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FPS NIGHTMARES

Started by Lemming, November 17, 2019, 12:23:16 PM

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Ferris

Quote from: Lemming on March 22, 2020, 04:42:41 PM
Haha, not as far as I know - I was just referencing your joke. If only it was him we could add him to the list of incredible celebrity cameos in 90s games.



It says something about Cage's career that I was genuinely unsure if he had licensed the use of his face for the Turok series.

...is that Bowie?

popcorn

Quote from: FerriswheelBueller on March 22, 2020, 06:37:38 PM
It says something about Cage's career that I was genuinely unsure if he had licensed the use of his face for the Turok series.

Even if it were Cage, he might not have had to license it. I wrote something about this in an account of my time at an actual video game company. I ended up not being able to publish it anywhere for NDA reasons (might be resolved eventually) but here's an excerpt on this subject.

Quote
Tom says the worst job was coming up with names for fictional companies and brands the artists could use to populate the game world with shops and ads. "So, like, five names for launderettes  – checking each made-up name to make sure it didn't exist in the real world."

The company would not sign off on any name that produced a Google hit — so, for example, as a Percy's Pizza exists in Des Moines, there could be no Percy's Pizza in our game.

In fact, as we discovered, there is almost no sensible name for a pizzeria you can conceive that does not already exist. Even most of the insensible ones were taken. If we couldn't use Percy's Pizza, could we use Percy's Perky Pizza? Would players accept this? Would it end up a meme on the Gaming Age Forums?

"LaundroMax, Soapy Joe's, Bubble 'n' Squeeze, the Wash Doc, Rinse It Up," says Tom. "For days. It was like CIA torture."

The strange thing was that the artists had modelled several of the characters on real, famous people, mostly Hollywood actors. For some reason this did not trouble the management, though you'd think the singer from Muse might object to the player beating the shit out of him. As it happened, the sister of the drummer from Muse also worked at the company, though as far as I know she had nothing to do with the character model. I never got the chance to ask her how she felt about being able to virtually beat up her brother's bandmate. Maybe it was her idea.

PlanktonSideburns

Quote from: Inspector Norse on March 22, 2020, 06:19:27 PM
EDIT: just realised that is Bowie, from some other game. Thought it was supposed to be the Cage face referred to above.

Here's Cage, though I get more of a Michael Imperioli vibe:



I never actually played Turok though I remember schoolfriends raving about it. I think I had the weird idea in my head that it was some kind of boring hunting sim except with Allosaurus instead of ducks.

Exact same experience


Bazooka

Nomad Soul probably plays like shit now, it did way back then, odd game but really hooked you in.

Turok was probably the second fps I played after golden eye on n64, and the series will always have a special place in? my heart (yes even that shit show 3).  Turok 2 was also a backtracking fuck fest, thank fuck for level skip.


Lemming

Chasm: The Rift (1997)





STORY: Timestrikers are using timestreams to attack Earth! I don't really get it, but there are some guys who give you occasional briefings between certain levels who try to explain what's going on, and they say that aliens who strike throughout various points in time (hence Timestrikers) are just fucking shit up, for a laugh. Ancient Egypt, Medieval Europe, they just show up and fuck everything up. It's up to you to stop them!

MUSIC: Reminds me of those CDs from the 90s that had industrial sounds for people to sample.

THAT JESTER DEMON THING ON THE COVER ART IS KIND OF CUTE: I first played this a couple years ago and pretty quickly wrote it off as low budget Quake. That was a mistake because playing it a little further reveals a surprisingly tight and well-paced game.

First off, let's talk graphics. The graphics remain pretty good for the time. Very, very Quake-like in visual direction (it even has the same bizarre nonsensical enemy types, eyeless mutants with gaping mouths full of huge razor-sharp teeth).

So the game's big selling point is that you can deal locational damage to enemies and remove limbs, like a proto-Soldier of Fortune. It's a pleasant surprise that this is more than just a gimmick - it's actually a core gameplay mechanic. As you learn each enemy's attack styles, you can deal limb damage accordingly. For example, much of the later game is filled with these alien soldier things that have a ranged weapon on their right arm and a blade on their left. Taking out the right arm is a good way to force them to engage you in close combat. You also fight these weird Viking guys, and shooting away their shields lets you deal more reliable damage to them. Another example is the zombie enemies, which can't be killed unless they're gibbed or have their head blown off. The only complaint about this system is that the locational damage doesn't always register well - especially with the zombies, it's pretty frequent to see blood spraying out of the zombie's head and then its arm flies off or some mad shit like that.

