
Or why Descent is awesome and Earthworm Jim can go fuck himself.
Recently you've reopened and called for new developers to revitalize your classic properties. Names like MDK and Earthworm Jim have been bandied about. Let's be honest; those weren't your biggest sellers. The one people recognize is Descent.
Now Descent 3 was good. It had pretty graphics, fun weapons, and clever robots. But you spend too much time in Descent 3 looking for something to shoot and too often that leads to trips to the surface, outside of the labyrinth confines Descent is best known for. When (not if) Descent 4 is made, please take the game straight back to its roots. No helper bot, no outdoors. Just you, your weapons, a maze full of robots lusting for your death, and a really good soundtrack. These are what made Descent and Descent 2 great.
Furthermore, the Material Defender works best as a the silent type. I've gone over this before (somewhere), Descent 3 ruined the Material Defender by giving him a voice and making him anything more than a faceless mercenary. Using the lame story to string along the levels was lame. This time, keep it simple. There's the mine, there's robots in there somewhere. Here's your gun.
Please Interplay. Make this happen. And don't fuck it up.
No, I'm not deployed again, I'm just playing Clive Barker's Jericho! Ha!
Seriously. Can this game get more brown? I'm in the World War 2 period of it and I'm not shooting undead nazis, I'm shooting big brown monsters with chainguns and flamethrowers. At one point I was shooting a dead woman with a German accent named Lichthammer whom I assume was in nazi regalia but I can't be sure because everything was brown. I could only tell by her stylish hat.
And the voice acting. It's god awful. I want to strangle Father Rawlings and Delgado and I'm positive I only don't hate the rest of the characters because they don't talk as much as those two. The best one so far is Arnold Leach and he has barely spoken at all.
This is all such a far cry from Undying it's unreal. Undying was a colorful, well voiced, genuinely scary game. The best I can say about Jericho is that the fiction is pretty good (but not as good as Undying so far) and Leach is a well designed monster. He looks like he's straight out of Hellraiser. The concept art is impressive but seeing him in motion at the end of the first section of the game is damned near terrifying.
I know Undying didn't sell well, despite being a great game, so that probably limited Clive Barker's options for studios willing to take the risk in developing another game for him (especially after Demonik was cancelled) but I do hope if he has it in him to give us another game he shops it around until it gets picked up by a studio that can do him some justice and stays involved in it's development. Until I get further all I can tell is that he gave the studio a script and a couple of concept sketches and let them fill in the blanks and when his name is in the title, it really only hurts his reputation that this game turned out to be a big disappointment.
I game at work. Big shock, right? Only when there's really nothing going on though. Today I was revising the original System Shock. I've never beaten it but maybe I will this time. It's amazing. I get back to my room and I'm still hungry for more System Shock. I don't want to start over so I figure I'll fire up System Shock 2 and beat it again. I couldn't get the disc ripped properly so I downloaded it off bittorrent. It's cool, I bought the game ages ago, I just want to play it without having the disc in Iraq. But what I got wasn't the game, just a single executable that won't run. Awesome. So after I find another download and get that started I start to look at alternatives. Games that are often compared favorably to System Shock 2. I know! I'll try Deus Ex. Again.
I've owned Deus Ex for a long time. I probably even paid full price for it. I've never finished Deus Ex. Whereas System Shock deals with being a space hacker fighting cyborgs and mutants, Deus Ex puts you in the shoes of some superhuman CIA agent uncovering every conspiracy theory known to man. The games play relatively similar except that one of these games is fucking awesome and the other game fucking sucks. I finished the one that's fucking awesome.
Here's the myriad of problems I've found with Deus Ex:
So keeping these in mind since my last attempt to play through Deus Ex, I fired up the installer. Installs fine, patches fine, throw in the Shifter mod (which claims to take the Suck out of Deus Ex), fire it up. I fix my resolution (which maxes at 1024x768, what the fuck), fix the color depth (which requires the whole game to restart), and quit out. It quits with an error. Oh well, whatever. Back to desktop, which is noticably lighter. Like the gamma setting within the game is now stuck in the real world. Awesome. Start it up again. Name my duder (Hank Rearden), pick my skills (Advanced Rifle, Trained Lockpick), start the game. Crash to desktop. What the fuck. Do it again, another crash, fuck you Deus Ex. Uninstall.
Take a breather. Maybe the Shifter mod is doing it. Google the mod, find a newer version, find an enhanced OpenGL renderer. Awesome. Install Deus Ex, patch, start it. I do everything I did last time up to the crash to desktop except this time everything is working. Quit out, install Shifter and the renderer, start up again. It's working! Thank god.
