RETRO-BLAST 90s

[ASFTSN]

The original Alone In The Dark is great, a haunted-house smorgasboard with extra Cthulhu garnish all over it.

[Lemming]

Every time I replay it I'm amazed at how good it still is. I kind of prefer it to Resident Evil even if RE almost objectively has the edge in terms of polish.

However:


Anyone who has ever complained about the platforming in the likes of Tomb Raider or Xen in Half-Life should be forced at gunpoint to play this section of AitD to see what terrible platforming really looks like. I love how comically extreme the consequences for failure are too; all rifle ammo destroyed instantly on contact with the water.

[madhair60]

excited for this AITD post

[Lemming]

Alone in the Dark (1992)



RELEASE DATE: 1992



STORY: In the year 1924, a reclusive painter with an interest in the occult dies by suicide. His niece becomes convinced that some supernatural force was involved, and goes to investigate the mansion in which her uncle died.

LOOK AT THE PIANO, EMILY: Alone in the Dark is a really interesting franchise because, despite its prominence in gaming history, I could hardly tell you a thing about it. It's been rebooted once or twice, has had a couple of movies made of it by the legendary Uwe Boll (beloved director among gamers worldwide). The original 1992 game has a reboot coming out later this year with Jodie Comer and David Harbour as the protagonists. It's simultaneously a big title and also sort of half-forgotten. From the fact that this game has been rebooted twice now (that I know of), maybe it's fair to conclude that it's still the most interesting game in the series.

If you've ever played Resident Evil, then you've essentially played Alone in the Dark - fixed camera angles of pre-rendered backgrounds, choice of two different characters, jankiest combat in the history of the world, inventory management (much more generous in AitD than in RE), wandering around thinking "what the fuck am I meant to do", and using items to solve puzzles. And demon dogs smashing through windows.
 
The two heroes to pick from are private investigator Edward Carnby, and Southern gentlewoman Emily Hartwood. Funnily enough, nobody ever seems to remember Emily, but she's actually the default protagonist, and the one who makes the most sense by far given her direct connection to the mansion (Jeremy, the reclusive painter who's offed himself, is her uncle). And, more importantly, her accent is hilarious and she pronounces "family lawyer" as "fahmleh lawh-hyah". I don't get why anyone would pick Carnby, whose opening narration is just him explaining how much of a dickhead he is! He does have a superb mustache in-game, but other than that, no advantage.

It doesn't really matter who you pick - Emily apparently moves slightly faster and Carnby has a better melee range when using the kick attack, but it's basically irrelevant. I think the full extent of the impact on the story is that it changes the description of one object, a photograph ("A photo of uncle Jeremy and me!" if you're Emily, "a photo of Jeremy and his niece" if you're Carnby).

When you get into the game, you'll find it to be more or less exactly like Resident Evil, as mentioned. Unlike in Resident Evil, though, actions aren't contextual; you have to choose your action from the menu. This puts you into various modes - combat mode, search mode, jump mode, etc. It's kind of awkward but it's not too bad.

The game also has a bit more of a sense of fun than RE and is somewhat more willing to tease the player - one of the stupidest instant deaths in videogame history will occur if you try to walk down the corridor leading out of the attic, opening the main doors will get you eaten by a creature from beyond the cosmos, and there's a lot of other similar instakill traps for you to fall into. Luckily, you can save anywhere (albeit only one save slot!) and so as long as you remember to save, being tricked into death is usually more amusing than annoying.

When you escape the attic and the upper floor, you'll enter the main part of the mansion, where the bulk of the game takes place. Learning the layout won't take long and from there it's a case of solving a few puzzles and gathering some keys to eventually move into the underground area. This part of the game is great fun and flows really well; all puzzles feel intuitive (the only one I had trouble with was disarming the killer painting, I assume the solution was written in one of the in-game books somewhere because I don't know how the hell you'd ever figure it out otherwise). Some of the setpieces are just great, too - the waltzing ghost couples, the sword duel against the undead pirate, the library monster, the room with the weird deathly cigar smoke.

The game's briefness, and the relatively small size of the mansion, makes things very easy to digest. You'll never really worry about abandoning an item, because you'll not have to go far to retrieve it, nor will you ever be truly lost, especially when you gather enough keys to find out where all the rooms are and how they connect.

