as I quickly recover. I switch from my knife to the Beretta 92F. I'm not sure if I'm missing or if they're too strong for it. Then they gun me down. Right, I guess I'll restore...

"Are you well, K-Ko?"

Oh, I'm still alive. And so are the refugees. K-Ko is as confused as I am. Apparently someone took K-Ko here after she collapsed. She apologizes that she wasn't reliable. The chief disagrees and then idly speculates how they'll escape from there. "The military...what's the matter with those guys?" K-Ko says. The chief says they if the military gets in here, they'll get bloodshot eyes, that is, in a frenzy. They need to find arms and food...and something about not continuing to be the bottom. For the time being this place is safe, but for how long? They need to escape, and there's something I don't understand. K-Ko says she'll find them somewhere that they can escape to. The chief says she's too weak, but she says she'll scatter them this time.

Then I'm sent back to Shinagawa. It has a new music track now. I reload because I want to check two points. Can I actually go through that door beforehand in Shinagawa? No, I genuinely can't. Can I fight off the soldiers? Yes and no. You can shoot them, but they respawn like the zombies, so there isn't much point. You can't flee either. I also discover that you can't skip cutscenes. Good, that's probably the only way to do this, short of bruteforcing your way through Shinjuku. Obviously, my next destination is the door that was previously unenterable...only a quick search reveals that this a new area entirely.

I start just south of the new camp, which I figure out upon entering. Still just the chief and the doctor. The Chief asks how it is outside and K-Ko says that the army is out there with bloodshot eyes, but she thinks it'll be okay. As I leave, the chief says that it's impossible to do with the remainer, which I don't quite understand. K-Ko says that they should strike the pier, put the remainder to zero. I missed something, but okay. I do a quick run about the area to see what's going on...

The rest of the soldiers are of course, not Japanese.

...and I suddenly think that everyone was incredibly optimistic about their survival in real terms, because this place is crawling with soldiers. This is going to be this area's foe, soldiers. We got Soldier Japan, who fights with a knife. Soldier Mustache, who has a Mac-10, hits hard but dies harder. Soldier Alice, who has high defense, but doesn't shoot that often. Finally, Soldier Sniper, who don't move and hit pretty hard. Enemies with ranged attacks are becoming more frequent, but the amount of experience the game is giving me is reasonable. They also have a good enough respawn time that you won't get caught out.

Man, I really messed up getting shots of the guns this week.

The game continues with it's problem of being too generous with the guns, and surprisingly the medical capsules. Most drop the latter. I pick up a M-16 off an Alice, I drop the shotgun since I can't imagine it being useful ever. Then a Mustache drops a MP5A3, and I wonder why I need a pistol when I can have three machine guns. The M-16 is genuinely an improvement over the shotgun, it doesn't shoot as fast as the P90, but it does hit very hard. The MP5 meanwhile, burns through ammo. I don't see how it's better than the P90. As it should be!

Also, checking my discarded guns against these guys, the Beretta is hardly worth the effort, not much point in having a single fire gun when you can deal as much damage with the knife. I imagine the Glock is similar. The SPAS-12 is interesting, it's autofire, but because of the kick, unreliable. And you know, the pellets never hitting their target. The P90 and the MP5 seem to be the same from a damage standpoint, but the MP5 shoots more bullets per burst.

Basically just the evade line below.

I'm just bopping around at first, seeing the lay of the land rather than mapping it out. Just by going through the rightmost doors, I find myself talking to the commander again. I wasn't expecting that. He says that she couldn't evade his forces. K-Ko minces no words, she promises to kill all of them. He says that her friends will be caught in his net soon. It's futile to stand against him. He calls someone called W (in very poor Kana) to strike her down.

Is this supposed to be a sunset?

Surprise, surprise, it's a boss fight. This guy seems intended to be pretty weird. Threatening to kill my friends again isn't saying anything new, so The soldiers die, but he doesn't seem to take damage, at least not that I can tell while fighting, looking at the screenshots it's clear that he does. I don't think this is a fight I can lose, as dying freezes the game. Well, that or the game bugged out again. Stopping now, because I now have my next real objective and some grinding to do. This could be unpleasant.

