Painkiller

Developer: People Can Fly

Release Date: April 12, 2004

Time Played: around 90 minutes

Troubleshooting: one unofficial fan patch

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Kills pain? Honestly, no. If anything it made my arm hurt more than it usually does playing games like this.

Would I play more? Sure?

As shooters started to drift away from the high-speed stylings of Quake and Friends during the mid 00s, there was definitely a countertrend of even more stripped down, even faster games that took the “Arena Shooter” moniker seriously. Namely, by putting you in a big arena of dudes and asking you to strafe and/or bunny hop your way around them. Okay, admittedly, when I call this a countertrend I’m mostly talking about the surprise success of Croteam’s Serious Sam games, which I have been on record as not particularly liking. For what it’s worth, I think I like Painkiller slightly more. That’s not an especially high compliment, but on the other hand it’s definitely not the worst thing I’ve played for this feature by a long shot.

Similar to Serious Sam, Painkiller explains itself fairly quickly and lets you know up front exactly how dumb it is. Are you a bad enough dude to strafe around a literal arena-shaped environment shooting (at least in the first episode) a bunch of evil monks and demons and skeletons with a shotgun? Sure you are. It’s not as intent on having you run away from screaming, headless bomb men, but it’s about on that level of goofy and mindless, more a test of raw reflex and crowd management skills than any sort of mechanically complex endeavor. It also has some, uh, decidedly broken-ass physics interactions and weapons (if you enjoy pinning enemies to the wall, may I recommend the stake launcher) and once-per-level power ups in the form of Tarot cards. Honestly was having an alright time until I ran into the first boss encounter, spent multiple attempts dumping ammo in it for minutes at a time only to more-or-less get one shot by one of its wide, sweeping attacks.

I think the highest compliment I can give Painkiller (or at least the first “episode” of Painkiller, which is what I played on stream) is that I can see how People Can Fly got to Bulletstorm, Gears Judgment and Outriders from it. There’s a similar manic energy to all of their games, and some of the goofy, physics-inclined nonsense from this was directly codified with Bulletstorm’s stylish kills interactions. I don’t think I’d ever recommend any of their games without caveats, but by golly they’re going for it in that delightful Eurojank way. Just skip every single cutscene in Outriders. You’ll have a better time.

Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion

Developer: Acclaim Austin (aka Iguana Studios)

Release Date: September 6, 2000

Time Played: A little over two hours

Troubleshooting: Definitely didn’t spend slightly too much time getting the controller mapping to work sensibly on an emulator, no siree.

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Dinosaur Quotient (DQ): Surprisingly Low

Would I play more? Was sincerely tempted to try and play the entire thing on stream. I don’t know what that says about me other than the usual “I’m slightly broken” Considering it for Extra Life.

To see the progression of Turok is to see the progression of the FPS genre during the late 90s. I’m not even joking. The first game’s claim to fame is being one of a handful of Nintendo 64 games to release in the months after launch (alongside Shadows of the Empire,) and summarily the butt of many jokes involving pea soup fog and ill-fated digs at Quake. Turok 2, with its larger world and non-linear progression (i.e. sometimes you had to backtrack) was already doing some pretty ambitious shit for the time, even if part of that ambition seemed to be “exactly how low could you drag the framerate on the Nintendo 64.” For whatever it’s worth, the Night Dive remasters of both Turoks reveal entirely okay games underneath, even if the design limitations of making a shooter for console are more apparent once the technical ones are gone. I wouldn’t call either of them “classics” or anything, but they’re not entirely Dubious Wheel material.

This is all preamble to say that by the time Turok the Third came out, shooters were in a post-Half Life world. Remember that thing I said in that first blog about how it took video games a long time to catch up to Halo and Half Life? What if I told you Turok 3 is trying to do the kind of scripted, set-piece heavy stylings of Half Life, but on the N64? Also that it has fully-voiced cutscenes? And two playable characters with slightly different ways of getting around the world? As either Danielle or Joseph, the siblings of Josh Turok, you’ve gotta defeat some sort of interdimensional alien monster from doing evil stuff. Danielle gets a grappling hook, Joseph can crawl through vents, and they even get a couple of different weapon upgrades. Now, Deus Ex this is not, and a handful of different routes through levels does not make two divergent playthroughs, but it’s kind of staggering to see what this game is trying to do on the hardware.

Now, obviously, if it was entirely successful at what it was trying to do, Turok 3 would be heralded as a classic of the late N64 era and whispered in the same breath as its contemporary, Perfect Dark. Instead, it’s a part of this feature. I will give it this: Turok 3’s frame rate is slightly better than Perfect Dark’s. This is just one of those things you kinda forget about the hardware (because I was clearly running the game on actual hardware, officer) but just a reminder that a consistent 30+ FPS was the exception, rather than the rule. Similarly, console FPSes didn’t exactly have… standardized control schemes, especially on the triple pronged herald of doom(64). The way Turok 3 natively attempts a dual analog control scheme, with the c-buttons for movement and the control stick for aiming is, uh, novel? It’s trying? Definitely didn’t play the game with those controls mapped in a sensible way to a DualShock 4, nope. It seems like something that would’ve been a nightmare at the time, but there’s a very, very generous auto aim to compensate.

Control issues aside, there’s a real “boy golly it’s cute that you’re trying” energy to a lot of Turok 3’s set piece level design. There’s that subway level where you’ve gotta avoid running trains (which isn’t good), a level where you infiltrate a military base and suddenly have to deal with hitscan enemies in a game where you aren’t mobile enough to avoid taking damage, and a couple boss fights that I might generously say involve “strafing around in circles, which is definitely something that would’ve been a mess on the N64 controller, (which I of course used)” Really, the biggest problem is a complete dearth of dinosaurs to hunt, with them only starting to come in during the later levels of my stream. It’s the kind of messy-but-interesting nonsense I like to champion on this feature, so even if Turok 3 might not be a great game, it’s a great dubious game. You might see more of it in the future, which is more than I can say for the next two games on the block.

in case you're wondering, you can watch me suffer in real-time on my Twitch channel. Also sometimes I play good video games. Like Blood Omen! Also gonna play some Silent Hill 2 to close out Spooptober. Will I ever get around to writing about non-dubious games? Maybe?

Strife

Developer: Rogue Entertainment

Release Date: May 15, 1996

Time Played: A little more than two hours (some of which was offstream)

Troubleshooting: Used Night Dive’s remaster, so there was none whatsoever

Dubiosity: 2 out of 5

Sewer Count: One is still one too many

Would I play more?: see the benefit to first person shooters over RPGs is that shooters tend to not be 40 hours long, which means there’s a higher-than-zero chance of me revisiting them even if I’m not entirely thrilled with what they’re doing.

Video game criticism wirt large has more than enough things to say about Doom and why it’s an important thing that is also still good. It’s almost a self-evident truism, which is why I, being the contrarian hipster piece of shit that I am, find far more pleasure looking at the weird, questionable, and obscure deviations of popular games than the games themselves. Strife is a game that, by all metrics, is “impressive for the time.” It’s a first person shooter running in the Doom engine, but it has quests! NPCs! Shops! Voice Acting! A main hub! Something resembling a narrative! In a world where FPSes (or “Doom Clones” as they were known) were still very much a series of bespoke levels, one after the other, the idea of one of those games where you don’t immediately shoot everything in sight is novel indeed. In The Year of Our Lord 2021, the things Strife does are just things that every video game does now.

I don’t want to be too dismissive out of the gate, because hey I would probably still play this over Hexen, which takes Doom’s formula and says “what if you had to find eight switches to progress.” But in this particular case, pretty much everything that made Strife ambitious and interesting in 1996 is now commonplace. As a result, I cannot muster more than a general “this is neat” to what the game is trying to do, and I think part of that boils down to execution. Contrast this with my reaction to Black Mesa, which I had a great time with last year and which gave me a pretty solid grasp for why Half Life is as important as it is. Sure it’s a polished up, prettified version of that game from 1998, but I think a lot of it is just core design fundamentals.