It'll probably take no more than an hour to clear this, at which point you're on to the underground. This plays a bit more like an action game, with you outrunning giant death-worms and leaping across chasms. The platforming controls are awkward but the whole area is such a refreshing and unusual change of pace from the slower puzzle-solving gameplay earlier that I never got pissed off with it, even in that BASTARD room with all the collapsing wooden walkways and the cunty alligator people waiting in the water below.

And then, all too soon, the game is over. I generally really appreciate short games and find that most games overstay their welcome, but even I would have liked another hour or so of gameplay with Alone in the Dark. Still, better to be too short than too long.

THE GOOD:
- Visuals still look great today thanks to surreal art direction
- Fun dreamlike atmosphere with great setpieces
- Game is concise and brief meaning that getting lost isn't a problem
- Puzzles are mostly intuitive and there's only one way to dead-end yourself

THE BAD:
- Controls can be slightly awkward, especially in the platforming sections in the finale
- Camera can fuck you over a couple times, though not generally a big deal

THE VERDICT: I always wonder how Resident Evil got away with ripping AitD off so hard! The two games beg to be compared, and though Resident Evil is fantastic and pushes the concept forward with some superb additions and refinements, something about Alone in the Dark's concise and focused design, not to mention the far more memorable and surreal visuals, gives it the edge in a few areas.

1992 was a big year for games, with plenty of attempts at making things feel grander and more cinematic. Wolfenstein 3D offered better first-person action than ever before (though granted, its only real competition was stuff like Catacomb 3-D and Hovertank), Ultima Underworld offered a bollock-breaking level of immersion in a huge 3D world, and Darklands tried to bring the scale and intricacy of a tabletop RPG campaign into a videogame. Even among stiff competition like that, Alone in the Dark stands out as being particularly impressive and cinematic - the dynamic soundtrack, the camera angles, the memorable setpieces, all of them combine to offer something that really feels filmic and spectacular, and that still holds up today even though the backgrounds can look a bit pixelly and the Emily/Carnby models look genuinely hysterical.
 
If you like the survival horror genre then Alone in the Dark is still one of the best!

GOLD STAR



See previous gold and silver stars on the BIG BACKLOGGD LISTS: Gold, Silver

[Mister Six]

I used to play the demo of this - don't know where it came from; on some other game's CD, maybe? - obsessively, but when I borrowed the game proper off a mate I was too much of a pussy to leave the nice, safe attic.

Block the window, block the trap door, sit in the attic and starve to death. Lovely.

[Jerzy Bondov]

I was a kid, I installed the demo, wandered about in the attic getting used to the controls, some fucken thing came in the window, I immediately closed the game down and uninstalled it.

[JaDanketies]

I took Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday off work and played a lot of Blood and Rollercoaster Tycoon. I'm working again today tho :(

[Waking Life]

I was a kid, I installed the demo, wandered about in the attic getting used to the controls, some fucken thing came in the window, I immediately closed the game down and uninstalled it.

Thats what happened to me too.

[shoulders]

National Trust : LAZER DIVISION

I laughed

[Lemming]

The attic is such a great intro to the game too because, in addition to people who fall for both the window and the trapdoor jumpscares, there's a good chance that you'll block the window, smugly think you've outfoxed the game when the dog fails to get in, and then suddenly have the trapdoor zombie come up behind you. It's hilarious and a great way to show players that pretty much anything that can possibly go wrong will go wrong in this game.

[bgmnts]

Excellent stuff.

A beautiful cover as well.

[Lemming]

While plugging away at Traffic Department 2192 - which is long as fuck, chiefly due to being 90% cutscenes - it occurred to me that the thread has been on an unintentional female protagonist streak for a while now, since Tomb Raider, interrupted only by Crusader: No Remorse.

Tomb Raider, Fallout, Menzoberranzan, HEDZ (you're some kind of asexual alien but you can adopt female personas through the grim magic of head-removal), Drakan, Alone in the Dark, and soon Traffic Department 2192. All have either set female protagonists or offer character creation options.

