retro games

Corpse Killer thoughts

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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.

two zombies wearing flannel and shorts in the jungle

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.

a photo of vincent schiavelli and text that says his name, his character Dr. Hellman, and the text November 11, 1948 - December 26th, 2005

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.

zombies walking towards the screen at a beach and a digitized sprite of a guy in brown shirt and jeans

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.

Amazon: Guardians of Eden thoughts

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Developer: Access Software
Publisher: Access Software
Year: 1992
Genre: Adventure

Amazon: Guardians of Eden is a point-and-click adventure styled after pulp serials and adventure films from the 1950’s and earlier. You play as Jason Roberts, a man in search of his brother in the Amazon rainforest after hearing his brother was attacked, and the adventure grows into something much bigger from there. This one had been sitting in my backlog for a while, and I decided to finally play it when I saw that the Adventure Tuesday streams were going to play it next and wanted to go through it before any of it would get spoiled for me. I thought I would enjoy this one because it was developed by Access Software, the developers of the Tex Murphy series, and I also love cheesy FMV, but it may have been one of the worst adventure games I’ve played in a while.

it's a side view of a man walking through an office

One of the biggest issues with the game is that it just feels bad to play. It’s a point-and-click adventure but walking around by clicking barely works, so you need to use the arrow keys to move around. That’s fine, I’ve played plenty of other adventures that do that. Movement is an incredibly frustrating experience though. Your character is constantly getting caught on territory or cannot walk around the rooms that you would expect. It gives you a limited area to walk around in, but you don’t actually know what spaces you can walk in and what you can’t.

The game also feels bad to play because everything just moves too slowly. The game constantly does fade-ins and outs in scene transitions that just last too long, every pop-up box describing something hangs for a few seconds longer than it should and you can’t skip them, and the death scenes also take far too long. I don’t mind deaths in adventure games. I even think they can be funny when they frequently happen in games like Space Quest. However, whenever a death happens in this game it plays an annoying siren and the screen slowly flashes “Shock Warning” three times before it finally shows you the death image and description that again, lingers too long before you can load your game. For some reason the game dumps you to the parking lot screen near the beginning of the game with all the inventory items you had. I’m not sure why it does this. The game is unplayable if you are in this state, so you need to reload it anyway.

You will see this a lot as the game is also filled with timed sequences, sometimes there’s timed sequences inside of the timed sequences, and there’s not really any way to figure it out other than through failure. I’m not against learning through failure, but it becomes painful when you have to keep seeing a tedious sequence every time it happens. This game also really loves to only allow one character to do specific actions during the timed sequences, but they don’t tell you that. They just give vague descriptions of how an action doesn’t work, and then you try it with another character and it will suddenly work. Some of the scenes are very violent too and will show someone covered in blood after you lose. Again, I’m not opposed to this in theory but I don’t think it fits the tone of this game.

view of an airport with a guy standing next to a pixel and message saying "get closer"

The game constantly tells you to move closer to objects. I’ll be standing next to an object and it will say to get closer. At one point I had to clip through the game’s graphics and walk on a table, so I could pick up an item. In the screenshot above you can see that I’m attempting to pick up an item that is exactly one white pixel and I’m standing right next to it. This was not good enough and I had to stand on top of it to pick it up. The item in question were cigarettes and if I forgot to pick up this one-pixel item, it will lead to a softlock later. The game is filled with many opportunities for softlocks that you don’t see until much later.

The softlocks, pixel hunting, and bad controls unfortunately hurt the puzzles as well. Puzzles are difficult to solve because the room art is ugly and everything blends in together, making the pixel hunting even more frustrating than usual. Puzzles are often very finicky with how you interact with the solution so even if you have the right idea, the game gives you the impression that it’s wrong. For example, one part of the game wants you to put a gas cap on a jeep. Ok, so you would pick it up, right? Incorrect, if you try to pick up the gas cap on the ground, it will give you a message saying your character has no interest in the gas cap. You must “Use” the gas cap to pick it up this time, so your character will pick it up and put it on the jeep. This is despite the game just telling you that you have no interest in the gas cap.

