RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business thoughts

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Developer: Teyon
Publishers: Nacon
Genre: FPS
Year: 2025

Just wrapped up RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business, a standalone DLC to 2023’s RoboCop: Rogue City. I had enjoyed that one quite a bit as a AA budget FPS/RPG even with its flaws, which I think were covered pretty well in outlets like Bullet Points. Since Unfinished Business is a standalone expansion, it’s essentially more of the same, so I also enjoyed this despite it not being as well designed as the original game. Unfinished Business is sorta similar to the film Dredd (or what I remember of it) in that you are now investigating a large apartment complex that has been built by the mega corporation OCP and is doing everything in their power to get people to leave their homes and move into it, so they can knock everything down in Detroit and build a new city on top of it. Mercenaries have taken over the building For Reasons and you learn what they are as you walk through the building shooting bad guys.

Robocop petting a cat
You can now pet cats

Just like with the original game, the shooting and movement still feels good to me and it’s fun seeing Peter Weller come back to do more RoboCop voice acting. One of the fun things in the original game was that you got to walk around Detroit doing some mysteries and exploration, and that part was cut down a lot in here. You still get little hub areas once in a while, but there’s a lot less exploration, which I thought was a shame. The parts that still exist are a lot of fun to walk around in so I wish we could have had more of that.

Something I really wish these Robocop games would do, but probably shouldn’t expect if we’re being honest, is leaning into the politics of the films more. OCP is clearly an evil corporation and throughout the game you’ll find little notes and emails of them doing evil stuff, like internal communications about how they can jack up the prices of insulin since it hasn’t hurt sales yet, but I wish there was more of this. I think it’s some of the more interesting bits but the games aren’t really that interested in being anti-cop or digging that much into the evils of OCP.

a message saying "The recent increase in insulin prices has not affected the number of medications sold. The price has therefore increased again. If the number of buyers remains consistent, another price increase will be considered"
Throughout the game you find notes and emails that build on the world

The game is also shockingly buggy. I have a pretty high tolerance of bugs in games as long as they are still playable, but it was still jarring how much weird glitches would pop up and how poorly optimized the game seemed to be.

This one mixes things up a little by having you switch to different perspectives during the game to move the story through flashbacks. You play as Alex Murphy, pre-RoboCop, as well as some other characters. They’re pretty brief, a little clunky, and 2/3 of the flashbacks are more walking sim-like bits, but I still liked them? I just think the variety was nice and the one that was hyped up the most, the Alex Murphy bit, was probably the least interesting one to me.

I am fascinated by how much this game references RoboCop 3, which is no one’s favorite in the series. It’s a bad movie but I think it has some interesting ideas in there (along with quite a few bad ones) that are in a film constantly being tripped up by studio mandates like how it must be PG-13 and appeal more to kids. It’s definitely not a Clone Wars/Prequel movies situation where it elevates the prequels, but it’s still interesting to me that it helps setup the events of the third movie a little by making people tired of OCP and introducing early versions of the robots in that movie and the jetpack and helps soften some (and just some) of the rougher parts of that movie like the kid being able to hack the ED-209 by saying that it’s always been an easily hackable pile of garbage. It’s too bad it’s such a poor movie because I think it’s really interesting that it’s a movie about homeless people vs cops and making the homeless people the good guys, but the movie is bad. I also don’t like Robocop 2 as much as other folks either, which means this is a franchise I know a lot about even though I really only like one movie in the series and one or two video games.

Anyway, this is a lot of complaining but I did enjoy my time with this expansion. It took me about 10 hours to complete and I think if you enjoyed the original game then you’ll like this. If you didn’t like that one, you’ll also not like this. Sometimes I just like my weird AA budget computer games that are a solid B that I won’t think about a ton after I finish them! I heard their Terminator game is like this too and should play that sometime.

RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business is available on PS5, Xbox, Steam, and GOG.

