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Saint Freak posted:Mechanically is really where I think this boss really shines and exemplifies what I enjoy about the overall design of Sekiro. Sure he has a lot of moves. Sure the moves come out fast, and flashy, and cover huge areas of space. But by this point in the game you should be able to look at his moveset and realize something. Ashina Cross, Perilous Thrust, Lightning Reversal, Ichimonji Double, Perilous Sweep, Ranged Projectile, Chasing Slash. These are all moves you have seen before. Tenchu and Wrath of Heaven were some of my fave psx/2 era games and I have a deep love for the Souls series. So naturally, I've been thinking about a Sekiro post for a long time. My personal favorite part of Sekiro was the Tenchu zone, full of blue enemies that can one-shot you with a channeled ability so you have to sneak around and backstab them all. Alas, Elden Ring came out a week after I beat ISS and the post never materialized. Elden Ring is amazing, just absolutely packed with content, but Sekiro is easily the best action game I've ever played. This post does a very good job of describing what makes it so great. Souls games have always had good bosses, but never good jumping. And they've always had to design the bosses around the versatility they allow in player builds. Sekiro easily incorporates good jumping into the combat and the bosses are perfectly tuned for vicious, high-speed sword fights. I want to expand on one more thing, the final boss intro FMV is epic. Video is a full fight, but the link starts at the end of phase 1 and the start of the FMV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlvuV8lUfeA&t=121s Spoilers about what the hell is going on: Genichiro, the guy who gets stabbed, is the main antagonist throughout the game, he's the one who takes your arm, and the grandson of Issin. Issin was an ultra badass back in the day and taught Genichiro well, but is old as gently caress when the game starts and dead by the end. Genichiro is trying to save his clan and has acquired a dark power to do so, the black mortal blade he wields. There are various hints that he can use it to sacrifice himself and get a wish. He wishes for his grandfather to come back to life at his peak and gently caress you up.
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Apr 6, 2022 17:41
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I absolutely loved Elden Ring and love that they made it... but oh God I hope we haven't seen the last of Sekiro. It is a fantastic game, has fantastic combat, looks fantastic, and all-in-all it's... well, fantastic!
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Apr 7, 2022 06:04
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I believe their next game is a new armored core, so no more souls likes.
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Apr 7, 2022 06:11
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Wittgen posted:I believe their next game is a new armored core, so no more souls likes. Bearer of the Mech Seek larger, more powerful cores Seek the Nine Breaker, that is the only way Lest this land swallow you whole
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Apr 7, 2022 13:04
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Saint Freak posted:Bearer of the Mech I really don't care for the ludicrous concept of mechs, but I'd BearSeekSeekLest the poo poo out of this one nonetheless.
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Apr 7, 2022 13:17
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You've a kind radar, don't let them take that from you
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Apr 7, 2022 13:43
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Jerusalem posted:Marathon by haveblue Minor edit- my game was Marathon Infinity, also it was 3rd in the series
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Apr 7, 2022 15:09
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Please do not credit me for a post I never made.  Mine is not an effort post it is praise of a good one and I keep thinking about editing to fully quote it for the new page.
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Apr 7, 2022 17:23
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Jerusalem posted:Updating the list for the OP: Done! Hopefully Harrow doesn't mind.
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Apr 7, 2022 19:19
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I'm not really interested in Armor Core, but I am interested in games that FROM make in general so.... maybe?Mega64 posted:Done! Hopefully Harrow doesn't mind. Thanks, although I have of course now gone ahead and edited my post to adjust for what haveblue and Harold Fjord said 
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Apr 7, 2022 23:07
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Easy fix, updated again.
