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| Shareware Explosion Rough Draft by Mischief Maker 07/29/2004, 9:05am PDT | ||||
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Submitted for review and grammatical analysis. I've pretty much rewritten most of it. Links and screenshots yet to be added. Any suggestions? No one seems to be making interesting commercial computer games anymore. So after being disappointed by the coulda-been-great-if-only-they-hadn’t experience of Freelancer, and having access to a fast connection for the summer, I dove into the murky depths of the shareware community in an attempt to find some pearls amidst the muck. Here’s what I found: Gish After years of screaming in rage at shitty jumping puzzles in modern games like Ninja Gaiden and (name any FPS) along comes Gish, which not only reminded me why I used to love platformers, but turns every idea I had about what makes video games bad on their head. Gish is a game that takes place in a dark sewer, your enemies are cartoony and twisted like those devil dolls they sell at in the Gothy McDark section of Spencers, and the main draw of the game is its realistic physics system and how you can use it to interact with the environment, which includes a liberal dose of crates. You play a ball of tar with yellow glowing eyes and vampire fangs named Gish. Gish behaves like a squishy blob with a moveable center of gravity. Besides movement, your main controls are jumping, becoming stiff and heavy, becoming mushy and slippery, and becoming sticky. Don’t bother with the keyboard, use a joystick or gamepad for this game. Playing Gish, I’ve realized the difference between a fun platformer and the many, many shitty ones is that your character must be fun to control in the first place for the player to enjoy it when you start throwing that character into convoluted obstacle courses. Gish is very fun to control, and by using his properties creatively you can do things like grab enemies and judo flip them into a wall of spikes, or pick up heavy objects and throw them around as weapons, or just hurl yourself at big enemies so hard that you SNAP THEIR FUCKIN’ NECKS! On the downside, unless you’re the type to search furiously for every hidden secret, the game’s pretty short. On the plus side, some of these secrets are warp zones that send gish into levels from old famous platformers like super Mario Bros and River Raid. World 3 grabs you by the scruff of your neck and rubs your face in the disadvantages of having such a realistic physics engine because it’s filled with instadeath spikes and lava that you can only avoid by performing certain acrobatic feats just right. Finally, there’s the horrible lingering question in the background of how exactly Gish, a 12-pound ball of tar, and his busty goth girlfriend actually do it. Price: $20 Demo Notes: It’s a good demo. You can get a feel for the physics engine and play around a bit, but other than the mine cart, there isn’t too much of the creative stuff in the demo. Bottom Line: All the fun of the 2D platformers of yore with enough new stuff to still come across as fresh. (Screenshot 1: Some games use clowns and spiders for edginess. Gish uses giant Catholic Priests in Gimp Masks. Eat your heart out, American McGee!) (Screenshot 2: Fuckin’ SNAP! Motherfucker!) Starscape Every review of this game you find on the internet calls it the all time #1 must-buy OMFG SPLORT indie game. Let me assure you that this is not true. A cool concept -Sinistar meets the RTS portion of Giants meets ship customizability- but it fails in execution. The main thing that shoots this game in the face is the shitty keyboard-only controls (or joystick, if you can get the damn thing to detect yours) and its choppy physics system. The other features just put a few more bullets into the game to make sure that it’s dead. BLAM! The fact that there’s a “right” way to build your custom fighter and any major deviations will result in you being unable to fight or running out of power after the first salvo. BLAM! The fact that there are 3 pastel colors of resource crystals you need so you can end up harvesting an entire sector but still have your research stalled because you’re short purple crystals. BLAM! The fact that your mothership is much better at fighting than you while you are much better at harvesting, turning the game into a tiring chore of blasting asteroids hoping that this time it’ll reluctantly drop a crystal of the color you need. And finally, BLAM! The fact that you can just skip the main game proper by shuttling between the DANGER ZONE where you can get way more resource crystals than in the asteroid fields by shooting at ugly exploding worm thingies and the safe zone where friendly robots heal your