Well, after completing RoboCop: Rogue City ‒ Unfinished Business, I wanted to finally play this one since I’ve been a fan of the soundtrack of it for a long time. This post will be the farthest thing from a hot take because I’m here to confirm that like the movie it’s based on, RoboCop 3 is not an amazing game. Like the previous RoboCop NES games, it’s a platformer where you walk through levels and shoot bad guys. While those were developed by Ocean, this one is by Probe and only published by Ocean. None of the RoboCop NES games are that amazing but this is the worst one. The controls just feel off and the difficulty is cranked up to a very high degree to make up for the game only having five levels. One of these levels is just a repeat of the previous level but in reverse order.
RoboCop 3 does a really “fun” thing where if your body takes enough damage, parts will malfunction. You can repair parts between missions by finding powerups that you use on the Repair screen between missions. It’s a really interesting idea in theory but is just not executed well. It’s too bad because I don’t really like criticizing games that are ambitious but it turns a game that was already hard to control into something even more frustrating. I watched Jeff Gerstmann play this and agree with his take that this is more frustrating than when RoboCop 1 is just frustrating to play because of clunky controls. Choices were made to make the game more difficult and it just makes the game worse.
So overall I wouldn’t recommend the game but I can recommend the soundtrack Jeroen Tel. It absolutely rules. Listen to this theme!
From listening to it, it sounds like something that was made for the Commodore 64. I do want to give that version a shot because from reading the YouTube comments and watching a few seconds of it, it does seem like a better version. It still seems to have some clunky movement but something about it being on a computer makes it more acceptable to me.
RoboCop 3 isn’t available legally anywhere but it’s easy to find on your favorite rom site.
Developer: Trilobyte Publisher: Virgin Interactive Entertainment Year: 1993 Genre: Adventure
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.
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.
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
Developer: iD Software Publisher: Softdisk Year: 1991 Genre: FPS
I am a fan of the incredibly inaccurate box art for the game
Catacomb 3-D is the third game in the Catacomb series and the first in the series to be a first person shooter. I feel like people sometimes claim it’s the first FPS, but that’s incorrect and it’s not even the first FPS by iD Software. In this game you play as a wizard named Petton Everhail and must explore a series of catacombs to defeat the evil lich Nemesis and rescue your friend Grelminar. Different releases of the game switch the names around but that makes no sense to me and the later games refer to the lich as Nemesis so that’s what I’m sticking with.
Today the game is pretty simplistic compared to even FPS that would come out a few years later. You wander around maze-like levels and shoot fireballs at a variety of monsters that you would expect to see in a fantasy setting. The fireball is the only weapon you have, but you can pick up two different powerup types that shoot multiple fireballs at the same time but in different patterns. It still has a little bit of a rpg influence since you pick up healing potions that you choose to use when you think you need them.
Even though it’s dated, I still had fun. It’s very interesting from a games history perspective and I liked seeing what id software dropped and what they carried to their later FPS. Walls can be destroyed by shooting at them, adding more of an exploration element to this game compared to Doom. There’s also some puzzles that you need to figure out from reading scrolls. I think the enemies are charming too. I really enjoyed the pixel art for them and their animations.
I would recommend the CatacombGL source port if you want to check it out. It adds a lot of nice features like widescreen and smoother movement.
Glypha: Vintage is a remake of the 80’s Macintosh arcade game of the same name. It’s a variant of Joust, which happens to be my favorite arcade game, where you fly around on a giant bird and use your lance to destroy enemies by bumping into them while you are at a higher height than them. As far as Joust variants go, I think it’s one of the better ones, but to be fair there’s not really that many Joust clones I can think of. It’s mostly the same game, but with everything modified to have more of an Egyptian theme. The thing that stands out to me is how fast it moves compared to Joust. Everyone moves faster and less floatier, so you have to hit the flap button quite a bit more to stair in the air and enemies can turn around much faster. The egg items hatch a lot faster too. This all makes the game a lot more difficult than the original but to compensate, Glypha is much more generous with the extra lives you get from accumulating points. It took a few minutes to get used to but once I did, I thought it had felt very good.
The original Macintosh era was all a bit before my time. By the time I was in elementary school, our classrooms all had Macs that had color, so I don’t have any nostalgia for this era of computers. That doesn’t mean I don’t love the art in black and white Mac games though. It’s essentially the same art as the original Glypha game but obviously at a much higher resolution and a lot smoother. I’m guessing there’s some additional animations as well but I’m not familiar enough with the original game to know. I think it looks great.