As a video game, I think Strife firmly falls in “okay” territory. There’s an abundance of 90s energy coming from the character portrait art (which is actually stylized and pretty good) and the sassy woman who is constantly talking and cracking wise in your ear (which is bad and I hate it.) As a shooty shoot the vague focus on “narrative coherence” actually is a minus for the level design. That sewer level is infamous for a lot of reasons, and while I eventually managed to get out of it (after finishing my stream, naturally) it’s bad and labyrinthine in a way that would make even Sandy Petersen blush (this is a Doom level design joke; that’s how far I’ve fallen.) There’s a vague attempt at stealth mechanics that doesn’t work because of how binary it is, but it’s once again “neat.” Similarly, the weapon arsenal is novel mostly due to being one of the first “actually good flamethrowers” in one of these, but is otherwise mostly fine? It’s fine. This game is fine. You can play it on a Switch. That's neat.

Killzone

Developer: Guerilla Games

Release Date: November 2, 2004

Time Played: Around 2 hours

Troubleshooting: I mean unless you count the absurd chain of devices I use to capture PS3 games, not much at all

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Halo Killer? No. Not remotely.

Would I play more? WHY DID I PAY $15 FOR THIS

Killzone looks and feels like a fake video game. Its entire existence feels less like the product of creative impetus and more the result of Sony’s first party development desperately trying to fill a hole in their catalogue. To say it bluntly: it is a product that existed to counter Halo 2, which meant something back in yonder days of 2004. In every aspect of its being, of its execution, it seems intended, with precision, to Kill Halo, which as we all know was the goal of every console FPS between the years 2002 and 2008. It came out a week earlier, and I can only imagine the quality and tenor of online discussions surrounding these two directly competing juggernauts. Yes. Directly competing.

Except, here’s the thing. Halo 2, for as dumb as its non-ending is, is still a damn good game, almost seventeen years removed from its release. Halo, while diminished, is still a big franchise in the VideoGameosphere. I played some of that multiplayer test flight last weekend, and it turns out I still think Halo is pretty good. I don’t see anyone on the internet going to bat for Killzone, with the possible exception of the truly zealous console warriors still litigating arguments from more than a decade ago. I’m going to try and avoid just going down a laundry list of direct comparisons, because that serves no one. I’m just going to say that even by the standards of mid-00s console shooters, Killzone is this weird, slow, clunky mess of a thing. There’s no one thing I have a problem with; moreso it’s everything. I think I might hate everything about this game. It’s a better game than Red Faction 2, I’ll give it that. It has a coherency of design RF2 lacks, and while it had one turret sequence within 10 minutes of game starting, said turret sequence lasted 90 seconds. If the undercurrent of this feature ends up being “Did I enjoy this game more or less than Daikatana” then I’m okay with that, but let it be known that Daikatana has no turret sequences. Point in favor of John Romero.

Instead your group of characters (who have vaguely different abilities, like “stealth” and “holding three guns instead of two) go in a vaguely straight line shooting British Space Nazis in a bunch of dull scripted moments with characters constantly yelling in your ear, punctuated with a bunch of dull weapons and aggressive animation priority. For example, the Helghast assault rifle has what is basically an underbarrel masterkey shotgun as its alt fire, which should be cool. I think Buck is pretty cool in Rainbow Six Siege, and was always a fan of the goofier underbarrel stuff in various Call of Duty games. Whatever cool factor having an assault rifle that is also a shotgun goes out the window when you realize there is no way to cancel out of the (lengthy) reload animation between every single shot. Instead you’re left vulnerable for seconds at a time and as a result should probably just stick to that gun’s extremely large magazine of regular bullets. And I feel like that sums up the moment-to-moment gunplay pretty well. The entire thing just feels like it’s running through molasses, but the time to kill is still pretty low, for both you and the Helghast. It doesn’t work in a tactical sense; it’s just sluggish. Throwing a grenade takes way longer than you think it should, and the way the animation plays out means it’s hard to get a judge of where exactly you’re chucking the thing.

Now, to be entirely fair, it sounds like Killzone 2 and 3 are a significant improvement, and I’d be remiss if I judged the entire franchise based on this incredibly dull fucking boring-ass grey fucking boring piece of shit. There was some temptation to go with them (and Insomniac’s Resistance games) over this, but instead I’m $15 poorer and significantly grumpier. I’ve spent more money on worse purchases, even for dubious wheel streams, but there’s something about Killzone that stings more than normal. Maybe it’s just the complete absence of anything I can call “interesting” or “mechanically satisfying”. Instead I’m left with the video game equivalent to Worker and Parasite. Don’t play it! I mean, this feature should probably not be buying advice for anyone who is not also a sicko (outside of my entreaty to play Wizards and Warriors, you coward.) This is an exception to that. You probably weren’t going to set up your Playstation 3 to buy the HD version of a game from 2004, but just in case you were thinking of it, don’t!

John Romero’s Daikatana

Developer: Ion Storm

Release Date: May 23, 2000

Time Played: About Nine Hours

Troubleshooting: Light, mostly just works with the fan patch (this is a new thing I’m gonna put in here, which is the amount of work it took to get this game running in an acceptable, streamable fashion)

Dubiosity: With the fan patch? Probably like a 4 out of 5

Doomiosity: Very few pentagrams, very disappointed

Would I play more? Listen, I would consider playing through this game again, solo, for like charity or something. I did not hate my time with it.

I think there are few flops more notorious in the history of video games than John Romero’s Daikatana. It's a little before my time on the internet, but the hype cloud and ensuing fallout of this game was one of the big things the internet cared about during the late 90s, and honestly feels like it serves as the precursor for disappointing game releases of present day. If you haven't read Masters of Doom, I highly recommend you do. I read it for the first time this year, and the later chapters of that book really paint a damning portrait of this game's development, John Romero's leadership at Ion Storm and the work culture that led to this game becoming the punchline for "overhyped trash." Knowing the lurid details of Ion Storm’s penthouse office (it turns out air conditioning the top floor of a skyscraper in Dallas is expensive!) and the various missteps made during Daikatana’s development (namely, switching from the Quake 1 to Quake 2 engine midway through) really helped, uh, enhance my experience with this seminal(?) game. The seminal game I bought for 97 cents and decided had to be the centerpiece of my weird, questionable, and obscure shooty shoot wheel. Also, to be entirely honest, it’s not entirely terrible? @justin258 and I played through the entire thing co-op and it was hardly the worst thing I've done to myself this year.

Oh, to be clear, Daikatana is a mess. Even “fixed” with the essential fan patch, even without the limited save system, even without AI companion babysitting, even with a co-op partner, and even without the game’s surprising abundance of overwrought bad cutscenes, it’s a mess. There are fundamental problems with it that go beyond occasionally(?) crashing and not being able to leave without one’s buddy Superfly Johnson. There are layers to its dubiosity, but there’s also clarity in its madness. I can say authoritatively, as a person on the internet who has accidentally turned his brand into playing weird garbage, that I think this game is interesting? It’s interesting. It’s not good. But I think as we all know by this point, it’s my eternal curse to forever be drawn to things that are more interesting than they are good. That’s a Dubious Wheel promise.

While I could probably break down the specifics of Daikatana’s confusing, ugly, and occasionally jarring level design, I think there are enough videos (including my own playthrough) to hammer the point home. There have been enough things said about how genuinely awful the beginning of the game is, between the abundance of dimly lit, extremely green industrial environments or the dimly lit, extremely green enemies that inhabit them. I get the impression that’s where most people stopped, and I do not blame them one bit, because shit is genuinely terrible. That said, the game gets notably better once you get out of that first dark future “episode” and onto later environments. You wouldn’t KNOW that because most people never got past trying to shoot those fucking mosquitoes with the garbage ion blaster, but at the very least the game’s terrible initial first impression eventually leads way to something… less bad. Still a surprising amount of “where the fuck do I find this key item” syndrome going on. If I wanted that I’d play Hexen.

Daikatana’s greatest curse might be that it was made by a bunch of people who clearly played a lot of shooters and clearly had a lot of ideas. In a lot of ways it resembles the game that Romero wanted to make for ages, without anyone else there to tell him no. For some reason there are RPG mechanics, and you can level up both Hiro Miaymoto's (seriously?) stats and the titular “Big Sword” itself. That has the corollary effect of starting you out feeling kind of shit, between weapons taking slightly too long to fire (tied to the "attack" stat, which is different from the "power" stat) and the Daikatana itself feeling like straight garbage until you power it to level 3, at which point it becomes monstrously overpowered. Of course, once you get a few levels in you things get a lot better. Like, the movement in Daikatana is actually pretty great? Once you get a few points into speed and jump, you can fuckin’ zoom across the (far too large) levels and eventually rocket jump over a surprising amount of geometry. It's still a Quake engine game, so I guess I can see why it has a small-but-dedicated deathmatch scene.