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Apr 8, 2022 00:06
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My favorite game of all time is Suikoden 2, but since that's already gotten a very good write-up, I wanted to effort post about two weird games I stumbled upon by chance as a kid that have stuck with me. When I was an elementary schooler with a Nintendo Entertainment System, I wasn't particularly tapped in to what games were receiving good reviews or were in high demand--I just wanted whatever I was allowed to have. One year for Christmas, my mom gave me what was pretty obviously a used Blockbuster Video copy of something called Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom, a cartridge with a bright pink label adorned with clay sculptures of little vegetable people. I have no idea what possessed her to buy this particular game, but maybe she thought it was VeggieTales-adjacent or something along those lines. Whatever the reason, it didn't take long for the story to draw me in, since at that point I wasn't really familiar with games with any sort of overt plot that existed outside the manual.  The overarching plot is pretty simple, in a world populated by fruit and vegetable-headed people, Minister Pumpkin has staged a coup using his army of Farmies (inexplicably just regular humans), in which he killed King Broccoli and abducted the king's daughter, Princess Tomato. Your job, as Sir Cucumber, is to rescue the princess. The game drops you off on a road in the outskirts of the kingdom and you navigate the world one screen at a time using a variety of buttons surrounding the screen, including MOVE, CHECK, LOOK, TALK, ITEM, HIT and FIGHT. You rescue a persimmon boy named Percy and together you adventure through the various locales of the kingdom, which are generally subdivided into stages, although on a few occasions you do backtrack to earlier areas of the game. It's not particularly action packed, but it is astoundingly cute, funny and above all weird. In several circumstances, you would need to use seemingly useless actions like HIT or PRAISE to progress.  The only instances of combat in the game are accomplished through a variant of Rock Paper Scissors where after beating your opponent, their portrait starts rapidly spinning and you need to point in the direction they're facing at the right time to actually score a hit. In one instance you have to traverse a forest maze to do Rock Paper Scissors battle with a giant cannibalistic salad monster named Saladron.  For a NES game (which itself was a port of a PC88 game) the visuals do a good job of building a wacky world of vegetable people, and while there isn't a ton of music, generally only one track per stage, what is there still occasionally pops into my head to this day. When I was a kid I didn't know a single other person who knew anything about Princess Tomato, much less someone who actually played it, so while I couldn't really articulate to anyone why I liked it so much back then, now I realize that it probably laid the groundwork for what has been a lifelong love of RPGs and other story-forward games. I wish I could provide a legal way to play this game, but to my knowledge it hasn't received a re-release on any modern platform or virtual console.  The second game, Chiki Chiki Boys aka Mega Twins, was an arcade game released in 1990 for Capcom's CP System hardware, but I didn't even know about that version until I was an adult. As a kid, I only had access to the Sega Genesis port, which among other things removed the ability to play the game with two players. The game stars the titular Boys, two sword-wielding brother-princes dressed in blue and red, that set out to acquire a mcguffin prophesied to save their kingdom. You are initially presented with three levels: a forest boasting standard platforming gameplay, an underwater level where you don a snorkel and can swim up and down, and a level in the sky where you spend most of the time floating.  The level select mechanic is interesting insofar as while I probably complete the levels in the same order 90% of the time, they each present enough differences that gameplay doesn't ever feel stale. The music in this game is fantastic, and meshes well with the big, colorful sprites and level design. Combat is accomplished through use of a sword which can be upgraded by finding power ups hidden in the levels, and a limited magic system that, while pretty one-note, is at least fun to see in action. All the bosses are charmingly strange and include oddities such as a vampire flasher, a bean general and an evil clown.  This game is easier to recommend, because the superior arcade version got a re-release last year as part of the Capcom Arcade Stadium. If you play on Steam, you can get just this game for $2 and it's absolutely worth that much to at least give it a spin.
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Apr 9, 2022 06:27
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AuroMarshmallow posted:Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom I didn't play this when I was a kid, but maybe 10 years ago I used to stream a little to my friends where I would pull up a randomizer and just pick random NES roms to play and look at it. One of the ones we pulled was this game and honestly it was a complete hoot. Very strange and weird, I remember a bunch of us breaking into laughter at Percy's introduction. He's just a weird baby vegetable that says simply, "I'm Percy!". There are a few NES games that work with this sort of menu/adventure game style. Deja Vu, Uninvited to name a couple. I never played them when I was younger but they're all decently surprising little NES titles
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Apr 9, 2022 16:42
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gently caress I remember Princess Tomato. My dad was really big into adventure games when I was a little kid so I had like every single one that came out for the NES and PC. Shadowgate was probably my favorite for the NES.
