Developer: Art & Magic Publisher: Psygnosis Year: 1992 Genre: Arcade
I am still going through my retro gaming phase and thought I would finally check out a game that has been in my Amiga backlog for a long time, the shmup Agony. It’s a pretty straightforward arcade shooter. You’ve been transformed into an owl and must stop an evil wizard by flying through levels and shooting at stuff. You occasionally pick up powerups that you can use at any time to briefly help you through obstacles but there aren’t any innovations in this one. It’s not anything I’m upset about and I enjoyed the shooting quite a bit, but that’s not why people still talk about the game today.
Where the game really shines is the art and music. The vibes are amazing. Everything is gorgeous and features incredible animation. I wonder if people lost their minds over Psygnosis finally publishing a game where you play as an owl. Between each level is a transition screen where you have some really nice art to look at as the game loads the next level.
The game itself mostly isn’t too difficult to play except for the big difficulty spike at the end. I guess that’s expected because it’s an arcade game and people would beat the game in 15 minutes without that, but I actually found the first few levels to be cozy and relaxing. Like I said, it’s pretty simplistic and why there isn’t much to say about this one, but I had a good time with it and would recommend it if you’re looking for some games that are exclusive to the Amiga. I’m surprised that this one didn’t get ported anywhere else since it probably could have worked in some form on other platforms.
One of the developers wrote about the making of the game on his site and it also includes a download of the game. I don’t know if that means it’s officially freeware but clearly no one cares and no one is selling it today so have at it. I also just recommend looking around the site if you want to see more Amiga game dev history.
Agony is available on your favorite Amiga rom site.
I don’t know why this became RoboCop video game week for me. I completed that Unfinished Business game and then I guess RetroAchivements got me to start playing old British games. I believe this is a loose adaptation of the RoboCop arcade game by Data East. It’s a 2D scroller where you walk through stages shooting various gang members with the game switching things up at a couple points, like two levels where you have to shoot someone taking hostage
I think this is actually the first Amstrad game I’ve ever played and thought it was pretty neat. The use of color was really interesting to me and I’ll have to check out more games for the platform, especially if there are any exclusives. I’ve heard the ZX Spectrum version is better but wanted to give this computer a shot since I’ve played games similar to this one before like RoboCop 1 and 3 on the NES. While the game is clunky, movement is awkward and I thought the mini games don’t really work, I can see why it was a hit and has its fans. The NES already had better arcade games at this point and I think the Amiga was out there as well, I imagine that it was fun to have something like this on the home computer.
The inclusion of mini games feels like a thing that’s very specific to British computer games in the 80s? I suppose the thought is that it adds a lot of variety but I don’t know if I’ve ever enjoyed any of these in any game? In this game the hostage saving is frustrating because you have to shoot the hostage taker a lot of times like it’s a boss fight and I hated the Suspect Identification mini game because I felt like it’s incredibly fussy about getting everything right or else you lose.
I still had a better time with this than RoboCop 3, where I was constantly fighting with the controls and got frustrated with the instant deaths. Like that game, it’s only a handful of levels but once you’re done, it loops around back to the first level, giving it more of an arcade game-like feel. Little quirks like the game only having music and no sound did not bother me and it was fun dipping into an area of gaming I wasn’t familiar with.
RoboCop is probably available on your favorite rom site.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Developer: Calligram Studio Publisher: Calligram Studio Year: 2024 Genre: Adventure
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.
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.
Developer: Bioware Publisher: EA Year: 2019 Genre: RPG
Anthem is an online action roleplaying game where you play as Freelancers, basically adventurers in big metal suits with jetpacks, that must stop some evil folks from taking controls of the Anthem of Creation, which is a mysterious force that has created most of the advanced technology in the world. I started playing this one after EA announced the game was going to be shut down for good at the beginning of 2026, however it turns out that the game was no longer for sale and only accessible through EA Play, where it was only available for the next month.
I kinda didn’t know what to think going in. It was my first Bioware game in something like 15 years and I think my first AAA game in a while too, outside of Nintendo’s stuff. Bioware doing multiplayers shooters is also just not what I want from them and why I never bothered with ME3, since at release that relied on you having to play those bits for that best ending or whatever was going on.
The game is a bit of a mess but for the most part I had a good time. The flying and shooting feel great. I don’t know if I’ve played a game with a better jetpack. It was technically very impressive to me too. I think some of the design of things in the world falls a bit flat. None of the designs of things like the suits were really that interesting to me. But the effects and creation of that world look nice when you’re zooming around in a jetpack and the modeling and facial expressions are all well done. I forgot how expensive video games can look since I usually don’t play that many expensive ones, so it’s a weird change for me to play one where you can feel tons of money being dumped into one and for things like famous actors who pop up just to voice a couple lines.