For my money, though, the most Romero thing about it might be how the weapon roster is esoteric to the point of obnoxiousness. Each of the four time periods has a totally different set of weapons, which is as admirable in its ambition as it is frankly absurd. A lot of the guns very much feel like a parade of “wouldn’t it be cool if” prompts without consideration for why most video games suffice with a shotgun that acts like a shotgun. In Daikatana, the first shotgun you encounter is a six-barreled automatic shotgun that discharges all of its rounds with one pull of the trigger and can be used to rocket jump, which *sounds* cool but just leads to you wasting a bunch of ammo or getting caught between barrages. No, you’re not going to use the mine launcher or the actual rocket launcher to rocket jump too much, because you’ll blow yourself up with their surprisingly large and dangerous splash radius (which is the other running trend of a lot of Daikatana’s arsenal: high friendly fire potential.) It goes on like that for pretty much every “episode” (Snake staff that shoots poison balls that can bounce off walls and hit you? Check. Magic fire staff that shoots giant fireball? check.) until the last one where they decide to finally give you a regular-ass pistol and shotgun. Sure. Only took the entire game.

So yeah, uh, you probably shouldn’t play Daikatana, even with the fan patch. I cannot stress that enough, for as much as I do not regret playing through it myself and would, in fact, not be against playing it again for various charitable purposes. Quite simply, among the crop of both old and new classic-style shooters there are better prospects for your time, ones that are perhaps less historically infamous but significantly more playable. That said, if you do decide to take that 97 cent plunge at least rest assured that it has interesting™ ideas and is not the worst thing ever. I mean, fuck man, I was looking at Redneck Rampage on sale, going “hmmmmm” and then wondering what I was doing with my life. I did not buy Redneck Rampage. I did buy Daikatana! Take that as you will. Hopefully Romero will make a good video game again one of these days, because Empire of Sin sure did seem... well-intentioned when I checked it out a couple months ago.

Red Faction II

Developer: Volition

Release Date: October 15, 2002

Time Played: A little over 90 minutes

Troubleshooting: Light

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Geomodosity: NOT NEARLY ENOUGH

Would I play more? no.

One of the reasons why this “season” of The Wheel of Dubious FPSes is mostly fixated on games from the mid 90s through the early 2000s is twofold. First, it’s after shooters had become more than “Doom Clones” but before the genre had been fully codified (or CODified, am I right? High five.) and cemented during the 360/PS3 generation, which means there are *ideas*. Second, I don’t think you could pay me to play most of the mediocre to bad console shooters of the mid-late 2000s, especially once everything transitioned from being set in World War II to being set in A Modern Conflict Set in Brown Nondescript Middle Eastern Country and Sometimes Russia. I’ve got bad news: gaming for me may be a religion, but Haze just kinda seems shit. (i.e. not worth the novelty of me eBay-ing a copy or going to the trouble to set up an emulator.) I apologize to everyone who was anticipating an endless string of Korn jokes. I don't know any. Except their music. Heyo.

However, Red Faction II is a reminder that, uh, maybe most shooters weren’t super great on console during the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era either. Or rather to use a reductive hot take that I formulated about 30 minutes into this Red Faction II stream: “First-Person Shooters sure did spend a lot of time playing catch up to Halo and Half Life.” Now, I played a few hours of the first Red Faction before this stream, as a barometer for its comparative dubiosity and general quality as a first person shooter; it seems totally “fine.” However, compared to its sequel, it’s a masterwork of game design. If you'd ask me what "the thing" about the first Red Faction was, it's that it's a shooter set on Mars, and uses the "GeoMod" terrain deformation engine. So imagine, much to my shock and astonishment, Red Faction II does not take place on Mars, nor does it actually have much of the environmental destruction and terrain deformation that more or less was the entire selling point of Red Faction the First. That's like if Halo 2 did not have recharging shields or a two weapon limit. So what does RF2 have?

Two lengthy turret sequences in the first 90 minutes, that’s what it has. Having played Black Mesa last year, I can state with some confidence that the original Half Life still does that style of very scripted, set-piece driven video game very well, and I’m pretty sure that game has maybe one turret sequence in its entire runtime. Red Faction II has your band of quirky one-dimensional super soldiers yelling into the main character’s ear at all times about a plot you don’t care about abruptly transitioning between linear, cramped, PS2-sized levels in what was clearly a poor PC port. One of said super soldiers, the guy who drives all the vehicles during aforementioned turret sequences, is voiced by a pre-fame Jason Statham, and that might just be the most memorable thing about my entire experience. Of course, given that the on-foot sections involve shooting extremely dumb AI with a handful of mediocre guns (and once again, very little in the department of actually blowing up walls or otherwise modifying geometry) it’s not great in the moment-to-moment stuff either. I mean fuck man, I’ll say it here: I’d rather play Daikatana again than play any more Red Faction II. Here’s hoping the rest of the wheel manages to keep things dubious without keeping it boring.

You're welcome to follow me on the youtube if you'd like to keep up with my stream archives, or my actual Twitch channel if you'd like to keep up with stuff live.

The Legend of Dragoon

Developer: Sony Interactive Entertainment (but like, specifically Japan Studio IIRC)

Release Date: December 2nd, 1999

Time Played: A little more than four hours

Dubiosity: 2 out of 5

CD count: 4

Would I play more? Probably not, if only because there are so many other weirder PS1-era JRPGs out there. Still gotta touch them Suikodenzz… or like, Xenogears.

There’s something really interesting about The Legend of Dragoon, namely that it’s Sony’s few real attempts at making their own in-house first-party JRPG. It has high production values, sold quite well in both the West and Japan, and also… never really got a follow-up? To be frank, this game has a strong “Game people have fond nostalgia for because they were 12 but have not played since 2000” energy, but I also can’t say I had a bad time with it. In late 1999 and early 2000, your’s truly was too busy getting stoked about Donkey Kong 64 on his Nintendo 64, so I’m not exactly the best indicator of nostalgic quality.

I think the most complementary and most condemning thing I can say about Legend of Dragoon is that it seems to be a totally fine “game of this era.” It’s got that four disc sheen, which as we all know was the correct indicator of quality during this era. There are pre-rendered backgrounds, an evil empire that is using dark magic to take over the world, decently detailed polygonal character models, overly-long elaborate battle animations that make everything slightly too long. You know what this game is. That said, the biggest “addition” to the game is the “addition” system (see what I did there?) If you like Mario RPG-esque button timing properties, do I have the game for you! That’s right, rhythmically pressing buttons in quick succession with the added thrill of knowing you’re playing a PS1 game on an HDTV and thus have to anticipate a certain amount of input lag. Characters learn new attack strings as they level up, and there’s an interesting quality between picking ones you can nail the timing on and ones with higher damage potential. Also you can turn into a dragon and do weird super moves, which require a different timing window and interface… aaaand that’s about as far as I got with that mechanic. It’s basically a limit break.

Now while I definitely think it comes off a tad generic, maybe a bit stock outside of having timing-based attacks, the actual dubious quality of Legend of Dragoon is its translation. Final Fantasy VII gets a lot of flack for its “This guy are sick” gaffes, but it maintains a basic level of coherency for most of its runtime. Legend of Dragoon wears that “translated in two months by a small handful of people who were given a raw text dump of katakana” energy in everything, from basic-ass menu text to every stilted-ass line of dialogue. It borders between overly literal and incoherent, and as a result I had trouble getting invested in the adventures of Dart and Friends in their quest to… something something dragons. Like, the tree enemies you’d expect to be called Treants are just called “Trent.” On the other hand, there is a character named “Lavitz Slambert” so who am I to disagree with the choices made? No, seriously, Lavitz Slambert is the best JRPG character name. Prove me wrong. Bartz Klauser? Pffft.