I never played the earlier Glypha games but my understanding is that they eventually got color and probably other changes as well. I think they were all developed by John Calhoun, who is also know for his paper airplane arcade game Glider, also for the Macintosh. He eventually worked for Apple for a long time before retiring and I think this most recent version of Glypha was developed either right before retirement or right after. If you want to see what else he’s up to, I highly recommend adding his blog to your RSS feed reader.
Anyway, this is probably one of the best versions of Joust that you can actually buy for the PC. As far as I know, the original arcade version of Joust isn’t for sale anywhere and yes, obviously you can always just emulate the game, but it’s nice having this version as well with its ideas on how Joust should play and I’m not usually an achievements person but they’re fun in an arcade game like this.
Apparently the Amiga computer turns 40 today! It was first computer I used and what we had in our household when I was born so I have a lot of fond memories of it and playing games on there with my dad. It’s nice to see that it still has a very active game dev scene for it and you can find lots of great games for the platform on Itch.io. Amiga emulation is a little bit of a headache which understandably keeps a few people from checking it out, but I think it’s worth pushing through it and giving the games a lot. There’s a lot of weird stuff on there like everything by Bill Williams, the Psygnosis stuff looks really nice, and it’s got some nice versions of old adventure games like the early Sierra games and Infocom’s The Lurking Horror.
Someone has patched in mouselook controls to Under a Killing Moon! If you’ve ever played the original game, you know that it has kind of a goofy control scheme. I love the game but it takes some time to get used to and can sometimes make it tricky to recommend to people. The post below includes a video of what the patch does and it looks great, but also incredibly weird if you’ve played the original game. But again, probably also a big improvement on what it had before. Nice job!
I got sick of the bonkers control scheme in Tex Murphy: Under a Killing Moon and patched in mouselook + WASD.(This footage looks shocking if you've suffered through the normal velocity-based mouse controls, honest!)github.com/moralrecordi…
Developer: Actual Entertainment Publisher: Actual Entertainment Year: 1997 Genre: Arcade
If you follow me on social media, you’ve probably seen me making plenty of goofy posts about the 1997[1] puzzle game Gubble. It would be easy to assume that someone posting about an obscure and goofy looking computer game character is making fun of the game and either never played it or didn’t enjoy it very much. Folks, I am here to tell you that Gubble is good.
Screenshot taken from Steam
In Gubble you play as Gubble D. Gleep, a purple alien who finds that space pirates have invaded your planet Rennigar, fastened zymbots (the game’s levels) to the planet’s surface, and now you must remove them. Each level has you running through a maze, removing all the screws put in the floor of the maze while avoiding the level’s enemies. The screws come in different shapes, requiring you to switch between the tools that have been placed in the level. This gives Gubble a puzzle game-like element and helps add variety to all the mazes you’ll be going through.
In the original Gubble, the only way to heal was to find a health powerup or to save, and saves were consumables. There were typically 3-4 located in a world and they would disappear after you saved. In the 2020 release on Steam they are no longer consumable and you can repeatedly use the save points anytime you want. In my opinion this is a drastic improvement over the original game. There’s an argument people have made in some Steam reviews that this makes the game too easy but give me a break. No one is forcing you to save. If you want to only save a few times in each area, knock yourself out. I think it’s great when a game allows you to save anytime you want and either save yourself the time from not having to play the same parts repeatedly, and just letting me leave a game anytime I want since I have three kids and sometimes have to drop everything to go do something. Gubble 2020 gets it.
Some levels also feature hidden mini levels in them too, where you run around on the board and try to grab as many objects as possible for points. I suppose this is maybe interesting if you’re trying to get the highest score possible but most people won’t care.
Gubble was designed by Franz Lanzinger, who is probably more famous for the 1983 arcade game Crystal Castles. Crystal Castles plays very similar to this and it’s interesting to me that he’s been iterating this design for decades though Crystal Castles and the Gubble franchise. Gubble must have done well because it was followed by a Gubble 2 (Wikipedia says 1998, MobyGames says 1999), where the new feature was that Gubble could walk. Gubble walking is an affront to God but I’ll save that for another post. But the world must have agreed because in 2000 we got Gubble Buggy Racer (MobyGames says 2001), a kart racing spinoff, which I guess is an interesting direction to take a puzzle game franchise. Gubble HD came out in 2007 on PC and later for iPad. This version is very similar to the one on Steam.