Gotta say, even if this is pretty cliche, I'm just digging the way this game was setup and executed so far. It's one thing to say the army is corrupt, it's another to show it in a game that's been sparing with real cutscenes, especially this this is the first real animation. The whole way they force the player to die is the best way, where you can fight them off but there isn't much point since they'll never run out. Though I must admit that I am finding it annoying that two of the game's three major characters might as well be The Commander and The Chief.

This Session: 3 hours 40 minutes

Total Time: 7 hours 50 minutes

Inca II (1993)

Name:Inca II
Number:220
Year:1993
Publisher:Sierra
Developer:Coktel Vision
Genre:Space Simulation/Adventure
Difficulty:3/5
Time:5 hours 20 minutes
Won:Yes (91W/70L)

I don't understand this game. Why it exists, what they tried to do with it, and what they expected people to get out of it. We're four games deep into Coktel Vision's space action games, and while we're slightly better in combat than we were in 1990, we're just getting to, well, it's acceptable, while the rest of the game has been suffering more and more. Galactic Empire had an excuse, it was 1990 and nobody knew what the hell a first-person shooter was, Inca II does not.

My best guess for all this, is that the people assigned to do a game with space combat were not fans of space combat games. They had a list, and had to stick with it. Of course, they didn't put any effort into the adventure game portion either, but we expect adventure games from Coktel, not space sims. The attempts at making the plot more shifting feels like it was taken from space games, since Wing Commander is the only game of this era that actually managed to do something like that.

Which goes all out the window when I look at the credits and see names that were the previous games, some even worked on E.S.S., so they believed in this idea. How are they six games deep into this vague concept and nowhere near being better than when they started? I realize that outside of E.S.S., it's all been downhill score-wise, but that hides that Galactic Empire and Inca were both more about the experiences than the actual gameplay.

He's spying on you!

Inca II is not really about the experience. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the game has the balls to treat its characters like people and to kill off a main character, but it doesn't keep itself going after that. When I started, I kept thinking about Krull, a visually interesting movie with an unimportant story. Inca treated its world of a resurrected Incan figure in space as completely sane despite being, well, crazy, and I thought Inca II was trying to make the story grounded, the forces of good are just Incan-inspired, the bad guys are just Spanish-inspired.

These space combats are the only place where the story choices matter, you get more if you chose certain actions, which may make the last one easier.

The plot goes off the rails when the main character, Atahualpa, dies and we're forced to play as the main character from the first game, Eldorado. Despite the promises of a branching story, there seems to be no way to avoid this. It's at this point that ideas seem to be pulled from places that have no place belonging in the story as previously established. Every planet seems to have a random person on it who seemingly could not have gotten there and there are frequently no signs of anyone else. It's not surreal, it's ill-fitting.

Eldorado is weird this time around. In combat, he's very obviously mortal, but the existence of his powers implies something a lot more is going on. Most of the game is dedicated to laying down his powers to destroy a great asteroid threatening the Earth, but not that it's going to crash into the planet. At other times, he seems subservient to people he shouldn't be subservient to, like his wife or someone who is effectively a random guy on the council he set up.

WHAT!?

To top it all off, we don't even get a resolution to the game, at the end it turns out that a here-to-unmentioned god (Unless you count the European title) got awakened, presumably by Eldorado, and then does some stuff. It's not even a sudden downer, he just comes back and shoves off. Nor is it a Cthulhu Ex Machina. What was the point of anything then!?

Getting to the gameplay, we now just have space shooting sections and adventure sections, no more ground combat. I can't help but feel that this change is for the worse, it's not that they were good in of themselves, but they made adventure sections you moved around in; Here every adventure section is very self-contained. Maybe this would be better if they were better, but I just feel limited in what I can do in every place.

Most of all, this feels like an interactive movie, better than that implies from the time, but worse than that should be. It's feels like you're just acting out your part in a script you haven't read, and everyone else just awkwardly stands there waiting for you to do your part. Things that would make sense for a character in a movie to do fill the game. The game frequently does these in a way that only works because you have such limited options that you would naturally do these things just by clicking around.