In any case I think this is a case of me feeling like I *did* get a pretty solid grip on a JRPG for this feature, which is something I can’t say for stuff like The Last Remnant. I think outside of the translation, which is truly dubious, this game seems… entirely okay. Heck I might even say it’s quite possibly “good” depending on one’s tolerance of PSX-era JRPGs, of which mine is fairly low. Seems alright!

Code Vein

Developer: Shift

Release Date: September 26, 2019

Time Played: a little more than 2 ½ hours

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Anime: Yes

Would I play more? Yes. When there is a need, I will be there to play the mediocre anime souls.

As both a sales success and the most recent game featured for this wheel, I think Code Vein is probably a known quantity at this point. It was mostly on this season because I owned it and wanted an excuse to stream it. It’s frankly a bit of an anticlimax after having both Konung and King’s Quest VIII back to back (and, to be clear, those two games are a real fuckin’ trip) but on the other hand it was a good reminder that my thoughts and feelings on Code Vein have not changed. Like, at all. Which is to say that Code Vein is totally *fine* and also at no point would I say that it’s great. I’m probably gonna play more of it. The character creator is real good.

In the same way that God Eater is a much lighter, streamlined, and more anime Monster Hunter, so too is Code Vein the lighter, streamlined, and more anime Dark Souls. At no point is it entirely clear that the developers understand *why* Dark Souls is designed the way it is, but by golly they made an attempt. That’s an accusation I’m willing to make for a lot of “souls-likes” (just the worst term) but it’s especially notable in what Code Vein does well versus what it doesn’t. Picking up my roughly 10ish hour save file I was reminded that the way Code Vein handles mix-and-match skills and classes is neat… which was immediately followed up by my remembrance that the combat is airless and feels like it wants you to mash stuff out. You shouldn’t, because there’s still that big fat stamina bar, but the way your swings come out and the way the enemies react to them feel closer to the feedback I’d expect from a Musou game.

That back and forth was kind of my experience with the entire stream, TBH, between feeling entirely okay about the sad pretty vampires (many of whom are barely wearing any clothing) and then being reminded that every new “class” you acquire comes with its own set of melodramatic flashback sequences. It needs be said that your AI companions in this game are surprisingly effective most of the time, which definitely leads into complaints that the game is too easy? It is, but also I apparently haven’t gotten to the more bullshit parts of the game to see if things end up swinging the other way. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. Alas, the start of various life events means I’m gonna be more busy than I used to be, and for better and worse Code Vein isn’t entirely up on the priority list right now.

And that does it for another weird, questionable, and obscure season of The Wheel of Dubious RPGs! If you’d like to join along with my future endeavors, consider following my internet twitch channel. I’m playing through Daikatana with Justin258 in anticipation of THE WHEEL OF DUBIOUS FPSes. That’s right nerds. You thought dubiousness was over? Well, I need a break from RPGs, and not just because I’m also sometimes on a podcast that covers RPGs (Our third and final podcast on Grandia II is now out!) so what if I played another genre I have fondness for and features an extensive array of weird shit? Look forward to it.

Konung: Legends of the North

Developer: 1C Company

Release Date: September 3, 1999

Time Played: about two hours

Dubiosity: 5 out of 5

Russiosity: пять out of пять

Would I play more? Very seriously considering an encore stream. Dunno if I’d manage to play the entire thing though.

Konung is… special. I’ve flirted with Eurojank plenty of times for this series, but this is the first time The Wheel has really delved into the magical world of true Eastern Bloc RPGs. And make no mistake, if 1C being the developer wasn’t sign enough, Konung is extremely Russian in all the ways you’d expect. It has a lot of ideas, explains itself very little, and felt less comprehensible the more I dug into it. It also was an absolute pain in the ass to get running with OBS and at one point even crashed aforementioned capture software mid-stream. Oh there’s also a special bug exclusive to the GOG version (which otherwise runs… fine-ish as long as you aren’t trying to capture it in a window) where the game will eventually crash if the music is on.

But let me backup a little and explain first. Konung is a party-based isometric CRPG not entirely dissimilar from Baldur’s Gate, which came out the previous year. It’s also a very non-linear, sandboxy game with city building elements(?), crafting mechanics, three separate character storylines(?) set in a mythical version of seventh-century Scandinavia(?) As one of three ex-immortals, it’s your job to become king of the land and get all three pieces of the dragon amulet, or something. Choosing between the four standard RPG classes, (Warrior, Ranger, Merchant, and Leader) determines how many party members you can recruit (from literally any male villager running around with a sword, naturally) as well as your starting stats and abilities. I mostly spent my time on stream wandering around very slowly, fighting various forms of giant ants and saving compulsively.

It was only as my patience wavered that I realized I could increase the game speed by pressing + on the numpad… which sure isn’t explained. Much like a lot of the game, actually. The tutorial tells you how to pick items up off the ground and recruit characters, but in true fashion doesn’t actually explain the structure of the game. I very intentionally did not look up any external documentation regarding this game (at least outside of “making it run with OBS” which for games like these sometimes requires DgVoodoo and sometimes requires DxWnd) and so my experience was wandering around mostly empty wilderness areas, fighting ants by right clicking them and occasionally using a healing potion, and slowly, slowly making my way between different towns while getting questionably translated quest dialogue. Even sped up, Konung seems like a deliberate game, and I’m not entirely sure if there’s some magical rough gem buried underneath. But there sure as hell is *something* there, and I think I’m going to want to find out more.

The first video is only 20 minutes because, as mentioned, the game actually crashed OBS for a second

King’s Quest VIII: Mask of Eternity

Developer: Sierra On-Line

Release Date: December 14, 1998

Time Played: About four hours

Dubiosity: 5 out of 5

Tis: Beyond My Reach

Would I play more? Fuck me, the answer is probably yes.

Now, you may be wondering “Arbitrary, what’s a point-and-click adventure game doing in my dubious RPG wheel? Isn’t such filth better relegated to ZombiePie’s area of expertise?” Well friend, I have great news. In their attempt to revitalize the series for the 3D era, Sierra On-Line decided that the best course of action was to turn King’s Quest into a 3D action-adventure RPG. In doing so, they killed the franchise and relegated it to the same purgatory as Ultima. Also, I saw the speedrun for this game at AGDQ 2021 and it seemed like the exact level of trash I wanted to feature on my blog and stream that I am ultimately the final arbiter of. I’m sure Roberta Williams has her share of regrets about this one, but given this was after she and her husband Ken had sold the company, I bet the giant pile of money and upcoming yacht retirement probably eased it a tad.

However, before we dive into the game itself, it should be noted that King’s Quest VIII has the special distinction of being the single most difficult game to get running of this entire endeavor. The GOG version of this game does not work on modern Windows computers. Yes, the digital distribution platform whose original pitch involved selling no-fuss versions of classic games and only legal avenue to purchase this game does not work. I imagine something with a reputation as rancid as Mask of Eternity is probably pretty low on the priority list, but to be clear I had to find an iso for this game and use an external fan installer on top of a bunch of other dark magic to make this game functional and capture-able. Not since I just gave up and did desktop capture for Lands of Lore III has a game given me hours worth of troubleshooting, and the fact that this is… this is what I did it for maybe says more about me than anything else.

While I think Tomb Raider is probably the more direct inspiration here, there’s exactly enough RPG here to make it qualify. You level up, fight monsters, and obtain increasingly better gear when you’re not awkwardly platforming or solving basic item use puzzles. As Connor, a righteous goober unrelated to King Graham and co, I spent my four hours less involved in solving obtuse moon logic item puzzles and more wandering fairly large, 3D environments in search of quest items, all while effectually murdering a whole lotta skeletons by clicking on them and having numbers vaguely go up in the background. Items are still used on things, blocks are occasionally pushed, and bits of solid voice acting, animation, and music remind you that there are actually some real solid production values at play here. But when you consider the year it came out and compare it to some of the other 3D games of the time, it’s a mess (albeit an ambitious one.)