The arsenal of weapons is pleasingly weird, taking another cue from Quake I suppose. You have the obvious single shotgun and double shotgun, but then there's a minigun, a crossbow which fires some kind of laser dart, a razor disk thing you can throw (very useful in that it's the only weapon that can reliably stun enemies), a grenade launcher and some kind of weird impressive-looking thing that launches grenades that vaporise almost everything - including you - in one hit. Also, landmines which are guaranteed to hurt you more than the enemies.

I played on Normal difficulty and it was pretty well balanced overall. You're good as long as you don't allow yourself to get cornered - easier said than done in a game that consists of many narrow corridors. You can lose your entire health bar in about five seconds if melee enemies start ganging up on you which means the main thing you're thinking about in the game is positioning and keeping a good distance from enemies at all times.

The game's level design is, I think, probably the primary reason this seems to have been forgotten by gaming history as anything other than Shit Quake. The levels are very flat and boxy, to the point where the game almost feels more akin to the Wolfenstein 3D clones we've mercifully left behind than it does to its contemporaries. Given the design trends of the era tending towards bigger and more detailed levels, it's a mystery why the devs of Chasm decided to opt for the abstract thin corridors with rectangular rooms of FPS games past.

When you get past this, though, and accept Chasm for what it is, the level design is actually pretty strong. It feels like the devs learned and improved as they went along with this game. The first level sees you enter a boring warehouse composed entirely of large rectangular rooms and the lamest enemies the game has to offer, and your first reaction is pretty much guaranteed to be "this is Shit Quake". But before long, the game starts to pick up, and as it goes on you get to some Egyptian tombs which are a little more complex, the game reveals its varied weapons and enemy types, and by the time you reach the Medieval/gothic themed set of levels, the map designers seem to have really got the hang of it and you're playing through some really fun levels which strike the perfect balance between having plenty of secret areas and alternate paths to look around for, and being linear enough to flow well and keep the action moving.

The switch and key puzzles don't stop the pace, not least because the game gives you some fairly clear directions of what to do - "find a hidden switch in the library", "take the ankh back to the tomb" and such. Switches also almost always control things that are very close-by to the switch itself, so there's no Hexen-esque scanning rooms for 5000 hours trying to figure out what the fuck just happened.

Final relatively minor complaint, the second to last (or third to last, I'm not sure) level is total bullshit. Basically you have to press like four switches and whenever you press one, more enemies than you can reasonably fight teleport in and attack you, sometimes teleporting INTO YOUR BODY. Literally the only way to win is by using the razor disk things to frantically stun everyone. If you have no razor disks left you're FUCKED.

Oh, by the way, if the Quake comparisons weren't clear enough already - the final boss is just Shib-Niggurath from Quake! Seriously, go look it up, it's a giant fleshy multi-tentacled thing in a pit. Although the fight against it is hilarious and better than Quake's "push-two-switches-to-win" letdown - you have to injure it until it screams in pain and then you've got about three seconds to leap down its throat, whereupon you actually run through its innards to shoot at its heart.

I think the only reason this didn't succeed at being the QUAKE-KILLER back in the day is the entirely single-floor level design which feels well out of date for 1997. Quake's movement (aided by the large 3D levels) is the obvious way in which it crushes Chasm, but in terms of weapons, enemies and graphics, Chasm isn't far behind Quake at all. The limb damage system even gives it an edge.

FINAL RATING: It's nice straightforward fun. It starts out pretty weak but by the fourth or fifth map it's consistently a good time. Torn between 3/5 and 3.5/5, but we'll go for 3 Severed Limbs out of 5 just because the first couple levels don't match up with the rest of the game quality-wise.


purlieu

It was completed in 1996 but they couldn't find anyone to release it, which is one reason it's not as fondly remembered - if it had come out a year earlier, it would have definitely seemed more impressive. Also, the game engine was built from scratch, unlike a lot from the era.

The medieval episode is definitely the highlight, so many memorable sections, notably the opening village section and the weird jester monsters. I also really like the first boss level, where you have to lure the weird mutant bloke to the fan room and lock him in so the giant fan pulverises his body.

samadriel

I like the title. Hole: The Gappening!