Another fussy puzzle is one that wants you to use a coat hanger to break into a car. You have to grab the correct specific hanger in a closet lined with them that all look the same, or else you get a message saying the hanger is attached.

a photo of a sweaty man and two dialog options "perhaps a glass of lemonade" and "I need to get to rio blanco."

I wanted to like the FMV in this game more but a lot of it is very flat. The main character, Jason, is so incredibly dull and generic. You get to have a second playable character later, Maya, and she’s not great either, but at least I liked her more. I think if anything, the actors should have gone even bigger, but I can’t really fault them that much when they have the script they do and it was a brand-new technology that everyone was trying to figure out. To some extent I even wish it didn’t have FMV because once you leave the office building at the beginning of the game and go on your adventure, half the characters you run into are some sort of racist trope or another. I guess it’s not surprising that a game from the early 90’s that’s inspired by adventure serials would be filled with this kind of thing. It just sucks and it’s a huge bummer to keep seeing as you play. It’s all very weird. It’s a game that feels very ahead of its time technically in some parts, like the FMV, and at the same time it feels like the game is barely holding together because I was constantly running into bugs, frustrations with the controls, and lack of descriptions when trying to use objects.

isometric view of a man standing on a table in a bar
Here I am, clipping through a table so I can grab the item on it

Even if the game didn’t have these racist tropes, it would still be tough to find anything good about the writing because the game essentially has no interesting ideas. I will give the game this, the serial format is a lot of fun. The game is broken down into chapters and each one has a nice little intro and cliffhanger. I think this format works really well and wish they leaned into the pulp serial nature more. One issue is that it doesn’t commit to a specific type of serial. It is going for more of a Cold War-era vibe at the beginning with references to Communism and a robot security guard in one puzzle at the beginning, and then all of this is dropped as it becomes a jungle adventure story once you leave the office.

Unfortunately, I think most of this part is very dull and feels like busy work. You’re supposed to be on the run from a guy you never really see much and be on the search for Amazon women, who you don’t see until an extremely brief part at the end of the game. Most of this game is spent doing very tedious sequences like stealth sequence, doing the equivalent of side quests in the jungle, or arcade sequences where you ride a canoe down a river. So much of the game feels like filler and then you’re done. There are so many more interesting directions with this they could have gone in than just going down rivers and investigating spots to see what happened at places you already saw in cutscenes. At least it has a pro-environmental message at the end? It’s all very frustrating because I think the game becomes much more interesting at the very end when you get the change of scenery and new characters, but it’s so brief. At least you fight a giant ant. The giant ant looks very good.

The canoe sequences are absolutely miserable. The controls are terrible and you have a massive hit box that is bigger than your canoe. If you touch a single rock, you get the fail screen I mentioned earlier that goes on for too long. In addition to this, you’re supposed to take one of two branches at various points and if you get the wrong one then you fail. The correct sequence is given to you before you start the canoe section, meaning you write it down and look it up as you play. I’m not actually sure if you get the right sequence in the third and longest canoe section though. I did all three so I could say I 100% the game but skipping it is an option. There’s a button in the top left you can click to skip the arcade sequences. It’s like they developed all of this and then realized in testing that people hated it so they added the Skip button as a fix.

side view of two people in the jungle with a woman standing on top of a man
Why did this room load with one character standing on the other?

The audio for the game is odd too. The music itself is perfectly fine and some of it is very good. The game keeps choosing to use a cheerful jingle you hear in the office at the least appropriate moments though. An important character is introduced and then immediately killed off and I think it’s supposed to be emotional but doesn’t feel like it because it plays the office jingle. It plays the office jingle when people are shooting arrows at you. The game loves this song.