ships for free. On the plus side, the game uses some very pretty lighting effects and looks very professional. I could totally see this game getting released commercially back during the DOS age. Price: $25 Demo notes: They do a very good job of implying something way cool will happen in the game after your 20 minute time limit is up. Lies. The boss fights are just a case of you hitting the missile key as fast as you can. The plot doesn’t get any better either. The mysterious bad guys can best be described as “Exactly like the borg, but less interesting and more prone to fits of malevolent cackling.” Bottom Line: Save your money for something better (Screenshot 1: Woah! My Mothership kicks ass! I guess that means I’ll just go gather some more crystals…) (Screenshot 2: Here’s the hot engineering chick who gets your hopes up that you’ll be able to build a custom spaceship to your own specifications before pulling the rug out and letting you know there’s only one right way to build it. Bitch.) Flatspace Surprisingly good. A 2D elite in a randomly generated universe. Buy any ship, take missions at space stations, go do what you want. Be anything from a grizzled cop on the edge to a jolly swarthy space pirate. Controls are mouse-based and refreshingly smooth. Combat is fun, missiles must be avoided by dropping flares and jinking, you need to lead your shots. There’s no annoying plot to speak of, just you and your quest to find the 4 (very expensive) components of an alien galactic hyperdrive scattered across the galaxy. The thing that makes this game cooler than Freelancer or Elite is the fact that every ship in the universe is individually tracked and goes about its own business. This means no randomly generated encounters aimed solely at you to provide “atmosphere.” You’ll run across crowded clusterfucks of miners digging into a rich asteroid field, cops calling for backup and swarming pirates, and raiders attacking some other poor schmuck who, if you’re careful, won’t notice you once they’re done with him. It also means that the universe doesn’t “level up” with you, avoiding that Diablo level treadmill feel that Freelancer had going for it. Your escalating sense of power in this game comes from the fact that you really are getting more powerful compared to everyone else. Finally, there is no perfect uber-ship. You can put together one excellent for specializing in a specific job, but every ship and piece of equipment has its advantages and disadvantages and even a slight change will result in a very noticeable change in the handling of your ship. The Dagger racing ship may only have room for a dinky cannon and the slightest hit will turn it into a little poof of vapor, but it can fly circles around a hulking Battle Station and can make a good living as a daredevil bounty hunter. On the downside, the graphics are shiny basic polygons with minimal light effects and texturing. The ship and station menus are very ghetto. The targeting button targets the closest ship AND ONLY the closest ship, making it hard to find specific ships in a crowd (or in an asteroid field.) The noncombat AI still needs a little work as ships WILL NOT move to avoid obstacles/asteroids/you making for a real “watch it, asshole!” rush hour experience in crowded systems. There’s also a bug that can make space stations and their fighters accidentally start shooting at themselves. Finally, the game’s universe is a true libertarian utopia where nothing’s illegal to trade, cops are paid on pure commission, and you never see massive space fleets engaging in warfare, which makes for a pretty mellow experience punctuated by sudden senseless bursts of violence. If you need more of an epic conflict than protecting your ass from Jean-Paul Kronkite who wants to collect on your $500 dead bounty, try Escape Velocity. Demo notes: Since you’re only limited to weapon upgrades, the cop, the trader, and the scavenger are the only really playable starting classes as you need a (better) radar to track down criminals over the large distances in each sector. Price: $21 Bottom line: Better than Elite, more engrossing than Freelancer, kicks the ass of nethack, too. Alien Shooter I quote from the review at Game Tunnel, apparently the biggest indie game review site on the net, “If the purpose of a review is to help you figure out which games you should buy, then we can end this review right away. GO NOW! BUY THIS GAME!