Bazooka

I don't remember hearing anything about it at the time, that jester demon is fit as fuck.

Lemming

Quote from: purlieu on March 25, 2020, 10:26:48 AM
It was completed in 1996 but they couldn't find anyone to release it, which is one reason it's not as fondly remembered - if it had come out a year earlier, it would have definitely seemed more impressive. Also, the game engine was built from scratch, unlike a lot from the era.

I actually thought it was the Quake engine! It's definitely a testament to how quickly things were moving technologically and design-wise that Chasm was perceived as being dated so quickly. It's mindblowing to think that back then, 12 months in gaming was enough time for new cutting-edge engines to be built, existing ones to get completely overhauled and standards to completely shift, whereas nowadays it's hard to even tell the difference between something released in 2020 and something released in, say, 2015.

QuoteThe medieval episode is definitely the highlight, so many memorable sections, notably the opening village section and the weird jester monsters. I also really like the first boss level, where you have to lure the weird mutant bloke to the fan room and lock him in so the giant fan pulverises his body.

Yeah, the boss fights are ace. Felt pretty clever when I realised that "DESTROY THE SPHINX COMPLETELY!" really did mean "ignore the boss and aim for the Sphinx". The medieval boss fight where you have to lure him into the holy light and then dance around dodging demon bats while he slowly incinerates was another highlight. The boss battles basically being puzzle rooms was a really welcome change from the "just shoot at the boss with literally all your ammo" fights of just about every other game of 1997.

Quote from: Bazooka on March 25, 2020, 12:19:49 PM
that jester demon is fit as fuck.

EXCELLENT NEWS: It's single!


EDIT: The thought occurs that this image of a cute jester-demon that I made in 2 minutes for the purposes of a joke may well be the first piece of Chasm: The Rift fanart ever created. History in the making, right here in FPS NIGHTMARES

Lemming

#400
Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2 (1997)





STORY: Kyle Katarn is back for another round of semi-coherent space adventures! And he's gone from being a scary intimidating tough guy to a nerdy-looking live action actor, as has his trusty pilot friend Jan! When Kyle's father is killed by some bastard (or rather he finds out that his father was killed ages ago by some bastard), Kyle must become a Jedi, embrace the powers of the Force, and bunny-hop his way through a succession of Imperial bases and fortresses.

MUSIC: As with the first game, it's music from the films. Sounds slightly higher-quality to me here than it did in Dark Forces, dunno if it's different sound technology or if my DOSBox emulation was just shitty in DF1 or what.

SET BLASTERS TO FULL!: FIRST AND FOREMOST: if you ever play this, TURN AUTO-AIM OFF. It's on by default in the options menu and it renders all your weapons totally useless as the game decides to totally ignore where you aim and instead just have your bullets perform a magic Oswald Harvey style curve into the nearest wall.

Visually, the game veers between looking great and looking quite dated. It's a good engine but the map designers sometimes bit off a little more than they could apparently chew, leading to some pretty ugly looking outdoor environments. These are balanced out by most of the interior levels which still look great.

Most of the weapons of Dark Forces return, and they all feel a lot more accurate. While Dark Forces 1 successfully replicated the shit-flying-everywhere combat of the films, this game goes for much more reliable standard FPS gameplay. The only complaint I have is the Thermal Detonator grenades. They have been COMPLETELY NERFED and Stormtroopers basically shrug off direct hits from them now.

The big new weapon is the lightsaber, which is overpowered to the point of hilarity. Not only will hit kill most enemies in one hit, and not only can you twirl around the map like a mad bastard with it chopping down everyone in sight before they even get a shot off, but it also DEFLECTS BULLETS. If you stand still and face incoming fire, Kyle will use the lightsaber to deflect the shots. Despite this I actually wound up forgetting I was even carrying the lightsaber and opting for standard blaster weapons instead - which isn't a complaint about the lightsaber, I just ended up not really using it much for some mysterious reason. Maybe it felt a little too cheap, to have an insta-kill weapon that also prevents you from being hit.

After becoming a Jedi (MAJOR SPOILER!!!), Kyle also gains access to Force powers. Finding secrets during the levels gives you points to spend on Force powers. These were mostly pretty lame and I relied chiefly on Force Jump, which is fucking wicked because not only can you actually skip parts of levels if you manage to do a ludicrous enough Force Jump, but you can also accidentally kill yourself indoors by Force Jumping into the roof and breaking your neck, which is wicked.