I’m probably being a bit unfair to the game. This is a lot of words to say that a game that’s over 30 years old isn’t good, and it’s not even a game that anyone is really talking about. But a lot of the frustration comes from it being created by a developer that I like who should have known better, and the reviews for it. Access Software was very successful with the Links franchise and would go on to create some of my favorite adventure games like Under a Killing Moon and other Tex Murphy games after it. Reviews at the time praised the game. I assume it was because of the FMV novelty, because the game is filled with so many faults that Lucasarts and Sierra were not doing. I can be very critical of Sierra at times, but at least they nailed the pointing and clicking part of a point-and-click adventure. Their games felt good to play, even if they could sometimes be loaded with design faults. The reviews for the game on GOG are no surprise. It’s people complaining that the criticisms of racism are by people being too sensitive and generally praising a game because they remember liking it 30 years ago when they were children and haven’t revisited it since then.

So would I recommend this game? Well no, probably not. You could maybe watch a stream of it or play one of their later and much better games like the Tex Murphy series instead. If you want a pulpy adventure, go play Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis or Flight of the Amazon Queen. Both do this thing much better and the latter game is even free.

Amazon: Guardians of Eden is available on GOG.

Various Retro Gaming Bits

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I don’t really know where to categorize all of these things but feel like they should be shared, so here’s kind of a link dump of retro gaming stuff I’ve come across in the last month that I think is neat.

a laptop showing the text adventure game amnesia but with a lot of UI elements added

The 1986 adventure game Amnesia has a very nice restoration where you can play the game as it was originally released on the C64, Apple IIe, and PC, but it also has a contemporary web mode with tons of quality of life features added.

A new ZX Spectrum fan zine launched about a month ago and it’s available for free on Itch.

man in a film studio asking another man in a hole "what are you doing in there?"

denzquix has done a lot of great translations of adventure games and the latest is for Bi-Fi: Action in Hollywood, a promotional point-and-click adventure game from 1994 for Bi-Fi Rolls, a salami-based snack originating in Germany and sold across Europe. You can read more about it here on BlueSky.

two Japanese men talking to each other

The cd-rom TRIPITAKA 玄奘三蔵求法の旅, the sequel to the legendary Cosmology of Kyoto has finally been saved and put on the Internet Archive! It’s incredible that this has been preserved and you can read more about it on BlueSky. If you’ve never played Cosmology of Kyoto, it’s currently abandonware but you can treat yourself to this nice repackaging of it.

This looks like a nice update of the classic DOS game Abuse.

top down view of a robot dog flying through space

Rex and the Galactic Plague just looks like a fun teaser for an Amiga game and the dog reminds me of K9 from Doctor Who. Sometimes I just get excited about people still making Amiga games and this one is on Itch.

Project Magma is a restoration of the game Myth that’s new to me and maybe it’s new to you as well. If you’ve never played Myth before, it’s great!

Idk, that’s all. This isn’t a recurring bit on this blog. I just wanted to share all these things because I think they’re cool.

Michigan Video Game History Link Dump

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I recently came across two things on the Internet Archive that I thought might interest other folks that are local to the area. The first was brought to my attention by streamer BogusMeatFactory. It’s a complete backup of the University of Michigan Atari Archive. Bogus originally sent it to me because it might have contained info on the MUD I keep searching for, HeroMUD. It does not, but it’s still a fascinating snapshot of what the university had for Atari related stuff.

The second thing is an archive of the Michigan Atari Computer Enthusiasts Journal. I’ve only looked at a little bit of it so far but it’s already a fascinating snapshot of a community in a specific region. There’s so many ads for local businesses too. I’m really hoping to come across MUD info in here. This looks like it eventually merged into the Michigan Atari Magazine, which also has at least a partial archive uploaded by Kay Savetz, writer and host of the great Eaten by a Grue podcast.

cover of Michigan Atari Computer Enthusiasts featuring a man and a woman but they have computers for heads

Doom 2 Thoughts

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Developer: Id Software
Publisher: Id Software
Year: 1994
Genre: First Person Shooter

Finished my replay of Doom 2 last night and yeah, it certainly is more Doom so I enjoyed it. This time it was done with the recentish Doom 1 +2 rerelease that Bethesda did, which I got for free since I already owned it on Steam. Like my Doom 1 review, every single opinion on Doom 2 has already been posted before but this is my blog so I’m doing a random collection of thoughts anyway dang it.