Look ma, a 3D cutscene!

Don't get me wrong, there are actual aspects of this that are an interactive movie, like little cutscenes that play to show some action has taken place or the overwhelming importance of the story. Which is odd because it doesn't feel like the story should be the primary part. It's just that usually when a game is like an interactive movie, it's either a crappy game full of FMV, or a game with a nice story that puts you in control of the nice action scenes. I'm guessing this is just a failed attempt at the later, but my last guess was very wrong.

Such lovely art, wasted here.

The adventure game sections are pointless, they're just there for pretty backgrounds. But the space sections, well, they're just there because the last game had them. I could go into detail, but you basically move with the mouse and you have an infinite laser weapon, along with specialized missiles for special targets. I want to point out that I was playing along with the TAG review, and Ilmari, who lost every space battle last time, won the final space battle. If someone who admits they aren't good at the genre won, do I need to go into detail? Though I must admit, I'm not sure there's much detail to go into.

It's not technically just moving the face up and down, but it sure looks like it in motion.

Visually, it's very nice, the 3D is of the period to a certain extent, but the 2D art is very nice. Two complaints I have are that some of the 3D animations loop far too obviously, and the real actors are animated by moving parts of their face down. That's very awkward, and I can't help but feel like it was intended as a counter to Lost in Time's lack of showing the mouth. Like these guys felt that no mouth was a lame move. I think it's the opposite, no mouth gave a mysteriousness to that game, whereas this felt cheaply animated.

If anything, the game looks too good for what it is. It's like a book where the cover is really cool, but the actual writer is boring at best. Often, a really beautiful screen will flash by for a single moment, never seen before or after. A graphic artist's hours are not the same as a programmer's hours, but still, they were used for something that wasn't that important.

The CD version I played added in some stuff which honestly made the experience worse. There's a maze and then a final puzzle which add absolutely nothing to the game, much like the rest of the endgame. Then we have the voice acting. Everyone is terrible. Sometimes this works in the game's favor, like Atahualpa sounding like a whiny teen or the Han Solo knock-off sounding like he's collecting a paycheck. Other times it doesn't, like Eldorado being wooden in a way that never works. When Eldorado's son dies, his cry of "no" doesn't sound like he's dead, just that he ordered an expensive souffle for dessert and he wants to see a football game at home.

To close this off, I just thing that in most little ways this game was worse. Like I said, Inca was an experience, this was not. There are no little touches that make the game come off as Incan-themed, even the music is just sort of there. It's not really Incan themed, it's just sort of there, filling the void. I recognize it listening to it after the fact, but it just isn't interesting or memorable.

Weapons:
A laser weapon with a weird firing arc, and basically weapons that take out one kind of target. There's no crosshair, and there's no way to figure out where you're actually shooting. 1/10

Enemies:
The game talks up a lot about enemy ships, how many varieties there are, how they're all piloted by different kinds of pilots. The difference is that some don't move, some do, and sometimes there are way too many. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
Despite a great deal of implication, there are no in-game friendlies. 0/10

Levels:
Something I never thought I'd say, but the game flows too well. It ensures that the game doesn't get stale, but at the same time it plays out like a series of events with no buffer between them. 3/10

Player Agency:
You control 99% of the game with the mouse, shoot, turn, all the adventure stuff. Other actions require the keyboard. Plus and minus control speed, although it's sometimes automatic. The function keys select your weapons. Some other keys, along with spacebar, control your targeting. You can tell it's a European game of this era when the developers don't understand how a keyboard is supposed to be used. 5/10

Interactivity:
Click on things and things happen, sometimes the puzzle makes sense, often it doesn't even if it should. 2/10

Atmosphere:
In theory, a wide variety of differing places and moods should work for a space opera game...but that is done far better in other works. 3/10

Graphics:
For the most part, beautiful and well-animated. 8/10

Story:
I don't understand any of this, at all. 1/10

Sound/Music:
It's fine, everything works, nothing feels out of place, but nothing is memorable. 7/10

That's 32, but I feel it's inappropriate for it to be higher than Inca given what I've said, so let's subtract 3 more for 29.