There were a few attempts to make new games in the franchise after this. In 2012 there was a Kickstarter to fund a Gubble 3D but this only hit $1,249 of the $80,000 goal. In 2014 there was an attempt to make an endless runner for Android and iOS called Gubble Vacation Rush. This one looks like it came very close to release, because you can pull up videos on YouTube of the game being played at conventions and the designer saying that it should come out in a few months, which never happened. In 2020 there was a remaster of Gubble 2 announced, but it presumably never happened because God does not want Gubble to walk and struck it down.
Overall Gubble is just a solid little arcade game. It’s kind of a meme game at this point because of the creature’s design and the Game Grumps folks angrily yelling “It’s fucking Gubble!” in one of their videos. Let me just say this, fuck Game Grumps. What, you’re going to listen to adult men who will forever be trapped acting like they’re teenagers, because that’s what their fan base expects? It’s fucking Gubble? Yeah, that’s what I yell with joy whenever I see this guy.
[1]: MobyGames and the Steam page of the rerelease lists the release as 1996 but Wikipedia points to this press release and I found this interview which points to 1997. Both happened close to release so I’m going with those. Gubble.com also states it is 1997. The Playstation 1 release seems to be 1998. As you noticed earlier in the post, MobyGames and Wikipedia also disagree on later entries in the series so I’m not sure what’s going on.
In case you missed it, the Commodore computer brand has been bought again, this time by a YouTuber. You can watch the whole bizarre thing here if you want. I saw some people on social media being excited about this I’m not even sure what you can do with what he bought. He got a bunch of trademarks and some people from the original run of Commodore as advisors, with the argument that if you get all this stuff, it does become the original company again and does it? Unless you can jump back in time and start manufacturing computers in a world where most people don’t have them, I still don’t see the point of what any of this is other than the opportunity to be an IP landlord. They spent all their money buying the brand so there isn’t really anything left to actually do something with it. But I guess this is the kind of thing the retro gaming community loves to get excited about, the tiniest possibility that a brand will continue to have its name on things. It doesn’t matter that it won’t be anything people actually want, it will still be alive. I guess this is why a lot of adventure game folks were willing to cheer on the acquisition of Activision by Microsoft. Didn’t matter how much of a disaster it would be, maybe Microsoft would be more willing to do something with old Sierra and Infocom properties (they aren’t).
It’s also just hard to get excited about that announcement when it’s filled with AI generated slop and the inclusion of disgraced actor and repeated sexual harasser Thomas Middleditch as an investor and member of the board. I would simply not include an incredibly problematic in my announcement video or let them have anything to do with my company!
My dream scenario that will probably never happen is that the retro gaming community buys the rights to obscure things that aren’t available today and have very little financial value, and makes them public domain instead of being IP landlords. Why aren’t we pooling our money together to buy the rights to Dot Gobbler and Pyst? They belong to the people.
Yesterday there was an article I read about the history of bisexuality in games, which I’ll always welcome, but it was a frustrating read because it left out so much and basically ignored anything before The Sims and anything that wasn’t a major hit. It was this quote specifically that I really didn’t care for:
Because when games started tentatively including queer representation in the late 00s, it began with playersexuality: the idea that characters would be attracted to the player, no matter who they were. You could marry someone of any gender in Skyrim or the later Harvest Moon games, for example. Liara in Mass Effect would want whichever Shepherd – male or female – you chose to be.
It’s very possible I’m misreading what it’s saying, but this isn’t true in any reading I could think of. The representation is certainly notable, but queer games go back all the way to the late 80s at least, with games like Caper in the Castro in 1989 and Gayblade in 1992. Both are games by developers who are part of the LGBTQ+ community and are about people in the community.
Even if you’re ignoring indie games (and why would you?), there’s plenty of examples from larger publishers in the 80s and 90s. If we’re just talking about video game characters, Infocom’s game Moonmist from 1986 has a Lesbian woman and a bisexual woman as NPCs. If the article means playersexuality, that goes back to at least 1992 with Ultima VII: The Black Gate. There’s also games with a big budget like Phantasmagoria 2 in 1996 that explicitly have a bisexual male protagonist if the subtext that’s basically text in Gabriel Knight 2 was too subtle for some people. There’s so many other examples listed too from a basic Wikipedia search. Granted, a lot of the examples listed are very homophobic and transphobic, but there’s positive representation in the 80s and 90s too and it’s just really frustrating to see this history get ignored. It’s not the first time I’ve seen it happen at a games outlet and it probably won’t be the last.
On a more positive note, I really liked this recent page listing games developed by trans people before 2010, which extends basically to the beginning of the games industry. Trans game developers have always been here and always will be.