I will be the first to tell you that I’m not a Sierra diehard by any means; my general opinion of classic adventure games is pretty low. But even I know that Mask of Eternity does not really feel like a King’s Quest game, nor is it an especially great action RPG. However, for my dark purposes, it is the exact level of dogshit that I want out of this streaming/blogging series. Like Ultima IX, it’s a special combination of accessible, janky, and franchise disintegrating that really captures my ruined soul. The third person camera is borderline unplayable, but it’s also abundantly clear that a lot of craft and care was put into Connor’s animations (I would not be surprised if there was some mocap work involved.) The game is weirdly violent by the family-friendly standards of the series, but the writing is still very much the hyper-earnest faux-medieval fairy tale fare King’s Quest was known for. The puzzles are dumb, but occasionally still have glimmers of that old Sierra nonsense. In other words, it truly is the best of all dubious worlds.

Now to be absolutely clear, King’s Quest Mask of Eternity is a bad video game and you should probably not play it. For all its accidental charm, I was starting to get fed up by the end of my time in the land of the dead (and would probably cheat my way through if I returned, tbh.) But it’s a showy disasterpiece that also epitomizes why this garbage attracts my interest in the first place. It’s not the most dubious game I’ve played in a series where Dungeon Lords exists, and only barely meets the definition of RPG, but this is absolutely something I think you at home should see. Just don’t play it.

The next blog will be the SEASON FINALE, at which point you can look forward to me taking a quick break from wheels (I will get back to Shadow Hearts Covenant, I swear) before moving onto new exciting ventures. Like maybe some of the things I suggested a few blogs ago.

Beyond Divinity

Developer: Larian Studios

Release Date: April 28, 2004

Time Played: Around three hours, including a spontaneous podcast with ZombiePie where we dunk on the revived TSR brand, a topic that I think is already out of date given that they seem to have deleted their twitter and retreated into their grognard lair.

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Soundtrack: 6 out of 5

Would I play more? Cards on the table here: my answer wouldn’t be no, even if I think I’d be better served replaying Original Sin 2.

So between this and The Dragon Knight Saga, I think I might have to return to the original Divine Divinity to address my fascination with Larian Studios’ arc as a developer. You can absolutely start to see a path from all their divinity games to making Baldur’s mother-effin Gate 3, from their sensibilities as storytellers, to their focus on systemic interactions. However, I feel like I need to go back to where it started instead of just spending my time with the failed and the messy offshoots like the garbage voyeur I am. Of course, being that the failed and the messy is the prerogative of this entire blog/streaming series, I’m happy to confirm that Beyond Divinity is a game with a lot of interesting ideas, almost none of which seem to be delivered on in a satisfactory fashion. So, in the hierarchy of dubiousness, it’s nearly perfect for my purposes.

I dunno why the impetus to follow up Divine Divinity, which was a fairly open-ish CRPG, with what appears to be a way more linear straight dungeon crawl, but there’s a muddle of ideas going on here. Like its predecessor, Beyond Divinity is a diablo-adjacent isometric, vaguely hack-n-slashy RPG with open character development and a surprising level of weird systemic interaction. Your main character, a nameless paladin of the Divine Order, is basically in hell and soul-shackled to a Death Knight in an awkward buddy comedy slash single-player co-op game where if one character dies they both keel over. That? That right there is a choice. Thankfully you have full control over both characters, but it all moves fast enough that micromanagement (and by that I mostly mean “chugging hella potions”) is a surprisingly dicey affair, at least at the early levels where I was at. It’s not an easy game, and that’s fine, but I sure was mashing quicksave aggressively.

As someone who only vaguely knew of Beyond Divinity as “the bad one where you have to escort quest for an entire game,” I think the biggest surprises were how much of it is just straight dungeon and how weird and open the skill system is on top of that. Skills are abstracted to the point of literally putting points into “Bladed Weapons, Accuracy” or “Elemental Projectile, Electric.” which gets the job done as far as allowing a strong amount of granularity with exactly zero flavor. That said, it’s not quite as open as it initially appears, since you have to buy access to more advanced skills from merchants or gain them from quests. It's... strange?

And to be clear, while it does seem like the game was dialing itself up to be a straightforward hack-n-slash type thing, there’s enough weird wrinkles that I’m not sure it continues like that the entire way. Did you know that, straight up there’s an optional area you can warp to with merchants and side dungeons and no direct connection to the story or the pace of the main game? Shit’s weird, man. Maybe not quite in a “there’s something here” sort of way, but in a “I would watch someone else play through this” sort of deal. It’s got a discordant tone, balancing between the goofball tongue-in-cheek silliness I mostly expect from pre-Original Sin 2 Divinity and the grim darkness of its setting? Like the voice acting is way too “good” to be taken seriously. Also did I mention the Kiril Pokrovsky soundtrack is just absolute fire? Because man I don’t think his work got appreciated nearly enough. Anyway Beyond Divinity huh. It’s a game.

Honestly if you are strapped for time I highly recommend the second video over the first. If you wanna hear two layabouts talking shit about Gary Gygax's son while vaguely hackyslash happens in the background, it's probably a good time?

Shadows Awakening

Developer: Games Farm

Release Date: September 4, 2018

Time Played: A little under two hours

Dubiosity: 1 out of 5

Personal Surprise Factor: High

Would I play more? Potentially.

How was I supposed to know that an action RPG with a forgettable title from a Slovakian developer called “Games Farm” was going to be the least dubious game I’ve played this season? I’m not going to claim Shadows Awakening is some revelatory hidden gem, but it seems like a remarkably solid action looter-scooter in the same vein as stuff like Victor Vran and The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing. Video games know what a Diablo is, so when they try to do something *other* then just make a very optimized version of “Diablo II but with X” you have my attention. I have no doubt Path of Exile is a good time, but fuck me if I’m gonna put in the hours (and repetitive stress injury aggravation) to get to the end game build guide insanity that people seem to care about.

Instead, Shadows Awakening offers the benefits of being an explicitly single-player, narrative-driven RPG. At the start, your protagonist (who is literally an ethereal soul-devouring demon) resurrects one of three ancient heroes who conveniently represent one of three character classes (Two Hand Axe Man, Archer Man, Magic Woman.) It seems like who you pick has a pretty direct influence on the initial setup of the game. Having picked Vaguely Scottish Fantasy Middle-Eastern Axe Man, I was greeted with a bunch of confused NPCs who asked why he wasn’t dead. I didn’t get much further than enacting vengeance on Axe Son who murdered Axe Dad, but the writing seemed passably generic (generically charming?) in a way that at least kept my interest for the stream introduction. That’s not always a given, given how close I was to wishing for release by the end of my Last Remnant stream.

More importantly, it means that this is a clicky-click looter game where you’re essentially a posse of one, being able to switch between the shadow demon and up to two other characters at any time, and seemingly being able to assemble a large-ish party of several characters who fall vaguely into the Axe Man, Bow Man, and Magic Lady holes. Oh did I mention that the shadow demon actually occupies a different plane of existence, so you’ll sometimes have to switch to it to like, break an enemy’s shield in the shadow plane before going back to axe walloping? And there’s a surprising level of puzzle solving to a lot of the dungeons too, between some traversal challenges between the physical and shadow realm, or straight up Resident Evil-ass lever pulling and rotation stuff.

Anyway, none of this is hardly revelatory, but being able (and encouraged) to switch between characters on the fly helps disrupt a lot of the banality that turns me off from this particular style of game, especially early on. Who’s to say if it delivers on that promise beyond like… two hours, but for now I can say, assuredly, that there’s nothing about this game that seems particularly dubious. I apologize for that, but rest assured, dear reader, that the next two games are absolute bangers in that category. I will not leave you wanting.

The Last Remnant

Developer: Square-Enix

Release Date: November 20, 2008

Time Played: Two Hours and not a bit more

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Amount of this game I felt like actually understood at the end of that time: 1 out of 5

Would I play more: There’s a part of me that absolutely wants to understand this game more, because clearly it has its fans. But also would it actually be worth it? Need I remind you, they’re localizing more Trails games so I’d probably get started with that anime hole at some point.

The Last Remnant is probably the most pointed example of this series’ format not necessarily gelling with some of the denser Japanese RPGs I’ve encountered. The way some of these games parcel out their mechanics and gimmicks isn’t conducive to short-form exhibition streams. While I can point to plenty of CRPGs with generally “slow” beginnings, I think it’s fair to say most of them are pretty good about throwing things out upfront within the first 2-4 hours. Conversely, two hours into Final Fantasy XII and you’re barely past killing rats in a sewer, let alone touching the gambit system. To this I once again remind you, dear reader, that this feature is *probably* not representative of a truly exhaustive critical opinion and should be taken with a grain of salt. Most of the time. I also still maintain that more of you should play Wizards and Warriors, but I understand that's my sickness.

