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March 29, 2024, 12:35:16 PM

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FPS NIGHTMARES

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

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Lemming

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (1998)





RELEASE DATE: 21st August, 1998

STORY: When a murderous group of radical environmentalists (???) steals a deadly strain of the Ebola virus and modify it to be able to kill almost all of humanity (???), it's a race against the clock to stop them from using it to depopulate the Earth (???). Only Rainbow Six, a secret, elite global counter terror unit (???) can put a stop to the terrorists' devious plans. Along the way, they stop to fight a fanatical anti-EU neo-Nazi organisation (???).

MUSIC: There was none, though there's an option for it in the menu so it's probably yet another GoG-induced fuckup.

ALPHA! GO!: This is, I think, the first proper tactical shooter. The game qualifies for this REVERED status with two gimmicks that define the experience and set it apart from the pack - first is the planning screen and second is the "realistic" combat.

To discuss the combat first, the gist of it is essentially that guns are scary and both you and your enemies will die in one or two hits - not only that, you'll die from halfway across the map from enemies you can't see. Similarly, you'll burst into rooms and kill three people in under a second. It's initially really cool to finally play a game where gunfights are actually dangerous and weapons are terrifying, but after the initial "ooh" factor fades away, the combat is janky as fuck, which I'll talk about later.

The planning stuff also seems cool at first. The first few missions have pre-made plans for you to study to get to grips with what a good plan looks like, and by playing them out, you get a sense of how cool the game can be when a plan goes perfectly and all your squads work together like clockwork.

From the fifth mission onwards, though, the game abandons pre-loaded plans and invites you to make your own. Frankly, it's not worth actually doing this, because to make a plan that's even semi-effective, you need to play the level about ten times to learn where everything is and what the layout is like because the map you're given on the planning screen really isn't that useful. By the time you're familiar enough with a level to make a proper plan for it, chances are you already beat the level by chance.

Any plan you do make can go utterly tits up through no fault of your own for all kinds of reasons - hostages die in crossfire in a way you literally could not have prevented, units get stuck on level geometry or furniture and can't move anymore, or - and this one is most common - the entire team just completely shits the fucking bed and walks single-file into a deathtrap, all four so-called "elite" counter terrorists getting torn apart by a weird Brexit terrorist in a t-shirt wielding a homemade pistol.

The planning also lacks some features that really should have been obvious inclusions. For example, other than go-codes, you have absolutely no control over a plan during the mission. I seem to remember the fantastic Rainbow Six 3 had exactly this, an in-game commands menu you could use to quickly re-plan and give new orders during missions. In Rainbow Six 1, though, if you notice a fatal flaw in the plan, you're fucked and just have to watch as pure farce unfolds before you.

So if you ditch the planning - and the game gives you every reason to do so - what are you left with? Well, for a game that tries so hard to set itself apart from a standard FPS, a standard FPS is basically what it ends up turning into. To summarise: the planning interface really isn't that useful and bad teammate AI means that any plan you do make is likely to backfire, so in the end, if you're anything like me, you give up on the plans, put yourself in charge of a team of your best units, and then just play it like a regular FPS.

The problem with this, though, is that the combat itself isn't really fleshed out enough to work, and ends up being pretty comical at times. Off the top of my head, some very obvious complaints:
- You can't lean around corners. Given that you virtually always get shot if you don't immediately see an enemy (every single terrorist you fight is somehow an expert highly-trained crack shot who will wipe out your entire squad in half a second), this means that you're going to die a few times.

- I can't really overstate how crucial the lack of leaning is. Rainbow Six 2 and 3 both have it, as I recall, and it's really a core mechanic. The lack of it here hurts the game more than any other design choice/"missing" feature. The only thing you can do is switch to third person mode and use the camera to look around corners that your character can't actually see around, which feels like cheating and is also stupid. The planning maps give you vague locations of terrorists but, of course, that's not accurate because the enemies move around. You can also play as a scout unit with a "heartbeat sensor" that will display enemies on the mini-map, but even knowing the enemy's approximate location won't save you from getting your dick blasted off the instant a single pixel of your body comes into your enemy's line of sight, before you can actually return fire.