Internet Mysteries: CompUSA Corporate and Borders Books and Music’s YouTube Channel

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Because I have no life, I am thinking about two internet mysteries I do not have the answer to.

Mystery 1: How is the CompUSA Corporate page still up? The company went under like 15 years ago and yeah, the name has been passed around a few times by companies trying to bring it back, but it never stuck. Someone has to be paying for this though. Who? I’m currently seeing very small gambling ads at the top but that’s a new addition. Does that mean it was kept alive by someone else and then sold to a gambling company, who is assuming that people are looking up the corporate site for a long dead company and will click on the ads?

Mystery 2: Who is uploading new videos to the Borders Books and Music YouTube account long after that company has closed down? Is there an employee that still has the login and uploads videos when they stumble across them on an old hard drive? The most recently upload is an interview with Jimmy Carter where the first comment is “I thought both of you died how did this get posted?”

Some Summer Reads I Enjoyed

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Recently I came across this article about how reading for fun has dropped a ton in the US over the last 20 years. I don’t actually know if this is accurate or the way they studied this, but it did prompt me to post about some books I enjoyed reading on Bluesky so I may as well post an expanded list here. The trick to reading a lot over the summer is simple. Just develop an extreme love with your library’s summer reading program. Anyway, here’s some things I’ve read with each title linking to the Bookshop.org page, but I read a lot of these through my local library. Many of them have audiobooks too.

Some recent Sci-Fi/Fantasy reads include:
Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey
A Necessary Chaos by Brent Lambert
Sir Callie and the Champions of Helston by Esme Symes-Smith

Comics also count as reading and here’s some I read:
Dungeon Club: Roll Call by Molly Knox Ostertag/Xanthe Bouma
Girl Town by Casey Nowak
Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
Eerie Tales from the School of Screams by Graham Annable

The non-fiction I’ve read this year is sorta all over the place, but some of the things I liked were:
Collected Game Writing Articles by Steve Ince
Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything by Colette Shade
All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
Good Game, No Rematch: A Life Made of Video Games by Mike Drucker
How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones

I’ve also read a billion The Baby-sitters Club and Baby-sitters Little Sister books because that’s what my two girls love and know a lot of the lore AND can recommend the graphic novel adaptations

Forums Are Still Great

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Once in a while I’ll see a post on social media lamenting that the Internet isn’t as good as it used to be and pine for certain things like forums, personal sites, IRC, etc but you can still do old internet stuff! There’s still plenty of active forums, and you probably already know this if you’re reading this site, but you can still make websites and webrings. IRC chat rooms are still going too. It’s still fun! Go do it if you miss it that much.

I really like papercult.club for tabletop rpg discussion. It’s a nice smaller community and it feels like there’s very little drama in the indie ttrpg scene when people can actually discuss stuff in smaller communities. This applies to the various ttrpg discords I’m in too.

DOS Game Club is another favorite of mine. It’s a DOS game discussion group where each month they pick a different DOS game to play and discuss. There is an IRC channel built into the web page too if you prefer real time chat and I think it’s a nice place to hang out.

Sometimes I poke my head into the IntFiction.org forums to see what is happening with the interactive fiction community too.

I’m sure I’ve talked on here about making personal sites. Personal sites are fun too and you can get one going pretty quickly with bearblog.dev or neocities.org. Both support RSS feeds as well, which is still neat and very useful.

Anyway, this stuff all still exists and it’s fun!