Is this one of the worst games of all time? Personally, I'm going to say no, but I can see where someone could argue for it. Would I say it's one of the worst adventure and/or space simulation games ever? Adventure, no, any game that I can finish within 6 hours is not near that list. Space simulation, maybe. I haven't played enough yet to know if something like this would qualify. The thing is, to be one of the worst games you really have to have hated it.

I don't hate Inca II, I am confused by it. It doesn't know if it wants to be as crazy as the original or just a space opera game with an Incan theme, starting off somewhat mundanely before going into utter insanity. The space combat sucks, but somehow two people who sucked at it managed to bumble their way into winning it. Even the more chaotic battles. The adventure game sections, even when they come off as reasonable, manage to make themselves seem convoluted.

It's not something I'll ever have a bugbear about, but it just leaves me scratching my head. Why did they do this, and why did they do this that way? A lot of good time was spent on this game, and nothing ever really tied it together. More than any other Coktel Vision game, I want to know what was going on behind the scenes. I understand where other games are starting and going, at least vaguely, this feels like three different plots tied together. Why the ending? Why the ending?

The next, and final Coktel Vision space game is 1995's The Last Dynasty, which by my current reckoning, will be played along whenever TAG covers it in 1995, assuming it's another adventure/action hybrid like the past four. Other Coktel Vision games will probably be played when I get to the years they're released in and whether or not they're actually worth playing here, I think only a couple are fully within my interest. For now though, it's time to return to Rejection, and not a moment too soon.

Xenomorph (1990)

Name:Xenomorph
Number:219
Year:1990
Publisher:Pandora
Developer:Pandora
Genre:FPS
Difficulty:3/5
Time:20 hours 50 minutes
Won:Yes (90W/70L)

I picked out Xenomorph as a sort of filler game, knowing that it was a Dungeon Master-style RPG that the CRPG Addict didn't cover, when the sub-genre is something I think falls into the domain of FPS just enough for it to be a reasonable title to cover under my rules. As I got through more and more of the game, it became clear just how much of an odd duck Xenomorph truly was.

Whenever I hear discussions of game genres on the internet, it's very rigid, a game either is or is not a particular genre, barring the odd 50% or so genre split. You could make many valid observations about this, ranging from the impolite to the polite. I think this isn't quite true, a game can have many elements of a genre without it necessarily being the primary genre, and even what appears to be a game's genre could just not be so.

The only character you ever get, no improvement allowed.

Xenomorph is a good example of this, because everyone says it's a RPG. It isn't. There isn't that much that you could say that exclusively applies to a RPG that also applies to Xenomorph. It appears to be a RPG, though, it plays like Dungeon Master. At first glance. In Xenomorph, you have no stat growth, no role-playing, no, for a lack of a better term, RPG combat. The only thing I can think of that mostly appears in RPGs is armor, this is something that very rarely appears outside of the genre.

As I've said in the past, a Dungeon Master-style grid level is not necessarily a RPG aspect, though most FPS with them are not rigid to the grid. There is no aspect of this level design that is not out of place in Wolfenstein. Nor are food and drink exclusive to RPGs. The way you interact with things might be nearly exclusive to RPGs, but that is not necessarily because that is a RPG trait. It is ultimately as much a RPG as it is a strategy game, minor aspects we probably wouldn't think of.

So, what is it? Story-wise, it's basically Aliens, except instead of being sent to recover a destroyed colony, your ship just arrives after some horrific accident that leaves it badly damaged, and you have to explore the place to repair it. Gameplay-wise, it seems to me to be a FPS, it's in first person, you are a human, and shooting is primarily a player action, not an in-game character action. Obscuring this, is that the game is controlled exclusively by the mouse and has a fairly complicated interface. Only System Shock and Pathways into Darkness spring to mind as something with such a complicated interface, which are FPS/RPG hybrids. This is a RPG feature, but is it necessarily a component of RPGs themselves or just something we assume because FPS generally don't offer enough depth in their equipment like this? Though I say this like I know what the depth of the game's equipment even is.