- Auto-aim is a joke at times and causes you to miss people stood directly in front of you, but sadly, you more or less need it on, at least for a first run-through. Aiming is imprecise and awkward without it, and also, auto-aim helpfully magically knows who's hostile and who isn't. Without auto-aim, you're guaranteed to end up shooting hostages, surrendering enemies, etc. You also need auto-aim in situations where killing multiple people in under a couple seconds is a requirement, usually in hostage scenarios where the hostages will be executed as soon as you start firing. I found some of these to be borderline undoable without auto-aim.

- Your team frequently won't fire at enemies, preferring to watch you absolutely eat shit right before their eyes. As you fall to the ground, vision fading to blackness, you see your entire team stare uselessly at the ceiling as your killer fires another hail of bullets ripping your friends to pieces.

So you still end up just replaying levels until you learn where you're going to be ambushed, and then using your telepathic knowledge of all the terrorist's placements to kill them before the AI has time to react. It's a game of trial and error in the end, whether you use the planning system or not.

But somehow, it's still a lot of fun at times. Many maps are well designed and interesting, not only being visually and thematically impressive but also containing many side-rooms, ambush points, multi-floor areas with catwalks and such that can be used for surprise attacks, and so on. If you do bother to make a plan, it's satisfying to see it eventually pay off. When you start mastering the combat and doing ridiculous multi-person takedown shots from across the room, the game starts being pretty entertaining. There's also some cool missions with "moving parts", so to speak - there's one for example where when the mission begins, a convoy of cars is moving down a road towards your spawn point. You have to race against time to get your teams in place for an ambush. I wish more missions had this kind of thing going on, because it lends itself really well to the tactical/planning side of the game.

This is a really tough game to rate. The concept is awesome and full of great moments, the plot is actually really not bad, unintentionally funny though it is (seriously, armed Brexit fanatics have taken over a ceremony celebrating the introduction of the fucking Euro) and the combat can be tense.

Oh yeah, I forgot, there's two fucking godawful abysmal stealth missions which suck absolute shit and should not have been in the game. I won't discuss these further because the review would go on for 50 more paragraphs, but rest assured, I've actually not been so annoyed at any game so far in this thread. The first stealth mission is pure fucking atrociousness and took me over two hours of sustained trying before I lucked out, and then just as you think "thank fuck its over" it's immediately followed with another, even worse stealth mission. I actually quit the game for a couple days over it. For this reason, the rating is going down to 3 Incomprehensible Doomed Plans out of 5.



Next game: SHOGO Mobile Armor Division (1998)

evilcommiedictator

Rainbow 6 is based off the Tom Clancy novel of the same name, it's a right wing fever dream which explains the (???) but the bad guys are staging these terror events so their mercs can get the security contract for the Sydney Olympics and Ebola the world back to nature. It's not a bad read except for the plot tho

Mister Six

I remember reading reviews that said Rainbow 6 was really tough, but it never occurred to me that might be because it was just badly designed.

Lemming

Chronic insomnia has CRIPPLED my ability to play games or do much of anything else. Things are ultra slow-going lately, but it just lets the ANTICIPATION build for Half-Life.

Through the haze of crippling sleep deprivation, though, comes

SHOGO: Mobile Armor Division (1998)





RELEASE DATE: October 15th, 1998

STORY: On a distant planet, a war is being waged for a rare natural resource. Sanjuro, a mech pilot for the UCA army, is sent to kill the leader of a rebel organisation. BUT ALL IS NOT AS IT SEEMS!!!

MUSIC: Here's the soundtrack. Very late 90s vibe.

GET IN THE MCA: Did you ever have an anime phase? Maybe you're STILL HAVING ONE. I've had a few anime phases but one genre I always just passed by was the mecha genre. Teenagers piloting big robots and yelling - I literally do not give a fuck. Neon Genesis Evangelion, WASTE of time. Mobile Suit Gundam, more like Mobile Suit Boredom. Big robots punching each other, zZZzzzZZz.

I'm excited, then, that the first* anime-inspired FPS is based on that very genre!