On one hand, the thread is now in dire need of testosterone, which could come in the form of a super-hunk like Crash Bandicoot or the bloke from The Last Express. On the other hand, I wonder how far you could take a female-protagonists-only streak. Looking over some potential options for future games and the answer is "for fucking ages". Here's games from my list that, to my knowledge, have female protagonists (and it's a very incomplete list, especially since I don't have many console games noted down yet):

Spoiler alert

Fallout 2
Baldur's Gate
Urban Chaos
Phantasmagoria
Grand Theft Auto
Re-Loaded
Rage of Mages
ODT: Escape Or Die Trying
MageSlayer
The Legacy: Realm of Terror
Hired Guns
Deathtrap Dungeon
Jill of the Jungle
Darklands
Oregon Trail (kind of, in that the characters are all represented by names. Also yes I know it's a 70s game but look, it came out on DOS in 1990)
Bad Blood
Civilization
Dark Sun: Shattered Lands
Anvil of Dawn
Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession
Master of Magic
Umihara Kawase
The Elder Scrolls: Battlespire
Ultima Underworld
Jagged Alliance 2
Realms of Chaos
Star Trek The Next Generation: A Final Unity (sort of, in that you can play as Troi or Beverly for almost the whole game)
DeathKeep
Resident Evil
Daughter of Serpents
Dino Crisis
DarkStone
Space 1889
Realms of Chaos
Carmageddon
Diablo
Tomb Raider II, III and IV
Nightmare Creatures
Meat Puppet
Wizardry VI and VII
Clock Tower
Space Bunnies Must Die!
The Dagger of Amon Ra
Excalibur 2555 AD (looking forward to this, truly awful game)

[close]

Anyway, happy belated International Women's Day - for RETROBLAST 90s, women's day inadvertently started in December, because we don't do things by half measures.

[Lemming]

Looking over that list again and this seems like an appropriate game to follow Alone in the Dark, as sort of a "game from 1992 in which a woman wearing a business jacket and pencil skirt gets trapped in a big haunted mansion and punches demons to death while solving puzzles" double bill!

THE LEGACY: REALM OF TERROR



Extraordinary next-level hardcore mega tagline aside, this is a bit of a shonky ad. You have to actually squint to see the title of the game.

MicroProse weren't fucking around here - at the bottom there you can see that they're promising seriously fun software. I've seen quite a few MicroProse magazine ads from around the same time and I can't remember any making such a promise before, so the expectations for this one are stratospheric.

[Mister Six]

Absolutely storming copy there. Someone in the marketing department was having fun. If only those shitty little screenshots lived up to the novella they accompany; by the looks of things they're from pre-rendered cutscenes, and they still look cack.

Shame that once you get to 1997 or thereabouts, these ads are all just going to be black and white pictures of a woman in bondage gear with shit puns about GRABBING YOUR JOYSTICKS and PLAYING WITH YOURSELF.

[bgmnts]

Yeah fair play marketing earnt their pay there. Stupefying stumpers is a great turn of phrase.

[Lemming]

About an hour into The Legacy and I already love it. Only game I can immediately think of where your character screams in terror whenever they see an enemy and you lose the ability to move or do anything other than scream until you're killed.

Shame that once you get to 1997 or thereabouts, these ads are all just going to be black and white pictures of a woman in bondage gear with shit puns about GRABBING YOUR JOYSTICKS and PLAYING WITH YOURSELF.

Even amid all the sexism and tastelessness of that era, the ones that stick in my mind are the ones where it's just something surreal and unnerving with no connection to the game at all. Great example:


Saw it for the first time years ago and to this day have no idea what the fuck it means. Maybe someone told the ad company that it's a game "about fighting lizard people" (ie the Skaarj) or something, and nobody bothered to send screenshots or give any further description.

This one too, absolutely no idea how this could have come about (unless the baby's meant to have some tenuous connection to Nihilanth):

[Mister Six]

That Half-Life one looks like an ad for a completely different, but equally interesting, game.

[bgmnts]

Quite impressive that they managed to get Michael J Pollard to star in the game.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Even amid all the sexism and tastelessness of that era, the ones that stick in my mind are the ones where it's just something surreal and unnerving with no connection to the game at all. Great example:


Saw it for the first time years ago and to this day have no idea what the fuck it means.