There are a decent range of enemy types but most of the time you're stuck with Stormtroopers. It's not a problem because squads of Stormtroopers are easily the most fun enemy type anyway and the game hand-places them in tactical locations - in bunkers, on catwalks, etc - resulting in some great combat encounters. The fully 3D engine is harnessed to great effect and the game loves to put you in multi-floor structures which have enemies shooting at you from above and below, resulting in gameplay that, in its best moments, manages to feel even more cinematic and exciting than Dark Forces 1 did. The FUCKING BASTARD TURRETS from DF1 have been removed and, almost as if the developers are trying to apologise, replaced with laughably weak turrets that almost never hit you and don't hurt much when they do.

Levels bring back the setpiece-based design that made the original Dark Forces a success, and by and large they're great here too. There are some quality ones towards the end especially - running through an exploding ship with a fucked anti-gravity system is the highlight of the whole game, and its followed shortly after by a fantastic segment where you've got to enter a base through a huge wind tunnel, and one wrong move sees you blasted out of the tunnel at a billion miles an hour and thrown to your death off a huge cliffside.

The objective system returns, but is far more complex now. While in Dark Forces 1 all your objectives were essentially just window dressing, here levels have multiple objectives that must be completed sequentially to proceed. It really does a lot to enhance the story and sense of setting and, as with a lot of other games of the late 90s, the developers really seemed to want to make the game feel more like an exciting cinematic experience and less like a generic shooting gallery. They succeeded!

The new engine allows for a greater range of platforming possibilities, which the game uses well. Death-defying leaps across chasms and over cliffs are commonplace, and there's a particularly great puzzle (again towards the end of the game) in which a giant cargo container thing starts rotating in mid air and you have to leap on it and race across it before it tips far enough to throw you off.

There are several boss fights that come in the form of lightsaber duels. You have access to all your weapons but they seem to magically fail to do damage, even explosives launched directly into your opponent's face, so you'll have to engage in a lightsaber battle. These are, without exception, absolutely farcical and involve you and the enemy sliding and prancing around each other like demented jackrabbits as you swing wildly at each other and hope the frankly dodgy hit detection works in your favour.

I still don't get Star Wars and lack any real familiarity with or investment in the setting so once again I'm not the target audience, but I did absolutely love the cutscenes in this game. Dorky looking actors in silly costumes, reading laughable dialogue and overacting next to CGI robots - fuck yes. If the films were done in this style I might have become a huge fan. The cutscenes really are fun to watch and feel like a suitable reward for beating a level. Everyone's clearly having fun with it - the Kyle and Jan actors are having a great time playing ridiculous action heroes and the villains practically do evil "muahahaha" laughs after every single line.

Speaking of the plot, there are apparently two different endings based on whether you followed the Dark Side or the Light Side. Very cool idea but in practice I had no idea what I was doing. I only realised towards the end that the powers you choose between levels are coded as being Dark or Light, and choosing Dark powers pushes you towards the Dark Side. Other than choice of powers, apparently the only way to influence your Dark/Light rating is to kill or spare unarmed NPCs. Because I'm not a LUNATIC I got the Light Side ending which I assume is the intended one.

Oh, and you can also go into third person. There is NO REASON to do this and, just to add to the fun, your character model looks absolutely nothing like cutscene-Kyle.

FINAL RATING: It's fun and feels very similar to Dark Forces in both flaws and strengths. Dark Forces 1 was a little better overall, I think. Thinking of a 3.5 rating but those last few levels are so great that I want to say 4. But fuck the lightsaber duels so it's 3.5 This Guy Literally Can Not Possibly Be Taken Seriously As An Action Hero out of 5. It's more like a 3.8, but we are NOT getting into that level of insane micro-rating.


Jim Bob

#401
Great game, but I agree that he first one is better overall.

Quote from: Lemming on March 30, 2020, 12:19:33 AM
MUSIC: As with the first game, it's music from the films. Sounds slightly higher-quality to me here than it did in Dark Forces, dunno if it's different sound technology or if my DOSBox emulation was just shitty in DF1 or what.

The music in the first game was MIDI, whereas it's John Williams' actual recordings in the sequel.

