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| Gemini Rue by Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS) 06/10/2012, 8:37pm PDT | ||||
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| Gemini Rue is one of the games in the Bundle in a Box in which you get an incredible amount of material where you choose the price starting either at the ridiculously low price of 99c to anything you want to pay, and if you offer something like more than $4.15 you get the complete collection. Since my (assumed) name is "Tansin Arogan Darcos" I decided to pay $6.66. This was the game that convinced me to buy the set. I'll look at some of the other games in the set later on.
I got stuck a couple of spots playing the game and found a walkthrough. All I use a walkthrough for is that really quick hint when I get stuck somewhere. Like on the top of the stairs in the building, I figured out to lock the door so the bad guys can't shoot me, but I couldn't figure out how to get out. Then I find a walkthrough and it says, get the guy you're with to push on the door, then you kick it at the same time. Little things like that where I just need that slight hint. So the gameplay isn't bad. The idea that you have two separate characters you're running and you can switch between the guy in the mental hospital and the guy stuck trying to get the location of his brother from the local Yakuza (Boryokudan) confused me a little and I suspect the game isn't saying so but the incidents on the street are the guy in the hospital dreaming them, sort of like Avery Brooks in Deep Space Nine trying to convince the orderlies in the mental hospital that he's actually a 25th Century Starbase Commander. Technically the Boryokudan aren't Yakuza since the story takes place on another planet but I'm sure you get what I mean. But Jesus, I think they could really have put some effort into making the graphics worse. The game's graphics are cheesy even compared to 1980s CGA animation. I have probably seen games written in Basic using sprite animation that had better production values than this game. Maybe they're trying to say something, but the animation is so crude as to be ridiculous. Well, that wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact sometimes the graphics fails, and you get "crock animation" in which parts of the screen become snow - literally snow - like you got when you tuned an analog TV set to a non-existent broadcast channel. Then if a character crossed over the area you could see the XOR effect in which their sprite replaces the snow where they're standing or walking past, then the snow returns. This snow effect looks terrible, and can't be intentional; it's a big, fat bug destroying the effect of the game. The original price of this game alone is supposed to be something like $15 but if anyone saw how bad the graphics are and these sort of careless or thoughtless bugs I doubt they'd get that many people wanting to try it. The game supposedly has a lot of hand-drawn scenes, and I suppose that's true; it reminds me of someone using crayon on a bathroom wall; it's not even as good as chalk on the sidewalk. I mean, the game's content is good, but the way they've done the graphics is so crummy, and doing it that poorly probably requires excessive effort to make it look bad, vs. standard graphics systems now in existence that I find the clearly low-level graphic mode detracts from the game. I'm running it from Valve's Steam content manager as opposed to using the original downloadable version. I don't know if that would have made a difference. |
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