I think it means the ad agency just got Photoshop.

[Lemming]

Found a newspaper reporting my own suicide, then I was suddenly pulled into the "Ethereal Plane", which appears to be a Windows Media Player music visualisation with floating CGI cubes that repel you when you try to touch them. Then some old guy told me that my "nemesis", who I know nothing about and have never heard of, dwells in THE ASTRAL PLANE. Oh and I'm also wearing a kevlar vest and a circlet that repels magic, and am wielding a baseball bat, but I'm otherwise still dressed in my Late 80s New York Businesswoman outfit.

This game's fucking hilarious, I have no idea why you never hear people talking about it. Seems to have gotten decent reviews at the time but has been almost totally forgotten now.

[Lemming]

The Legacy: Realm of Terror (1992)



RELEASE DATE: 1992 (by the way, if you're wondering why I'm doing this completely redundant "release date" thing where I just put the year, it's because a lot of these games have no known month or day of release. Which amazes me, you'd think it'd be written down somewhere, but everywhere just says "1992" for this one)



STORY: The CEO of a property development company discovers that she is the heir to a stately mansion in New England, and plans to turn it into a luxury hotel. Upon entering the mansion, she becomes trapped, and unveils a plan started by her malevolent ancestor from centuries ago to bring a terrible cosmic horror into the world with a complicated ritual. The final ingredient in the ritual is her death.

HEIR LEAVES ON WORLD CRUISE: This game was a shock. I picked it because it sounded incredibly naff and I thought it'd be a laugh, but it's actually a pretty compelling game. It styles itself as a cross between an RPG and an adventure game, and that's sort of what it is - you're running around collecting items and solving puzzles as in a point-and-click adventure, but the game takes the form of an "Eye of the Beholder" style blobber.

The premise I wrote in the story section up there is just one of six (I think?) possible stories. You can play as several different characters, only one of whom is MILLIONAIRE PROPERTY DEVELOPER CEO CHARLOTTE KANE. The others include a professor, a valley girl, a mysterious woman who's clearly a witch, and some knobhead called Brad. The game plays the same whoever you pick and you can edit each character's attributes and skills to be whatever you want, but having such clearly-defined characters is a great thing in a game like this (the somewhat similar Anvil of Dawn would do the same thing a few years later). I think I prefer to be told who I am, why I'm here, and what my goals are rather than the "Eye of the Beholder" route of just having me generate four people entirely from my own imagination, though I guess both styles have their place.

When you read the manual, they tell you that this is NOT A COMBAT GAME!! IT'S NOT A TYPICAL RPG!! YOU SHOULD RUN FROM ENCOUNTERS!! As I think most people will, I read this, rolled my eyes, assumed it was some over-enthusiastic marketing talk from the devs, and built a combat-focused character, putting virtually all my skill points into the Club skill and all my attribute points into Strength and Stamina.

It turns out the devs weren't joking around, because you can't win most fights in this game, at least not at first. You get absolutely toasted. Worse, health and mana do not restore over time, and your only way to restore them is with limited-use items, which are fairly rare. You can die from attrition in this game pretty easily, and if you're a combat character, you probably will.

Unfortunately, the RPG systems kind of suck shit. It's hard to describe what's wrong with them without showing you, but basically - as stated, you're not meant to fight enemies, and you essentially can't, so combat skills are worthless. On top of that, several other skills are quite literally useless, in that they don't seem to be implemented in the game. On top of that, you need magic to finish the game - this isn't told to you at all during character creation, so if you choose to play as a character with no magic, you'll be on the back foot trying to catch up (though it is still possible to win the game with almost no mana).

So why the fuck let me build my own character if there's essentially only one viable character type?! To add to the issues, here's a few other problems:
- the Firearms skill and the Throwing skill are swapped due to a bug. The Firearms skill is mildly useful in later levels, the Throwing skill is never useful.
- Brawling is meant to govern unarmed damage but it does nothing; unarmed damage is governed by the Club skill for some reason.
- Lift does nothing. It's meant to let you lift heavy objects; none exist in the game as far as I can tell.
- Force, as far as I know, does nothing; it's meant to be for kicking doors down but I never found a door in the game that responded to this.
- Mechanical and Electric are for lockpicking. Not only are they useless, but you need items to use them... items which are much harder to find than the keys to the doors in question.