Before my replay I thought Doom was the better game but as I played through the game again I went through the arc of thinking Doom 2 was actually better, and then back to thinking Doom 1 is superior. Doom 2 isn’t without its improvements though. It’s been said a billion times before but the double barrel shotgun is great. I like the new enemies too. While the archvile can be frustrating, I think it’s mechanically interesting.

I think what makes Doom 1 the better game is the level design. Doom 2 starts off very strong with the level design but becomes a little bit of a slog in the second half when the levels attempt to be more realistic city designs. It was much more impressive at the time and makes sense in the context of the game, but don’t hold up as well as the more surreal levels found in other parts of the game. I also noticed that just like in Quake, I think Sandy’s maps are a very mixed bag. I just don’t enjoy his style of map design. They’re usually filled with poorly made puzzles where you stumble around until you figure out the right wall to push on, and occasionally decide that you must open a door by shooting it instead of pressing the open door. It just ruins the pacing of the level and the game has a heavy amount of these in the second half, which is probably why it feels like a slog to me.

I think the bosses in Doom 1 are also better. They come up in here as well but I think that while the Icon of Sin is a fun gimmick, I ended up finding it mostly just an annoying fight.

My (possibly hot) take is that ID Software actually started to decline after Tom Hall had left the company, not Romero. I still love Doom 2 and Quake, I may even like Quake more after my recent playthroughs of both, but the company starts to play it a bit safer and less playful. I think this theory still holds up! While I don’t care for Rise of the Triad as much as Quake and Doom 2, it’s goofy as hell and throwing in lots of new things and seeing what sticks. Doom 2 really only does this with the secret Wolfenstein 3D levels and those end on a sour, mean spirited note by having you shoot at Commander Keen. As a side note, there’s some weird censorship in the Doom 2 rereleases during the Wolfenstein 3D secret levels and I don’t know why.

Anyway, yeah, Doom 2. It’s still good but I like the first game more.

Doom 2 is available on Steam, GOG, and basically everywhere else.

Samorost 1

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Developer: Amanita Design
Publisher: Amanita Design
Year: 2003
Genre: Adventure Game

a guy with a hookah on a hill and a little gnome in white clothing in the background going skiing in the background

Recently played through this one with the kids and it still holds up! My kids are fans of Chuchel so I thought it would go back to their earlier stuff since this one is so short and simple. The game originally came out in 2003 but we played the remastered release from 2021, which updates the visuals and music but didn’t go too far with the updates. There’s not a whole lot to say about it. You help a little space gnome save his home by pointing and clicking on stuff and it only takes 15 minutes to play. I suppose there are technically puzzles, but most of the fun comes from clicking on things and seeing what happens. I suppose it’s sorta like the Gobliiins series in that way, but much, much easier. Anyway, my kids liked it and we’ll be playing 2 and 3 soonish.

This game was such a big deal when it came out! This was during the adventure game drought when Sierra and Lucasarts had recently stopped making adventure games so people were starved for high quality adventure games. One of my biggest memories of hanging out on the Adventure Gamers forums was people making a thread about this game every week saying “have you all seen this game Samorost? It’s great!” and not realizing that there had already been many threads on the game. It happened to the point of it becoming a meme on the forums. But I think it shows that even when the genre was “dead” there were still folks making memorable point-and-click adventure games.

The game was such a success that it led to the studio becoming a full time gig for the folks there. First by making tiny free browser games like this for companies (man, remember flash games being a profitable gig for devs?) and then making their own games. In fact, I think it took a while for me to get to playing Samorost 2 because it came out in 2005 and was a digital purchase, before indie games were being sold on Steam. I don’t think I even had any way of buying the game and I don’t think I even considered asking my parents because I knew they wouldn’t buy a game online. I think it had even received some criticism for being too short for a paid game.