Dark Seed thoughts

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Developer: Cyberdreams
Publisher: Cyberdreams
Year: 1992
Genre: Adventure

pixel art of the darkseed box art, showing a cybernetic like face staring at you

Players control Mike Dawson (played by lead designer Mike Dawson) who has a nightmare, while living in his new mansion, of an alien embryo being shot into his head by a machine. While exploring his new house and the town he lives in, he learns of a parallel universe called the Dark World and must stop the aliens that plan on invading our world.

man with a mustache in a run down bedroom

The game features incredible artwork by H.R. Giger that makes it stand out from other adventure games at the time. Unfortunately, this is the only highlight because the actual design of the game is a mess. Mechanically the game is very dated and features an incredibly aggressive timer. If you aren’t doing the right thing at the right time at the right place, you are stuck and must restart the game. Many times you will have no idea that you missed an important step and the game never informs you, leaving you to flail around until you decide to look up what to do in a walkthrough. I am endlessly amused that the game’s main character is played by the lead designer and has the same name as well, but that is not enough to recommend this game. The art of Giger is a wonderful fit for a horror game, but the horror in this game is undercut by Mike Dawson’s performance and his line readings.

pixel art of a man with mustache in a bedroom
Did you know there is also a bootleg NES version of the game?

The lead designer left the industry after this game, deciding to focus on writing for television. Dark Seed was enough of a success that the developers made a sequel without him, leading to the odd situation of Dark Seed 2 being about a man named Mike Dawson, who looks like Mike Dawson from the first game, but is played by someone else.

Dark Seed is unavailable today and will probably be for a while because of the licensing situation with the H.R. Giger estate. My understanding is that Night Dive came very close to working something out with H.R. Giger and then he unfortunately passed away. If you are interested in playing it today, it’s not too hard to find it online using ScummVM or DOSBox.

Dark Seed is available on your favorite abandonware site.

The 7th Guest thoughts

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Developer: Trilobyte
Publisher: Virgin Interactive Entertainment
Year: 1993
Genre: Adventure

pixel art of the box for the 7th guest, showing a house on a hill with lightning in teh background

The 7th Guest was an early cd-rom game that became such a massive hit that it helped lead the cd-rom drive to becoming a common feature of PCs. It’s a first-person adventure game where you play “Ego,” a faceless character who explores a haunted mansion and figures out what has happened by solving puzzles that will reveal cutscenes of ghosts showing what they did when they were alive. Even early on in development the developer and publisher knew they were making something big. The game was originally proposed to the CEO of Virgin Games, Martin Alper, by Rob Landeros and Graeme Devine. Martin was impressed and “fired” them so they could found their own company, Trilobyte Games, and focus completely on the game instead of letting company politics get in the way. The game was technologically groundbreaking in many ways and was being talked about by others in the industry at conventions and pitch meetings. Sierra On-Line talked to the developers about publishing the game at one point and when Myst was being pitched around, the developers were asked if they could make something that would look as good as The 7th Guest. The GROOVIE game engine allowed continuous streaming of data from CD-ROM and it was the first adventure game to have 640×320 graphics with 256 colors. 

inside of a dark mansion with stairs going up to a second floor

While the game was ahead of its time when it was released, it’s a little hard to recommend now. Conceptually the game isn’t a bad idea, you wander around a haunted house and do puzzles, and successfully completing a puzzle means being rewarded with some fun FMV. Unfortunately many of the puzzles you are required to do require lots of trial and error, or they’re just not fun to do. I don’t think the maze puzzle in the basement is quite as poorly designed as its reputation says it is, but even once you figure out how to get the solution it’s still incredibly tedious to solve because of the slow walking animations between each scene transition. The slider puzzles in the game aren’t too difficult either but are also an incredibly boring puzzle style. I think that’s the main issue with the puzzle design, not all of them are incredibly difficult but even a lot of the ones that are solvable are just boring. There’s still a few gems in the game, such as the famous cake puzzle where you need to divide a cake into equal sizes with the same number of pieces. Many of the puzzles were pre-existing ones from previous sources like puzzle books, explaining why they’re almost all standalone. I don’t think this is necessarily an issue though. Both the Puzzle Agent and Professor Layton series have self-contained puzzles and are a lot of fun. So the idea works, it just needed some better puzzles in places and snappier movement for the other puzzles that relied more on trial and error.