As such, the best I can say is that The Last Remnant has an immediately obnoxious main character in the form of Rush Sykes. Move over Fayt Leingod, this plucky-but-dumb Johnny-Young-Boschly firmly fulfills the “Anime shit boy” quotient this feature has been so desperately lacking up to this point. He’s a dumb-dumb lacking all social tact who also has a weirdly strong attachment to his sister and zero understanding of any of the sociopolitical machinations that probably underlie this game’s plot. I sure as hell didn’t know what was going on any more than he did other than vaguely understanding that fantasy war is happening and ancient mcguffins called “Remnants” are probably important to the fabric of society. Also I didn’t even encounter The Conqueror yet, who I’m to understand is this game’s omnipresent and decidedly scary antagonist.

So what *did* I encounter during the two hours I played? A handful of tutorial dungeons and very little actual tutorial. This seems like the kind of game one would need a FAQ open most of the time to really get. Instead of controlling your units on an individual basis, you arrange your characters into squads, something similar to Ogre Battle, and issue general commands like “use special skills” or “use offensive magic” based on the context of how things are going. This sounds great. If only the game even remotely explained itself to me in any decent capacity. There’s something to be said for games that ask the player to figure things out. There’s another for games that attempt to explain themselves but do it incredibly poorly. This is the latter. And, for better or worse, I dunno if I’m ever quite gonna cross that threshold.

Underworld Ascendant

Developer: Otherside Entertainment

Release Date: November 15, 2018

Time Played: Two hours

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Special Achievement Award: Most Improved

Would I play more: like the worst part is that my answer is probably “yeah sure why the hell not”

I’m not going to beat around the bush: While Underworld Ascendant is probably still the worst game I’ve ever personally backed on a crowdfunding campaign (well, it’s that or like… The Bard’s Tale IV at this point) I need to give Otherside Entertainment credit where credit is due. They sure did manage to salvage a broken, barely-functional skeleton of an immersive sim into a less-broken, functional one! If you know anything about Underworld Ascendant’s launch and its 37 metascore (quite possibly the lowest one on the wheel) you know that’s a vast improvement.

To be clear, this is probably the closest I’ve gotten to bringing an “indie” RPG onto the wheel. As I’ve said before, I mostly want to focus on published, “boxed” titles for this series. Part of that is because I don’t want to punch down on smaller teams and smaller projects and part of that is because it saves me from the endless flood of RPGmaker trash and similar detritus. Part of why Underworld Ascendant manages to skirt past that border is because of its pedigree; namely having a lot of former Looking Glass and Irrational folks who were more than happy to remind me during the kickstarter campaign that they made some video games people cared about. While I don’t think you can necessarily buy physical copies of UA, at least outside of whatever they gave to backers, it was picked up by mid-tier publisher 505 and ported to console.

I’m not going to get too far into the weeds on the likes of “broken promises” and what they were initially promising during the kickstarter campaign versus the final product. However, it needs be repeated that Underworld Ascendant was clearly and openly trading off the name of Ultima Underworld, which is one of the most important games ever made. It is not that, nor from my investigation into this final version is it any closer to being the spiritual successor it initially pitched itself as. But, it at least ditched the generic, randomly generated mission structure that the original decided was a good idea. So what you’re left with is something I’d describe as “babby’s first immersive sim.” The big tech gimmick in this game are a bunch of systemic interactions, which is to say that if something is made of wood it can probably be set on fire and if there’s a switch you can press it with any sort of physical force (i.e. an arrow.) That’s it. Also the rope arrows from Thief are there and sort of work. It’s cool. Well, it would be more cool if Breath of the Wild hadn’t come out a year prior, but still, even in my short time with the game I did set things on fire, which is a definite plus in my book.

That said, even with the addition of such invaluable mechanics as “mid-mission saves” (no seriously that wasn’t there at launch) and a more structured campaign, there’s still a lotta JANK in Underworld Ascendant. The melee combat is sub-Oblivion flailing about, enemy behaviors are occasionally… questionable, and the hand-crafted nature of the environments becomes a little less novel when one realizes that the devs tried to extract as much use as they could with the way missions and respawns are handled. Still, gotta give a point in their favor: I did not hate what I played, which is more than I can say for how the game was at launch. Kudos. Golf clap. Still maybe not a great video game, but something I wouldn't be opposed to revisiting in the future. Perhaps for charity?

Aaaanyway, as always feel free to follow me on Twitch if you wanna see these games played live for your amusement and my pain. I've also been playing some Jedi Knight 2 and Shadow Hearts Covenant recently, if you'd like to see me play video games that aren't terrible. I'm also playing Grandia II for my occasional off-week podcast, Off the Deep End, so if you'd like to hear my thoughts about that, maybe consider giving that a listen too? We have fun.

Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear

Developer: Beamdog

Release Date: April 1, 2016

Time Played: Around three hours on stream (more on my own time)

Dubiosity: 2 out of 5

You Must: Gather Your Party Before Venturing Forth

Would I play more? Yeah. That’ll happen eventually.

I cannot emphasize enough how weird Baldur’s Gate Siege of Dragonspear is. To be clear, this game’s status as “dubious” comes not from its actual quality but from context. As its recurring (and future) presence on this feature suggests, the Dungeons and Dragons license has been used for games both amazing and dubious, but outside of the Neverwinter MMO (which continues, inexplicably) was mostly silent for the last decade until the announcement of Baldur’s Gate 3. Mostly. Beamdog, a cadre of ex-Bioware developers responsible for the Enhanced Editions of all the Infinity Engine games (except Icewind Dale 2 because, uh, no one has the source code) put out a new Baldur’s Gate game. The only reason you remember its existence at all is because people on the internet are shitty transphobes.

Now, I don’t want to dwell too much on that controversy, because it’s profoundly stupid and more-or-less boiled down to “People on the internet were mad that video game (somewhat hamfistedly) acknowledged that trans people exist.” I could probably also go into detail about poor Ed Greenwood having to come out of his semi-retirement to say “Yes there are trans people in Faerun, get off my lawn.” Or I could get into how some of the fallout from this led to Wizards of the Coast, noted bastion of progressive sentiment*, axing Beamdog’s future plans for a new Planescape game and another BG midquel between BG2 and ToB. I have to acknowledge this because it’s probably the biggest part of this game’s legacy, for the worse, but it doesn’t really speak to the weird, obscure, and questionable aspects “in the text.” Friend, there’s so much more interesting stuff in this game. We need to talk about it.

Siege of Dragonspear, which I will also refer to as “Baldur’s Gate: The Pre-Sequel” takes place between Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, more or less setting up how your character ended up leaving the titular city of the first game and ended up in the clutches of Jon Irenicus at the start of the second. It’s a weird balancing act, trying to bridge two tonally disparate games that came out a decade and a half prior, while also telling its own self-contained story about Caelar Argent and her crusade to rescue trapped souls from hell. Oh, and perhaps way more obviously, it’s Beamdog’s audition to make more original Dungeons and Dragons games after years of doing remasters. But perhaps most of all, Siege of Dragonspear is “The Baldur’s Gate Reunion Special.” They went to the trouble of getting a lot of the original voice actors back, including folks like Jim Cummings, Jennifer Hale, and David Warner, and while some of them definitely *sound* 15 years older, it’s probably the only way this thing would’ve worked. Not that it works entirely, but it’s an effort.

While I haven’t finished the game (because this came out right around the time my old, old computer was melting down and I never got back to it) even in the opening chapters there’s maybe a little too much wink-and-nudge fanservice for it to work in a vacuum. All your favorites are here, this time with an acceptably modern standard of RPG party banter! Minsc, Boo, Dynaheir, Viconia, Edwin, Jaheira, Khalid, those goobers from BG EE, and also Safana for some reason. There are also new characters!.. They’re fine! There is an aggressive amount of foreshadowing! The writing is maybe a tad too snarky! The final boss fight is with the final boss of Icewind Dale 1! I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. I deeply, deeply want to hear from someone who played this blind, because so much of Siege of Dragonspear is trying to play off your nostalgia for the first and second Baldur’s Gate games while also trying to be its own thing.