The shooting feels good too. It all feels good! It’s just that it all becomes pretty repetitive. Generally you fly to a place, shoot all the bad guys in an area, and repeat. Sometimes you grab some Important Things in an area and bring them to the glowing thing in the center of a region. This is generally how the missions go. I’m making this all sound kind of awful but I still enjoyed it. I think this is where the “It’s a 7/10 game (complimentary)” thing comes in. I actually think there’s two types of 7/10 games. There’s the kind that are your experimental games, like early 90s French DOS Games that takes lots of fascinating swings that don’t always work, and the other kind being pretty safe games that are kind of messy or boring at times but can still be fun to play. I felt like Anthem falls into the latter. Once you’ve played for a few hours, I feel like you kinda “get it.” But I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. Well, maybe it is if you bought it at full price for $60. But I didn’t mind as a one month of EA Pass thing. Sometimes I just want kind of a mindless shooter that has a nice jetpack.
I can’t really blame people for being critical of it in reviews though. There’s never that much roleplaying that happens or a whole lot to mix it up, which is kinda why people go to Bioware games. Once in a while you do some dialog choices but they aren’t especially interesting and I found some of the characters to be irritating too. The game’s plot at a high level is an interesting idea but it never goes to any directions that I was really into. The small storytelling details are great though. I liked things like the codex and in-game mailbox where you get emails from other people and spam mail. You’ll also find little bits of story by exploring the world and maybe finding little things like a list of passengers on a crashed ship, shopping lists, or a recipe. I loved all of this! It sounds like fluff but this is the kind of stuff that makes the world feel more like a real place. You’ll occasionally overhear bits of conversation between two people while walking around the world, maybe in an alley or hanging out on a balcony, and I wish there was more of this too. The hub world you walked around between missions really could have used more of this to give it more life.
I think I’m frustrated by this game because it never develops a strong enough identity and doesn’t justify being an always live game to me. I think a lot of people would feel very differently if it was a single player game with instanced coop. The game never allows more than four people in the world in an instance and never in the hub area either, so it all feels extremely unnecessary other than to say “Well, EA wanted a live service game so here it is I guess.” There were only a few times where I would come across another player, who would stop for a moment and help me shoot stuff, but that was it. There were times I got to play with friends but again, that could have been handled in a way that doesn’t make this a live service game.
The game was delisted from EA Play yesterday, meaning it’s no longer available to play for me. This is a bizarre decision to me because the game is still playable to people who bought the game until January. Why not let people subscribe to EA Play for the next few months for an exclusive game and make some more money from that while the servers are still up anyway?
My understanding is that the production was a bit of a mess, with a lot of bad decisions being made at the executive level. It’s so unfortunate because you can tell that a lot of care went into this game by the people working on it and were hampered by these bad decisions. There are moments of brilliance that come through when it’s not fighting against all the directions the game was being pulled in during development. I still had fun playing it and it’s so unfortunate that it will no longer be available for folks to play in a few months unless people figure something out in the next few months. I know StopKillingGames is a whole thing but this game came out years before that started and why I think that movement is poorly thought out is a whole other mess.
Anthem is no longer available for sale and not playable anywhere.
Developer: House of Tomorrow Publisher: Netflix Year: 2018 Genre: Interactive Movie
Bandersnatch is an interactive episode of Black Mirror where viewers make decisions at key points to determine the outcome of the story. The episode is about a young man who is developing an adaptation of a novel but feels he is starting to lose his grip on reality as he develops the game. Through various points in the story you are offered a choice between two options and each one will lead you down a different branch. I wasn’t very impressed with the options offered and felt very railroaded during the whole thing. That’s probably part of the point of this thing and the story it’s telling, but it also just kinda meant I became bored with the idea of it all pretty quickly. Often when people criticize Black Mirror, it’s for making really basic statements like “what if technology was bad?” I don’t think this is always the case but it certainly felt like it with this episode, while feeling very smug at the same time. I’m not a fan of Black Mirror in general though so this may have been something I was never going to enjoy. There are many other games that do a much better job having meta commentary about choice in games that you can play instead. However, it does get some points for the Jeff Minter cameo.
I guess it doesn’t really matter that much about how I felt about this game. It was delisted earlier this year and as of this writing, I don’t believe any of Netflix’s interactive movies are available anymore. It’s a big shame because I’m not opposed to the idea of them and I heard some of them were good, but Netflix will dip its toes into games and then get distracted and decide it’s not really worth the focus. It feels like they’re going through something similar with their mobile games offering and dropping a bunch of games from their service on there as well. I can’t imagine it helps that no one knows Netflix even offers their games.
