Month: June 2023

Recent Games I’ve Enjoyed

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Here are some new games I’ve been playing this last week

System Shock Remake

They actually pulled it off! I’m sure the development of this was a nightmare. They spent about 8 years working on it, had to restart development at one point because it wasn’t turning out the way they wanted it too, and other things popped up, but it’s great! The remake updates just enough so the game is much more approachable than the original, while still feeling like a faithful remake and an immersive sim with more fiddly bits than we’ve seen from other recent immersive sims. The art is so good too. If I recall, it’s similar to what they had for the demo they were making in Unity, then they switched to Unreal and went for a more realistic look, but then realized it wasn’t working at all and went back to the old art style but in Unreal. Go check it out, it’s really good.

Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer

Slayers X is a spinoff of Hypnospace Outlaw where you are playing a “lost” FPS from the 90s created by a character from that game who recently found his missing code and is releasing the game today. I think what really impressed me with this game is how much more faithful it is to the 90s style of FPS and Build engine era of games than everything else in the recent retro FPS trend. For better or worse this also includes the bits likes levels being weirdly designed and disorienting, but I think this is part of the charm of that style of FPS so I’m glad it’s been kept in. It also happens to be very funny, as you would expect for a Hypnospace Outlaw related game.

Queer Games Bundle 2023

I already wrote about this last week but just wanted to bring it up again. There’s a lot of great games in here and it’s only $60, which is the price of a AAA game. There’s also a version of the bundle that’s $10 if you can’t afford that at the moment.

Indiepocalypse 41

There’s a new one of these. It’s good! If you never checked out an issue of Indiepocalypse, consider picking one up. They are all good starting points and each has some great games in them. It’s just a fantastic place for curation and discovering new games and game devs.

Inca

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Played Inca, an adventure game/rail shooter by Coktel Vision and released in 1992 about Incas and conquistadors fighting in space. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is! You journey through time and space to grab some important looking orbs to become El Dorado and bring the rebirth the Inca empire, all while fighting conquistadors flying boats in space. The game has you alternating through these shooting segments (there’s also some on foot) with traditional point-and-click adventure game parts. Since this is a French DOS game, none of it is really that well designed but it’s all fascinating and certainly a lot more playable than other DOS games that hop around between different genres, even with the difficulty spikes. I’ll definitely play Inca 2 at some point because the weird combination of it all and the FMV is very interesting to me.

I’ve been playing Goblins 3 this month for Adventure Game Club, which is by the same developer, so it’s fun looking at the credits and seeing that the people involved with that goofy game also worked on this right before that game. I don’t know if I could recommend it because it certainly is a clunky game, but it’s easy to get running in DOS Box if you want to try it and it has passwords and stuff you can do to make the action segments a little bit easier. I would definitely recommend watching the intro which starts off normal enough and then suddenly shifts into “what the hell am I watching?”

I love French DOS games

An Intro Guide to Gobliiins

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This is a spoiler-free guide for people who wish to check out the series Gobliiins, a point-and-click adventure game series created by Pierre Gilhodes and Muriel Tramis. This is not a walkthrough and is just meant as an intro to help people get into the series and a little background on the games. There are five games in the series. The first three were released in 1991, 1992, and 1993. Many years later, after Coktel Vision had shut down, Pierre Gilhodes created a Gobliiins 4 in 2009 and recently released Gobliiins 5 in 2023, after getting funding for it on Kickstarter. The number of i’s in a Goblins game changes based on the number you play as. So Gobliins 2 has two playable goblins and Goblins 3 (also known as Goblins Quest 3 in the US) has one playable goblin at the start, but you have other playable characters as well.

goblin standing on a flying boat in the sky

Why Should I Play It?

The Gobliiins series is an entertaining series of point-and-click adventure games that have great art, animation, and music, with really charming sound effects and talking noises for the characters as well. If your interest in adventure games is more focused on the puzzles than plot, which isn’t a big focus for this series, then I would recommend these games. The puzzles can be challenging but even failure can be fun to watch in these games and for the most part (with the exception of the first game) you cannot die or lose in a Gobliiins game so you are encouraged to try everything to see what funny results occur even when it’s not the correct solution.

How Do I Get Started?

Fortunately it’s very easy to get most of the games in the series. Goblins 1-3 are available in a pack on GOG, which includes both the floppy disk and cd-rom versions of the games, which all run in ScummVM. While I’m fine with the cd-rom versions of the games since that’s what I grew up with, many people prefer the floppy disk versions due to them having a different soundtrack. Some people even prefer the Amiga version of Gobliins 2 over the PC versions since that has a different soundtrack. So when playing these games, I would maybe just go on youtube and listen to brief snippets of the soundtracks to see what you prefer but if you don’t feel like doing that, it’s probably safer to go with the floppy disk versions. Unfortunately Gobliiins 4 is now abandonware and you’ll have to find it on your abandonware site of choice. Gobliiins 5 is available on Itch and coming to Steam very soon.

This next part is where things might be a little controversial. If you’re looking for a game to start with in the series, a lot of people would recommend Goblins 3 and I would agree with this. It has the most solid game design of the three original games and some of the best art in the series too. Plus the series is so light on plot that you won’t be confused by anything if you skip ahead and will just miss some references. Gobliiins 1 is very hard to recommend to beginners due to its health meter. So much of the humor in the series is connected to failing or seeing your characters get hit in a cartoonish way and the first game will remove health anytime this happens, almost defeating the point of the game. Your health bar also carries over between levels and there are only one or two places in the game where you can refill it, meaning you either have to replay levels after you figure them out and not lose health, or the game almost becomes unplayable towards the end. I would also hesitate to recommend Gobliins 2 to beginners even as a fan, due to some of the frustrating puzzle design. The game has two characters that have the same abilities but sometimes requires you to arbitrarily use one to solve a puzzle. It also has puzzles requiring chains of actions that must be executed perfectly or else you have to redo the whole puzzle.

That all said, if you play through Goblins 3 and enjoy it, I would recommend playing the others if you want more. If you want to check the game out, consider playing it with us in the Adventure Game Club, where it is our game for June.

Queer Games Bundle 2023

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A new Queer Games Bundle is out this month. I loved the ones from previous years so I’m immediately picking this one up too. In an episode of the Adventure Game Club podcast last year, we recommended a bunch of games that are also in the bundle this year, but here are some more games I really like in this year’s bundle

LesbiAnts – I wrote about this one before but it’s a very good rpg for the Game Boy where you play as ants.
Funny Walk – Very funny adventure game laser targeted at people with a fascination with digitized sprites like in Dark Seed 2. You do not need to play the other two games in the trilogy to understand this.
A Circle of Charity – It’s a brilliant game set on an old Windows desktop so of course I’m recommending it
WASTE EATER – Wrote about this before too but it’s a great IF game and only 10 minutes long so I don’t want to say too much. It’s cool!
Ladykiller in a Bind – Very funny adult visual novel by the developer of other great games like Digital: A Love Story