The studio stuck with this format for a long time. It wasn’t until the last few years that they started to explore horror and branching out from their linear style of adventure game design more. The format works for me though and I can play a lot of their games with my kids, which is always a plus, since that’s when I usually have time to play video games. They’ve been taking their biggest swing with their current game in development, which is supposed to arrive next year. It will have been a five year gap between games, which is wild to think about. But as long as they keep making solid adventure games, I’ll keep picking them up.

Samorost is available for free on Steam, Itch.io, and many other places.

The Repossessor

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Developer: Dave Gilbert
Publisher: Dave Gilbert
Year: 2001
Genre: Adventure Game

the grim reaper standing in a bar with a bartender and chicken holding a gun.

Yeah that’s right, I’m still playing games in the Reality-on-the-Norm series, a collaborative universe created by the Adventure Game Studio community in 2001. The ninth game in the series is The Repossessor. You play the role of Death, who has come to Reality to reclaim the soul of Michael Gower, the zombie that your character reanimated in the first game and is now running for mayor of the town. The version I played was downloaded from the RON site and I didn’t realize until I had completed it that it was actually a remastered or remade version of the game, explaining why there was a huge graphical leap from the previous game and could now run in ScummVM, making it the easiest game to get running so far.

The most interesting thing about this entry is that it’s by Dave Gilbert, founder of Wadjet Eye Games. I had made a post about the game and he confirmed that it was his first game and built in a weekend. I have to say, it’s an incredibly impressive first game. I know some of that is coming from the game being a remastered version that looks nicer, but even from a design perspective I think it’s the best game so far. The remade version even some nice little touches like an instrumental version of Don’t Fear the Reaper playing in a room or two. Like previous RON games, it’s a little tricky to recommend specific games because they all build on previous ones, but I think you could manage to jump into this one since all you need to know is that there’s a zombie running for mayor in a town. Playing through this series has been a delight and continues to improve with each game as the community figures out how to make adventure games and use AGS.

The Repossessor is available for free on the Reality-On-the-Norm website.

Blastoff!

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Developer: Edmundo Ruiz Ghanem
Publisher: Edmundo Ruiz Ghanem
Year: 2001
Genre: Adventure Game

a woman standing in a purple convenience store
Reality-On-The-Norm has discovered gradients

My playthrough of Reality-On-The-Norm continues with the 8th game in the series. It was nice to play two entries in a row without having to fuss too much with getting them to work. This one has you playing as Elandra, who has appeared in some of the previous games, and you must help an amateur rocket builder. On average the series has been improving in the quality of the art and gameplay design. This one even features a really nice location select screen.

a screen containing a notepad listing "places to go" like a town square, launch site, and airplane graveyard
The game’s location select screen

I think the writing is the best in the series so far too! It’s genuinely fun going back to these and seeing topical nerd humor like an unironic All Your Base Are Belong to Us reference. Part of the fun of playing this series is that it’s a time capsule of a specific point in the adventure game community.

a woman talking to a man outside of a building and one of the dialog choices is "All your base are belong to us"
Folks, we’ve got an All Your Base reference

Another way this thing is a time capsule of the community is how many Yahtzee references it has. I posted the following screenshot without any context, because I forgot, and someone thought that there was maybe some in-community fighting happening but no, he had helped with the art in this game and someone in the team threw this reference in there as a fun joke. Maybe there was drama at some later point but it certainly wasn’t happening with this game.

view of the outside of a military base and the words Yathzee Sucks! is spray painted on the wall

I mentioned in a previous review that a dev saw my RON posting on Bluesky and this was that game. It was entirely positive, since I did have a good time playing this game, but I still imagine that it’s probably weird to see someone playing a game you made almost 25 years ago. They even mentioned that it was like doing an excavation on their 19 year old brain when I mentioned that reference. So generally I’ve kept any and all criticism off social media, as light as it may be, because who wants someone throwing rocks at something you made that long ago when you were a kid. The only real criticism I even have with this is just that it had some frustrating pixel hunting but that’s kinda it. I may have played an updated version too? It makes references to picking up items later and a walkthrough I found references picking up an item and going to rooms that I never came across.

