Hello bombardinos. Bombfriends? Bombos? What do we call each other anymore? Fandom wiki editors? It's been a bit, and I'd like to apologize. I'd also like to apologize because this absolutely isn't a dubious horror blog. Haven't had the time to give Countdown Vampires the write up it deserves, but now that I'm currently "done" with the Tower of Dubious Horror games (at least, I'm taking a break) you at least can rest assured that the backlog of things I need to write about isn't getting any larger. So instead I decided to write about something while it was still hot, namely my participation in various charity streams.

For the past three years I've been participating in Extra Life as part of the Giant Bomb discord's larger effort. It's been a lot of fun doing the relay thing with some other cool members of the community to help raise money for children's hospitals. In order to further justify these choices, I've decided to do a write-up.

Extra Life 2020: Mass Effect Andromeda

I’ve already written my thoughts on Mass Effect Andromeda, and for the most part I think I stand with what I wrote five(????) years ago. It’s a messy first draft of a BioWare game which feels like it treads the same ground as its forebears, but worse. My stream, a six hour zip through the game’s opening hours as Heathclif Ryder (followed by me playing Grimrock II to wrap things up) was a breezy, fun affair sitting in public voice chat with folks from the GB discord. For whatever it’s worth, the act of playing Andromeda is the least arduous part of the experience. The shooting is snappy and mobile enough to at least make the parts where everyone talks more tolerable. I don’t feel like I need to say much more than that.

It was probably the most straightforward of my charity streams, back when I just had a laptop, a capture card, and a series of bad ideas. As will become abundantly clear, my desire to one-up myself year-to-year has led to increasingly bad decisions.

Extra Life 2021: Hunted The Demon’s Forge

You cannot accuse me of failing to go the extra mile for my dumb stunts. Hunted: The Demon’s Forge used Gamespy for its online services; a service which has long since been discontinued. In order to play this very co-op focused video game, cooperatively, one needs to set up a fake LAN using a service like Hamachi. This is probably more work than such a thing deserves. But it was also probably an ideal game to pick with my friend Joeku, whom I’ve played many a terrible or mediocre co-op game with over the last couple years. We already played Resident Evil 6 and FEAR 3; we had to go more obscure. So why not play a forgotten 7th generation co-op shooter trying to be Fantasy Gears of War?

That might sound like a reductionist statement, but it’s 100% on the mark. Hunted feels like the median Xbox 360 game, coming out in the peak Xbox 360 year of 2011. It’s an aggressively desaturated brown and grey third person shooter with too much light bloom, waist high cover, and two grungy, moderately edgy protagonists. One of them is a bald man in heavy armor, the other is a bikini elf wearing barely anything. They quip, they gripe, and they shoot not-orcs (Norcs?) in the head and sometimes do bad melee (if you’re not playing as the elf you’re doing it wrong). If you wanted to hear Laura Bailey doing the posh accent she’d later put on display in the first season of Critical Role, there’s plenty of that. The one celebrity voice of note is Lucy Lawless as the villain, earning a paycheck. She deserves better. Pretty much everyone who worked on this game did. I've talked at length about my feelings on InXile as a developer (Wasteland 3? Pretty good! Tides of Numenera? Not good!) but this being the straw that led to the Wasteland 2 kickstarter makes a lot of sense. It's just abundantly clear this isn't the game the devs wanted to make.

The thing I’ll say about Hunted is that it’s too competent to be a complete disaster. That's not entirely praiseworthy, since it doesn't have enough budget or flair to have many memorable set pieces or combat encounters either. A year removed from its completion, I could not tell you many specific moments or set piece from its surprisingly lengthy runtime, because they all bleed together. The one thing which sticks out from the morass of dead simple traversal and repetitive combat arenas is the presence of optional puzzle tombs. One gets the impression that someone at InXile wanted to make something closer to a traditional dungeon crawler at some point, and this was the only thing which remained from that original idea. Not that the extra skill points and loot feel especially worthwhile, but it’s at least something better than the mid-budget, mid-execution Generic Dark Fantasy Gears the rest of the game is playing at. I’m glad we’re out of that console generation, but at least it provides an inexhaustible source of charitable chaff.

So hey unfortunately I didn't record this stream locally, so there's no archive of the original eight hours. That said... we did do another stream later to finish the game. And that's archived. It took us another three hours.

Extra Life 2022: Aliens Colonial Marines

In what may be one of my prouder achievements from this year, I tricked three other adult men into playing the entirety of Aliens Colonial Marines with me, cooperatively, for the childrens. ON MY BIRTHDAY. I need not overstate it too much, but ACM is one of those special bad games which truly lives up to its questionable reputation. There’s plenty which could be said about its long development; the number of developers who at one point or another tried to make a game called “Aliens Colonial Marines,” the legal drama surrounding Gearbox’s alleged embezzlement, etc etc. It’s fair to say the game’s development was a mess, and it shows. The AI? It bad. The guns? They bad! The storytelling? Especially bad! Even the DLC, which initially seems to Have Ideas, is very quickly revealed to be Quite Bad.

As a cooperative experience, however, ACM deserves special attention for *very clearly not being designed for co-op.* You know how the general map design of Halo and Gears became wider after they shifted from two to four players? There’s none of that here. Aliens: Colonial Marines is a game designed with one player in mind, which makes playing it with four a hilarious clusterfuck. The number of times we got stuck in door frames and in corridors deserves special mention, and will likely be a pretty big part of the “best of '' supercut I’m planning on making. But it’s also impressive how little of it works. Because of the highly scripted, setpiece-driven nature of the campaign, anyone lagging behind will get teleported with the rest of the crew immediately. This sometimes (frequently) happens even if you are only a few steps behind. Or ahead. It doesn’t really have any rhyme or reason. Oh, also being teleported revives you, if you’ve been downed.

The end result of this was a lot of running past as many stupid xenomorphs as possible, hip-firing the SMG (somehow the most consistent and accurate weapon in the game) and essentially trying to get to the next checkpoint as quickly as possible. It turned into a feat of impromptu speedrunning; a competition to break the scripting as quickly as possible so we could get it over with. The stealth mission where you have to escape the exploding xenomorphs was far less difficult once we realized one player could just kite all of them leaving the rest to sprint towards the next checkpoint. It’s deeply, deeply stupid, but at least it made for a fun cooperative experience when we weren’t getting angry at each other over things just breaking.

Do I recommend this experience? No, absolutely not. Was it the worst game I played this year? In a year where Duke Nukem Forever and Corpse Party shall haunt me, ACM was both thankfully brief and decidedly successful as a charity event. Should you play it? Fuck no. Absolutely not. Do something better with your time. We intentionally avoided using the fan mod which supposedly “fixes” some of the more egregious issues, but even with better AI and more impactful weapons I think the overall quality of the set piece design is poor. Unlike some other choice pieces of garbage I dunno if this one can be salvaged.

Too long? Probably gonna make a shorter highlight vid as a way of goofing around with some stuff. Consider following my youtubes and twitch for more.

Illbleed

Category: Sega NightmareCast

Developer: Climax Graphics

Release Date: April 25,2001

Time Played: Around 11 hours

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Quality of 20-year-old GameFAQs walkthroughs: terrible and amazing

Would I play again? Could be convinced to do a true ending run if I were to ever make something resembling money doing these silly streams.

“I can’t believe this is a real video game which was released on store shelves and sold for money” is a phrase I uttered multiple times during my playthrough of Illbleed. As the follow-up to Blue Stinger, it’s an ideal companion piece. The former was released at the start of the Dreamcast’s short lifespan, while the latter heralded its demise. It’s also with great fanfare and appreciation I announce it’s somehow weirder and more deranged than even Blue Stinger. It’s games like Illbleed which make features like this worth doing. Is it a good video game? No, probably not. But is it a great video game you should see with your two own damn eyes? Yes.

The game part of Illbleed follows the trend of its predecessor by being “weird” and “maybe not especially good” but it deserves points for originality if nothing else. It’s a level-based structure where each mission is a take on a different kind of B-horror movie. Most of them involve detecting traps moreso than solving puzzles or managing inventory. Instead, most of the challenge in Illbleed surrounds not wasting your limited pool of adrenaline on things which aren’t traps using a series of unhelpful UI bars at the top of the screen. Oh and there’s also combat, which is generally terrible and maybe not great, but at least deserves kudo points(?) for trying something different.

The real prize aside from novelty, however, is just how fucking weird Illbleed is. It’s worth noting that multiple lead developers from Climax Graphics left the industry after the Dreamcast went under. If they had stayed, would we know their names in the same way we know the Suda 51s or (god forbid) SWERYs of the world? Its tone is inexplicable. If I had doubts about how self-aware Blue Stinger was, then Illbleed made it abundantly clear that the people making it and localizing it knew exactly what they were doing. Probably. Why is there an extended, deeply deranged Toy Story parody which feels like a presage for half of Adult Swim’s programming in the early 2000s? Why does the devil look like Sonic the Hedgehog? Why does the true ending involve the main character sacrificing all her friends? It’s a lot to unpack and I can’t say enough about it. You should play Illbleed. Or maybe just… watch someone else play it.

Doctor Hauzer

Category: Respect the Classics (or else!)

Developer: Riverhill Soft

Release Date: April 29, 1994

Time Played: An hour and 15 minutes

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

“CD ROM ENERGY”: Immaculate

Would I play again? No, but now I have working 3DO emulation so that’ll probably result in something stupid. Well, more stupid than when I played it for charity.

