FUTURE NAZIS

So, Mortyr, a Polish game from 1999, best described by what is on its game page on Gamersgate:

In this highly unofficial remake of the classic first person shooter Wolfenstein 3D, you are Sebastian Mortyr as he travels back in time to prevent the Nazis from building a time machine which will grant them victory in World War II. It isn't just for humanity - it is for the world itself, as the Nazi's actions are taking a heavy toll on the future ecosystem. 30 levels set both in the heart of World War II and in the future await you, and you'll need to fight the Nazi war machine with ten WW2 guns and six more future weapons.

To me this sounded like a pretty good game. but unfortunately, it doesn't run well at all, as you can see in the below video, so I have no idea whether the above is actually true or not. Shame really.

So this is El Matador, Max Payne but with drug cartels instead of Max Paynes.

SLO-MO

So this is a third person shooter with bullet time mechanics and side jumping, and actual health. It even runs on the Max Payne engine, or so I read, so the comparisons are pretty valid. But then you get to the themes and the story and they become nothing alike. This game is about a DEA agent combatting the Mexican and South American drug cartels, but honestly, that all seems like some weak front for shooting the hell out of dudes in slow-motion, which you do, a lot. It seems you have to shoot them all in slo-mo too, otherwise you will die, very quickly, even on normal. Which is kind of annoying as the slo-mo stuff gets pretty tedious, pretty damn quick. The game was oddly easy to headshot dudes without the slo-mo, so I just plonked my kalashnikov into single shot mode and popped fools and then got bored, so stopped.

The first mission has you shooting some dude in a club in Tijuana, of which climaxes with you shooting a dude into and down a well. The second mission had you escaping from a burning building in Bogotà and then shooting some dudes in slo-mo.

There’s not really much to talk about with this game; it’s kinda boring, and the things it tries to do to make it different get tedious really damn quick.

King Truck

So this is Hard Truck 2: King of the Road, a trucking simulator from 2002. Part of the Hard Truck series, from which Hard Truck: Apocalypse, that I played a few days ago, is a spin-off. I didn't really know what I could write for this, as it a trucking simulator, so I made I recorded my 20 minutes of playing it and have uploaded it to Youtube for your viewing boredom pleasure. For some reason, Fraps decided to record the FPS counter, even though the game was running at like a thousand FPS, it just shows what it is for the video. Weird.

Slightly interesting moments of the video are: crashing into a river, crashing into a lake accidentally, crashing lots, Russians that drive on the wrong side of the road >:(, getting speed tickets, explosions, and getting into a Police Chase.

Another TBSRPG. Yes I may have coined that term.

Spirits of Rage.

So, in the Fantasy Wars post the other day, I said it was like HoMM; I was kinda wrong. This is like HoMM. Or what I should say is, this is the reboot of the game that spawned HoMM. King’s Bounty was a game developed by New World Computing in 1990, who used it as a basis for the HoMM games, with the Might and Magic games obviously being where the world and mythos came from.

The game is a turn based strategy RPG game; where you play as a Hero character, whom you can level up, and you can control your army of units against another character’s army of units. You fight on a gridded arena, as opposed to an open map like the last game, which is very reminiscent if you know HoMM but not this game.

This and Fantasy Wars are similar though; the unit types for example are largely similar, although, a lot of games have similar unit types. You have warrior units, magic casting units, agility units, etc, and you battle against similar units from the enemy.

The magic based units seem to have a nice big spellbook to choose from, with various types of spell, allowing for varied magic based combat.

There was an overworld style thing where you gather bits of story, and gather some loot, and further the game along. In the middle of the map there’s an NPC who you talk to and he will open up new rooms for you to go into and face off against the enemies.

I went through a couple of missions, fortunately destroying my enemies somewhat easily; although I did lose a couple of the weaker units. I gained some gold and loot from defeating the enemies, but I was unable to use any in the time I played. On the topic of how much I played... I didn’t really like the game; the game seemed a pretty good game, did everything it was trying to do well, but it’s really not my kind of game. I don’t really like turn based games, and find them mostly boring, especially with an arena setting like this one.