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May 4, 2022 20:14
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Princess Tomato loving owned.
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May 4, 2022 20:29
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exquisite tea posted:Warning: Hella spoilers ahead. From a while back, but I really enjoyed reading this. It helped me understand why it resonated so much with me, also an adult man, when I played it several years ago. Also, it gave me the idea to check in on the LiS subreddit. Despite two more recent games being out, almost all the posts are Max and Chloe stuff. Makes me think that a good deal of what made the first game so engaging was done by accident lol
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May 12, 2022 04:37
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I keep loling that Square-Enix was stupid enough to sell Eidos. Like Christ that was one of the very few acquisitions that was actually good for both parties.
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May 12, 2022 04:55
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And they did it to free up money for NFTs just as the market started to tank in earnest.
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May 12, 2022 09:42
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Maxwell Lord posted:And they did it to free up money for NFTs just as the market started to tank in earnest. It’s incredible just as Square-Enix was in reach of cementing the return of their glory days with FFXIV expansions, HD 2D Team, TWEWY Neo, Nier, and the the upcoming FFXVI FINALLY getting the series back on track in almost (or over depending on your feelings on XII) two decades they blow it up by chasing the digital tulip market. Edit - Oh yeah and Eidos was producing multi-million selling hit after hit. Tomb Raider is more popular now than when Laura was a 90s cultural icon. This must mean it’s the perfect time to sell the IP! Maybe they thought of game publishers/studios like the speculative market too? Like they buy the studios and IPs low and then sell them high? punk rebel ecks fucked around with this message at 16:33 on May 12, 2022 |
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May 12, 2022 16:28
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don't worry one day they'll appoint one of their huge backlog of wormlike legacy hires to head up FFXIV and the game will immediately collapse
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May 16, 2022 22:11
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punk rebel ecks posted:It’s incredible just as Square-Enix was in reach of cementing the return of their glory days with FFXIV expansions, HD 2D Team, TWEWY Neo, Nier, and the the upcoming FFXVI FINALLY getting the series back on track in almost (or over depending on your feelings on XII) two decades they blow it up by chasing the digital tulip market. Square Enix as a publisher has burned through a lot of my good will between NFT rumblings, unattractive game models like with Babylon's Fall and Chocobo Racing, and sub-par PC ports like Stranger of Paradise, Final Fantasy VII Remake, and Chrono Cross. See also my post ITT. Otoh Dragon Quest Builders II was loving perfect and Balan Wonderworld was one of the most entertaining-by-osmosis games ever. The move is probably good for IP like Legacy of Kain.
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May 17, 2022 15:02
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Impermanent posted:don't worry one day they'll appoint one of their huge backlog of wormlike legacy hires to head up FFXIV and the game will immediately collapse Yeah as much as I love FF14 its probably on borrowed time, yoshi-p can't keep the vultures at bay forever
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May 23, 2022 15:54
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FF14 is making the money that funds all squenix's disastrous failures so he kinda just can
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May 29, 2022 19:35
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He’s also on the SE board of directors and has P&L for a business unit. He’s got way more juice than a normal producer.