Quote from: Lemming on March 30, 2020, 12:19:33 AM
Visually, the game veers between looking great and looking quite dated. It's a good engine but the map designers sometimes bit off a little more than they could apparently chew, leading to some pretty ugly looking outdoor environments. These are balanced out by most of the interior levels which still look great.

I know that you like to play these games as originally intended but for others, I would highly recommend the upscale, remodel and effects mods.  They vastly improve the experience.

Are you planning on playing the expansion pack Mysteries of the Sith?

Quote from: Lemming on March 30, 2020, 12:19:33 AM


Ben Affleck has let himself go.

Lemming

Quote from: Jim Bob on March 30, 2020, 01:07:24 AM
Are you planning on playing the expansion pack Mysteries of the Sith?

Definitely! I was pleased to find out that there are some more Star Wars games featuring Kyle Katarn, I think I'm warming up to him and his stupid beard.

Jim Bob

Quote from: Lemming on March 30, 2020, 01:19:02 AM
Definitely! I was pleased to find out that there are some more Star Wars games featuring Kyle Katarn, I think I'm warming up to him and his stupid beard.

Let me know if you have any trouble getting the expansion pack to run.  I know that I did, but I was eventually able to find a solution and have some relevant replacement files, should you require them.

popcorn

Do not, repeat do not trust JimBob's "replacement files".

Mister Six

To add to the joy of Jedi Knight, one level has a secret room containing Max of Sam & Max fame, and once freed, he'll run around blasting all the enemies for you.



Haha, fucking Wookieepedia.

Jim Bob

Quote from: Mister Six on March 30, 2020, 04:48:22 AM
To add to the joy of Jedi Knight, one level has a secret room containing Max of Sam & Max fame, and once freed, he'll run around blasting all the enemies for you.



Haha, fucking Wookieepedia.

Ah, yes.  One of my favourite easter eggs in gaming (Lucasarts liked to include Max in all of their games - the shape of his head formed the overhead map in one of the secret areas in Dark Forces).  Sadly, my last replay with all of the mods enabled seemed to nerf Max's appearance in Jedi Knight, as he was unable to ascend a stairwell from the nearby door from which he emerged, meaning that I had to leave the lethal lagomorph and continue the level without him.  Alas.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

The main thing I remember about Jedi Knight is that they obviously hadn't worked out how to do glowing objects yet, because the lightsabres looked like metal baseball bats.

Cuellar

I got very into Jedi Knight multiplayer when I was younger. A friend of my brother's with whom I was in a clan was reputedly the best Jedi Knighter in the country at one point. Can't remember how this was calculated or verified, but there you go.

Jim Bob

#409
Quote from: Cuellar on April 03, 2020, 03:12:16 PM
I got very into Jedi Knight multiplayer when I was younger.

Oh, boy.  That takes me back.  Good ol' MSN Gaming Zone.

I was addicted to playing Jedi Knight multiplayer on that server as a teenager.  I remember one time, trying to connect to the Gaming Zone and getting a 404 type of error.  I was so desperate for my daily fix of Jedi Knight, that I phoned the Microsoft technical support line and reported the issue.  The guy on the other end had clearly heard this sort of thing all too often and wearily said, in between heavy sighs, "have you checked your IP settings and reset your computer?".  I explained to him that I'd never had this issue before and that I'd logged in earlier that day.  His response: *sigh* "I'll open up the site on my end, because it will absol....".  His voice suddenly became animated; "OH, MY GOD! It is down! Oh wow, thank you so much! Thank you phoning and letting us know. Nobody else had told us! We'll get right on that."

Thankfully, the service was back online within the hour.

Sorry, that's not a very interesting anecdote really.  It's just something that's stayed within my memory for decades.

Lemming

Attention Star Trek fans:



These weird Shit Cave Dweller Things are now CANON. Please incorporate them into any future Star Trek fanworks you may create.

Jerzy Bondov

YES! Very glad you've got to this game.

Lemming

Star Trek: Generations (1997)





STORY: Malcom McDowell has gone fucking mental and is blowing up suns to try and return to the Nexus, a chill place he once visited. It's up to Picard and pals to stop him.

MUSIC: Much like Berman-era Star Trek, it's barely there. You couldn't accuse it of being out of step with the series.