“ Let that prove as a lesson to us all never to trust reviews from sites or magazines that sell advertising space. Because my only purposes for writing this review are boredom and a persistent need for attention, I can sum up this review right away. STOP! TRY THE DEMO IF YOU MUST, BUT DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THIS GAME! Alien Shooter is Serious Sam from an isometric perspective with the “Move with the keyboard, aim with the mouse” controls of Crimsonlands. The gametunnel review says some bullshit about every level being half tension and foreboding and half all out action. Not really. A couple levels start out with the power out until you hit the switch that turns the lights and doors back on, but for the most part the game is just you verses a solid smear of identical charging monsters. You have a big arsenal of weapons to take the monsters out, but poor balancing just results in each successive upgrade rendering the previous weapons obsolete. One level the minigun is king. Next level the aliens are packing armor so the rocket launcher is king. Next level the freeze gun is king. Trying to use old weapons against the stronger enemies will just result in you getting your ass kicked, and you don’t ever have to worry about ammo for the new ones because enemies drop it en masse as you mow them down. But the biggest reason to avoid the game is because it’s short. Really fucking short. I mean 5 hours, if you’re taking your time and looking for the hidden secrets, short. You get 10 small levels. Level 1 is just you walking through a chain-link fence into the base unmolested. Once you beat the game, you see a tiny alien escaping the base, which is the game’s way of saying “way to fuck up, all your efforts have been in vain!” and a promise of additional levels from the game’s website. Well buckle your seatbelts, cowboys, because the first pack of 5 brand-spanking new levels has come out for the paltry sum of $12.50! These levels are more expensive than the main game’s levels because they have a deeper plot, which is exactly what someone playing a game called “Alien Shooter” is hungry for. On the plus side, I haven’t seen environments get this fucked up since Crusader and it’s ridiculous the amount of gore caked across the floor after you open up on a stampede of aliens with the minigun. But remember you’re paying at least $4 an hour for that minigun blast. Price: $20+ (Worth $5) Demo Notes: Gametunnel says the demo doesn’t really do the full game justice. No, actually it does. Other than not getting to use a turret the full 2 times you do in the full game, the demo gives you a taste of everything from the game proper. Bottom Line: A full priced game that’s not even as long as the Duke Nukem 3D demo. (Screenshot: Ooh. The Janitor’s gonna be pissed.) Starships Unlimited v.3 STUN3 is a 4X/Tactical Naval combat game made by one dude that succeeds everywhere Master of Orion 3 and Starfleet Command failed. It de-emphasizes the boring parts of Empire Management by actually de-emphasizing them instead of having a dumb-ass AI make all the decisions for you. It bring all the complexities of Starfleet Command’s “Stately capital ship combat” without making you juggle them all simultaneously in a mad fight against the interface to keep your head above water. It makes you feel like you really are the Emperor of Space busy sending your Starships on voyages to explore the galaxy and blow up your enemies instead of the Auditor of Space nitpicking over the happiness level of the farmers on planet Bumfuck 3 of the Yawn system. STUN 3 is a 4X game with the emphasis front and center on building and customizing a state-of-the-art Starfleet to explore and conquer the galaxy. The rest of the usual 4X junk is present, but de-emphasized to the point that most can be safely left in the AI’s hands. Colonies are expensive and rare, swaths of the galaxy are captured by exploring outlying systems and adding them to the web of freighter routes that ferry money back to your colonies. Your empire’s economy is geared almost entirely towards paying for ship components, and paying for the crew’s salaries. The only thing that differentiates one species from another is the fact that weapons come in “families” (lasers, missiles, guns, death rays, etc.) and you specialize in the first family you research, with each additional family incurring a research penalty. So in one particular game, the special thing about the Greys is that their ships carry Waves and sometimes Torpedos while the Robots specialize in Bolt cannons, while the Humans use lasers and fighter craft. In fact, you could say the game is less about your empire of Tentacle Beasts and their conquest of the galaxy and more about the continuing voyages of your ships, with the political maneuvering and plotting merely the reason behind their missions. These are Starships of the “Star Trek” variety: big, versatile, constantly undergoing refits and upgrades, and taking care of business by themselves. They gain experience, uncover artifacts from a lost Alien civilization, chase off pirates, battle