This is maddening. Not only have they put in an RPG system that basically punishes anyone who doesn't have the meta-knowledge to make the only worthwhile character type, but also half the options are broken and do nothing. This isn't even uncommong for RPGs of this era, but I still have no fucking idea how anyone ever thought they could get away with this.

So, you have to take the game on the terms it wants to be taken on - don't fight enemies unless you literally have to, put all your points in dodge and run past them. Forsake your combat skills because you'll never truly need them; instead put all your points into Dodge and Meditation (the latter restores mana).

However, the game does at least commit to this - most enemies can be overcome in a non-combat way. The zombies on the first floor, for example, will go non-hostile if you acquire the Juju Fetish. The "nightcrawlers" - demonic crab things - in the Museum can be eliminated by destroying three statues, which banishes the nightcrawlers from the physical world. The Servitors (mindflayer-type creatures) can be fooled by wearing a dead squid on your face and pretending to be one of them. These solutions are all fantastic, often pretty amusing, and it means that as soon as you enter a new floor, you're always looking for ways to outwit, rather than fight, the enemies there. That's very unique for an early 90s blobber.

Not all enemies can be vanquished like this, though, and ultimately most enemies in the game are just annoying - it's basically a health tax. Run up to them, try to run through them, roll your Dodge skill. Then, either you go past as if they weren't even there, or you fail and get hit, and roll again until you make it. It's just an irritating health tax, more than anything.

Speaking of health, your health and mana are incredibly precious, because there's no rest mechanic and they don't replenish automatically over time. Your only way to restore health is through first aid kits or the healing spell, and your only way to restore mana is through crystals. Both of these options can fail and have you waste some or all of the item in question for no gain. There's a limited supply of each and, when you run out, you will essentially lose the game.

Anyway - level design is competent and the game has a nice automapping feature (though irritatingly lacks the ability to annotate the map, which would have really helped). Puzzles are fun and largely fairly intuitive. The story is barmy but very entertaining, and after all the shit your character goes through, you'll really want them to win by the end (spoiler: they win big-style). Not much else to say.

THE GOOD:
- Brilliant atmosphere with some wonderfully creative ideas
- Clever level layouts
- Some fun puzzles
- Interesting story with great sense of progression

THE BAD:
- Enemies are ultimately just a nuisance
- RPG systems might as well not even be in the game, especially given that half the skills are mislabeled or do nothing
- Inventory management can get to be a ball-ache, especially when you have to backtrack through the whole house for one item
- No map marking system

THE VERDICT: As the review indicates, this game's not perfect. I really really enjoyed it for some odd reason, though, despite its general jankiness and flaws typical of games of the era. In many ways it reminded me of "The Summoning" (also from 1992), in that it's a bit clunky and parts of it are irritatingly obtuse, and yet the feeling of adventure kept me playing pretty much nonstop for a few days.

It's a shame nobody ever seems to talk about this one, because it's a lot of fun if you're a fan of the genre.

SILVER STAR



Here's a question. How many videogames end with you in a tunnel made of flesh? It happens in this game, it happened in Alone in the Dark, it happened with the Atlantis levels in Tomb Raider, it happened to an extent in Fallout with the corridor of revulsion... I seem to keep picking games where you end up in a surreal tunnel of flesh toward the end.

And speaking of Alone in the Dark - isn't this weird? Two games from 1992 that both feature an somewhat older-looking woman in a business jacket and pencil skirt who becomes the heir to an old mansion, gets trapped inside, and discovers that a long-dead villain plans to bring a Lovecraftian horror into the world. Both women discover that their own death is the final ingredient in this process, and vow to stop it. Both women run around solving puzzles to unlock new areas, both tend to outwit rather than fight enemies, and both wind up traversing tunnels of flesh beneath the mansion. That's weird. The games are from the same year so I can't imagine one really had chance to copy the other, as their development times must have mostly overlapped.