A fun thing about it being a shared universe is that we’re starting to get more callbacks and it’s almost a sequel to the first game. I thought the epilogue and animated cutscene in an early AGS game was fun to watch. Even though I just complained about this game having some goofy design stuff, so far I think it’s the best one I’ve played and it’s fun watching a community learn how to make adventure games and referencing stuff that happened in this universe 8 games ago. Overall I had a lot of fun with this short game and would recommend it to others. Just be sure to play previous entries like the first game before doing this one.

Blastoff! is available for free on the Reality-On-the-Norm website.

Return of Die Vie Ess

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Developer: Ben Pettengill
Publisher: Ben Pettengill
Year: 2001
Genre: Adventure Game

Well this one was weird. My playthrough of the Reality-On-The-Norm shared adventure game universe continues with the 7th game in the series. I skipped ahead a few because I couldn’t get some to work in DosBox, ScummVM, or my Windows 98 VM. Return of Die Vie Ess is about a scientist in Reality who has plans to take over the world. You play as Nameless Law Official and must stop his scheme. Other than the return of Davy Jones as a character you interact with, and walking around the town of Reality, there isn’t that much of a connection to the previous games. Most of the characters are new and the scientist does all of his scheming from a room that you never go in, so it feels very disconnected from your actions. I’m assuming that some of the new characters will pop up in later games.

a young man standing in the middle of a town square

The game itself is very straightforward and only took about 5 minutes to beat. It’s still pleasant enough, except for the ending making a very odd detour with a random joke from the scientist about a sex worker and Davy Jones having a comment about unprotected sex. They come out of nowhere and it’s unfortunate mark on an otherwise fine game. Other than that, the game is ok enough and I think it’s worth playing if you’re going to take the same odd journey as I have and try to play through this series.

Like I said in other reviews, it’s hard to be too critical because these were games by teenagers and folks in their early 20s in the early 2000s. I cannot even imagine what 14 year old me would have put in a game if I made one at this time, probably jokes that have aged much more poorly than anything in these games, so I can’t judge anyone for a joke in a freeware game from almost 25 years ago and really isn’t as bad as I’m making it out to be.

I’ve been posting about these games as I play them on Bluesky and Mastodon and even with me being completely positive about the games on there, because I am genuinely having a good time playing these including this game, I think it did trip out one or two devs who worked on these when they saw them on Bluesky, since they had worked on them decades ago. I took a screenshot of an All Your Base joke and a dev commented that it’s like I’m doing an excavation of their 19 year old brain. They liked the post so I don’t think they were mad about it. I wasn’t dunking on the game, but it’s still probably a trip to have someone commenting on what you were doing at 19, 24 years later. I don’t know how I would feel about it if I had made games at that age, which is why I’m not really broadcasting these reviews despite enjoying the series, other than the automatic posts my blog does to Mastodon.

Is this probably more thought than what should go into a 5 minute freeware game from 2001? Yeah probably, but I like logging everything I play through on here since other folks aren’t talking about these games. Not that I’m really expecting anyone to talk about something like this on social media, and demanding that people do would probably make me sound like Jim Gaffigan wanting to talk about the movie Heat, but I think someone should since it’s an interesting time for the genre that I don’t see discussed too much. It’s also why I went back and removed the “Review: ” title from all of my review posts. You can still check out the Review category that all of these posts have, but it’s almost more of a log at this point and having it categorized in the post title made it sound too dang formal. But who knows, maybe I’ll sell out and throw it back in when I desire that SEO boost.