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May 30, 2022 08:36
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At the remove of almost 40 years, it's difficult to describe how gripping a game Fifth Eskadra was. It was a grognardy naval war game about NATO vs Soviets in the Med, put out by Simulations Canada. There were no graphics, but the five-and-a-quarter floppy disk came with a paper map and cardboard counters to keep track of your units and enemy contacts. You gave your orders for the (8-hour) turn, optionally waited for your opponent to do the same if you were playing hotseat head-to-head instead of against the machine, hit the button and waited for reports to roll in. It was just little dots being drawn across the screen in gradually descending lines, but the tension mounted as you waited for the Apple IIe's lovely piezo speaker to do a remarkably lifelike impression of a teletype printer to spit out something like ::TORPEDOES INCOMING TF1:: It was 1984, so not all the nomenclature had fully settled into what we think of nowadays (the Slava-class is still referred to by its provisional code name of "Krasina" for example) One of my favorite little quirks was that every ship captain had two stats: Initiative and Reliability. Initiative, as in how likely it would engage without orders, and Reliability, how often it would ignore the orders you gave it. NATO sub commanders tended to have a lot of the first one, and less of the second, and could thus disappear for turns at a time while you wondered if they'd been sunk or not and then pop up halfway across the map from where you'd ordered them to. The scenario started off in peacetime ("Rising Tensions" in the game's wording) and could be escalated by request from either player, or sometimes nothing at all. Conventional Warfare, then Tactical Nuclear Warfare, then Operational Nuclear Warfare (that's the same thing as Tacnukes, but with the random chance of big surface targets being deleted by ICBMs), and finally Global Nuclear War, which loses the game for everybody. I don't actually have to try to describe it, because as it turns out you can play it online now! https://archive.org/details/a2woz_Fifth_Eskadra_1984_Simulations_Canada
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Jun 7, 2022 22:37
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This took way longer than it should have but I finally finished my video on AquaNox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlYK84fCVoY It's a real weird aquatic space sim kind of game with a funky setting, some wild characters and some 'unique' voice acting, which you can sample in the video.
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Jun 9, 2022 05:01
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My love for Romancing SaGa has apparently been vindicated, since Square has announced a remaster! 
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Jun 9, 2022 20:17
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Sardonik posted:This took way longer than it should have but I finally finished my video on AquaNox: I remember getting this one free with a retail Nvidia graphics card back in the day, with the other pack-in game being Sacrifice. While Sacrifice was obviously the better game, I still remember playing AquaNox through. The strange underwater world and the bizarre characters were interesting enough, but I think AquaNox really pushed my new sick 3D accelerator to the limit.
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Jun 10, 2022 20:23
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Aquanox being right next to Anachranox on my GOG shelf has caused much confusion over the years. EDIT - And the kewl 2001 fonts in the art don't help much.
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Jun 10, 2022 23:04
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 MORDHAU IS MY FAVORITE GAME. The gameplay? Smooth The armor/weapon design? Badass as hell. (Very sick.) The community? Full of unabashed schizophrenics, socially inept RPers, and animation reading rain-men. It's perfect. Most of the games I've seen posted are story based, and for good reason. It's hard to justify putting an exclusively PvP title on a list with greats like New Vegas and Doom if only because there is no set-in-stone story to return to after a break and honestly you only get back what you're willing to put into it. With a game title like this everyone's experiences are vastly different. I'm hoping to highlight the nuances of those experiences as well give a decent representation of the game in this post. While much of Mordhau's perceived depth is derived from systems that were originally implemented in Chivalry, quite a few innovations by Mordhau's dev team (Triternion) knocked the game's mechanics and polish out of the park. The depth of the game to a new player seems, from experience, absolutely monumental. With the laughably short tutorial lacking details on most important game mechanics and most people in public servers more willing to call you pejoratives than help; you're left to fend for yourself. It's a sink or swim experience where the water you're treading is (hopefully) your opponents tears. During your rise up the Mordhau skill bell-curve you're forced to pick up tricks you see others do to augment your slowly growing skills. The lack of a cut and dry catch all tutorial for advancing in the game means experimentation is an absolute MUST. The experimentation, skill dissemination through fighting different players, and the fact your skills using most game mechanics are self taught means no two players are the same. Playstyles learned over the course of hundreds, even thousands, of hours contribute to forming this unique fingerprint to such a fine point that most people can tell who you are despite being set to offline or on an alternate account.  