Now, as an RPG, Siege of Dragonspear is definitely working on a smaller scale or budget than either of the games it is attempting to insert itself in the middle of, like the weird bread puck in the middle of an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Big Mac. It’s a pretty linear campaign with a sparkling of side activities and some interesting (?) attempts to do stuff that wouldn’t have been possible with the Infinity Engine in 1998 or 2000. Alongside a continued effort to hack in modern-ish D&D ideas to a ruleset from 1989 (which in turn was an updated version of a ruleset from 1979), there’s stuff like enemies using potions or otherwise grouped up in more interesting encounters than most of BG1. I mean, heck, there is at one point a quest that actually uses your characters’ Infravision abilities. It’s been five years since I played more than the first few hours of this game, but I think I can say at least that the Video Game part of this video game is mostly un-dubious. Inconsistent, a tad shaky? Sure. But Beamdog can make some decent dungeons, at the very least. It’s an earnest effort and a weird experiment, and I would’ve been interested in seeing what else they had planned. Of course, now that we live in the timeline where Larian is now making a modern-ass AAA Baldur’s Gate 3, Siege of Dragonspear remains a singular, strange anomaly. It’s a weird thing, and I’m mostly for it.

*Even if WotC is definitely, uh, trying to be better about that stuff these days, their ability to shoot themselves in the foot on inclusivity issues is remarkable in its consistency.

An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire

Developer: Bethesda Softworks

Release Date: November 30, 1997

Time Played: About 90 minutes

Todd Lies: 0

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Would I play more? Listen man, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t kinda into this even though it’s all sorts of terrible. Maybe it’ll be my pick for the next kusoge episode of the podcast.

While Daggerfall remains, in my mind, a quintessential Dubious RPG, I think it’s fair to say that it’s not the only Elder Scrolls game worthy of the label. One might argue that they all are, depending on how you feel about systemic chaos and jank, but I think I might actually get murdered if I were to ever put Morrowind on the same wheel that once hosted Dungeon Lords. Besides, as this feature has reminded me there’s still plenty of depths to plumb in the series’ surprisingly extensive catalog of spinoffs. While it’s unlikely you’ll get my full thoughts on the pre-smartphone mobile games (or the NGage exclusive Shadowkey) it’s still worth talking about the two games that came between Daggerfall and Morrowind. Redguard is an adventure game that was notoriously impossible to run on anything but a very specific line of graphics card (at least until the GOG release?) but alas, is not easily classifiable as a traditional Role-Playing Game. The other one, however...

An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire is a strange turn for the series. Running on a heavily modified version of Daggerfall’s engine, pillar of stability that it is, is a more action-focused, dungeon crawl-y take on an already action-focused, dungeon crawl-y game. Character creation is immediately recognizable if you’ve played Daggerfall, but stripped down to a more straightforward “point-based” system. Instead of being set in a large open world, it’s set in a succession of seven large crafted open dungeon levels. Instead of being good, it’s bad. Oh did I mention the entire game can be played multiplayer, either cooperatively or in deathmatch? Take that, Quake. (if anyone wants to start a Battlespire deathmatch league, or play through the entire game co-op, lmk. We can set up a Hamachi server)

Perhaps (un)surprisingly, the additional focus doesn’t make Battlespire good, at least as far as my fumbling around the expansive first dungeon level was concerned. It’s incredibly easy to make a character who is *not equipped* for the kind of game this is, especially since the “made with multiplayer in mind” nature means you cannot rest to restore health or magicka. That immediately discounts most of the generic classes, it turns out, but also you still need to put enough points into basic combat stats to not immediately get worked by the group of scamps in the opening chamber. It’s… it’s a strange beast. There is a story, something to do with the fate of the Imperial Battlemages during the events of Arena, but I certainly didn’t see much of it between getting worked by Dremora and getting stuck on level geometry while platforming because this is still an Elder Scrolls game. There’s still the grand, overwrought ambition you’d expect from the series, but without the large-scale open world to play around in it falls flat on its face. Maybe it’s just because the bespoke dungeons are bad, actually? Dunno, didn’t get past the first level.

Still, there’s definitely something there, and by “something there” I mean “Maybe I’ll watch a LP of this on YouTube.” I’d certainly love to hear more about the development and conception of this game from the likes of Todd Howard and Ken Rolston, who were at Bethesda during this game’s development and did work on the game, but I imagine a lot of it probably boils down to “we wanted some of that deathmatch pie.” Maybe don’t pick this one up, friends. I know you’re all champing at the bit with the GOG sale to pick up as much garbage as possible like your’s truly, but maybe don’t?

Unless you’re serious about that deathmatch league. C’mon. I’ll stream it. We can also play Dungeon Lords. Wait. Why are you running away.

And that’s it for this week. As always, if you’d like to see video evidence of me playing these games for your pleasure, feel free to follow (and use your free monthly amazon prime sub to subscribe to) my Internet Twitch Channel, or feel free to watch the VODs on my Internet YouTube Channel. Honestly might just start throwing the VODs in these blogs, come to think of it. I have a good microphone now, so you can hear my dulcet tones in even higher fidelity than before, and I have also successfully played through all of The Evil Within’s story DLC! I did not care for it! You should’ve voted for Hitman Absolution!

Also, perhaps more excitingly, I've been thinking about what I wanna do next once this current season of "The Wheel" has wrapped up. In addition to the inevitable Season 3 of The Wheel of Dubious RPGs, I've been thinking about both The Wheel of Dubious FPSes and The Wheel of Cool Indie RPGs. If you have suggestions for either, I'd love to hear them. Until next time, remember that I do this because I want to and definitely also because I am broken inside.

Lost Kingdoms II

Developer: From Software

Release Date: May 21, 2003

Time Played: A little more than 90 minutes

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Amount I paid for this game: Less than Xenosaga Episode III, but more in terms of a mental toll.

Would I play more? I mean, maybe? I certainly paid too much for this to let it sit on a shelf. Alternatively, anyone interested in buying a secondhand copy of Lost Kingdoms II? I accept Venmo and Paypal.

Upon revisitation, I think I’ve decided that both Lost Kingdoms and its (far rarer and more expensive) sequel are quintessential representations of Early 2000s From Software’s RPG design. Which is my nice way of saying that they’re an interesting idea (action RPG where your attacks are represented as a deck of cards) that does not sustain a full 8-12ish hour game. Even with the improvements of the second game, including the removal of random battles, something resembling a story, and a general quality-of-life upgrade can’t change the fact that it’s a clonky RPG coasting more on novelty than anything else.

As the excellently-named Tara Grimface, I spent the slightly less than two hour introduction of Lost Kingdoms 2 fighting monsters in fairly barren environments. Like my time with the first game late last year, it’s the kind of B-tier (and I mean that in the budgetary term and not the far more nebulous “Star Wars The Force Awakens is a mediocre video game and therefore B-tier” sense of the term) action-RPG that was rife during the PS2 era. There is some level of thought into stuff like deckbuilding and using the brief invincibility window when you play cards to avoid attacks. Make no mistake, the FromSoft-ass Fromsoftness is still here, even if Lost Kingdoms II bothers to explain and expand upon its mechanics far more than its predecessor ever did. While more… comprehensible than King’s Field: The Ancient City, there’s still enough arcane mechanics and strange choices to make it clear who made this.

Unfortunately for my tattered attention span, that wasn’t quite enough to sustain me with Lost Kingdoms II, and given the amount of time it’s taken me to write this particular write-up, you can be assured that it was hard to think of things to say about it. It’s a marked improvement over its predecessor, but it’s still not *all that interesting* once you stare at it long enough. It’s just a tad too stiff and rigid to be a great action RPG. ...I still might play more of it.