[Mister Six]

Do you play these games without knowing about shit design flaws like the ones in Legacy, play until you get stymied, then look up the details and restart? Or do you do your research beforehand? I think if I got fucked over by crappy game design and bugs like you're describing here, I wouldn't have the patience to start over.

Also...

Both women discover that their own death is the final ingredient in this process, and vow to stop it.

...is this bit the same no matter which "character" you play?

[Lemming]

Do you play these games without knowing about shit design flaws like the ones in Legacy, play until you get stymied, then look up the details and restart? Or do you do your research beforehand? I think if I got fucked over by crappy game design and bugs like you're describing here, I wouldn't have the patience to start over.

I go in blind and suffer every time. The only source online I could even find that described the Brawling/Club and Firearms/Throwing bugs was a post on the game's Steam forum, though testing it in the game confirmed that it's true. It especially stung since I went for a Brawling-only build the first time around, which meant that for all intents and purposes I'd invested all my skillpoints into literally nothing (and lived about forty seconds as a result).

It's exacerbated by the fact that a lot of people who wrote the manuals for these games seemed to have either not played the games or had been given erroneous information, as a shocking number of them refer to things that don't exist in the game or were perhaps planned features that never got implemented. The manual for Darklands is bizarre, lots of references to things that just don't exist in the game.

I remade my character and replayed the first floor about six times for The Legacy!

...is this bit the same no matter which "character" you play?

I believe so; you're meant to be the very distant relative of a warlock who was burned at the stake in the 1600s and part of the game's plot (which is quite difficult to follow at times so I might get details wrong) is that all the living descendants of this guy have been lured to the house, as they all have to be killed to open the gates to the "Astral Plane" to let the cthulu-nightmare-thing come through to Earth. But most of them aren't even aware of their ancestry, so it's essentially just a random selection of disparate people from across the USA who happen to have a distant connection to the same guy.

[Mister Six]

Christ, thank you for your service.

That premise is fun, though. A great excuse to have a random assortment of characters. We need more games where the protagonists are just random, unremarkable people in extraordinary situations.

[Lemming]

Traffic Department 2192 (1994)



RELEASE DATE: 1994



STORY: In a hyper-violent future, a traffic cop fights an endless losing war against the gang that killed her father.

DON'T FRY YOUR CIRCUITS!: Here's a game you can't find much about online!

The game has a lot of good points, but it doesn't sound that way if you just describe it bluntly: basically, the game is a series of long cutscenes broken up by really shit birds-eye-view combat. That's it; it's more or less an uninteractive visual novel which you sporadically have to stop reading to go around shooting shit. It's borderline-impossible to actually lose the combat sections, as far as I can tell - there's a few missions you can lose by failing to protect a target, but in terms of actual threat to the player, the enemies have no chance against you all the way into the third and final act. You get to fly different ships, but fuck me if there's much difference between them. During these bits, you also get to listen to the most generic 90s videogame music ever made (I mean that as a compliment).

So, the whole point of this game is the story, which is basically as follows: in the future, there's a bunch of right bastards called the Vultures, who just go around shooting shit for a laugh. One day, they kill a guy by burning him alive, and his young daughter, Marta Velasquez, watches. Years later, Velasquez signs up to the traffic department (who ride heavily-armed gunship things) with the sole intention of laying waste to as many Vultures as possible. In the process, she manages to alienate everyone she comes into contact with, typically through making exaggerated death threats, to the point where nobody will agree to fly as her wingman because it's considered to be outright dangerous to be near her. The traffic department keep her on due to... recruitment issues, I guess. They have the usual lines about "ooh we don't like your attitude but you're The Best Pilot Around so we need you", which is good enough.

I'll try to avoid major spoilers (and the review will thus be short since the whole game is pretty much just story) but as the game goes on, the war against the Vultures goes increasingly badly (and turns out to involve greater forces, including a "DEATH SATELLITE" being pointed at the planet) and most of the characters are violently killed. Velasquez's initial commander is tortured to death and replaced with a new one who has far less patience with Velasquez's endless bullshit, various wingmen die, and Velasquez herself is fragged when one of her own team decides he's had enough of her and sabotages her vehicle, causing it to explode. In the resulting blast, she's blown apart and is rebuilt as a partial cyborg (and the saboteur returns and tries to kill her again, shooting her point blank in her own quarters, before Velasquez finally tracks him down and obliterates him). Unfortunately, the cyborg tech is experimental and gives her blinding headaches, which doesn't do much for her temper. So dire does the situation become that, by the third act, Vel is promoted to captain (despite being on the brink of death due to her janky-ass cyborg implants glitching out).