While the Dreamcast will continue to be this feature’s unofficial mascot, I must give the 3DO endless credit as the most “dubious” of video game consoles. Unlike the other failures of the early 90s (Jaguar, 32X) it actually has some redeeming features among the truly baffling multimedia nightmare trash it tried to champion. In addition to a certain level of misguided first-party support from the 3DO company, it has some solid console ports of contemporary PC games and perhaps more surprisingly, a lot of support from Japanese devs. Now, admittedly, a lot of the system’s popularity in Japan had to do with the number of porn games ported over from the PC-98, but even then you have weird experimental shit like D, or the best home port of Super Street Fighter II Turbo. It’s a weird piece of hardware, and you can likely expect me to delve more into it at some point in the future. Who could’ve imagined that a *true pioneer* of the survival horror genre was a Japan-exclusive 3DO title? Me. That’s who. Me.

As one of the earliest games of its type, Doctor Hauzer is absolutely trying to break new ground. Unlike those namby pamby wimps over at Infogrames giving the original Alone in the Dark trilogy “pre-rendered 2D backgrounds,” Doctor Hauzer dared to push the hardware with fully polygonal, textured environments. Sure, that means it runs at an especially chunky sub-10 FPS at pretty much all times, but was this quality which truly activated the “what the fuck am I looking at, how is this a real video game” part of my brain. Besides, if you run the emulator at approximately four times the clock speed of an actual physical 3DO console, the game runs totally fine. It’s fine.

What you’re left with then, is an experimental attempt at a horror adventure game with full 3D movement and the crustiest of tank controls. There are no enemies to threaten you, no ammo to manage, just a spooky mansion full of traps, items, and the same 30 second horror stinger playing on loop*. It turns out Doctor Hauzer is a remarkably short, straightforward game when you’re following a guide, as its main venue for challenge is just putting a bunch of death traps everywhere. It controls like butt, moves like molasses, and As my time played will indicate, I beat the game in a little over an hour and found it a slight, if interesting, piece of history. I have higher hopes for Riverhill Soft’s later games, including the infamous Overblood and the “so good it never got released in the US” Overblood 2, so look forward to those at some point.

*so, a weird anecdote: my twitch archive for this game got flagged for copyright violation. The claimant was some weird horror atmosphere CD, which used the exact same music. The weird kicker is, the track in question is from a CD which came out in 1998, four years AFTER Doctor Hauzer. Did both things borrow from the same sample library? Did this random CD you put on in the background of your middle school halloween party steal music from Doctor Hauzer? The mysteries are unknowable!

Clock Tower The First Fear

Category: Clonk Tower, Respect the Classics

Developer: Human

Release Date: September 14, 1995

Time Played: Around five hours

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Despite having its own self-contained category, I was surprised to find out how straightforward the original Clock Tower was. To be clear, this is the original Super Famicom game, not its PSX sequel which came out in the west as “Clock Tower.” That’ll probably happen at some point, but not today. This is the one with the girl who is clearly just Jennifer Connelly running away from the scissor man. As opposed to the one with the girl who is clearly just Jennifer Connelly running away from the scissor man in THREE DIMENSIONS. It’s also definitely not any number of Clock Tower imitators, 90% of which also involve a young girl or woman running and hiding from weird monsters wielding comically oversized sharp objects. There’s a type to this category, is what I’m saying.

Before your Amnesias and your Outlasts and your Bloober Team Steam Trashstravaganzas, Clock Tower was the series of horror games where you couldn’t fight back and had to run or hide. It’s not a subset of horror games I’m particularly fond of, as any tension that might come from being chased is quickly doused by the frustrating trial-and-error nature behind it. There’s a reason why most of the games I’ve covered for this feature are closer to the Resident Evil side of things, and it’s partially because I find the push-and-pull resource management angle to survival horror a lot more interesting than figuring out what the game wants me to do to avoid getting stabbed.

No amount of predetermined scissor man hide-and-seek can really change the fact that Clock Tower is more-or-less a traditional-ass point and click adventure game, albeit a very slight one. There are multiple endings based on fairly obtuse criteria, some of the room layouts are randomized, but for most of my time with the game I very slowly wandered between rooms wondering what the hell I was supposed to do while occasionally avoiding the scissorman via trial and error. It’s a game whose strength comes from vibes, and whose weakness comes from… literally anything else. It’s a little too easy for me to peek behind the curtain and see the mechanics at play and conclude they aren’t particularly good mechanics. So I guess I’m saying it’s really good there are at least three more Clock Tower games and numerous homages. Look forward to those.

X-Files: Resist or Serve

Category: Licenses of Death

Developer: Black Ops Entertainment

Release Date: March 16, 2004

Time Played: About six hours

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Duchovnyosity: He still doesn’t give even the remotest of shits

Would I play again? Probably not!

I don’t have a ton to say about The X-Files: Resist or Serve. In a lot of ways, it’s self-explanatory. It’s a licensed game from the mid-2000s based on one of the most popular television shows of the 1990s for the Playstation 2. You can probably fill in a lot of the blanks right there, especially when I tell you it’s “heavily inspired” by Resident Evil. Well, Resident Evil but you can play as dubious favorite David Duchovny or actual favorite Gillian Anderson sleep talking their way through what feels like a particularly dire multi-part episode of the series.

I haven’t seen a ton of The X-Files, but I certainly hope this isn’t what fans are talking about when they talk up the quality of the television show. I was under the impression it wasn’t a series where our protagonists shoot a bunch of zombies, alien hybrid monsters, and weird psychic clones every week, but I don’t know for sure. At least they got the obnoxious 90s nerd characters a fairly significant supporting role. They got their own spinoff? Really?

For what it’s worth, it’s not the worst game I’ve played for this feature. It’s pretty bad sometimes, but more often than not just comfortably mediocre. Given it was published by the shambling corpse of Sierra mid-death throes and developed same studio responsible for 2003’s Fugitive Hunter: War on Terror (which is most notable for being the game where you fistfight Osama bin Laden) it could’ve been far worse! In a nod to Resident Evil 2, Mulder and Scully have two separate but interconnected stories, with different puzzles, weapons, and playable sequences. How much of that is padding, asset reuse, and a way of extending the length of a $50 video game I cannot say firsthand, but I bet it’s a lot!

Hello and welcome back to another SURVEY OF TERROR. That’s right. The Tower of Dubious Horror Games is back, with another handful of interactive entertainment vaguely relating to the act of getting scared and/or conserving ammunition. I apologize for this one taking a bit, but in my defense life is hard, writing is hard, school is hard and sometimes I just want to play Total War Warhammer III’s Immortal Empires for *too many* hours a day. With that said, let’s talk about video games vaguely representing the horror genre of a questionable quality. The next write up should probably take less than two and a half months. Potentially.

The Ring: Terror’s Realm

Category: Licenses of Death and Sega NightmareCast (also, as I was to discover: Actual Garbage)

Developer: Asmik Ace

Release Date: February 24, 2000

Time Played: A little over four hours

Dubiosity: 5 out of 5

Musical Numbers (from me): Multiple

Will I finish it? If you throw enough money at me, absolutely.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears. I think we’ve come across a genuine bonafide Kusoge here. Not only is this the only game of note to be directly based on Ringu (well, outside of some mobile stuff, pachislot machines, and Sadako being in Dead by Daylight now) it also came out in the United States years prior to the film’s American remake. It’s a deeply baffling, lethargically paced, technically incompetent attempt to recreate a Resident Evil, and it’s fucking terrible in a standout way. Is it the overly loud, extremely CASIO keyboard plink-plonk soundtrack? Is it the way the already stiff tank controls have what seems like an entire half second of input lag? Or is it the deeply scuffed translation underlying what appears to be some very dubious writing?

It’s all of those things. No longer confined to a mere videotape or 8mm filmstrip, the curse of Sadako has infected a video game within the video game you are playing. In the real world you play as a CDC Researcherwoman, who spends her time wandering between a series of identical-looking rooms having weird conversations with people to progress the plot. In the virtual program only known as [RING] you wander through a series of identical-looking rooms to do bad Resident Evil things and shoot goofy looking monsters. Neither endeavor feels like it was made by people who had ever made a video game before. I have played $4 indie horror games made in Unity by one person in their spare time which feel more coherent and cohesive than this.

It’s an interminable mess and was the first game I had to tap out of for this feature. So, kudos for that. I really do feel like I’ve accidentally stumbled onto something that would be featured in a Thor High Heels video about “Mysterious Dreamcast Games,” assuming he hasn’t already talked about it. It’s a product comprised of incompetence and jank and a very specific brand of late 90s, early 2000s Japanese skung for good measure. I would not recommend it.

Blue Stinger

Category: Sega NightmareCast

Developer: Climax Graphics

Release Date: August 31, 1999

Time Played: Around ten hours

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Am I glad I played it? Absolutely

Will I ever play it again? Probably not

I say without hyperbole that Blue Stinger is one of the more psychotic games I’ve played for any of my streaming features. This is a compliment, as it’s also one of my favorite things I’ve streamed this year. It’s the sort of deeply Japanese, tonally bizarre, ambitiously jank game which could’ve only come out during the lifespan of the Sega Dreamcast. I mean, shit, the cast of Sonic Adventure are right there voicing the main characters. It’s got Dogs Bower! How many other video games have Dogs Bower? That’s right. Only one other one. And that one is, uh, coming in the next blog.

Blue Stinger is weird. To say that Blue Stinger is weird does not fully encompass how batshit is is in every facet of its execution. It’s a survival horror game, kinda. Enemies drop coins, which you can use to buy ammo, healing items, and weapons from the vending machines scattered around Dinosaur Island (there are no dinosaurs in this game.) There are melee weapons, there are shooty weapons, there is some amount of solving puzzles. One of those melee weapons is a shirt for Dogs Bower which just says "Karate Man." It inspires him to do Karate, which is very good. It’s a weirdly ambitious combination of all of these elements in a decidedly clunky package. Grinding for healing items and ammo is basically required unless you’re good (I’m certainly not) and some level of clunky maneuvering is needed whenever camera angles and monsters are concerned. This goes doubly so for the boss fights, which aren’t great.