All of that development through all of those hours might eventually amalgamate into a great dueler or great frontlines player (frontline is a 32v32 public server objective game mode). But the real depth starts to set in when you take 5 people with their own unique playstyles and experiences who have all, in their own right, mastered their own way of approaching the game and pit them against another 5 who've essentially done the same in a no-respawn deathmatch. This game mode is called Skirmish or 'SKM' and it, played across multiple rounds, is the primary game mode used for competitive Mordhau. Since it's release, players from all kinds of gaming backgrounds try to relate their past game experiences to Mordhau specifically in an effort to glean an upper hand in SKM. Some teams have shot callers, some practice specific plays or maneuvers, and some let Jesus take the wheel. There are hundreds of video recordings of these matches on obscure YouTube channels and not a single one plays out the same. Despite having a couple thousand hours in this game I feel underqualified to speak at length on the actual game mechanics themselves. Suffice it to say the gameplay is a major draw to not only me but to many of the other players who frequent it. So much so that it is made fun of by a large part of the competitive scene via esoteric tutorial pictures/videos deliberately made to mean absolutely nothing.      Following in suit with the supremely helpful guides above; there is a comprehensive list of terms for tech/mechanics that don't exist. This list is used by select competitive match casters for the sake of comic relief and twitch viewer-count retention during long heated matches: -Gargslash -Glitch Slip -Kick Dupe -Wind Hitting -Walk Mogging -The Laerngurtus Slice™ -Hit Bash -Jitterslash -Diaper Swing -Blanket Chamber -Pan Overhead Omnistabs -Spitmorph -Shitmorph -Slobbermorph -"Erotic Mouse Movement" -Badass Shadow Renegade Slash -The Fighter Hit And that's just to name a few! The takeaway here, if there's any takeaway at all, is you'll know what your zoomer nephew means when he starts screaming "windup shuffle jousterdash into 180 darkslide fraxdrag" while cutting the Thanksgiving turkey. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIh5JYIVxdA There's quite a variety when it comes to players just like you'd see in just about any other title. You only really start to see the real difference in player base when you start talking to people who are good at the video game.  Something about this game warps the soul. Maybe it's thousands of hours of frustration disguised as a hobby where your only dopamine release comes from doing to others what made you baby rage the night before. Maybe it's Maybelline. Who knows?
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Jun 12, 2022 06:38
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Jun 12, 2022 08:56
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I understand all of that post perfectly and have no questions.
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Jun 12, 2022 14:34
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Eric the Mauve posted:I understand all of that post perfectly and have no questions. Same. I used to play DotA after all
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Jun 12, 2022 14:50
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Thx for reaffirming my decision to give up video games
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Jun 12, 2022 15:55
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steinrokkan posted:Thx for reaffirming my decision to give up video games  purpose through service
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Jun 12, 2022 19:15
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goethe.cx posted:From a while back, but I really enjoyed reading this. It helped me understand why it resonated so much with me, also an adult man, when I played it several years ago. I've liked each Life is Strange game in its own way, but there's something so completely brilliant about giving an indecisive teenage girl the ability to rewind time that you can really only get away with it once. It's hard to surprise people with that same level of emotional intensity once a set of expectations has been made.
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Jun 14, 2022 13:38
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exquisite tea posted:I've liked each Life is Strange game in its own way, but there's something so completely brilliant about giving an indecisive teenage girl the ability to rewind time that you can really only get away with it once. It's hard to surprise people with that same level of emotional intensity once a set of expectations has been made. I've skimmed through your fantastic review of the game; I blame my ADHD. But in general the feeling I was left with after reading your essay was Life is Strange 1 was incredibly popular because it managed to capture the feeling of the Slice of Life anime genre into a video game. Yeah, superpowers and choices are cool, but sitting watching the sunset with a friend is a beautiful emotion and it is somehow an untapped genre in video gaming. In most games you need to DO RETRY WIN ACHIEVE COMPLETE, LiS was great because it made the silent moments between the excitement peaks very cozy, personable and magic. I haven't played it in years, I forgot most of the story beats, but I vividly remember the peaceful panning shots with their great soundtrack the most. Seen under that lens, the games that come closest to the slice of life ideal of Life Is Strange 1 are A Short Hike (minus the friendship moments) and Night In The Woods (loved it).