One of the many dispensers around.

There's another train of thought, that this is a survival horror game. I say this knowing I don't really think it, but I must admit, by the usual logic, it is a horror game and you survive, it works flawlessly. Even better, unarguable logic is that this is a survival game, since you have food and drink meters and have to find food, and it is a horror game. By my logic of survival horror games being Alone in the Dark-clones, this it is not. By my logic of it being an action game with heavy adventure elements, like limited resources, it is not.

Which brings me to my big criticism of the game. Things are presented like you have to conserve resources. In a sense this is true, most resources are limited, money, explosives, and food/water. Except you don't need food, it just allows your stamina to regenerate faster and are presented with enough explosives to render it being limited moot. If you get hit, you regenerate health. Oh, and the ammo for all your weapons can be recharged at one of the many convenient stations around the game. In an action game, if the player has unlimited resources and the enemy doesn't, the only thing that can stop them winning is running out of interest.

One of the many computers, which only displays information found on floppies.

I don't think this is a case of the game being badly designed as much as being unfinished. There's no music, and some systems like food/water and a communicator don't work like the game implies. I get the same impression from this game that I do from games that are 80% finished. They clearly had to ship out an unfinished title, which is unfortunate, because a few more months would have done the game a lot of good.

One of the earlier enemies.

Don't mistake this for perfect, because I don't think combat can possibly be fixed. No matter what you do, shooting is point and click and it's going to be difficult to make a variation beyond fancy explosives or adjusting damage. Enemies you can do a little with, but even with the melee enemies the game understandably focuses on, it seems like there was one train of thought. Not even faster variations, just ones that do slightly more damage and take slightly more to kill.
This is not that much trouble in the finished product because you are expected to move around with the mouse. No hotkeys for moving around, in fact all you can do with the keyboard is do a keypad mouse or switch between your inventory and regular screen. At least in the DOS version, meanwhile, Amiga players can move around, but not turn. It is a problem whenever the game throws enough enemies at you for this to be a problem. At least your weapons are all point and shoot or activation based. Killing them is simple enough until you need to reload.

A fairly typical inventory in the later sections of the game.

Actually interacting with your inventory is weird, because you get a bunch of slots of varying sizes, which all can carry everything from the smallest battery to a rocket launcher. The only slots specific to any items are equipped armor, four slots for ammo and a holster for a sidearm, which works a bit weirdly. Despite the advantages this sounds like it brings, the inventory system is just bad enough that while it works, you can hide items behind other items. It's not obvious where something is dropped and it's not obvious which slot something is in.

This is something that happens when you interact with items at all, the cursor does not have an obvious point when it's your hand, let alone when it's anything you pick up. The big problem is with the cards and floppy disks. The former are how you interact with most vending machines, which are very helpful to essential, such as ammo recharge stations. The latter are your only source of figuring out what happened beyond knowledge gleaned from the title. What, a game called Xenomorph not ripping off Aliens?

There's a distinct feeling that the game wasn't ever really played during it's development, which comes across in most of the problems. It's not this way because the developer really wanted it to be this way, but because that was the way that seemed most obvious and didn't check it afterwards. I get the feeling that the Dungeon Master-style design was not what was originally in mind as much as what they could do. This was built on the ashes of another game, which I suspect is why the game plays this way even though the game takes very little advantage of said style. In another time it would have been a plain FPS or a TPS.

It's not that it's without merit, the game has a more naturalistic design that works well enough in the early half. When it starts to become a series of mazes you can tell that they just sort of gave up on the game. It's just there to pad out the game at that point, not helped by most mazes having the only unkillable enemies in the game.

The way you'd get the most enjoyment out of the game, ironically, would be to go in as blind as possible and just never use the recharge machines. Limiting your ammo gives you reason to use the explosives and to consider what a fight will cost. It makes it so you can't just do what I did and treat the laser pistol as the only weapon in the game and actually puts some tension into the game. Even what I'm telling you is enough to make the game too easy, after all, if you know that the game has enough ammo that you'd have to mess up to lose even without the charging stations, your victory becomes quite assured.