*[citation needed]. I think it's the first, but maybe there's some mad PC-98 FPS I've never heard of

SHOGO's big gimmick is that you get to pilot a mech suit now and then. On paper, the game has two completely different experiences - mech-based levels and on foot levels. Sadly, there's two big problems - one is that the levels don't really feel unique from each other mechanics-wise, and the other is that the mech levels are by far the worst levels in the entire game.

For the most part, I largely enjoyed the levels where you're just playing as a non-mech guy and fighting other non-mech guys. These levels usually have you running around office buildings and cities, and map design is usually fairly tight, weapons are fun (and very effective), and it felt more or less like a run-of-the-mill solid FPS. As soon as you get into a mech, level design becomes sprawling and shitty. It's all in an attempt to simulate you being gigantic and moving over great distances, I suppose, but running around ugly and unconvincing-looking 3D cities is really boring, it turns out. Not least because the straightforward level design of the on-foot levels is traded for either putting you in a huge empty space with jack shit in it, or a big square-shaped arena full of clutter. The mech weapons, despite ostensibly being huge lasers of death, paradoxically feel far less effective than the on-foot weapons. I guess because you're fighting other mechas, who necessarily take more hits to kill than the unarmoured humans you fight in the non-mech levels.

In your mech suit (or MCA, as it's called), you get a wide variety of weapons which are, no joke, all shit. I can't even list them here because I frankly don't remember them because I just picked this weird plasma thing and stuck with it. On foot you get access to the usual loadout of weapons - shotgun, dual pistols, assault rifle - and they're all decent, accurate, punchy and powerful, and just generally much better than the mech weapons.

Combat is occasionally satisfying but often pretty janky. The engine is weird, it's capable of some decent graphics and impressive lighting and particle effects but something about it just feels very dated. There's also a really dumb critical hit system that I just could not figure out. Sometimes you get a crit for no reason, which deals more damage to an enemy and heals you a little. Can enemies get crits against you in return? Who knows. A point in the game's favour is that non-mech combat tends to be very quick and brutal, and letting your guard down often means going from full health to death in a couple of seconds. Since enemies are similarly squishy and go down in one or two hits, this gives the game a pleasing level of difficulty.

One big flaw is that enemy AI is terrible, so bad that even I noticed it when usually in these games I'm too busy getting my ass kicked to comment on AI. Enemies walk in a straight line towards you, allowing for pretty laughable scenarios where you stand at a corner and wait for someone to walk up, shoot them in the head, and then wait for their friend to make the exact same mistake, followed by another one and another one until you've cleared an entire room. This sort of undermines the otherwise tough combat, because you can just lead all enemies into death-zones and ambush them one at a time as they dumbly walk towards you yelling "SURRENDER NOW".

The plot isn't exactly coherent but it's got just about enough presence to let you know what's going on and why. Basically the bulk of the game revolves around solving a mystery - your friends who were declared KIA are actually alive, and you have to go find out why while your employer yells at you and threatens you not to look into it further.

Interestingly, the game offers a few interesting moments of flexibility in its design. For example, there's a part where you need to open a gate, and the woman who owns it says she'll open it if you go find her lost cat in a power station. This is a relatively lengthy bit of side-content, which you can entirely bypass by just shooting the gatekeeper in the face, walking over her corpse and opening the gate yourself. Similarly, later on, you're contacted by a shady guy who wants you to do some work for him in exchange for helping you sneak into a base. You can just ignore him and walk straight into the base, at which point he'll get pissy and betray you by raising the alarm, but if you can fight your way through then the game will let you continue. It's pretty cool and like a very very VERY light version of the first half of Deus Ex, where you could routinely ignore what the game wanted you to do and find another way around, and the game would accomodate you.

It's tough to write more about this game, and not just because I'm so tired that I'm not even certain that I'm not dreaming right now. It's a very straightforward game that's not doing anything too impressive or unique. Reading up on it a little, it seems there's a consensus that it suffered due to being released only a month before Half-Life. Speaking of which, something I've been noticing lately is that many of the things Half-Life gets credited/blamed for - the loss of keycards, the move towards completely linear levels, an over-abundance of scripted moments and setpieces - are already in effect. Unreal and Shogo are far closer to Half-Life than they are to something like Doom, and even games like Klingon Honor Guard and Dark Forces have very Half-Life-esque moments of spectacle. It's a really interesting time in the FPS genre, especially with the hindsight of knowing what's coming up.