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Jun 14, 2022 14:31
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It's funny you mention that because not too long ago I played Blue Reflection: Second Light, which is very much a slice-of-life anime RPG, and got many of the same vibes as Life is Strange. I think "liminal space" has become kind of a buzzword lately but these games really manage to evoke both the emotional intensity and languid ambiguity of that threshold between adolescence and adulthood.
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Jun 14, 2022 18:55
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Traffic Department 2197 So, Traffic Department is a fairly generic game. It’s a top-down shooter with a sci-fi theme, and also the first game I ever played for the story. The game was programmed by P-Squared Productions, the brothers Michael and John Pallet-Plowright. It’s the only game they put out. It was distributed by Safari Software, a B-tier publisher with some ties to Epic MegaGames. They were eventually bought out by Epic entirely. Gameplay wise, it’s very generic. You control a land speeder kind of vehicle. They have various stats, but it rarely seems to make a noticeable difference in gameplay beyond the speed. It has all the usual issues associated with a top down vehicle shooter like this, mostly involving a very limited field of view which generally leaves you getting fired at by vehicles that aren"t even visible to you yet. You have a few tools, such as a rudimentary radar, that do help somewhat, but in general you end up relying on the fact that the game has pretty poo poo AI, with your enemies often ending up flying circles around buildings, to cover for that. Controls are… alright, I guess, with the exception of the baffling decision to require a separate button to toggle between default lasers and your limited payload of missiles. The missions are fairly generic too. About 75% of it involves just killing enemies until you"re told to come home. There’s the occasional escort mission thrown in, which generally sucks because the vehicles you are escorting are made from paper-maché and dreams and will come apart under the slightest amount of friendly fire. Every episode also has one or two helicopter missions and a simple “fly from point A to point B” mission in the mix. A few missions take place at night, but the only noticeable difference is that you press a button to activate “night vision” that just casts a red filter over everything. But like I said, the main draw of the game is the story. It’s mostly presented through simple portrait cutscenes before and after the missions, with an occasional bit of dialogue done via transmissions during the missions themselves. You play Martha Velasquez, a lieutenant in the titular Traffic Department that’s the city’s last line of defence against an alien invasion. The game is a strung together series of Good Cop with a Bad Attitude clichés. Literally everyone she meets gets insulted repeatedly, generally with a few death threats peppered in. The story suggests that this is tolerated because she watched her father, who was also a TD officer, get killed when she was a child. The fact that this emotional trauma clearly made her a deranged lunatic who lashes out at anyone who looks at her twice and who clearly can"t be trusted with the kind of weaponized hovercrafts the Traffic Department deploys is kind of brushed aside. The lieutenant’s commander serves as a father figure and she is the only one she shows any kind of grudging respect for, but about halfway through the first episode he gets captured and executed on live television by the alien invaders, which results in her going completely off the rails. So the story is heavily clichéd, but it’s still, in a way, very compelling, especially for an action game from the mid-nineties. However, as a child I was never able to get past mission seventeen of the shareware episode, where you have to defend your base against swarms of kamikaze attackers. A few years ago I noticed that the game was now available as freeware, and decided to pick it up again. I managed to get past the mission, and defeat the final boss. It should be noted that the first episode, in the tradition of shareware games like Quake, is the only one that has an actual final boss battle. After you return from the nineteenth mission however, your helicopter blows up on the landing pad. At the start of the twentieth mission it turns out that you survived, with most of your body being replaced with cybernetics. Although your helicopter had exploded due to sabotage there’s no time to investigate, as Robo-Velasquez needs to go out there to destroy the enemy super-ship in the aforementioned only boss battle the game has. in the final cutscene after that mission Velasquez gets attacked by an unknown assailant who promises to “finish the job.” The final words are “Continued in Episode 2.” Given the fact that Lieutenant Velasquez’ standard response to being wished a good morning was to tell the other party to go stick their dick in a power outlet, pretty much every character who survived to the end of the first episode had a reasonable motive to want her dead. So we go