However odd it plays, the real draw of Blue Stinger is “literally any time there’s a cutscene.” I can’t stop emphasizing the point: this game is accidentally or intentionally an absurdist masterpiece, and I have no fucking clue how deliberately its scenes come together. Elliot and Dogs are two dudes far more indifferent to the alien virus, horrible monsters, and strange floating fairy creature than they are to christmas shopping prospects, baths, and the affection of the one other character in the game. The voice actors seem well aware of exactly what they’re dealing with, but I don’t know if the script writers or localization team did. The end result is a strange, magical adventure which could not have come out of anywhere other than a mid-budget Japanese game in the late 90s. It’s one of my favorite games I’ve played for this feature, and if not for the next game from this studio, it might be *the* favorite.

BONUS GAME: Daymare 1998

Category: I played it for a charity stream

Developer: Invader Studios

Release Date: September 19, 2019

Time Played: 8.5 hours according to Steam

Dubiosity: 5 out of 5

Will I play it again? Please no

In 2015 a proof-of-concept video showing off a fan remake of Resident Evil 2 in Unreal Engine 4 hit the youtubes. Like a lot of proof-of-concept videos showing off fan remakes in the Unreal Engine, it gives off a lot of earnest-but-rough “Nintendo, hire this man” vibes. It was 2015 however, so the video elicited a decent amount of buzz from long-suffering Resident Evil fans. Unsurprisingly, it also elicited a friendly tap on the shoulder from Capcom. Like, genuinely, as far as Cease and Desists go it was maybe the friendliest C&D you could possibly have. Members of Invader Studios were flown out to Capcom HQ, where they chatted with some developers, got some tips, and generally had a positive experience. Emboldened, they announced publicly they were moving the project in another direction, with their own original IP. A few years, one failed kickstarter, and some publishing deals (with the people who made Hatred!) later, Daymare 1998 came out. And then a few years after that, I played it for a charity stream.

To use a Caravella-ism, “Video Games are hard to make,” and that is even more true when it’s a small independent team working with a limited budget. It's with that nicety that I say Daymare 1998 might be one of the more miserable experiences I’ve had this year; short of Duke Nukem Forever. On paper, it’s a third person survival horror-ish shooty shoot with similar ideas to Capcom’s own modernized take on Resident Evil. Ok, so it’s a little more than that. It’s an awkward pastiche of other, better survival horror games and never aspires to be more. What’s the line between bad imitation and loving homage? To be glib, the answer is “one of them is good.” Nothing about Daymare 1998 feels good, but if it had any original ideas, I’d be willing to champion them in the name of eurojank. Instead, the one unique thing it has going for it is… realistic magazine management? If what you thought survival horror needed more of was manually putting bullets into a limited number of handgun magazines between every shootout, it has that. Does it have interesting puzzle design? Or interesting environments? Or a sense of pacing? N-no?

What it does have is maybe the strongest “fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off” energy possible. I’m talking Fifty Shades of Grey level of “they hit Control-F and changed the names” with some truly baffling storytelling told as confusingly as possible from three different perspectives. The specifics don’t matter, because there’s barely a plot until there’s too much of a plot, but one gets the impression someone in the development team was very proud of their lore bible. That’s nuts, because it’s literally just bootleg Biohazard in every aspect of its evil biotech corporations, wife guys, and special forces wearing gas masks. The non-native English voice actors awkwardly delivering dialogue written by non-native English speakers is a nice bonus, honestly. Rest assured that they got Leon S. Kennedy’s original RE 2 voice actor (Paul Haddad) for a bit of stunt casting right before he passed away, and his lines are just as awkward as everyone else's. At least this game delivered one of the single funniest flubbed lines I've seen this year.

If I haven’t made this abundantly clear, I don’t like this game at all. Even with the veritable mountain of caveats I’m willing to make for smaller games with their heart in the right place, this one is a real clunker. In a world where the modern Resident Evil games didn’t exist, I’d be willing to give it more of a pass, but not only is there a fantastic Resident Evil 2 remake (and a still pretty good RE3 remake), there are also multiple other examples of small indie teams making better survival horror games without just an endless string of references. I’m sorry, but when the $3, two hour indie game made by one dude in unity is the better modern survival horror, maybe there are other options. So basically, please look forward to my inevitable playthrough of Daymare 1994: Sandcastle whenever it comes out.

This should start at the correct portion of the stream, but if it doesn't it's at around 3:15:00

Next write up should come sooner.

Welcome to the new age of dubious. The new age of terror. The new age of streaming gimmick formats because I was tired of being subject to a randomizer wheel and wanted to mix things up. It’s time for THE TOWER OF DUBIOUS HORROR GAMES. More structure, less chaos! More democracy, less transparency! More full playthroughs, less two hour introductions to RPGs! That’s right, it’s up to me to climb, traverse, or otherwise navigate this categorical calamity using my wits, cunning, and audience voting. The current categories (which may or may not be switched out upon my leisure) are:

• Horror(bitrary)Water: A surprising number of horror games feature aquatic themes! If it’s on a boat, if there’s a significant amount of wet, or if fish are involved, it probably goes here?
• The Real Terror Was Dubious All Along: What defines a horror game? What makes something “scary?” If you said “actually a video game of dubious quality is scary in and of itself” then this category is a catch-all for that, I guess! Sometimes I want variety.
• Actual Good Video Games: Because not all horror games are dubious, I swear.
• The Curse of Beloved Franchises: There are several video game franchises that spring to mind when one envisions “horror.” Not all of the games released under those names are great.
• Visual Novels Can Be Scary Too: Read along with your friend ArbitraryWater as you learn just exactly how many visual novels and spooky RPGmaker VNs one can go through before pants are shat (in fear. Not for other reasons)
• Licenses… of DEATH: sometimes horror games are based on horror films. A novel concept!
• Sega NightmareCast: The scariest console of them all, the Sega Dreamcast. A surprising number of weird-ass horror games only exist on this console! YOU BET I'M GONNA LOOK AT EM ALL, JESSIFER.
• Clonk Tower: an entire category devoted to justifying the $50 I spent on a secondhand CIB copy of Clock Tower 3. Anyway, um, I guess you hide from a scissor man or something.
• Respect the Classics… or else!: Only the creakiest, oldest, most crustiest of spooky video games in here! Haunted House for the Atari 2600, is that you? (probably not)
• Actual Garbage: Fox Only, Final Destination, No Items. Just dubious.

Watching my streams LIVE gives you the opportunity to determine the course of my horror streams. When I finish (or tap out of) a game, you will determine my route through this terrifying tower of torment! Depending on how hard I wanna go down the hustle hole (ew), there might also be follower and/or subscriber incentives. Should be fun, yeah?

Cold Fear

Category: Horror(bitrary)Water

Developer: Darkworks

Release Date: March 15, 2005

Time Played: Somewhere under five hours

Troubleshooting: Fan Widescreen Fix. I had to disable my second monitor so the ad-hoc controller setup I made worked.

Dubiosity: 2 out of 5

Number of times I sang the Lonely Island song “I’m on a boat” on stream: Twice

Would I play again? naw

I don’t have a ton to say about Cold Fear. It’s maybe the most “We have a Resident Evil 4 at home” game imaginable, given its release proximity in early 2005 and presence on Xbox, PS2, and PC. See, this game is from the same team responsible for Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare a game I played to completion last year and would just like to briefly touch on since it's basically half the inspiration for this feature existing at all. AITD: The New Nightmare is a weird, recursive mess of a video game. In the same way Wasteland 2 and 3 are inspired by Fallout 1 and 2, which were inspired by the original Wasteland, so too is The New Nightmare a weird riff on Resident Evil, which itself was inspired by... the original Alone in the Dark trilogy. Shit's weird. It's also an attempt to launch the series into franchise potential, with a bunch of ominous, poorly-delivered plot threads which are vaguely followed up in the 2008 Alone in the Dark revival (which, don't worry, we'll get to.) The most notable thing about it might just be the part where I literally had to do no troubleshooting whatsoever to get the GOG version to play nicely with OBS, but otherwise it's a mediocre trifle best avoided.

As Darkworks' follow-up game, Cold Fear dares to ask “What if Resident Evil had boat physics?” and goes from there. It's also a significantly better game than New Nightmare. As AmericanMcCoastGuard it’s your job to run back and forth between a handful of rooms on a spooky Russian oil tanker in an entirely linear fashion. In a feature I HAVE to imagine was riffed from pre-release versions of Resident Evil 4, it’s got mostly fixed camera angles but switches to over-the-shoulder when you’re aiming, but the actual layout and progression never becomes trickier than running around, grabbing one key item, and then going back to another room to use said key item. It doesn’t even have save rooms, it just has set places in the story where it asks if you’d like to save.

It’s a surprisingly playable, competent affair, which is more than I can say for a lot of other stuff I’ve touched. Don't confuse that for something you should run out and play, but as an introductory experience to this feature I'm happy it started basic. It’s also a game with exactly two ideas, both of which it uses throughout the entirety of its run. The first is aforementioned boat physics, and the fact that to kill the not-plagas infecting the crew, you need to go for the head. Always. The lack of a map is probably the game’s way of trying to feel longer than it is, but it also means at no point did it ever overstay its welcome. That's probably also why the whole thing fails to stick out in my brain, being DEEPLY UNMEMORABLE, but it's some extreme B-tier, 6/10 energy exuding from this entire product.