I've played the first level a hundred times so I'm in no mood for sightseeing. I'm killing every NSF trooper that looks at me. I get to the upper base of the statue and I'm trying to disarm a gas grenade and it blows up in my face. Awesome. Chug a medkit, start up the stairs to the duder I'm there to kill and I get a communique from HQ. Hermann is still in the basement. Goddamnit. Go all the way down, kill some duders, break out Hermann. Back up the stairs, I'm spotted by a camera and now I'm being riddled with bullets by a turret. Run up some stairs out of its' range and it's back to getting to that duder I'm killing. Another communique, I'm not paying attention, I get to the top of a staircase and I'm greeted by two NSF agents. I backpedal down the stairs and one of them gets off a lucky shot and brains me and I'm dead. I haven't quicksaved since Hermann. Fuck this fucking game.
And that's that. I'm done with Deus Ex again.
(Crossposted on my blog)
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Reverse time to prevent yourself from buying TimeShift!
(PC)
I don't know how I made it through this one. I'm going to gloss over the technical details so I can get to why this game really pisses me off. It's visually competent even though everything has a plasticky look. All the weapons sound weaker than they should and halfway ...
Reviewed by emnii on Oct. 16, 2009
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F.E.A.R. 2 delivers.
(PC)
I don't know why I waited so long to play this one. I love the original F.E.A.R. so you'd think this would've been a no-brainer. F.E.A.R. 2 takes place concurrently (only for a short time) and during the aftermath of the first F.E.A.R. You play a SFOD soldier named Becket ...
Reviewed by emnii on Oct. 11, 2009
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Still a 2½D Classic
(PC)
I've said this before but Dark Forces is probably my favorite Doom clone. It brought the Star Wars universe with all its diverse locations and creatures into a two-and-a-half dimensional game with an engine capable of faking 3D environments and set pieces. It didn't and still doesn't get near enough ...
Reviewed by emnii on Sept. 26, 2009
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1 out of 1 found this review helpful. |
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Not even worth a glance
(PS1)
Please note, I did not finish this game. I know it's a faux pas to write a review for a game you didn't finish but I'll explain why. Darklight Conflict, on the surface, looks fun. It's got some nicely done box art, and I'm a big fan of space ...
Reviewed by emnii on Aug. 27, 2009
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Metroid Reborn.
(XBLM)
When Shadow Complex was announced a couple months ago, I was somewhat torn by it. It was described as a metroidvania style game, which I like. It's developed by Chair, who made Undertow, which sucked. But the lead designer at Chair also made Advent Rising, which I liked! But Advent ...
Reviewed by emnii on Aug. 23, 2009
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1 out of 1 found this review helpful. |
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LASERS! IN! SPACE!
(PS1)
This is one I started before, and just now finished. Except that Colony Wars was one of the first games I ever owned on Playstation, so really it's taken me about 10 years to finish it. I got Colony Wars way back when it was new to complement my new ...
Reviewed by emnii on Aug. 8, 2009
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Punching dudes in the face doesn't get much better than this!
(PC)
If you haven't heard of this one, you're probably not alone. It won a few indie game awards but it has kind of been under the radar. It's also somewhat difficult to describe. To put it simply, it's a first-person fighting game that takes place in a very surreal environment. ...
Reviewed by emnii on Aug. 8, 2009
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Well worth revisiting (or just visiting)
(XBOX)
NOTE: This review was written for Fable: The Lost Chapters on Xbox. Unfortunately, The Lost Chapters page won't let me write the review for xbox, just PC and Mac. Here's a classic. I just got this one last year because it was $5 and it was completely worth it. I'd heard ...
Reviewed by emnii on Aug. 8, 2009
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How does survival horror become ho-hum?
(X360)
I love the Silent Hill series. My first one was Silent Hill 2 on PS2. It was an amazing experience and I've been a fan ever since. That said, Silent Hill: Homecoming probably holds the record for the longest period of time it's taken me to finish a Silent Hill ...
Reviewed by emnii on Aug. 8, 2009
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Not a masterpiece, but not a turd either.
(PS1)
If you google "epidemic psx review" you'll get a couple of 1/2 star reviews citing this game as the worst of the worst. In reality and historic context, it's not that bad. Epidemic is the definition of "corridor shooter". You never venture outside. The environments consist of sewers and labyrinthine ...
Reviewed by emnii on Jan. 2, 2009
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| Date Joined: | July 21, 2008 |
| City: | Clarksville |
| Gender: | Male |
| Alignment: | PC |
| Points: | 1,521 Points |
| Ranked: | Ranked #696 of 59,097 |
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Drakan: Order of the Flame game - 271 points |
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X-Men: The Ravages of Apocalypse game - 177 points |
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Exile game - 168 points |
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Colony Wars: Vengeance game - 127 points |
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50 Cent: Bulletproof game - 82 points |
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Exile: Wicked Phenomenon game - 69 points |
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NiGHTS into Dreams... game - 66 points |
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The Chikyuu Boueigun game - 48 points |
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I_am_Lono
4 months, 2 weeks ago I_am_Lono is playing Secret of Mana |
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GoranP
4 months, 2 weeks ago GoranP is working on Salmon Nation |
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MocPac
10 months, 3 weeks ago caPcoM |
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