Return of Die Vie Ess is available for free on the Reality-On-the-Norm website.

Quake

~ mpklamerus ~ 3 Comments

Developer: ID Software
Publisher: GT Interactive
Year: 1996
Genre: FPS

Much like with my attempt to review Doom, there’s nothing about this game that hasn’t been said a billion times! There’s multiple books about the making of the game so this review is more of a grab bag of thoughts about it that I had as I played through the game. My absolutely lukewarm take on the game is that it holds up. It’s still a lot of fun to play and the controls feel great.

The game occasionally gets some criticism for the weird mix of aesthetics it has, with it combining Lovecraft, medieval, and futuristic stuff all together and it not completely meshing. I get it, it’s a mess since the game went through development hell, but I dig it. There isn’t really another game doing this mix, even the ones strongly inspired by it, so it still stands out even if it’s a bit sloppy. Maybe it being messy is part of the charm too.

The plot is meaningless junk, even more so than Doom. This is what happens when you push Tom Hall out of your company! I think this is one of the reasons why they haven’t really revisited this specific Quake game with sequels or reboots. There’s just nothing to really grab onto.

I used to really dislike the boss in the first episode, I think everyone was pretty critical of it at the time, but I’m into it now. Doom’s bosses aren’t actually that interesting mechanically so I think it’s fun that this one is kind of a puzzle. I’m guessing the disappointment is that it’s this massive guy but you don’t even shoot at him, which is understandable, but if that was the case I think the boss battle would have just been circle strafing around the boss and shooting it, much like the cyberdemon.

first person view of a goofy green fish with two buck teeth and the text "The dopefish lives!"

The secret level in the first episode has the really fun novelty of it being low gravity. There’s no other level in the game like this so it’s a really fun gimmick for a one off and feels like a nice reward for finding the secret level. Which makes it odd that none of the other secret levels have any gimmicks. They’re fine, but they’re just more levels.

I think it’s odd that Episodes 2 and 3 do not have bosses. I really wish they did. The end of ep 3 is especially a big “huh, that’s the end? Well ok.” At least the end of Episode 2 introduces a new enemy type, the Vore.

Speaking of which, the enemy types introduced towards the mid point and end aren’t as fun! The projectiles for the Vore are too accurate so it feels like you have to slowly work your way through them, which hurts the pacing. The leaping blobs are the absolute worst. They’re no fun at all to fight and they may actually be the most difficult enemy in the game since they’re the hardest to hit. The first episode of Quake is the strongest partially because it doesn’t have either of these.

The other reason I prefer earlier Quake levels is because of the designers. Sandy Petersen’s levels in latter of the game are a mixed bag for me. They either work really well or they’re too big and ruin the pacing. All lean into the Lovecraft theme very well though, which I suppose makes sense because he was the Call of Cthulhu guy. I get why they relied on him to make the last episode of levels.

I know everyone hates the last boss. I used to as well but now I don’t mind it! To me the final boss is getting through all of those enemies and then actually killing the big boss is just doing the final blow to end the game. It works for me!

first person view of a big church like building that's on a very narrow bridge

I played this through the Nightdive remaster from a few years ago, which includes the two official expansions from the 90s and the two newer episodes from MachineGames. It’s fantastic and IMO much, much better than the more recent Doom rerelease, which I thought was poor and can go into in a later post. The two official expansions from the 90s are a mixed bag for me but the newer episodes have some incredible level design. Whenever new levels are made for an old FPS, they often make the levels too big and have you hoarding ammo to make it more difficult, but all it does is kill the pacing of the game. Not a problem in these! I loved them and would recommend them to any Quake fan. The first MachineGames expansion is available for free so even if you don’t have this remaster, you can still play them.

There, those are my thoughts on a game that’s nearly 30 years old. The first time I played this game was on Thanksgiving at my cousin’s house, so much like how people have Christmas and Halloween games, this is a Thanksgiving game to me.

Quake is available on Steam, GOG, and a billion other platforms.