IT APPEARS WE HAVE FOUND SOREN: Back in the review for Dark Forces 1, I said that I'd, quote, "give any old shit 5/5 as long as it's got Star Trek written on the box". It's time to put that to the test!

Without going on about Star Trek for fifty paragraphs, I really really like Star Trek - every series up to and including Voyager, anyway. I never liked any of the Star Trek movies though (yes even Wrath of Khan). They all felt so tonally different to their respective series, and the characters so absurdly warped, that I was alternately bored and annoyed through every movie, except that one with the whales which was at least funny. I mention this only to highlight the fact that I don't really remember much of Generations, other than Malcom McDowell yelling and Kirk getting crushed by a bit of scaffolding. It's lucky, then, that this game takes only the basic premise of the movie and does its own thing with it. Malcom McDowell is still trying to access the Nexus and Picard and Kirk still team up in the finale to stop him, but the bulk of the game consists of all new self-contained adventures across a series of solar systems.

The game has three components. The first is stellar cartography. This is a glorified menu from which to choose your next mission, but basically the gist of it is you scan planets and stars to try and find Soran before he can blow up a system. Theoretically, this is a race against the clock but in practice the game ends if you let more than like one system get destroyed. After you locate Soran, you get one of two mission types.

The first is space combat. These battles are, without exception, unspeakable horseshit. They're either so easy that you don't have to do anything or so difficult that you can only win one out of a hundred times. They also make no sense story-wise and I'm not really sure why they're in the game.

The other mission type is the away missions. This is the FPS component of the game and it's pretty clearly the actual game, with the other two just being window dressing. The away missions are, by and large, spectacular.

They cover a pretty huge range of styles. Worf, for example, must disguise himself as a Klingon soldier and infiltrate a base. This requires you to avoid conflict as you move through the Klingon complex, and culminates with you dramatically prancing out of a Bird of Prey seconds before it explodes. Beverley gets one of the single most creative levels I've seen in a videogame. She teleports onto a planet which is actually a gigantic lifeform. Her mission is to heal it, but these huge floating antibodies mistake her for a virus and attack her. The level essentially consists of Beverley karate kicking antibodies as she gets washed away down veins of blood and through pools of weird green shit. And if you shoot the walls, you hear the planet scream and Beverley is like "I CAME HERE TO HELP, NOT TO HURT IT!!!". Oh, and Malcom Macdowell is inside the planet's heart, stealing its blood or something. Genuinely amazed.

Troi gets to go undercover as a Romulan, just because she did in that one TNG episode. Picard gets one of the weaker levels, but it reintroduces the Chodak (from the adventure game TNG A Final Unity) and Picard is forced to shoot at them while saying "THIS IS NOT WHAT I INTENDED. FIGHTING WILL NOT SOLVE THIS. I HOPED TO AVOID BLOODSHED" repeatedly. Data visits a tropical island with strange animals and plants, where he ends up jumping across lily pads like he's Crash fucking Bandicoot.

But you won't get to see all of these on one playthrough. The game actually gives you different missions on different playthroughs, necessitating multiple playthroughs to see everything the game has to offer. This was a really interesting idea but I'm not sure if it was the right one. You could have had the entire game consist of the away missions and removed all the rest and it would have been all the better for it.

Star Trek is simultaneously a fantastic and awful setting for a videogame. Fantastic because it's one of the best fictional worlds ever created, awful because the whole point of Star Trek is non-violence, discussion and conflict resolution, which doesn't tend to make for hugely exciting games - except RPGs but I don't think there's ever been a Star Trek RPG (I've never played Star Trek Online). This game has some pretty creative ways around this core problem, though. In addition to levels that involve no combat against sapient lifeforms, such as Beverley healing the living planet and Data exploring the tropical island, the game also has a stun mechanic. Your phaser can be set to stun or kill. This isn't just a cosmetic choice, though - stunned enemies may arise and attack you from behind if you take too long (only seemed to happen on a couple of missions, though). Additionally, ammo is very limited on certain missions, and if you pick too low a stun setting, you may have to fire multiple shots, wasting invaluable phaser ammo and potentially fucking yourself over. Considering a lot more modern games (Dishonored, the newer Deus Ex games, the new Hitman games etc) make non-lethally subduing enemies virtually identical to killing them, with no drawbacks or added challenge, it's great to play a game that encourages non-lethal methods but makes them suitably more difficult to employ than lethal violence.