FINAL RATING: I dunno, it's alright. The mech levels drag it down, as does the general jankiness. 3 Incredible Anime-Inspired Art Styles out of 5 should do it.



Next game: Delta Force (1998), I think, but don't quote me on that.

PlanktonSideburns

Sorry to hear you're having a shitter of it lemming! Great review tho. Man I think I played delta force!

Lemming

Fighting through the PAIN to play Delta Force.

Delta Force (1998)





RELEASE DATE: October 31st 1998

STORY: Terrorist scum are working against the interests of the United States! Bastards! As a member of the gallant Delta Force, its your job to shoot people in the back from 500 meters away, at night, before they know you're there.

MUSIC: None. Wouldn't want anything to ruin the thrill of walking through a big field.

CHARLIE ONE IS DOWN: Rainbow Six demonstrated that guns can be pretty scary. Delta Force takes it about five steps further and shows that guns are terrifying to almost nightmarish proportions.

Delta Force is a game all about range. Really huge ranges. Your rifle scope measures the distance between you and targets, and you'll be killing most of your enemies from 500+ meters away. The fun part is that they'll do the same to you.

The gameplay is so basic and yet so effective that it's kind of hard to describe. Basically you're dumped into huge wide open maps. Enemies, usually about 20 - 40 of them, are scattered about the place. It's up to you to fight your way through. That's about it. There are rarely any real objectives, almost all of them just act as window dressing to explain why you've got to kill everyone on the map.

But the combat is so bizarre and unique that it really makes the game. You almost never get into close quarters combat, and you almost never get close enough to enemies to actually even see what they look like. For most of the game, you're firing at vaguely human shapes literally half a mile away, watching for enemy fire to try and figure out where the fuck you're being shot from.

It's completely unpersonal and mechanical. You fire and the blurry figure in the distance collapses. You scan the horizon and see another faintly human-looking shape. You fire - nothing, it's just a tree. You scan the horizon again and see another shape. You fire, and it goes down. You notice bullets flying in your general direction, so you get up and move to a new sniping position, then continue shooting at more blurry shapes.

The main take-away here is that guns are evil and really shouldn't exist.

Anyway, completely unique combat mechanics aside, Delta Force's other big feature is the landscapes. Someone who knows how the tech actually works will hopefully come along and explain how the effect is achieved, but as you can see in the screenshots, Delta Force renders HUGE areas. The detail obviously gets very pixellated only a short range in front of the player, but it's still very impressive, and it's the first FPS game that's really offered the sense of being truly outdoors.

Playing the missions in order, you almost feel as though the developers are improving as you go along. The first campaign is mainly full of large, featureless, empty fields, with enemies placed virtually at random. The last campaign throws you into landscapes littered with encampments, airstrips, warehouses, small villages and towns, enemy air support and more. This means that the early missions generally suck but I'm always a fan of games where you experience the dev team's skill increasing as you play along, so I was on board with it.

Each mission begins with a briefing that'll send you to sleep and a plan. As in Rainbow Six, there are waypoints to follow, but in this case you don't get any control over them. You also have no control over your teammates. In fact, you, the player, are the only effective member of Delta Force. Your teammates will almost ALWAYS die in laughably pathetic ways, often scoring absolutely no kills and failing to help you in any way. Charlie Team in particular seems to be some kind of joke squad because all they ever do is show up, fire blindly (giving your position away and alerting the enemies) and then immediately meet their demise at the hands of some chump with a pistol. That's if they manage to show up at all - there were more than a couple missions where the briefing promised I'd get backup, Charlie Team did indeed appear on the map, and then just stood there two miles away from the combat doing jack shit. They still sometimes managed to die even then.

The game's big problem is mostly those early levels. It's more of an idea than a game, right until the end. The mechanics are there, the engine is there, the basic frame of a game is there, but it all feels under-designed. They might as well have generated most of these maps at random and then placed enemies by just shutting their eyes and putting them anywhere, because that's how these levels end up.