A bunch of random licensed games my roommate had in a binder

Category: The Real Terror Was Dubious All Along

Developer: Various

Release Date: Somewhere between 2003 and 2007

Time Played: anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour for each of them

Dubiosity: Golden Compass: 4, Eragon: 4, Revenge of the Sith: 3, Return of the King: 2

DMCA claims to date: none, surprisingly

Would I play more? Maybe one day we’ll give Return of the King another look. Otherwise, nah.

Licensed movie tie-in video games! They used to exist, now they don’t, at least not in the same way! This is not a tragedy. This is not something we need to mourn or be nostalgic about. If my podcast episode on Lord of the Rings: The Third Age wasn’t proof enough, there’s no better example of this than the quick survey of four movie tie-in games I borrowed from my roommate. In this accursed CD Binder, I found video games based on two commercially unsuccessful, critically panned fantasy book adaptations and two of the highest grossing films of the 2000s? Sure, that’s a decent mix. At least, a decent enough mix for me to get threeish hours of quality entertainment out of the lot.

The thing that struck out to me is how much these game tie-ins all have in common. There’s the scuffed realistic art direction which just looks like mud, the soundalike voice actors (except Return of the King, which managed to get most of the cast in a recording booth for a day or two), the pained attempts to turn 5 minute movie scenes and set-pieces into 30 minute video game levels. Somehow, all four of these games are just brawlers. Pre-God of War character action titles, I guess I’d say. Complexity, mobility, or really any sort of combo potential are far beyond their reach, but by golly can you press a short string of face buttons together and stuff will happen. Sure, there are force powers and brisingrs and maybe a jump, but for the most part you’re doing the prehistoric equivalent of a square square triangle, but without the part where you can hold the triangle to do a launcher afterward.

Even The Golden Compass, the odd one out in this quartet, still opens with the most awkwardly animated armored polar bear fighting you’ve ever seen in your damn life. I don’t remember a thing about those books other than vaguely thinking they were the YA novel equivalent to r/atheism, but I’m going to guess they didn’t involve quite as many polar bear fights. Thankfully, after the action packed introduction, including fighting some sort of Inuit-looking shaman and his ghost wolves(?) the bad platforming and stealth elements became more apparent when you *aren’t* playing as the polar bear. Which is about where I tapped out.

I don’t really have much to say about the other three games, other than thinking Return of the King probably seems like the most playable of them. Alas, going back to it now, it’s not quite the banger I remember from 2003. Don’t get me wrong, It’s resoundingly good compared to the other three games I played for this feature, but between the surprisingly difficult insta-kill segments, groups of enemies swarming the player from off-camera, and less-than-generous checkpointing, it’s also “of its era” in a way I’m increasingly lukewarm of. At least it has FMV interviews with the cast, in case you’d like to know that Sean Astin is apparently the worst at video games. Please enjoy me narrating the cutscenes to avoid showing movie footage on screen when I get to that part of the stream

This is also the stealth launch of my sunday show, currently called “Sunday Scan Converter Supertime” which is my ill-intended method of justifying owning this RetroTink 5x Pro. I have a bunch of Gamecube, PS2, and Wii games here, ready to go and show themselves in beautiful (?) 1080p dark magic upscale. Wait, if I plug the PS3 in and use it to play PS1 and PS2 games does this also count? I guess we’ll see.

Resident Evil Dead Aim (AKA Gun Survivor 4: Biohazard - Heroes Never Die)

Category: Horror(bitrary)Water and Curse of Beloved Franchises

Developer: Cavia

Release Date: June 17, 2003 (happy 19th anniversary, bad video game!)

Time Played: Around three hours

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Light Gun? No

Would I play again? Lolno. I’ll likely end up playing Resident Evil Survivor at some point but fuck if I'm gonna play the Dino Crisis or Code Veronica ones.

The light gun game is one of those lost relics of the arcade age, something that never really translated when home consoles became the dominant form of interactive entertainment. Outside of a brief resurgence of Wii originals and the current proliferation of VR shooting galleries, it’s one of those dead end genres that loses relevancy the second you aren’t pumping quarters in constantly. I guess there’s that House of the Dead remake on switch? That’s weird, right?

This is why I find Capcom’s weird dalliances with trying to translate the light gun experience to home consoles so… interesting? They made four of these. Resident Evil Dead Aim is the LAST one, and the year prior there was a Dino Crisis themed one? Sure. The general idea behind this series was to combine the sensibilities of a light gun shooter with a traditional Resident Evil game, complete with the GunCON light gun controller. That last part is important, actually, because I don’t know if these games work removed from the context of a bespoke light gun doohickey. Of course, given that I don’t have a CRT television readily on hand, I also wouldn’t be able to play these games as intended even if I did have one.

With a regular-ass DualShock 2 (and definitely not a DualShock 4 hooked up to a computer, officer) what I’m left with is maybe the most bland simulacrum of a Resident Evil game awkwardly foisted upon a fake light gun shooter imaginable. Someone in my chat put it best when they said “This looks more like a Resident Evil knockoff than the actual knockoff [Cold Fear]” The ongoing trend of Biohazard spinoffs being almost universally terrible starts from the beginning, and Dead Aim is a perfect example of that. As action man Bruce McIrvin, it’s your job to shoot zombies in the head with guns and clonkily navigate through the blandest boat ever made. Sometimes discount Ada Wong is there. A plot is vaguely gestured towards, but the most memorable thing the game has going for it is some truly, truly, astoundingly bad voice acting made extra good because the VA doesn’t match the subtitles. Oh also the main villain turns himself into a sexy lady version of the usual Resident Evil Tyrant monster, complete with boobs and organic stripper heels, so clearly someone in the art department had some preferences they needed to get out. Don’t worry, like all final bosses in Resident Evil, it eventually mutates into an amorphous blob with tentacles and weird orifices that look like buttholes, so they got that part right.

Removed from the novelty of a light gun controller, it’s just a really fucking boring, sedate simulacrum of a Resident Evil game without any of the puzzles, environmental navigation, or resource scarcity which makes the series good. Inventory management is reduced to only being able to carry eight stacks of ammo, which is still PLENTY of ammo (there is a never-ending supply of handgun bullets in save rooms, which means you’ll never be dry) However, the dark and horrible secret about this game is… you can kinda just run past a lot of the zombies. Likely due to the game’s nature as a light gun thing, the environments themselves all tend to be quite wide, which also means the classic art of juking zombos is surprisingly easy. It’s not much harder once you get to dealing with faster enemies either. I can easily see speedruns of this game lasting less than an hour.

But yeah, I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised a forgotten installment of a forgotten sub-series made by the people who would go on to make Bullet Witch is kinda fucking terrible. What surprised me was finding out some elements of this game actually made their way into future Resident Evil light gun spinoffs, Umbrella Chronicles and Darkside Chronicles (uncoincidentally also made by Cavia, uncoincidentally also not great.) Oh well. At least the save room theme will continue to be part of my regular pre-stream music rotation.

I've made sure to keep a running youtube playlist of all my stream archives, in case you'd like to follow along at home. I'll try and keep up on the blogs from here.

Hi, I don’t have much to say about the *current state of things* on this website, at least beyond what others have already said. I’m going to miss Jeff Gerstmann’s presence on Giant Bomb, but I'm excited to see what this new team can cobble together (Dan and/or Bakalar, my DMs are open if you'd like to listen to my pitch for turning Dubious Wheels/Towers/etc into a GB Feature.) I’ll leave it at that. For the time being, yours truly will keep posting his blogs on Giant Bomb, but should I need an alternate place to put these, I will make it known.

Hello and welcome to the concluding installment of The Wheel of Ukraineous Video Games, my randomizer wheel feature to remind you that, despite all the shit happening elsewhere in the world, there is still an ongoing war in Ukraine and some of the people there have made some video games. I know! Weird to think about.

Heroes of Annihilated Empires

Developer: GSC Game World

Release Date: May 9, 2007

Time Played: A little over two hours

Troubleshooting: None, surprisingly

Would I play more? Nah, but please look forward to the inevitable, eventual, possible, probable(?) Wheel/Tower/Geometric Shape of Dubious Strategy Games

Before they were “The STALKER people,” GSC GameWorld were “The Cossacks People.” Cossacks is, to my basic understanding, a historically-inclined RTS series whose greatest claim to fame was its ability to support massive numbers of units on screen at once, very mucha game about cranking out hordes of units to counter your enemy’s hordes of units. However, for this feature I decided to instead check out Heroes of Annihilated Empires, their fantasy follow up to the Cossacks games. It’s, um. Fine?

Now, my RTS chops begin somewhere around C&C Red Alert 2, Age of Empires II, or Warcraft III, and end at around Battle for Middle-Earth 1. I’ve said before when I was talking about Dawn of War: I’m not great at the genre and my ability to enjoy it broke around the time I started to understand things like “Micromanagement” and “build orders” and thus things that weren’t just building a bunch of dudes and destroying the enemy base after 90 minutes. In some sense, this is that, and if I was still 12 I’d absolutely be on board with any sort of game that has a “make infinite amounts of units” tab as a basic feature.

However much the basic gameplay appeals to the lizard brain end of RTS, the transition from historical to fantasy lacks a certain je ne sais quois, a certain sizzle, that I want out of this stuff. For a fantasy strategy game, there isn’t quite enough fantasy weird involved. Spearmen and archers are spearmen and archers, regardless of faction, and it never quite goes as hard as I’d like it to. It’s no Lords of Magic, no Warlords Battlecry, no Spellforce or any other number of extremely mid-range fantasy RTSes I can think of. I think the baseline appeal of a fantasy series is the concept of the fantastical, as blase as that sounds. This? Not nearly bonkers fuckin crazy enough, even if having a lot of skellingtons on screen at once is an impressive achievement.