There's a strong focus on puzzle solving over combat in virtually all of the missions. When combat does happen, it's surprisingly fun - the phaser feels satisfying to use, and if you do ever happen to set it to kill, it's as terrifyingly effective as you'd expect. You can turn off mouselook to move your cursor freely around the screen to get precise shots in, like in System Shock, and clearing out entire rooms of enemies with short targeted phaser bursts is cool as hell.

Oh, and as a final plus point, the game features the voices of the entire TNG cast plus William Shatner. And you can right click shit to make them examine it and say things!

So the game is a huge triumph creatively. It suffers quite a bit from poor execution though. First off, there's just no getting around the dated feel of the game. It isn't full 3D, the control scheme is just bizarre (you have to hold down right mouse to enable mouselook and it's insanely clunky and imprecise), and the visuals swing between looking pretty good and looking like shit depending on the level. Movement is clunky and the game demands the occasional platforming challenge, which are all uniformly nightmarish given how little control you really have over your character.

The last couple levels feel rushed and too combat-oriented - there's one where Riker literally has to fight about 50 Romulans, and the penultimate level where you play as Kirk has absolutely everyone coming to kick your ass. The puzzles are mainly good but some have that annoying "what the fuck" nature that adventure game puzzles sometimes have - usually you missed a small item way earlier on and now you're fucked.

I think the big drag on the game is the space combat portions though. They tried to do something really cool by having you keep going back to Stellar Cartography to try and plan against Soren's next move but really the game might have been stronger if it had just been a linear series of away missions.

FINAL RATING: It's a fantastic attempt at making a game with a true Star Trek identity, where violence and action take a backseat to adventure game elements. If it weren't hampered by dated technology and bad controls, if it didn't have the mandatory space battles, and if the devs had a little more time to refine some of it, this would easily be the best Star Trek game. As it stands, it's a project that clearly had a ton of passion put into it with some awesome concepts for levels, but which only occasionally manages to pull off good gameplay. 3 Shit Cave Things out of 5. although I was seriously considering giving the first ever 6 out of 5 rating just for the Beverley level.


Wonderful Butternut

Remember playing that one, although I don't think I ever actually owned it. Must've borrowed a copy or played it at a friend's or something. It's gotta lot of fun environments, but the huge big inventory and health UI taking up half the screen was a bit of a problem. iirc you can cheese most of the space battles by targeting your opponents' weapons. You can usually knock their weapons out before they destroy you, even if there's three of them. Although I think there's actually a couple of battles that you can just run away from to clear the enemy fleet from the relevant system and still go back and do the mission.

There's some way to trigger a ridiculous battle where Soran somehow has 10 ships following his orders and if you (somehow) win, the Ent-D isn't destroyed like it was in the movie.

Quote(I've never played Star Trek Online)

Don't. You'll probably be disappointed.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Fun review, I played the demo of it and hated it, but was young at the time. Combo of poor controls and unusual format made it less than enjoyable.

Lemming

Someone please help me. I can't get past the first level of Redneck Rampage. Not only do I not have a clue where to go, but I'm getting slaughtered by these identical "GIT OFF MY LAND" guys. THIS HAS GONE ON FOR 20 MINUTES

Played this as a kid and I definitely remember getting to at least the second level. Have my skills (such as they are) degraded over time, or did I just sink countless hours into this as a child until I eventually managed to pass the first level, infinite-monkeys-on-typewriters style?

popcorn

You've already suffered enough Lemming, treat yourself and skip to Half-Life!

Lemming

Unbelievably tempting, but that way we'd miss the mighty FORBES CORPORATE WARRIOR

madhair60

Quote from: Lemming on April 09, 2020, 11:32:05 PM
Someone please help me. I can't get past the first level of Redneck Rampage. Not only do I not have a clue where to go, but I'm getting slaughtered by these identical "GIT OFF MY LAND" guys. THIS HAS GONE ON FOR 20 MINUTES

Played this as a kid and I definitely remember getting to at least the second level. Have my skills (such as they are) degraded over time, or did I just sink countless hours into this as a child until I eventually managed to pass the first level, infinite-monkeys-on-typewriters style?

Dynamite grain silo

Lemming

Redneck Rampage is destroying my life. Might give up and post the review after only playing the first two episodes, unless Episode Three: Pissin' Contest is game-changingly excellent.