There are also a range of weapons, sidearms and bonus gear to choose from. Unless I'm missing something, there is literally no reason at all to EVER use ANYTHING other than the M16 with the grenade launcher. The sniper and MP5 are useless because they lack scopes and the entire crux of the game is being a pussy and hitting people from half a mile away. Sidearms are useless (though the silenced pistol is useful on the rare occasional level when you can stealthily take out a few guards before inevitably being set upon by the main force), and of the bonus gear, you'll always pick the LAW because it's just the best. The M16 has near-infinite range, pinpoint accuracy, can be set to various firing modes, is effective either as a sniper rifle at great distance or fired from the hip at close range, and the grenade launcher makes short work of any enemy vehicles. Why the fuck would you pick the MP5, which requires you to run straight up to enemies (antithetical to the game design and almost always gets you killed), and then runs out of fucking ammo anyway?

FINAL RATING: It's a really great proof of concept. I have very, VERY hazy memories of Delta Force 2, but I think that's the game that takes this concept and these mechanics and turns it all into an actual game, rather than just a big sandbox shooting thing. So, 2.5 Possibly Human Shapes In The Distance out of 5.



THE GAME SUMMARISED IN A BOTTOM QUOTE:


I am fully convinced that Bottom has a quote suitable for every single game. Putting that theory to the test.

Next game: LSD Dream Emulator (1998), I think. The chronology of the list is fucked though so it could be anything really.

popcorn

Fuck me, I had Delta Force. We had a lodger when I was a kid and we both used to play on my dad's PC, and he bought it. The lodger I mean, not my dad. It was when I was young enough that any sort of video game I could get my hands on was worth trying but my god it was dry. I remember the sniping felt vaguely like Command and Conquer, placing the crosshair over tiny pixellated men and clicking.

Those screenshots take me back to boring summer afternoons bitterly trying to squeeze some sort of fun out of it. Luckily Half-Life came along not long after, thank fuck.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

I also remember playing Delta Force and remember the sort of impersonal, immediately quite fun, then quickly tedious dynamic of sniping. There's a sort of absence of drama and structure which may have helped create some sort of tension.

Evil Knevil

I had this at the time (paid £20 I think, which was a lot for a 15 year old in the 1990s) and I quite enjoyed it I think -- genuinely was the sheer power of the guns and being able to mash people from miles away- from what I recall the sound effects were fairly understated but effective- the brief roar of a gun and a splat when the bullets hit home.

PlanktonSideburns

I also fondly recall the gritty tedium of delta force. Gave me the same uncular thrill as playing Windows Flight simulator

Cold Meat Platter

Quote from: PlanktonSideburns on August 11, 2020, 07:12:19 AM
I also fondly recall the gritty tedium of delta force. Gave me the same uncular thrill as playing Windows Flight simulator

It very much was an army man simulator. Far prefer the vibe of things like this and Operation Flashpoint to the more narrative driven jingoistic shooters that started turning up post Sept 11th.
There was something cool and reassuring about the attempted realism. It had bullet drop didn't it? I hadn't seen that in a game before. And the voxel landscape was pretty advanced for the time, same engine they had used for the Comanche games I understand.

The Crumb

Quote from: Cold Meat Platter on August 11, 2020, 09:39:24 PM
It very much was an army man simulator. Far prefer the vibe of things like this and Operation Flashpoint to the more narrative driven jingoistic shooters that started turning up post Sept 11th.

Operation Flashpoint was a fascinating game, it had a really odd, downbeat atmosphere. Loved that you could just bin off your mission and go on a tractor tour of the island. The mission creator was great too, drop in shitloads of tanks and helicopters and see who comes out on top

Jerzy Bondov

I played the demo of the first Delta Force but I absolutely rinsed the third one, Land Warrior. They changed the engine to have more advanced buildings, which meant you spent a lot of time in tunnels. That's what you want from your sniping game, tunnels. The first mission is terrorists in Giza and the way your commander pronounces Sphinx has really stuck with me. Sphenx, he says.

Cuellar

God yeah I remember Delta Force. Never really sure what I was doing, or why I was doing it, but seeing it through to grim and bitter end.

Excellent futile war simulator.