Annoyingly, it would not run with the steam overlay, so I was unable to use that to gather screenshots, and I just couldn’t be bothered to run FRAPS to capture them with that, sorry.

This game refused to run, but it did provide me with this wonderful error window.

Unfortunately Hellforces would not run, whatever I did, so I was forced to skip it.

CaRPG... Amirite?

So Hard Truck Apocalypse is a post-apocalyptic vehicle-based RPG of sorts; you don’t gain experience points or anything, but you do gain money from selling loot, which you can buy better parts for your vehicles essentially increasing your stats. Weirdly it’s a whole lot like A.I.M. but with post-apocalyptic trucks instead of alien mech-minds. It’s also a lot better than A.I.M. which is good; unfortunately a whole lot better than A.I.M. isn’t that much a compliment.

You start the game with a truck - surprisingly - armed with a machine gun, which you can upgrade as you go, and are given quests to carry out; most of the quests are basic RPG stuff, fetch me this, kill this, accompany me here etc; but these are just the abundance of side quests, you also have main quests to carry out that I will assume have some semblance of story to them.

As with all open world games like this, I drove off into the wilderness as soon as I was able to, and drove directly up some mountains, very much like I did with the Mako in Mass Effect. Unfortunately the game had invisible walls on most of them mountains, so you are unable to drive up them all. As you drive along enemy cars will attack you; I assume they belong to some evil gang or opposing faction or something as there is never really any reason for them to attack you.

As I mentioned earlier, loot is a thing in this game, and most enemies will have loot for you to pick up. I ended up with an inventory full of wood and potatoes before long, which weirdly both sold for a higher price than the guns I managed to scavenge later on. All settlements will have merchants for you to sell your loot, buy new upgrades, repair your car, and buy fuel from.

The game was very well received in Russia on its launch 7 years ago, so I will have to take their word that this is a good game deep down. What I saw of it was a great idea, but kinda boring.

Denerhalle

Here we have Fantasy Wars, a turn based strategy game in a similar vein to HOMM or - as I have never really played anything like this since a game on the Sega Gamegear many years ago - the combat from Civilisation 5.

Set in a world hit with constant warring, the game features 4 races: Humans, Orcs, Elves, and Dwarves; and with that three campaigns: Humans, Orcs, and Alliance. The human campaign pits you against orcs, and the orc campaign against humans; the Alliance is locked until you finish the other two, which was kinda annoying, as that was the one I wanted to play.

You have an army you go into each battle with, and you can pick and choose from a given pool to compose your army, to add more or less units depending on whether you can afford them. The units are the usual types: archers, swordsmen, scouts, brutes, and weak fodder like peasants. Your units gain experience for their actions, and you can level up and gain, what they unfortunately call, perks; things like extra defense for hiding in forest tiles for the scout. You also have hero characters, who are stronger than the rest of the units, and you have to keep them alive throughout the mission, for obvious reasons.

For a game only 6 years old the graphics are pretty dated; whilst the landscape is fine, the character units are pretty blocky, and generally bad.

The game is probably mildly fun, but my hero guy was defeated in one hit by an enemy, thus halting my play.

So this game is a point and click adventure game, based on some Russian fairytales, hence the name, I guess.

Roman the Raven

The game opens with you in bed, with your Nan - I think - reading you a bedtime story, specifically the one about Father Frost, Ivan and Nastya. The game also opens with horrible echoey sound and this continues throughout the game, along with super jilted voice acting

You’re a girl who lives with her Father, Sister, and an evil stepmother who refers to you as a venomous viper; I can only assume she has a strong dislike for the character. I have to knit a sock, because the old bag stole my first one; what a party pooper. I went in to the house to find something to base my design on, which is weird ‘cause she just knitted one, and I found a ‘Mice’s Hole’; yep that’s right. So I find a lollipop and give it to her sister, that way I can steal her sock and copy it and knit another one. Unfortunately the sock came out half knit, and I have no more red wool, WHAT TO DO?