Of course, I spent most of my time in the game with the campaign, which feels like an attempt to incorporate Warcraft III style hero mechanics on top of Cossacks’ “pump out lots and lots of dudes” mechanics. Unfortunately for me and everyone involved, the first few missions of the campaign are… lethargic. Alas, the adventures of good voice acting Elfman and his amazing voice acting are mostly contained in a series of back-and-forth wars of attrition, at least as far as the first handful of campaign missions were concerned. Not everything for this feature is gonna be a winner, I guess.

Chasm: The Rift

Developer: Action Forms Ltd.

Release Date: September 23, 1997

Time Played: Around 90 minutes

Troubleshooting: None. There’s a pre-packaged DOSbox config made by the DUSK guy, of all people, which runs and remaps the game’s controls to about what you’d expect from a shooter.

Would I play more? Eh, possibly?

Chasm is a game which caught my attention thanks to Civvie11’s video on the subject. As what may be one of the first (if not *the* first?) Slavjank FPSes on the market, it’s mostly remarkable for its technical dark wizardry and various tricks, which would become a running trend going forward. In a world where Quake II was only a handful of months away from blowing the lid on exciting new technological developments such as “colored lighting”, there’s something undoubtedly insane about Chasm looking and moving the way it does *in software* and *in DOS.* There’s location specific damage on enemies! In 1997!

It’s an eclectic mix of those technological achievements, combined with off-kilter level design and attempts(?) at storytelling which really give it that coveted Eurojank energy. It’s fast but not quite Quake Fast, counteracted by how labyrinthine, puzzle-y, and flat the levels are. Weirdly enough, those two things together are a bit contradictory. This level design is also one of those things which started to frustrate after a while, and is probably why I’d relegate Chasm in the “curiosity” category, rather than an out and out banger. Only a little bit dubious, but definitely an interesting part of history.

Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason

Developer: Action Forms Ltd

Release Date: April 15, 2009

Time Played: a little under two hours

Troubleshooting: Yes, several

Would I play more? Zzzzzzz

Cryostasis is a game that sticks out to me mostly because it was championed by one Dave Snider, former site engineer for Giant Bomb and noted advocate for eastern bloc weird shit. Imagine my surprise when I found out it was made by the same developer as aforementioned Chasm, being Action Forms’ last video game before they descended into mobile dev hell. They also made the Carnivores games, which… seem like shooters where you shoot dinosaurs? Future research may be required; they seem, um… dubious.

Regardless, I came into Cryostasis expecting a kind of weird eastern bloc cult hit. What I found was, to my own misfortune, kind of a slow and plodding affair. Maybe it’s playing a chain of these things back-to-back-to-back, but it wasn’t nearly as weird as I was expecting. Cryostasis is a game where you wander around an old Soviet icebreaker for reasons initially unknown, fighting weird snow ghouls and venturing into the memories of the crew before their deaths. Initially, you just have your fists and a set of very awkward melee weapons, but eventually you get the world’s most awkward bolt action rifle (and I assume, other guns at some point.) I hope my effusive praise for games like Metro is proof I’m not against slow-burn atmosphere, but in my two hours with the game I never felt like I encountered anything which quite justified my time.

Sure, maybe in 2009, the era of peak brown shooter, this was revelatory, but I’m left indirectly comparing Cryostasis to Zeno Clash, which literally came out a week later, and Return of the Obra Dinn, which does the “venture into the memories of the dead'' thing far better. Moreover, I don’t think I found a game that crashed quite as consistently as Cryostasis did. Having been delisted from both Steam and GOG for what I have to imagine are publisher reasons, the technical problems people were having 13 years ago are… moreso on modern operating systems. I won’t get into the process, but even after I went into .ini files and did window capture shenanigans (which didn’t work, so I just had to resort to the nuclear option of display capture) it still crashed multiple times on and off stream. This one was a real disappointment, especially given its cult status. Maybe it gets better after the first two hours (of a 6-8 hour game) but I’m gonna invoke Wolpaw’s Law here and say my time is better spent playing more viscerally terrible good interactive entertainment.

STALKER: Call of Pripyat

Developer: GSC Game World

Release Date: February 2, 2010

Time Played: A little over two hours, on and off stream

Troubleshooting: see below

Would I play more? Yes

Oh hey, what a convenient endcap for this feature. Of all the games surveyed in this feature, I think it’s probably fair to call STALKER the most popular? Influential? Important, even? Definitely the most distinctly “Ukrainian” of these games, at least as far as cultural identity and influences are concerned.

I’m not going to restate what I said about STALKER from my Shadow of Chernobyl write-up. The fundamentals of the series still holds true, and if you like yourself some desolate surreal irradiated wastelands, do I have the video game for you. Instead, Call of Pripyat is a significantly more approachable game and far more of a traditional open world affair than its predecessor. Even in vanilla form, it seems like if you’re going to play one of these games, one should play this one, straight up. Don’t play Clear Sky, apparently. No one likes Clear Sky.

But I didn’t play this one vanilla. See, in contrast to SoC, in which I used a “vanilla plus” modpack focused mostly on audiovisual and quality of life stuff, the mods I installed for Pripyat more directly affect the gameplay. Instead of going nuts, I opted for just two well-received, popular mods, both of which seem rad as shit. Gunslinger significantly changes a lot of the ballistics modeling present in the game, adds a bunch of bespoke animations (including for stuff like first aid and bandages), new weapons in that very Tarkov-esque gun porn way, and generally enhances the basic feel of the shooting. AtmosFEAR 3, on the other hand, significantly alters the in-game weather systems, including dense-ass fog, dark-ass nights, and new forms of anomaly storms. It’s impressive as hell, and significantly improves the mood and tone of what is already a moody game. (also one of these mods, I don’t remember which but I assume Gunslinger, also includes a pretty impressive HD texture pack which makes all the foliage and dilapidated concrete look extra depressing.)

See, the real reason I want to talk about Call of Pripyat isn’t the game itself which, to reiterate, seems like the best game I’ve covered for this feature, perhaps barring Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishments. Instead I want to talk about what it’s like to poke one’s head into a long-running modding scene for a cult classic series of games. I’ve certainly dipped my toe into “fan mods” and “fan patches” before. I’ve said before that one shouldn’t play any of Troika’s games without fan mods, just as I’ve installed a bunch of shit for Morrowind and then played exactly two hours of Morrowind multiple times. Looking into the STALKER modding scene is its own beast. While other games may limit themselves to “curvy bodies” and “clean faces” and “remove encumbrance,” the mad lads modding this game go further. Are the mods compatible with one another? Are they supported in English? How many forum posts do I have to read between various people talking shit about each other’s mods? It’s a mystery!

I had to follow a youtube tutorial step-by-step to get just the two mods mentioned above to play nice with each other, and it turned out *that* video gave me different steps than the ModDB page *or* the Steam community guide where I initially found out about them! Friends, I’m here to say… we’ve been spoiled by Steam Workshop. We’ve become soft with easy streamlined mod managers, like the one I used for System Shock 2. Entering the world of the STALKER modding scene is to be reminded of a different age. Not just for the breadth, depth, and quality of offerings on display, but also because it’s a game in and of itself to figure out how to get everything installed correctly. It was a refreshing experience and also I never want to do it again if I can avoid it. (I won’t be able to avoid it)

The corollary to this is STALKER Anomaly; a fan project comprising numerous mods and mod ideas that I find more impressive than a lot of retail products. It has a lot of the stuff I mentioned about Gunslinger and AtmosFEAR, but like, eight more mods on top of those. It combines all three games (Shadow of Chernobyl, Clear Sky, Call of Pripyat) into a single massive sandbox with a bunch of tweakable mechanics for whatever experience you’re looking for. Wanna turn on fast travel, or make it so you can sell broken weapons to merchants? You can do that! While it’s perhaps a tad too open and a tad too “make your own progression” survivalist hell for my liking, I say with absolute sincerity that people should give this one a look. Oh, did I mention it’s a stand-alone thing? You don’t even need any of the games in question! It’s nuts! Check it out!

Alright, that’s it for me and this feature. I hope I’ve given these games and their developers the spotlight they deserve, because I’ve found some goooood shit here. I mean, hell, I’ll probably end up playing Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter at some point this year to follow up Crimes and Punishments, but until then I have great news: my next project is currently ongoing. Perhaps there will be write-ups about it. Maybe one write-up is already in process. Maybe you should check out my twitch channel and/or youtube archives to see what else I've been up to? Who can say? Well, I guess there's one thing I can say...

Slava Ukraini!

Trespasser

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should - Dr. Ian Malcom, Jurassic Park (1993, dir: Steven Spielberg)

At this point, I imagine most folks reading this have a general idea of my predilections regarding the playing of video games most ancient and obscure, especially when it comes to my stream output. My brain is a special kind of broken which considers “I’ve never really finished Link to the Past, have I?” a far less interesting and exciting endeavor than “lololol what if I played the Visceral Games Dante’s Inferno to completion?” You’ll have to forgive me for this, but my contrarian desire to unearth as much obscure nonsense as possible is all I have left in regards to #content. I will always go for something which is more “interesting” than good, and for that I dearly apologize to everyone who follows my streamblog shenanigans.

My most recent example of this is, surprisingly enough, not any of the Ukraineous titles of note, but rather a licensed vehicle whose greatest contribution to video game memery is the idea of looking down at your character’s breasts to see their health. That’s right motherfuckers, we’re talking about Jurassic Park Trespasser, the hit* physics hell nightmare game put out by Dreamworks Interactive as a tie-in with the second film. On one hand, Trespasser is a blatantly unfinished, deeply clonky experimental title where you play as a floppy right arm and diegetic cleavage in your quest to get velociraptors and everything else to ragdoll as hilariously as possible. On the other hand, it’s wildly, staggeringly, far far too ambitious for its own good and as a result is far more interesting than something that wasn’t trying so hard. Should you play it? No, probably not. Did I regret playing it? No, no I didn’t.