Which I would kind of recommend as while it's not the best game from the era, it is a very interesting piece of experimentation. Despite the frustrations, I found myself wanting to see the end of the game, at least the end of the game's content. The process of fighting your way down to the lowest level to find the necessary pieces of equipment to get off the planet. Not, you know, scrounging through every computer to get enough components to blast off. A fitting end, considering that the story ends without a resolution, with every intriguing question left unanswered.

Weapons:
Normally I appreciate such a large arsenal, but I can't help but look at the number of weapons and the wide variety of explosives and wonder what the difference between some of this stuff is. It doesn't matter if using an explosive is like pulling out a piece of salt water taffy if one flavor kills the enemy just as well as the next. 4/10

Enemies:
As far as I can tell, divided into two variations, just with many different sprites, invulnerable slimes and things you can kill. It's not quite that bad, the end stage shows something else, but for 90% of the game, the difference is going to be visual. Or perhaps weapons advance so well that the improvement is moot. 3/10

Non-Enemies:
None, disappointingly so, as the manual and even the game goes to a length to say that some survivors are around, you just never see them. 0/10

Levels:
Naturalistic and mazey, though the former is only as well done as 1990 allows. Half are basically a series of rooms with the odd sideroom, the other half is more open-ended with the way down/up having multiple paths between. I think enemies were supposed to respawn, because it's really obvious how some levels are empty when there's nothing there. 4/10

Player Agency:
A functional mouse interface with a lot of roughness around the edges. Any cursor outside of the crosshair is going to be a guessing game as to where you actually click. 5/10

Interactivity:
You basically get to press some buttons. Oh, I think there were some locked doors, but it never came up for me. 1/10

Atmosphere:
The game does a good job of appealing to those interested in another game ripping off Aliens, albeit playing up the element of the movie of someone arriving late to the tragedy rather than the focus on combat. It's got enough intrigue and interesting stuff that will last until the final sections. 6/10

Graphics:
Xenomorph's appeal feels tied into a very specific point in time when hi-end EGA graphics were what you strove for, and making the most out of a grid was the best you could do. In these regards, it's great. That said, limited animation is a negative and while the game makes it's ugly-feeling design work, it's still ugly. 6/10

Story:
Despite being just told through floppy disks, I was intrigued by the efforts of the members of this space station trying to fight back the hordes of aliens they found and what they discovered about them. Sadly, because the game is clearly not fully done and there was no sequel, I'll never know the answers to it all. 3/10

Sound/Music:
Outside of a few sound effects, dead and total silence. They're fine for PC Speaker, but there's just so much nothing otherwise it doesn't matter. 1/10

That's a respectable 33.

An extremely easy point of comparison is with the Turbografx game Silent Debuggers, another Dungeon Master-style FPS heavily based of Aliens. They don't really share anything outside of that, but it's weird that there are two of them.

The English reviews all seem more or less glowing. Nothing truly top tier, but all 7 to 9 ratings, outside of one lower rating that I couldn't find the magazine of. There's a lot of people on Lemon Amiga talking about how it was scary back in the day, which I can see.

Another character, oh wait, I need to flip the disk around.

After finishing the DOS port, my curiosity got the better of me and I went to check the C64 port, and I can't help but think that most of the effect went there. Here character selection is implemented, with different stats for each one. You can tell they put a ton of effort into this version, likely some of the stuff that was mentioned in the manual but wasn't included.

I say probably because when I fired it up, it was just so full of disk swapping that playing it would have been an exercise in patience. There's a reason I played the DOS version over the Amiga version despite minor advantages in controls.

Finally, the game was built off the ashes of a Mindware game called Lasers and Labyrinths. Reading about it, I can tell that they worked on this game from what they had from that game, which sounds like it was going to be a lot more of a RPG than what we got. I wonder what it would play like, but knowing it's from the same people who gave us Tracker puts me in the mindset that it wouldn't be as good as this.