I had a conversation with a Rooster; it told me the sun is our master, but unfortunately yielded no wool. Next I met a Raven. A talking Raven named Roman; he was atop a scarecrow and wouldn’t let me take our own Beetroot without feeding him, so I go to ask my Father for some of his breakfast cheese (actually not a euphemism). I need to find a knife to cut this cheese, so I head out to the forest to claim the knife my father was using to dig up forest mushrooms, to then cut his cheese (also not a euphemism). So I take the cheese to the raven, I till the field as my character is too weak to pull it from the ground, and then the game crashes, and I think cool, I am ok with that.

So that was Fairytale, a children’s adventure game, marketed kids age 6 and up.

Screw this game.

Freight... Tycoon?

What kind of person wants to play a freight tycoon game? An insane person. Probably. This game is bad. You buy freight garages and cars and drivers and stuff, and then take on contracts around premade cities to make money etc. Pretty much a tycoon game.

I really dunno what to write about this game. I didn’t like it at all. Theme Park World was a game I played the hell out of when I was younger, and I played the hell out of the demo for Theme Hospital too.

I apologise for this terrible blog, have a look at the best load screen so far.

Faces of War? That’s a similar name.

Viktor Smirnov

So I had another game that wouldn’t work: Dusk-12. It’s ok though, as it looked a darned awful game. Aliens and Marines and telekinesis. Wait, that sounds great. Hmm.

Faces of War is an RTS by Best Way, and just happens to be the predecessor to Men of War, one of the games I bought this pack for. Whilst I have sneakily been playing some of the Men of War multiplayer with @Akrid and @Liber, I already knew how this game worked, so playing it wasn’t as much of a chore as other games.

This is the first - maybe second, I forget whether Cryostasis did - game that has loaded up in my monitor’s native resolution, which is amazing. So if you aren’t familiar with the Men of War style - as I am referring to it as - you control units on the micro-est of levels (read: individually) or you can group them together and order around squads. Each unit has his own inventory, and as such you can kit your units out with whatever you find, if in caches or on enemies. It’s always good to have a mixture of guns between your units, as different guns have different uses; LMGs for suppression and cover, rifles for longer range, SMGs for short-medium range, and snipers for longer range and accuracy of course.

The game has possibly the best cover system in any RTS I have played; you can click up against a piece of cover and the units will gather against it in the best way they can, and it gives you a silhouette of how they will stand once they get their, which is very helpful.

The game has vehicles too, which unless damaged beyond repair, you can commandeer yourself, and will often be given vehicles to use in the missions. Obviously, like everything, these vehicles will have advantages and disadvantages, and serve different purposes. Same with the AT and AA cannons, dangerous, but slow to use.

The game has three campaigns, German, Allies, and Soviet; and naturally, I went with Soviet. The first two missions were training levels, the first one teaching you how to control your infantry, and the second how to use tanks and artillery. Then a proper mission was presented to me, clear a town of Nazis, and make contact with a resistance general. The mission was pretty straightforward, as you have allies pushing through at the same time as you, and they will do most of the work. After this mission came a mission in a series of smaller settlements, I had to clear them all out and gather some intelligence documents from a Nazi general. This mission was substantially harder, as it was just your 5 units against numerous Germans. You first have to clear a bridge of enemies, so I thought if I forded the river up stream and attempted to flank them, I’d be able to get the drop on their MGs and be able to defeat the rest of them easier, but no, there were some Germans in a house nearby and I died quickly. So I tried again to flank them from the other side, but this didn’t work very well either as my men got stuck in the middle of the river and were easily gunned down by the Germans that were alerted to their presence because I forgot to take my sniper off of fire at will, so that’s why I am here, writing this blog.

The game is pretty good, essentially a less refined version of Men of War, a game I look forward to playing.