Led by a team of former Looking Glass employees who worked on both Ultima Underworld games (including future Xbox exec Seamus Blackley,) the problems of Trespasser’s development are well documented. Mismanagement, failing to test different systems in tandem, making the entire game focused around software acceleration just as 3D cards were becoming ubiquitous, etc. Give that post-mortem a read if you aren’t familiar. It’s frankly insane how many things they had planned, and how many of those things needed to be cut because they didn’t work correctly. The amount of cut content still on the disk is significant. It’s almost impressive they shipped a product at all.

What’s left is a series of ideas and features (constantly buckling under their own weight) in search of a coherent video game. There’s a physics engine in this game, pre-Half Life 2, pre-Havok, pre-any sort of physics middleware, which I need to stress is fucking absurdly impressive for 1998. It’s busted and janky, sure, but when combined with your primary method of interaction (a right arm which can grip and manipulate a ton of items in the environment) hilarious chaos immediately ensues. I saw raptors accidentally kill themselves on random pieces of geometry multiple times! Sometimes the arm gets stuck and stretches out like you're Mr. Fantastic! Trespasser’s control scheme is… unique. Hold the left mouse button to move Anna’s arm, and then press the right mouse button to grip or drop objects. It’s the kind of uncompromisingly anti-player control scheme I can get behind, especially when any sort of aiming or combat is involved. It’s Immersive Sim QWOP. It reminds me of a lot of modern VR games, especially ones with a lot of tactile object interaction… except without the fidelity and technology granted by modern motion controls. Basic actions, like stacking boxes or aiming a gun, are a constant struggle. The attempts at a diagetic UI are extra funny. Aside from the aforementioned boob tattoo health meter on a pair of impressively large becleavaged behonkers, which will never not be funny, Anne will call out exactly how many shots she has in a gun while she’s firing it in the most robotic fashion possible. This game tripped so Dead Space could walk, I guess. I kind of love it. In a different world this game would’ve been stupidly influential and important, but since it’s all terrible and busted it’s a curiosity falling directly into my wheelhouse.

Since Trespasser is less a video game with explicit objectives or mechanics, and more a box filled with broken tools, there are moments where it’s accidentally just kind of a walking sim. The late Sir Richard Attenborogh reprises his role as John Hammond, acting as the ghostly audio log narrator describing the creation of Jurassic Park, while Anne (voiced by Minnie Driver) will occasionally quip… something, sometimes as if she’s hearing Hammond speak. The attempt at creating coherent, realistic spaces is one of those things the game actually does well. Especially so when you get to the overgrown, abandoned InGen facilities and just… poke around like it was Gone Home. The fidelity isn’t quite there, but it's ahead of its time in a lot of ways. The game still manages to evoke the kind of beautiful desolation the devs were going for. But a lot of it just involves very slowly walking through jungles and occasionally shooting velociraptors poorly, which is its own kind of meditative. Well, as meditative as my weird deranged tangents during the latter half of the second stream became.

I’ve been trying very, very, very hard to avoid just vomiting out as many parallels as possible between a failed dinosaur theme park foiled by hubris and systemic chaos, and a failed dinosaur theme park video game foiled by hubris and systemic chaos, but they write themselves. I mean, the game itself has an unused voice line where Hammond recites part of Shelly’s Ozymandias. It’s right there! Clever Girl! That’s a lot of shit! Etc etc. Jurassic Park Trespasser is an admirable failure; far too broken and unfinished to be anything other than a curiosity, a shadow of what could've been. I imagine it’ll never get any sort of modern re-release, but god bless the weirdos still making fan patches to make it run surprisingly smoothly on modern OSes. Video games… find a way. Okay I’ll stop. I’ll stop. Gonna try and finish my write-ups for the Wheel of Ukraineous Video Games in the next week or two, so look forward to those.

Also… maybe look forward to what comes afterwards? It’s gonna be spoooooky. and maybe not even a wheel?

Actual Video Game Playing starts at about 15 minutes in if you want to skip watching me ineffectually flail with config files until I figure out how to get the game in a window

Welcome back to The Wheel of Ukraineous Video Games, a cavalcade of high quality (and sometimes not-high quality) interactive software entertainment mostly developed in the sovereign nation of Ukraine! If you'd like to donate to the Ukrainian Red Cross, I'll include the link here, as always.

ATOM RPG

Developer: ATOM Team

Release Date: December 19, 2018 (1.0 release date. It was in early access for something like a year prior)

Time Played: Around 90 minutes

Troubleshooting: None

Would I play more? Nah, nope. Underrail and Encased are right there.

One of the things I’ve tried to be fairly consistent about with my various wheehicular rampages is a loose policy of “no indies.” This was partially due to me wanting to avoid the layer of garbage that sits at the bottom of Steam; be they Unity asset flips or RPG Maker porn games (with or without the 18+ patch.) However, it’s also because I think it’s less fun to dunk on smaller games made by smaller teams with smaller budgets than their published retail counterparts. The idea that something like Dungeon Lords or Nosferatu: Wrath of Malachi was a boxed product on store shelves is more interesting to me than going after a $15 indie game made by like a dozen people. I might eventually budge on this a little more, but for now the likes of Inquisitor are safe from the Dubious RPG treatment.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is that ATOM RPG is the most immediate turn-off I’ve had for this feature and I feel bad because it was made by like nineteen people total, including art contractors. Black Isle’s Fallout duology is only slightly less relevant than Heroes of Might and Magic III in the annals of post-Soviet computer mythology. If you wanted evidence, take literally one look at ATOM RPG’s UI, which is less an “homage” and more of a “direct translation” of Fallout 1 and 2; a feeling that extends to the rest of the game. I guess a less charitable way of saying it would be: ATOM RPG feels like a video game designed by No Mutants Allowed trying to recreate the lost Van Buren version of Fallout 3 through the lens of a post-nuclear Soviet Union, rather than a United States, but slavjank. If that sentence appeals to you, you’re probably the audience for this game. Apparently I’m not that audience.

Now, to be clear, sometimes I’m down for some comfort food blatant homage. I wouldn’t be a fan of the King’s Bounty games otherwise. But ATOM RPG’s tone is immediately weird and mean-spirited, its translation immediately scuffed, and mechanics immediately weird and janky all in a way that I nope’d out of far faster than I was expecting. I’ve liked A Fallout in my time, I loved Wasteland 3, and I’ve liked the little I’ve played of other indie Eastern Bloc Fallout-likes such as Underrail. But when the gameplay feels like a lesser reflection of a game from 1997 and the writing an awkwardly translated mish-mash of quirk, grime, and just a sprinkle of casual bigotry I don’t think it’s my jam. I could see someone putting in more time than I did and coming out with a better impression, but this is one of those cases where I’d rather just replay Fallout 1, finish Fallout 2, or delve into a more immediately promising indie RPG. I mean, heck, they released a new campaign for Solasta! You know I’ve gotta get in on that action, see what all of my weird meat puppets wanna say.

Metro 2033 Redux

Developer: 4A Games

Release Date: August 25, 2014 (Redux) March 10, 2010 (Original)

Time Played: Around 2 hours

Troubleshooting: I'm honestly surprised it's taken this long for a game to start randomly crashing on me

Would I play more? Yes

It’s almost quaint to go back and read some of the things people were saying about the Metro games back in the early 2010s. “It’s a shooter where there are long periods of not-shooting things!” “There are attempts at creating atmosphere and building a world???” and “you have to wipe your mask sometimes?” Like, I know this was the peak of Call of Duty and Call of Duty-poisoned shooter design, but folks, it’s not hard to understand. 4A Games (which was founded by devs who worked on STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl) attempted to adapt the Russian sci-fi novel Metro 2033 into a video game. It’s weird, slow, and doesn’t always quite nail what it’s trying to do, but as a premium vibez delivery service and entry into the surprisingly large “Slavic dudes wearing gas masks trying to avoid giving into despair while opining about life and the universe” genre of video games I had a very good time.

Now, funnily enough, Metro 2033 is just as linear, scripted, and directed as most shooters from 2010, it’s just slow and weird and contemplative when shit isn’t hitting the fan, a tone enhanced if you switch the voice language to Russian instead of hearing like… Yuri Lowenthal doing a Russian accent. Atryom’s journey to defeat The Dark Ones is the exact level of grim I expect from a game like this, with just enough Eastern Bloc mysticism and oh god horrible spiders jesus christ why are the spiders so gross to keep me involved. As I mentioned, it's a game whose greatest strength is less about the shooty shoot or the looty loot and more about the peak vibez of hanging out in dark tunnels with a bunch of sad Russians (and sometimes murdering Nazis.)

The Redux variant (which is the one I played) just seems to look better and smooth out some of the edges, if you so desire. I don’t wanna be the asshole telling anyone how to play the video game, but this definitely seems like it benefits from playing in “Ranger” mode, which turns off the UI and gives you less ammo to mess with. I know this because I didn’t do that; I was drowning in AK bullets only two hours in, had fully upgraded my revolver into a mid-range carbine, and rarely had to use healing items. I like it when I’m forced to engage in the video game systems (unless those systems are bad tbh,) and in that sense I don’t think the “normal” difficulty really facilitates any of the scrounging, sneaking, or ammo preserving Metro is designed around.