PlanktonSideburns

is there some sort of weird crossover where, like

not everyone played deltaforce, but all of them went on to become members of cookdnbombd?

feel like DF (as us deltaheads call it)  might have been my first step towards pacifism - it made joining the army seem about as exciting as doing work experience with your quantity surveyor uncle

Lemming

LSD Dream Emulator (1998)





RELEASE DATE: 22nd October, 1998

STORY: This game was made by a company called Asmik Ace Entertainment, Inc. One of the employees, Hiroko Nishikawa, started having strange and occasionally frightening dreams during the late 1980s, and began recording them in a journal. She showed this journal to her fellow devs, and everyone thought it was way cool and worth making a game about.

MUSIC: Mainly weird beats and electronic screeching noises. I mean, it is basically a nightmare simulator, after all.

LOVELY SWEET DREAM: Yeah, it's actually based on a real dream journal, which you could get as a physical book along with the game (neither of which I own). Here's a few extracts of Nishikawa's journal. Check out the third one, entitled "Plugging a Plug up the Asses of Game Characters":

 

No idea what the hell was going on with her in those days, but these surreal dreamscapes form the basis of this game.

The game is non-linear and it seems every playthrough is different because the game decides (more or less) randomly which maps to place you in and what characters or objects to put in those maps, but here's how my playthrough went. When you start, you find yourself in a small-ish 3D area, very unremarkable. You might get a field, or your apartment building, or a small town. You walk around, nothing happens, then the game suddenly takes you back to the menu and informs you that Day 1 is over and Day 2 is beginning.

Day 2 goes much the same. On Day 3, you begin your walk through your apartment building again, but a strange gargoyle creature is circling around outside. Hmm. You head out anyway and find yourself in the same town you saw before, but it's different now. Corpses covered in blood scatter the streets. You walk ahead anyway and find yourself suddenly sucked into a large field with a floating, textureless elephant above you. Then you wake up.

The next day begins and there's a giant baby waiting for you outside your bedroom, who spits a kanji character at you which teleports you into a room full of dancing fetuses. You see where this is going, it gets progressively more and more bizarre as it goes on.

There's virtually no gameplay - all you can do is walk around, look up and down, and bump into things. If you bump into anything, the screen fades out and then fades back in, dropping you in a different map. After each dream, you get to see your dream ranked on a chart. I literally had no idea what the chart meant. One of the axes is Upper vs Downer, and yet seeing three women hanging dead from a lamppost, being chased by a lion, and seeing dismembered body parts stuffed into a dumpster counted as an Upper, so the chart hardly makes sense.

There's a great twist - early on, during the first few days, you'll see a brief flash of what appears to be a man in a fedora and a grey trenchcoat. You shrug it off as just another weird dream thing, but then a few days later, you see him again, and he's chasing you. This lasts the whole game, and he'll ALWAYS show up when you least expect it, scare the shit out of you, and often end the dream immediately by touching you. As far as I could tell, he can appear in any map at any time. In addition to ending your dream, he'll also erase your Dream Journal, which is horseshit because the game only brings out the weirdest and most horrifying stuff when you've gotten plenty of dreams in there. It's weird how frightening this guy ends up being - the whole concept of a mysterious malicious figure pursuing you through every dream is disturbing enough, but the fact that being caught by him results in the only actual gameplay penalty it's possible to incur in the entire game makes it a proper "ooh fuck no" moment whenever he suddenly appears before you.

In addition to throwing an array of bizarre things into the maps, the game also sometimes completely changes all the textures. There are three texture sets, in addition to the regular textures: Kanji (everything becomes garishly coloured and covered in kanji text), Sexual (everything becomes brightly coloured and cartoonish - no, there's no actual sexual content, as far as I could find) and Downer (things become darkly coloured and NPCs often become downright terrifying).

Let me demonstrate this: here's a lion. These are pretty unnerving to start with - they move peculiarly, sometimes can fly (?!), and they'll often walk slowly towards you in groups of three, ending the dream or sending you away if they catch you.


Here's the lion when affected by the "Sexual" texture set:


What's sexual about this? I don't know. Anyway, here's the "Downer" lion:


Yep, it's fucking horrifying!