Developer: Digital Pictures Publisher: Digital Pictures Year: 1994 Genre: Arcade
Unfortunately I have the FMV bug again so I played through Corpse Killer, a rail shooter where you are a marine dropped onto an island to stop Dr. Hellman, an evil scientist who is bringing the dead back to life. On your quest you meet a woman reporter, who becomes your love interest at the end, and Rastafarian man who drives you around the island.
For the most part, the game is just rail shooter sequences where digitized sprites of people dressed as zombies walk around the screen and either try to get close to you or throw stuff at the screen. You do this for about an hour and then you’re done. They try to add some variety by giving you some powerups and choosing the order that you do the levels, but you have to do them all anyway so it ultimately doesn’t matter. For the most part you just repeat this sequence of levels and then fight a final boss and the game ends. One level type has you using a dart gun to shoot the zombies, I think to be stealthy. It’s not fun. There’s some optional side missions that give you a little bonus cutscene. They tried! I think there’s only so much you can do when a team films a bunch of zombies running around and then you’re told to make a rail shooter with it. I think it could have still been more fun to play by making the enemies feel less like bullet sponges and eliminating all the situations where there was an attack that was impossible to dodge.
Obviously the FMV is the reason why anyone would play this. Since I played the remaster from a few years ago, all the digitized sprites are now in a higher resolution and it just looks weird to me. They’re all much more crisp than the background they’re walking on. I think the original game actually looks better in a way, because the background and zombies are at the same quality level and it fits together better. I do like seeing the cutscenes at a higher quality than what it originally shipped at on the Sega CD. I’ll admit that I am a giant baby and some of the zombies creep me out a little, especially when they do the jump scares in front of the screen. I am not proud of this.
I wish I had enjoyed watching the cutscenes more. The tone is right, they’re intentionally doing a more campy approach, but there’s just not a whole lot going on other than the brief moments when you get to see Vincent Schiavelli do something as the evil doctor. It’s clearly just a paycheck job for him but he’s still trying to do something with the limited material he has and is the most fun to watch. I was surprised at how uninterested I became in the other cutscenes. I love garbage but they were mostly very boring. As you can guess, a game about voodoo and zombies may not be the greatest when it comes to race, even if the villain is a white guy. It could have been a lot worse but it still sucks.
The game then ends with you shooting zombies in front of a blurry photo of Vincent Schiavelli’s face and then it cuts to a scene of the woman reporter in a bikini at the beach, after she’s spent the entire game flirting with you. I guess they knew their market for this game. After the credits, it ends with a memorial to Vincent Schiavelli. Well, ok.
It’s not a great game and it’s boring, which is probably the worst thing a game with FMV can be. There isn’t even any gore. I understand why that’s not happening on a Sega CD game, especially after the whole Night Trap thing, but it’s still funny to see in a game with so many zombies.
Since it was the rerelease of the game, at least it has a lot of bonus stuff. The behind the scenes stuff is fun. I was surprised by how many videos were made and preserved since the making of this game. It’s goofy that you have to buy them with points that you earn from playing the game, but you can unlock everything after a single playthrough. At least it gave me these gems from someone interviewing the cast.
Talking with the lead actress: “Do you think kids will like this game?” “I think it’s going to be fabulous”
And interviewing Vincent: “Do you have a favorite moment in the script?” Laughs “What are you talking about?”
I get the impression he didn’t think very highly of the script but he’s very nice to the makeup crew while they work on him so there’s that. He did do at least one other video game though, one of the Dune RTS games. I didn’t realize the game had Bill Mosely as one of the soldiers until I watched the behind the scenes stuff.
There’s documents like a Corpse Killer 2 design doc. It looks like Virtua Cop is referenced in this one. There was also a pitch for a Cold War inspired Corpse Killer ‘53. I just think it’s funny they had multiple sequels in mind as they were making this one. Again, it’s fascinating that all this stuff got preserved when you see that other companies like Sierra basically threw out everything when they closed. I think this part of the remaster is great.
The remastered version also adds a new level where you shoot 3D models and also sprites of the two founders of Limited Run Games. It’s bad and I don’t know why they added it, other than to insert themselves into the game. It’s optional and just exists for points so it’s easy to ignore.
This is probably too many words about a rail shooter for the Sega CD. It’s not good but I’m glad that the rerelease has lots of bonus stuff because mediocre games should be preserved too. I don’t know if I would recommend actually buying it since the game itself is very tedious and Limited Run Games as a company is…well…..not great, but at least they didn’t half ass it?
Corpse Killer is available on Sega CD, Sega CD 32X, 3DO, Saturn, Windows, Macintosh, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch.