against enemy incursions, and rain death on the homeworlds of your enemies. Depending on the components you put into them and the crew you assign, you can create ships like a scientist-crewed explorer scout, a speedy corvette that specializes in lighting raids on enemy freighter routes and interception of enemy attacks, a destroyer that specializes in using marines to capture enemy ships, or an overall badass cruiser for your flagship. Ship-to-ship combat is where the game really shines. (Note: the game defaults to having the computer fight the battles. Change this setting immediately or you’re missing out on 2/3 of the fun.) Every round you pick a maneuver, then your ship rotates independently of this motion to get the enemy ship into its firing arc (represented by a wireframe wedge.) Depending on what you’ve installed in your ship, you can do extra things like launch fighters, or send an assault pod full of marines to penetrate their hull when their shields are down, or cloak. If you’re in a desperate bind, you can shunt energy from your engines or shields to your lasers to get an extra shot at the cost of damaging them. Or you can ignore all that fancy crap and just build a battlecruiser with 7 plasma bolt cannons that can cripple a ship in a single salvo. As ship components get damaged, they wink offline at random inopportune intervals, avoiding that old annoyance of ships fighting at full strength until they croak. Before battles, there’s a real min/maxing strategy game of what exactly to put on your ship. If you only have lasers and your enemy is packing anti-laser shields, you’re fucked. Every new technology age adds an extra level of pro/con complexity. Best of all, if you make the right tech choices and perform the best tactical maneuvers, you don’t just get some random victory in limbo, you’ve just expanded your empire or crippled your enemy’s infrastructure or taken down his flagship! There’re lots of other little things to love about the game. STUN 3 runs in real time that pauses every time you need to make an order, being the one game I’ve played that succeeds at mixing the brisk pace of RTSs with the relaxed deliberation of Turn Based games. Your enemies don’t undergo violent bipolar shifts in their relations with you. The enemy AI doesn’t cheat and is fantastically competent at using all the options available to it. If you and an ally seem to be getting too cozy (if relations between two races reach mutual 100% trust they can form a federation and merge into a single faction with all their resources intact) they’ll have their spies incite unrest in your populace. It’s also very good at maneuvering outside your firing arcs in combat, so putting some of your starships under AI control is no longer the death sentence it used to be in previous versions. If, like me, you were a fan of STUN v.2 but was disappointed by Divided Galaxies (The version that got released in stores,) rest assured STUN3 is the upgrade we were waiting for, taking all the good stuff from previous versions and chucking most of the bad. And speaking of bad, this game definitely has its downsides. The graphics and sound are ghetto with a capital ghe. It’s no fun getting into a fight with a ship armed with standoffs (long range cruise missiles,) because the only viable strategy is to keep your distance and shoot down the standoffs as they come until the enemy is out of ammo, then swooping in and trying to kick his ass before he can run away. But the biggest minus to the game is its weird interface. It’s not that hard to use once you get a hang of it and learn some essential keyboard hotkeys, but the curve for learning to use the thing is fucking steep. An HTML User’s Guide is included with the game and you will need to use it. Demo Issues: I haven’t played v.3’s demo, but some of the previous demos were so severely nerfed that the game ended before you were finished exploring the galaxy and starting to butt heads with the enemy. If that’s still the case, take my word for it that the mini-battles against the biohazards, violent storms, and leftover sentry bots of unexplored worlds at the beginning of the game is a pale shadow of the real ship to ship combat that’s coming up. Price: $25 Bottom Line: Best Star Trek game since “Starflight.” (Screenshot 1: Copyright infringement? What copyright infringement?) (Screenshot 2: This is a HUGE battle for STUN3) |
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Shareware Explosion Rough Draft by 07/29/2004, 9:05am PDT  Re: Shareware Explosion Rough Draft by 07/29/2004, 10:44am PDT Re: Shareware Explosion Rough Draft by 07/29/2004, 10:59pm PDT Re: Shareware Explosion Rough Draft by 08/01/2004, 10:52am PDT Re: Shareware Explosion Rough Draft by 08/01/2004, 12:09pm PDT |