It's hard to review this game, so I'll just keep listing interesting things. You might sometimes find a woman in a bed (supposed to be you, I guess):


When you see her again a few days later:


And you don't even want to know what happens to her in the Downer texture set.

FINAL RATING: Can't rate it, because it's not a game in the traditional sense. It does have a fairly short shelf-life in terms of holding your interest, but for two or three hours of fucking about and trying to see all the scary shit hidden in the game, it's good fun and a very interesting piece of, uh, software or whatever you'd call it.

It's also the only videogame I've ever played that I've genuinely found scary. Horror games (and horror movies/series, for the most part) have very little effect on me, but this game manages to instill such a real sense of foreboding and dread that it almost becomes unpleasant to play. In addition to all the occasionally shocking things the game puts before you, it's very successful in making you wonder what the hell you're going to see next, to the point where every time you turn a corner, part of you is terrified of what might await you. On top of that, the fact that you can sometimes just get teleported somewhere awful against your will (I got suddenly teleported into a corridor made of flesh more than a few times) makes literally every second of the game nerve-wracking.

You can check out a full list of all the possible weird shit the game can throw at you here, on the game's wiki.

Quite a short and disjointed review, I know, but it's really hard to write about given the fact that it's got no actual gameplay or progression (beyond filling your Dream Journal), and that basically the entire game is in seeing unexpected and odd things, which is a difficult experience to describe in text. Overall though, really interesting piece of videogame history.

THE GAME SUMMARISED IN A BOTTOM QUOTE:


NEXT GAME: Montezuma's Return! (1998)

PlanktonSideburns

Yes! More lemming!  Hope you're doing good like.

Lemming

I'm good, thanks for asking! The sleep deprivation torment is over, replaced by an assortment of micro-torments which are far easier to handle.

Ferris

Glad to hear it. These reviews are brilliant, I make a little "ooh!" noise when I see you've posted in this thread because another fun review is coming my way.

I grew up playing video games in the '90s and I've heard of basically none of these except delta force and the obvious ones like quake and half life so it's a really nice little window into things I should probably know about already.

Mister Six

Been poking around the wiki for this and it sounds amazing. Thanks for bringing it to our attention, Lemming!

purlieu

That looks brilliant. Would love to see one with more up-to-date graphics as I can imagine them doing some really bloody scary lifelike things now.

PlanktonSideburns

Quote from: FerriswheelBueller on August 24, 2020, 04:03:27 PM
Glad to hear it. These reviews are brilliant, I make a little "ooh!" noise when I see you've posted in this thread because another fun review is coming my way.

I grew up playing video games in the '90s and I've heard of basically none of these except delta force and the obvious ones like quake and half life so it's a really nice little window into things I should probably know about already.

To think we could have been playing lsd: mindfuck emulator, but instead we were trudging around Delta Force, joyless killing distant strangers

Ferris

Delta force was dead fucking boring, it's like itchy and scratchy's journey to the fireworks factory. Every time you see a baddie you think "ooh here comes the fun combat!" but there's only one of the fuckers and you can pick him off by very slowly creeping forward over a polygonal hill and pixel-hunting until you hit them.... the exact same thing again and again.

I remember preferring mechwarrior 2 (which was marginally less shit) but ultimately the command and conquer knockoff Total Annhilation was always the go-to. Not played an RTS since.

Plankton is right - I would have much preferred some of these mad games instead. Days are gone.

popcorn

Quote from: FerriswheelBueller on August 24, 2020, 11:39:39 PM
there's only one of the fuckers and you can pick him off by very slowly creeping forward over a polygonal hill and pixel-hunting until you hit them.... the exact same thing again and again.


But enough about your sex life Ferris what about the game ?? ?? ?

??

Ferris


evilcommiedictator

Thanks Lemming, really enjoy reading when a new post comes up, great work!

Mister Six

Also just realised that LSD is the only game so far that actually lives up to the thread's title.

Cold Meat Platter

Quote from: Mister Six on August 26, 2020, 03:00:21 AM
Also just realised that LSD is the only game so far that actually lives up to the thread's title.

Can you shoot in it?

Mister Six

The S stands for Simulated, obviously.

Cold Meat Platter

I thought it stood for 'sergic.