The parts of the game outside the puzzles are very charming though. When the FMV was being created, it resulted in video with a blueish aura around everyone and at a lower fidelity than expected, but this resulted in choices being made for the game’s design that I think ended up benefitting it. The developers had to pivot fully to it being a ghost story and the lower quality video meant the actors had to do bigger performances that give the game a camp appeal. The cutscenes are there to advance a story, but it’s a pretty thin story and really just an excuse to see awful people doing bad things to each other. It’s technically a horror game but the cutscenes are schlocky enough that it keeps the game from being scary, which I’m fine with. Robert Hirschboeck is a lot of fun to watch in his over the top performance as the evil Stauf and his scenes in this game are the highlight of the franchise. The soundtrack by George “The Fat Man” Sanger remains a classic and probably what he is still known best for, which is impressive considering that he also contributed the soundtracks to games like Wing Commander and Putt Putt Saves the Zoo.

a ghost wearing a green dress in a bedroom

The game was a massive success when it was released, both critically and commercially, and was responsible for many cd-rom drives being sold. The success kicked off a franchise that is still going today with various ups and downs and even survived the developer Trilobyte going under. Even though the game is a little hit or miss for me in the design department, I would still maybe recommend it if you’re ok with having a walkthrough next to you to get through some of the more annoying puzzles. There’s still some really fun puzzles in here, the soundtrack is great, and the FMV is entertaining too. I would probably recommend going with the original version of the game, which is supported by ScummVM. There’s a remastered version but reviews seem to have various minor issues with it. Fans should also look up the Philips CD-i version of the game. It features higher quality video of the transition animations but also seems to be missing music in some spots. 

A few years ago there was a VR-only remake of The 7th Guest which reimagined the entire game with new puzzles, mansion design, and FMV. I haven’t played it yet but it seems to have received positive reviews and it’s lovely to see that the game is being kept alive by interesting new takes on the idea.

The 7th Guest is available on DOS, CD-i, Mac OS, Windows, iOS, Android, OS X, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5

Phoenix Springs

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Developer: Calligram Studio
Publisher: Calligram Studio
Year: 2024
Genre: Adventure

pixel art of a statue bust for the phoenix springs box art

Phoenix Springs is a neo-noir point-and-click adventure game where you play as a woman in search of your missing estranged brother. I knew very little about this game going into it, other than it being developed over a long period of time, but picked it up based on really liking the art and it ended up being one of my favorite adventure games from 2024. It’s hard to explain more about the story, partially to avoid spoilers but also because it’s a very surreal story told in a non-traditional way, but I actually liked that a lot. I was talking about the game on Mastodon and Andrew Plotkin (who liked the game) described the game as “Philip K. Dick took the good acid,” which I think is a good description of the game’s story. Some people on Steam were critical of not full understanding the story but I liked that.

an illustration of a woman looking down

Since the game is a detective story, the game has a really interesting mechanic where you are basically using ideas and memories as inventory items. I loved that you’re using these “items” in a way that you would like an inventory item. There’s a lot of interesting side investigations as well that don’t advance the main plot but do reveal more about the world. There’s also a lot of red herring thoughts that aren’t used and get crossed out once you’re out of an area that is no longer relevant.

If I do have any criticisms, I do thing the last section of the game is too big and aimless. I had felt like I was doing the adventure game thing where I just try every item on everything and repeating that a bit. It was a little frustrating since the rest of the game moves as a pretty fast pace. The game even includes a builtiin walkthrough which I think is nice.

I think the voice acting also deserves a shoutout. It’s all narrated by the same woman and it has kind of a more deadpan or monotone delivery, but it works really well. Even the dialog from other characters is voice acted from the viewpoint of the main character.

I just think it’s a really solid mystery and think it’s worth a look if you want an adventure game that is willing to experiment a bit more.

Phoenix Springs is available on Steam, GOG, and Fireflower Games.