It’s not all doom though. People have figured out how to preserve these interactive movies and with some searching online, you can find the preservation efforts pretty easily. Even though I didn’t enjoy Bandersnatch very much, I’m glad it was preserved and will be available for people to check out for years to come.
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is no longer available on Netflix but is easy to find through your favorite search engine.
Developer: Christina Stone-Bush Year: 2019 Genre: Solo TTRPG
THIRST and HUNGER are two tabletop rpgs created back in 2019 for a game jam where the rules must fit on a business card. Both games are erotic solo ttrpgs about a vampire biting a human, but each game is played from a different perspective. The games are played with a deck of cards and something to write your notes with. You answer some prompts at the beginning, and each card that is drawn is another prompt to describe what is happening or how you are feeling. The game ends in a way similar to blackjack, you must keep drawing cards if your total is under 14, if it is over that then you may stop. If it over 21 then the game automatically ends. The two ranges where the game ends also have different prompts. Both games are very short and should only take a few minutes to play, but can be replayed many times. The layout of the games is great, with everything cleanly organized to fit on a business card without feeling cramped. The rules are very concise due to the business card limitation, which makes it very easy to pick up. As everyone knows, vampires are hot and this game succeeds in its goal. In addition to the games being effective at being erotic, I just think it’s mechanically interesting to use the Blackjack limitation of 21 for a ttrpg. It inspired me for my game Navigator, so it’s also very important to my own creativity as well.
While they have been delisted on Itch, THIRST and HUNGER are still available for download on Itch.io
Developer: Because Because Games Publisher: Because Because Games Year: 2020 Genre: Adventure Game
Detective Boiled-Hard is a traditional point-and-click adventure that came out in 2020 that I was also curious about but didn’t get around to playing until now.
You played as Detective Boiled-Hard and must investigate the death of someone to see what happened. It’s a very breezy adventure game. The puzzles are easy and it took me just under an hour to complete, but I had fun playing it. I had been motivated to play it after playing a lot of Reality-On-the-Norm games lately and this always reminded me of the early 00’s AGS freeware era. That could maybe sound like an insult to some people but I really mean it in the nicest way. I love that everything, including the voices for all the characters, was done by one person.
Since the game itself isn’t difficult, most of the fun comes from all the jokes packed into the game. There’s plenty of dialog choices that are just there for additional jokes and plenty to interact with in the game. It’s just a very light and silly adventure game that I think is worth a look if you want an easier and more relaxing adventure to playing in an evening or have a fondness for that AGS era I mentioned. I also just found out there’s a free mini-case of all new material if you want a demo or played the original game and want more, so I’ll need to check that out next.
Detective Boiled-Hard / Case File – Death of the Space Dino Hunter is available on Steam and Itch.io
Developer: Jason Godbey Publisher: Jason Godbey Year: 2019 Genre: Adventure Game
Discolored is a 2019 first person adventure game created by Jason Godbey that I recently picked up because I saw the recently released sequel pop up on a few sites and was in the mood for a Myst-like game. There isn’t much of a plot, you are told that a diner in the middle of the desert has lost all color and you are sent to investigate. This is essentially all the plot you come across in the game and just exists to get you to the puzzles as soon as possible. Fortunately the puzzling in this is very good. The game starts off with having no colors in the world, but through various poking and prodding, you add some to the world and they allow you to interact with more objects in the game. It’s a nice way to keep you from feeling overwhelmed when you are first introduced to the world but it also keeps the small environment interesting to look at as you keep seeing it in new ways as additional colors are added. The game also features some clever puzzles using perspective.
The game has two modes for controls, free-roam and point-and-click. Usually the point-and-click mode in first-person adventure games feels like an afterthought but I thought it felt very good to control and actually used it quite a bit since I have been having some wrist pain lately and needed this control scheme to play it.
It’s a short game. I completed it in two nights but each session was very short and the puzzles made me think but I was never stuck for very long or frustrated. The game even has a built-in hint system if you want help with a puzzle. I said at the beginning of the review that I was in the mood for a Myst-like but it really wasn’t a Myst-like game at all. This isn’t the developer’s fault as they never claimed it’s like Myst, but I will explain what makes a game a Myst-like anyway since this is my website. A Myst-inspired game to me actually has quite a lot of storytelling being done through the environment and this storytelling is tightly integrated with the puzzles in the world, where this game just felt like an excuse to have a bunch of good puzzles related to color and perspective. Nothing wrong with that at all and it’s just not what I expected going in due to my assumptions with first person adventure games.
I really enjoyed my time with this game and I’m looking forward to playing Jason’s other games. I already own The Search from a charity bundle on Itch.io and Discolored 2 looks to be much more ambitious and seems to have more of a story and adds more characters.