I’m honestly half-tempted to restart the game that way, but between this, STALKER, and Chernobylite (which was made in Poland and thus doesn’t qualify for this wheel, but in spirit ABSOLUTELY qualifies for this wheel) I’ve already apparently hit the triple jackpot of weird atmospheric shooters heavily inspired by Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Might need to mix it up a bit before STALKER 2 comes out at the end of this year. Anyway it’s cool. You might have it on the EGS if you got it during their giveaway. Give it a look.

Welcome back to The Wheel of Ukraineous Video Games, a celebration of video games developed mostly in the sovereign nation of Ukraine and also an accidental vector for me to play through the entirety of some of them, apparently. Man, I watched a friend play some of Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter and that seems pretty fucking wild in a way I’d like to see firsthand. As always, I’ll be including a link to donate to the Ukraine Red Cross so that this feature actually is meant for good instead of my own dumb indulgence.

Magrunner: Dark Pulse

Developer: Frogwares

Release Date: June 20, 2013

Time Played: A little over 90 minutes

Troubleshooting: None

Would I play more? Yeah

If there’s an accidental outcome from this feature, it’s that I suddenly have a lot more respect for the handful of recurring game devs featured here. As a champion of Eurojank (and its cousin, Slavjank) I’m always going to root for a developer or a game that tries to punch above its weight, outcome be damned. Frogwares has quickly shot up my list of favorites in that category, joining such hallowed champions as Dubious favorite Spiders… except, you know, they make games that I genuinely like instead of the RPG equivalents of successively less-lethal car crashes.

Take Magrunner: Dark Pulse, an XBLA and PSN game from late in the 360 and PS3’s life cycle that is very much capitalizing on the “Post-Portal” trend of puzzle games. It’s clearly not a big budget title, definitely a side project between all the Sherlock Holmes-ing, but it knows where to put the money where it counts. Instead of thinking with portals, however, this game asks the always prescient question of “Magnets, How Do They Work?” and goes from there.

As Jax, the most 2013 Shaved-Head Video Game Protagonist, it’s up to you to understand that sometimes you want things to attract, and sometimes you want things to repel, and you also want to solve some puzzles along the way. Having multiple items charged with the same polarity will increase the effect, and sometimes you’ll want to quickly switch polarities to give stuff momentum. A lot of the puzzles, at least during the parts I was going through, build upon those ideas mostly elegantly, and I’m proud to say I only spent *some* on stream time missing something really obvious to solve something. I never felt like the rules presented were especially obtuse or fiddly, and that’s a great benefit for puzzle-y stuff like this. Is it as tight and elegant as Portal? No. No, it’s not. But also very few games are Portal. I mean, heck, Portal 2 is pretty fucking good, but even that probably isn’t Portal. Um, magnets? Where were we?

Oh, right also Cthulhu is there. Somehow, I cannot escape the specter of Lovecraftian-ass Lovecraft shit showing up in my video games, even when I’m not actively seeking it out. See, the thing that separates this from the Quantum Conundrums of the world is that, a few puzzle rooms in, you overhear some ominous chanting on your radio. A few more puzzle rooms and you come in on a guy getting ripped apart by a Deep One. There’s something about this all being training to go to space, but the profoundly goofy premise of cyberfuture not-Facebook being fueled by the power of Elder Gods is extremely, extremely funny. I ended my stream having delved into the bowels of the testing facility, where profane statues and even more fish men lurked, and I just wanna say I’m way more into this than I would be if they just tried to be funny.

Now, I cannot speak for how Magrunner holds up as a full game, but for something I’m pretty sure I got for free on GOG at one point, I think it’s a fun puzzle thing and worth a look if you also at some point got it for free on GOG. At this point I’m here pulling for my homies at Frogwares regardless, so please look forward to more Sherlockholmesin and probably that Lovecraft game. No, the other one. The less-bad one whose Steam release is unsanctioned by the developers. Guess I need to get it on PS5.

STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl

Developer: GSC Game World

Release Date: March 20, 2007

Time Played: Um, probably somewhere around 15-20 hours?

Troubleshooting: I ran into an unavoidable crash literally during the ending sequence of the game, but other than that surprisingly fine

Would I play more? I played it to completion and I’ll be honest: probably gonna play more STALKER games

STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl is one of those oft-whispered cult classics; the kind of game people will ascribe GOAT status to before following it up with a massive laundry list of caveats. I certainly remember not making any headway whatsoever when I tried it in like… 2011 or something. Who else but an eastern bloc developer would make a punishing, survivalist semi-open semi-RPG based on a short story and a Tarkovsky film? This is absolutely the most unapologetically slavjank game I’ve played for this feature thus far, not cloaked in a license like Sherlock Holmes or smart budgetary limitations like the aforementioned Magrunner. If you like systems, subsystems, modeled systems and stuff that doesn't work quite right, do I have a video game for you. I dunno if anything will top Konung, but to be fair Konung also doesn’t have an absurdly active modding scene behind it to fix some of the cracks.

Now, I’m gonna save the conversation about mods for the *other* STALKER game on this wheel, but let it be known that I used a “Vanilla Plus” modpack called “Memories of the Zone” for my adventure through this video game. As far as I can tell, it’s built on mostly visual and bugfix updates without really touching the core gameplay all that much. I was initially tempted to play this game entirely vanilla, but the motion sickness brought on by the base 55 FOV and aggressive head-bob quickly banished that inclination. Just know that, as far as my experience went, it’s mostly comparable to whatever the final retail product which reflects “The Developer’s Original Intent” but the game sounds and looks better and is (somewhat) less broken. Cool? Cool.

While the audio-visual improvements absolutely helped, I certainly was not expecting to get as sucked into this game as I was. Part of this was initially borne out of the idea that I wanted to showcase some part of the game other than its infamously rough beginning. If you’re unaware, the opening hours of SoC pit your hilariously under-equipped protagonist against groups of similarly under-equipped bandits, semi-invisible anomalies that’ll kill you if you accidentally stumble into them, and lots and lots and lots of wild dogs. The makarov you start with is maybe one of the most peashooter-y handguns I’ve ever seen in a video game, and the sawed-off shotgun the bandits carry has the effective range of “point-blank, maybe.” It’s an astoundingly poor first impression, and while it emphasizes the uphill climb and gear curve you’re dealing with, it’s not until a few hours in that STALKER became something I actively started enjoying.

See, once you get past that point and start getting your hands on “actual body armor” and “assault rifles capable of hitting targets more than 10 feet in front of you” things start to swing in your favor drastically. It’s still a high-lethality game which more-or-less demands you quicksave obsessively, but what other shooter slash pseudo-open world RPG makes the acquisition of a scope for an AK the equivalent of being able to cast Fireball in D&D? At that point, the more sandboxy, systematic chaos, semi-open structure starts to come forth. In some ways, it’s closer to the video game people claim Far Cry 2 is than Far Cry 2, complete with almost psychic enemies capable of seeing you halfway across the map, but unlike Far Cry 2 I’m not constantly fiddling with a hidden malaria timer.

I’d hesitate to call SoC a true open world game in the traditional sense, though you can certainly embark on the sad Ukrainian scavenger equivalent of killing rats in a sewer if you so desire. It’s a series of interconnected maps with reasons to explore, but rarely obligations. The survival elements are present but rarely onerous, especially once you become over-encumbered from hoarding far, far more ammo than you reasonably need. There are mods for that, if you want it, but that’s something I’ll talk about when we get to Call of Pripyat.

Now, the middle part of this game is one of the best video games I’ve played this year. I cannot emphasize how good STALKER is as a tone piece. There’s an ethereal, alien quality to The Zone, both in its natural and urban environs, which I think is still fantastic even fifteen years later. It’s a good contrast to the small pockets of population you encounter, full of a bunch of sad grimy Slavic dudes playing guitar, sitting around fires, or listening to Russian pop music on the radio too loudly. The shooty-shoot is fine, and I probably should’ve put it onto Master difficulty after hearing how it apparently affects bullet damage for everyone, but it turns out most guys will go down in a headshot regardless. It’s just a shame the last few hours are where you can see time and budget running out, as the last few maps narrow to a series of linear literal, dimly-lit corridor crawls. It wouldn’t be Eurojank without it, and even with that caveat it’s something I highly recommend. Just… don’t ask me what mods to use. I have no fucking idea.

https://fundraise.pencilsofpromise.org/ArbitraryWater2022

Hi hello it’s once again time for me to put my body on the line to help Pencils of Promise raise money to build schools in the developing world. As always, my brand has become a garbage hell nightmare where I can only approach things in terms of randomized wheels of weird, questionable, and obscure video games. I will not apologize for this; it’s done pretty well for my charity endeavors and I’m glad folks seem to enjoy it. So, in “celebration” of two years of wheel-based idiocy from me, this year’s GBCER theme is:

THE WHEEL OF DUBIOUS WHEELS GREATEST HITSTRAVAGANZA EX PLUS ALPHA

That’s right lads, lasses, and non-binary masses, this high quality celebration of dubious games past, present, and yet to come, all on ONE wheel! You’ve got familiar favorites, greatest hits, other installments in dubious franchises. We’ve got old classics, future dubious hits, and most likely some garbage you’ve never heard of! You wanna see me play more Daikatana without the benefit of a co-op partner? How about the Lands of Lore game that stars Kane from C&C? What if I ruined my happiness by playing the most recent Heroes of Might and Magic game? ALL OF THIS IS UP TO YOU.

Like last year, my plan is to stream for a few hours each day, with a new spin of the wheel roughly every hour or so. However, any enterprising individuals who wish to offer me mercy (or extend my pain, I guess) can also pay a minimum of $20 to duplicate any one game’s entry on the wheel, doubling my chance of landing on that. If you really wanted to be a piece of shit, you could probably do that up to five times to quintuple my chances of landing on any one specific game. That’s right. $100 donated to help send kids to school could be used to drastically increase the chances I play Amulets and Armor for multiple hours, perhaps even consecutively. Just put it in your donation comment! I mean heck, if you really wanted to I’d probably let you pay $50 to remove a game from the list entirely… although someone could certainly pay $20 to put it back on. This is what donation comments are for.