into the part of the game that people were actually expected to pay for with a big mystery… which gets resolved twenty seconds into the cutscene introducing the first mission. Velasquez goes “It was this guy,” her commander says they"ll arrest him when he comes back, and Velasquez goes “Not good enough,” storms out of the office, hijacks a vehicle and goes after him herself. There’s a brief radio conversation between Velasquez and her assailant where her assailant basically goes “Yes! I did it! Because you were a total bitch to me!” before getting blown to bits. From there the story develops a serious case of ADD. The first few missions, you"re suddenly fighting against street gangs who are taking advantage of the chaos created by the alien invasion. Then it turns out that the alien commander from the first episode is still alive, just as a defective clone. He’s positioned as the main threat for the second episode, then promptly gets killed off in a cutscene a mission later. From there, the story just goes completely off the rails. While the story of the first episode mostly relied on the Loose Cannon trope, pretty much everything from bad sci-fi gets thrown in now. Cloning. Rogue cyborgs. Shady corporations. Rogue cyborgs that are actually reprogrammed clones of dead TD officers. The alien invaders suddenly develop a super weapon that lets them wipe out the city the game has taken place in until then, forcing the Traffic Department to relocate to another city. Along the way Velasquez assumes command of the Traffic Department. Of course, everyone hates her, but they mostly still follow her command because she’s the protagonist. It’s also revealed that she has a son, who is briefly used as a hostage before she manages to get him to ‘safety.’ All that is crammed into episode 2. In the penultimate mission of that episode, you kill the daughter of a general of the invading aliens. As a result, the general orders his second in command to “Flood the atmospheric envelope with Ulonium, then ignite the Ulonium with Ionized Vorozine.” Which is basically a sci-fi gibberish way of saying “wipe out all life on the planet.” In episode three, the Traffic Department just barely escapes to the alien invaders’ home planet, where they establish a base in an abandoned mine. Over the course of the final episode, literally everyone but Velasquez and her son get killed, mostly due to her being either insane or incompetent. Along the way she runs into a race of shapeshifting aliens, thus ticking the final box on the sci-fi cliché bingo card. The shapeshifting aliens belong to a race that was all but wiped out by the same alien invaders that destroyed all life on Velazquez’ home planet. They plan to take advantage of a power struggle in the aliens’ high command to place one of the shapeshifters on the throne of ‘The Overlord’ and turn them into pacifists. So, after literally every sci-fi trope gets served up three or four times, and the protagonist has gotten pretty much everyone around her and everyone on her home planet killed, because she’s completely psychotic and refused at any time to back down, Velasquez finally reaches the point where only one of the alien generals is alive. At this point, the shapeshifting alien that was supposed to take on the identity of the Overlord suddenly decides to kill the last remaining general, and Velasquez for… whatever reason, decides to in stead join the invading aliens, becoming the supreme commander of the sector that includes her exterminated home planet. She, the woman who, again, got everyone killed because she was completely psychotic about getting revenge for the death of her father, suddenly decides that violence is not the answer. In the final mission Velasquez kills the shapeshifter, and walks off into the sunset. So, the whole game boils down to narrative shareware syndrome, with everything compelling crammed into the first of three episodes. The remaining two are just completely insane. The person who wrote the script seemed compelled to cram in every cliché related to sci-fi at least twice, and turned the protagonist from an abrasive woman whose skills as a pilot just barely make up for her myriad personality flaws into a complete raving psycho who, as a final punch of crazy, decides that she’s not going to allow an alien with the exact same grudge as her get his revenge. Everything about this crazy story reads like someone who badly needed about half a dozen editors, an enthusiastic amateur who wanted to cram in every trope and cliché in there. But this well-meaning but ultimately deeply flawed behemoth of a script was written by Chris Perkins, who currently works as the lead story developer for Dungeons and Dragons at Wizards of the Coast. And he’s not even the only person who worked on this oddity that would go on to have an interesting career. While the developers didn’t put out much of note after this game some of the music in it was composed by their younger brother Owen, who was thirteen at the time. Owen would go on to have an extensive career in music, up to and including an Academy Award nomination.
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Jun 27, 2022 19:55
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