To give you a representative sample of the game's dialogue, here's Velasquez posing as a defector to try and infiltrate a gang in order to take out another gang.

GANG GUY: The last thing I need is a metal-headed mercenary.
VELASQUEZ: And I didn't come here for a damn job interview!
GANG GUY: If you're half as good as you say you are-
VELASQUEZ: I'm twice as good as the best you've got!
GANG GUY: I'm the best I've got.
VELASQUEZ: No wonder the Serpents have this city coiled. You moloton-brained morons are second rate vape-heads flying piece-of-shit Vulture skids!
GANG GUY: Think you can change all that?
VELASQUEZ: Someone needs to change your dirty diapers.
GANG GUY: And what about your Traffic Department?
VELASQUEZ: The Traffic Department is nothing but a bunch of blind-flyin' boners with badges and the IQs of sand fossils. I've killed more than one offier who's gotten in my way.
GANG GUY: You have many enemies?
VELASQUEZ: None of consequence.
GANG GUY: Want to make a few more?
VELASQUEZ: It's a slow month.

It really is all like that.

While all this is going on, the Vultures (and other gangs) are undergoing similar plots. I have to be honest and say I did not know what the fuck was going on half the time. One of the guys is killed and then cloned (and Vel ends up killing the clone), various evildoers arrive and point "death satellites" at the planet in the name of their overlord. Couldn't tell you what the hell was going on - probably not helped by the fact I played this in bits over the course of a couple of months, and forgot what was going on between sessions half the time.

Now for the bad side of things: the game took me so long to play because it starts to get so samey, and as amusing as the dialogue is, it starts to all blur together, especially since the story can get pretty convoluted and awkwardly-told. Every mission feels the same - lengthy cutscene where Vel snaps at her teammates and everyone berates her in response, scene where Vel gets sexually harassed by the dispatcher and threatens to kill him in response (I wish she would, fucker's insufferable), very basic and brief combat segment, lengthy cutscene of Vel getting back and threatening everyone again, then sometimes a scene involving the bad guys where characters are being introduced and killed off at random.

What doesn't help this feeling of routine is that there are almost 60 missions in the game! That might not sound like a lot, but the process of going through them is a slog since there's so many cutscenes between each brief burst of gameplay. The real problem is that I don't think the plot can sustain itself that long - you could realistically have told this whole story in 30 missions or even less, and all we'd lose are a bunch of extraneous scenes where everyone calls Vel a "bitch" and she responds by threatening to eviscerate them.

THE GOOD:
- Story and characters are quite unique
- Dialogue is occasionally very funny
- Velasquez is a superb protagonist

THE BAD:
- Actual gameplay is very basic and unengaging
- Game feels overly drawn-out
- Plot, good though it is overall, can start to grate since you're just getting so much of it in the form of lengthy cutscenes

THE VERDICT: The whole thing was pretty fascinating; it feels almost like it's a little bit out of time for 1994. You can imagine that if the same game were made today, the combat segments would be much tighter and more fun, the cutscenes would be a little more sensibly paced (and perhaps animated and voice acted, rather than just visual novel style heads with text), and that there might be a dialogue choice or two.

Plus, in missions, what you do never matters - story-critical characters can be killed during gameplay and show up with no explanation in the next cutscene, and so on. There's no reactivity as far as I can tell for killing civilians either; you can just fire your guns at all times and shoot everyone and everything you see and nobody seems to give a shit. Again, I imagine a remake today would have the kind of reactivity that's missing here.

I'm gonna give it a silver star just because it's too interesting a game not to note down in some way, but honestly, you might as well just watch a playthrough of it on YouTube instead of play it for yourself - you won't miss anything by losing out on the scant gameplay segments.

SILVER STAR