Oh, before I forget, here are the games up for contention:

GAMES OF DUBIOUS PAST:

King's Quest: Mask of Eternity

Daikatana

Daggerfall Unity

Might and Magic IX

Hitman Absolution

GAMES OF DUBIOUS PRESENT

Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness

Strangers of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin

GAMES OF DUBIOUS YET TO COME

Darkstone

Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny

Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom

Star Ocean: The Last Hope

Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Of Orcs and Men

Gothic 3

Amulets and Armor

Outlaws

That’s right 16 games, more than half of which have never been streamed by yours truly. With your donations, you can tip the probability in your favor! Ruin my life! Or don’t!

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE.

On SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY I will be taking a break from chaos to revisit one of my least favorite games of the previous wheel! That’s right, on Sunday I will be playing the hit Xbox 360 launch title Perfect Dark Zero with my friend and fellow charitable miserymonger Joeku. You may recall that we played most of Hunted: The Demon’s Forge for Extra Life last year, and I’m very excited to continue finding the absolute center point of playable and deeply mediocre cooperative games.

There are also milestones!

$200 - Overtime: another hour on the clock, for whatever day this is reached, conditions permitting.

$300 - Positive Round Redux: For the next hour I am only allowed to say positive things about whatever game I am playing. Note that Mighty Number 9 is not on this new wheel for a reason

$400 - I do some pushups? Not as many as however much Jatzu is going to do, but I’ll do them. You won’t see me do them, but assume I’ll be sweaty afterward.

$500 - in complete opposition to whatever ZombiePie is going to do to his body with that Little Ceasar’s pizza, I will eat something relatively healthy in a reasonable portion size. Maybe I’ll get a salad.

$600 - Democracy: In this next round, nobody wins! I’ll spin the wheel a couple of times and have either my twitch chat (or the GB chat, if I’m currently being featured there) vote on the next game!

Donation Goal: $650

At $650 American Dollars I will stream through ALL of Perfect Dark Zero to completion with Joeku, perhaps in multiple sittings, beyond whatever we play on Sunday. I’ll even re-up my Game Pass sub if I have to.

BONUS GOALS:

$750 - Dubious Revisitations! If we reach here, I will once again offer myself up to play one of the games I’ve covered prior to completion, put up to a vote! I sure did play all of The Evil Within last year! I don’t recommend it!

$1000 - fuck it man, Duke Nukem Forever. I’ll play the entire thing on stream. At this point you’ve earned it.

$1250 - at this point I will actively bully my friends into playing at least some amount of Dungeon Lords with me on stream. Why is this so high? True Dubiousheads will know

Schedule (not including overtime and any potential other extensions):

Friday, April 8: 6PM - 11 PM PDT

Saturday, April 9: 9AM - 1PM PDT

Sunday, April 10 (PDZ with Joeku!): 8AM - 12PM PDT

So, what are you waiting for? The earlier you donate, the higher your chances of tipping the scales of fate in your favor! Check out https://fundraise.pencilsofpromise.org/ArbitraryWater2022 now, and you’ll see the fruits of your labor come this next weekend!

Hello, and welcome to The Wheel of Ukraineous Video Games, a celebration of video games made in the sovereign nation of Ukraine, partially borne out of frustration at my own powerlessness and partially borne by my personal brand being the hell garbage nightmare I've let it become. If you’d like to help the people affected by the ongoing war, I’ll be including a link to the Ukraine Red Cross in every blog and video for this series. Or honestly you could check out this Humble Bundle. There's some good stuff in there.

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments

Developer: Frogwares

Release Date: September 30, 2014

Time Played: A little over 11 hours

Troubleshooting: The game crashed a handful of times

Would I play more (Sherlock Holmes games?): Yeah so I bought both Devil’s Daughter and Chapter One because I liked this one so much.

If your only exposure to Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes games was Justin McElroy’s legendary E3 saga you’d be forgiven for dismissing them as quirky Eurojank adventure titles. While I cannot speak for the earlier games in the series, (most of which *do* seem very Eurojank) what if I were to tell you Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments is legitimately one of my favorite games I’ve played this year? That’s not a goof, not an ironic bit, not me being a sicko for sicko games (at least, I don’t think) this one actually slaps. Nothing dubious about it.

Now, here’s where I pull the curtain away and reveal that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original Sherlock Holmes stories were a formative part of my childhood growing up. I would read through a large omnibus of stories and watch episodes of the Granada TV series with my mom as a nighttime ritual. While I doubt all of those original stories are bangers, I still treasure these memories and think fondly upon them. More importantly, I wanna bring this up because in a lot of ways Crimes and Punishments reminded me of the best part of those stories and the appeal of Sherlock Holmes as a character. While drawing from numerous interpretations over the years (esp Jeremy Brett’s portrayal from the Granada TV series,) this game feels authentic to my memories of Conan Doyle’s original material. Holmes in this game is arrogant, cold, a tad eccentric, and never not assured of his own correctness, which makes it even better when you can solve crimes horrifically, drastically, utterly wrong. (Watson, on the other hand, is also faithfully portrayed as an audience surrogate and absolute dunce.)

See, the big thing about Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments is that you very much can miss (or misinterpret) clues, accuse the wrong person, and send them to the gallows if you fuck up in your reasoning. You don’t even have to check if you were correct if you don’t want to! While not all of them are winners, the game's best cases are ambiguous enough and give enough leads that you can reasonably accuse multiple people. Between all the vestiges of adventure game-y elements, there’s a surprising amount of actual deduction required for the player, and I kinda love that. Holmes will justify it either way. Allowing the player to be wrong and subject innocent people to Victorian-era justice is both deeply morbid and inspired, and I don’t think there are many other games that rely on that kind of thinking. It also helps that some of these cases go in fucking wild-ass directions. It’s important to remember that even Conan Doyle’s original stories tended toward pulp and camp, but one of this game’s cases in particular is on some next-level Ace Attorney (hell, maybe even Danganronpa) level shit with how wacky it gets. That’s not a slight, by the way.

But, as I mentioned, there’s still a bit of adventure game here and there, mostly in the form of finding items, talking to people, and random-ass one-off puzzles or minigames. If you’ve ever wanted to arm wrestle a sailor, you can do that here (or skip it.) Outside of a particularly lengthy sequence involving secret Roman ruins that might as well be An Actual Point-And-Click Adventure Game I found most of that stuff pretty light and enjoyable. Walking around, snooping for clues and bugging people is what you’re here for, rather than being a chore. Sure, you can see the budgetary limitations here and there, especially with some of the character modeling and facial animations, but it doesn’t feel nearly as much like a B-tier eurojank game as I was expecting.

It’s perhaps a little unfortunate that this’ll probably be the best game I play for this feature, but allow me to say without any sort of irony that Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments is a banger. If my recommendation isn’t enough, I guess you could watch the archive of my playthrough, though I think I’ll also get around to the two more recent games (one of which features Himbo Sherlock, one of which features Twink Sherlock) soon enough. And by that I mean “oh god the video games keep coming out, please help.”

Darkened Skye

Developer: Boston Animation

Release Date: January 27, 2002

Time Played: a little less than two hours

Troubleshooting: none whatsoever definitely played this on a real gamecube anyway

Would I play more? You donate to the kids during the Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run next month and maybe I’ll see what I can do

One of the last games out of Simon and Schuster’s short-lived video game publishing arm, Darkened Skye, also known as “The Skittles Game,” would’ve likely come up on my radar at some point even before I found out it was made in Ukraine. That’s right, the developer known as “Boston Animation” was not, in fact, based out of Boston but mostly in Kyiv. This works for my purposes, given that the arc of the universe would’ve bent in such a way that I would’ve ended up playing Darkened Skye at some point regardless of its country of origin. I mean, how could I not, with this PC and Gamecube-only game coming out in the early 2000s, based on Skittles, put out by a book publisher and given carte blanche to do whatever? The story of how Darkened Skye was made is almost more interesting than the game itself, but I’ll leave that to the video I saw on the subject if you’d like to know more.

Now, let’s be fair here, a third-person action/adventure platformer based on a sugary candy featuring the voice of Princess Jasmine delivering a non-stop torrent of extremely 90s self-aware snark sounds like an absolute nightmare, and it's to the game’s credit that it isn’t. Oh, the platforming is ass, the navigation is clumsy, and the audio mixing is occasionally a nightmare, but like… effort was made here. The writing is surprisingly not-terrible, helped significantly by the delivery of the VAs and the almost prescient level of fourth wall goofs (like straight up there are stills of the live-action skittles commercials from the early 2000s in this video game.) I did not hate it. Well, okay, I hated parts of it. Mostly it’s a shocker that as much effort was put into Darkened Skye as there was. It’s clearly not a high-budget endeavor even by 2002 standards; the size of the environments and the draw distance should make that readily apparent.

Basically, if there ever was a definition for what constitutes a memorable “B game” this would probably be it. This is some peak “7 out of 10 by old games press standards” material right here, and for that I salute it. Is it in any way a video game I would willingly play more of (unless, let’s say, charitable donations were made to help build schools in the developing world, including Guatemala, Ghana, and Laos?) Probably not! I was raised with a N64 and Gamecube, I have an abnormally high tolerance for 3D Character Platformery and Zeldery (I think that’s what they call it) and even by that metric this is probably on the lower end. But, if nothing else, I cannot accuse The Skittles Game of being a cheap cash-in.