Final Fantasy Type-0

Developer: Square-Enix

Release Date: October 27, 2011 (or March 17, 2015 for the HD version)

Time Played: A little over two hours

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5 (one extra point for legitimately giving me a headache)

Inconsistent HD Textureosity: 5 out of 5

Would I play more? Listen, if ZP can’t play this game when it eventually becomes the subject of a Deep Listens podcast, I’ll take the bullet for him

In retrospect, it’s hard to look at Fabula Nova Crystalis as anything other than an albatross, a curse hung round the neck of the Final Fantasy franchise that more or less dominated its single-player offerings for more than a decade. I’m on record as saying I like XIII-2 and Lightning Returns, but it’s hard to argue for those in the recent shadow of the “actually a great video game” VII Remake. One of the odder ducks to come out of this initiative was Final Fantasy Type-0 (previously known as Agito XIII) a Japan-only PSP game whose translation patch was completed… just days before the HD re-release was announced. I feel like this is definitely the forgotten child of the bunch, and after playing a few hours I was reminded exactly why.

And to be clear, the thing most worthy of emphasis in Type-0 isn’t the M-rating, or the part where you’re very much controlling a band of murderous child soldiers who also attend a school (for child soldiers.) It’s the part where it’s a prettied-up version of a Playstation Portable game. There was very much a trend in Japanese portable game design in the late 00s, especially on the PSP to “try and make your game like Monster Hunter” so that it would appeal to the exact demographic of salarymen who have 20 minutes to murder a Rathalos on the Shinkansen before work. As I’ve mentioned before, that sort of focus around a repetitive core loop only works if it’s refined to a razor point… and most games are not as good at it as Monster Hunter. Final Fantasy Type-0 is very much “trying to be a monster hunter” with its structure. Between main missions, you have a certain amount of time to engage in faux-S.Links, attend classes to increase the stats of your FIFTEEN playable characters, research magic, do side missions, etc.

It’s the same problem as Valkyria Chronicles II and Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker, where, divorced from the culture around portable video games in Japan (and with these HD remasters, the concept of portability at all) you’re stuck with an intentionally grindy structure that doesn’t endear itself to longer play sessions. Of course, if Type-0 played well or like… understood why people liked Persona that would be a different story. But it doesn’t! It’s yet another example of Square-Enix trying really, really hard to make a good action RPG with some bootleg-ass sub-Kingdom Hearts action-based menu combat with the added benefit of having a camera that legitimately started to give me motion sickness after only an hour of play. Does it bother explaining like… most of its core mechanics or how any of its 15 characters play? Not really.

At the very least, I’m to understand the story goes in some wild directions, and some of it is apparent from the outset. They really do, uh, start this game with a bunch of war crime and also a chocobo covered in blood. Those kids sure do call this lady “Mother” and have a dogged loyalty to her. Oh, also the crystal erases the memories of the fallen from the minds of these kids so they can be more efficient murderers. I dunno if it’s good storytelling (especially given how not great a lot of the persona bits are) but I at least understand it goes full anime crazy at some point. Maybe something worth coming back to? No? Okay.

Other Business

Anyway, sorry about taking as long as I did with this write up, but hopefully things should probably be more stable. Now-ish. While I have you here, I'd just like to mention that our Xenosaga Episode 1 podcast series has wrapped up over at Off the Deep End. Might be a tad biased, but it's worth listening to all three episodes if you want to hear us slowly lose our minds trying to understand Monolith Soft's second venture into the world of God, Robots, and Existentialism (the first being Xenogears.) We also have a Kusoge episode done and in the oven, so look forward to our reactions to what might be *The Single Worst Video Game That Will Probably Ever Be Played On A Deep Listens Family of Podcast.*

Similarly, as was promised during my Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run stream, thanks to your generous donations there is now recorded evidence of me playing through the entirety of Tango Gameworks 2014 disasterpiece The Evil Within on my Twitch. I still kinda like it! oh also I played through all of RE6 co-op with a friend because I like to have fun. I guess you could watch that too. I even made a playlist for it on youtube, with the VODs coming over in a steady drip. C'mon. C'monnnnnn.

That'll be it for me. Hopefully I'll be back to your regularly scheduled dubiosity soon.

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

Developer: Troika Games

Release Date: August 22, 2001

Time Played: Around Three Hours

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Number of times I’ve played through the opening hours of this game: at least half a dozen.

Would I play more? You know it’s coming. I can’t escape.

I’m back on my decade-long bullshit again, and that bullshit continues to be “Arcanum is my CRPG White Whale.” It’s one of the few remaining games of that late 90s/early 00s “Golden Era” that I’ve never played to completion, and even moreso than the likes of Fallout 2 it’s the one that sticks in my craw the most. As part of getting older, I’ve managed to move past a lot of weird backlog anxiety in my life, much to my own benefit. I’m moderately capable of accepting the fact that I’m never gonna finish certain things, because who has the time and/or attention span to address the giant pile of Media sitting in physical, digital, and mental shelves. That’s fine, and in a lot of ways it’s healthier to accept that fact than always trying to force something.

Arcanum is one of those exceptions. I still firmly believe that *one day* I will give it another honest shot, even if there’s absolutely no guarantee that I’ll ever finish it. Why? Aside from my general affinity towards Troika’s troika of RPGs, in my mind, Arcanum is “Peak CRPG.” Less from a qualitative perspective and more from a position of raw ambition. Much has been said about Arcanum’s terrifyingly open character development system, the numerous background options, and the varying ways those can play off each other. As a fantasy world in the midst of an industrial revolution, a lot of Arcanum plays off the diametrically opposed status of Magick and Technology, and so too can your character diametrically oppose having an enjoyable handful of opening hours depending on the build you start with. I cannot emphasize enough that Arcanum means it when it says you can have a very different play experience depending on how you develop your character, but that shouldn’t always be mistaken for a positive.

Creating a character and then inevitably restarting a few hours in is something to be expected from games of this era. However, Arcanum’s classless, highly variable spread of stats, skills, spells, and tech recipes all being fed from the same pool of points is intimidating even for someone of my caliber. Yeah, sure, you can probably get away with playing a very straightforward fight-man, but if you want to play anything remotely more interesting it’s going to be an experiment in trial-and-error as you find out that things might not quite be as flexible as they initially appear. You might be tempted to make a gunslinger character, given the game’s novel setting, but most of the early game guns are terrible, ammo is scarce, and For the purposes of these streams, I went with a tech character and a throwing build, which is a decent initial start, especially once you start running around with easily-craftable molotov cocktails, but I only knew about that stuff because I’ve started this game a bajillion times and have looked at guides.

To be clear, you *should* play Arcanum with a guide, in the same way you *should* play Arcanum with the unofficial patch. There’s a lot to see, a lot to experience, and a lot of interesting stuff in this game that I’d like to see one day. But I also think it’s fair to say that you have to squint a little (or a lot) to see the kind of game its proponents tout it as, and I’m not just talking about things like the clunky UI, the intimidatingly open structure, or the bad, clusterfuck-y combat that is neither good real-time or turn-based. Arcanum is promise, it is potential, and it is, ultimately… something you’ll probably hear more from me about because I cannot escape that siren song.

Blue Dragon

Developer: Artoon (with oversight by Mistwalker)

Release Date: August 28, 2007

Time Played: A little less than two hours

Dubiosity: 2 out of 5

DragonQuestosity: Undeniable

Would I play more? NOPE.

I’ll spare you a repetition of my “Hey the late 00s and early 2010s were a rough time for console JRPGs” spiel that accompanied my write up on Enchanted Arms. Instead I’ll say that this period is also a pretty fascinating one, all things being equal. I’m not just saying that because this is also PRIME REAL ESTATE for both my idiot streams and our idiot podcast (I’m saying Eternal Sonata has been discussed with some seriousness) but also because you can see the same kind of weird experimentation and ambitious ideas of the PS1 and PS2 era coming to a head with technical, financial, and design limitations imposed by the shift to HD consoles. Remember how developing Final Fantasy XIII was so expensive for Square that they had to make two drastically different and extremely weird sequels? I sure do! Imagine how much more of a problem that was for developers and games who didn’t have that kind of Final Fantasy money!

Speaking of Final Fantasy, Hironobu Sakaguchi is a man of many talents, such as “being a Champagne King,” “burning giant piles of money to make a movie that almost bankrupted the company” and “creating one of the most beloved video game franchises ever made.” It turns out that imitating his colleague Yuji Horii is not one of them, as Blue Dragon shows. The comparison with Dragon Quest is unavoidable (and I have to imagine intentional?) once you start throwing Akira Toriyama in the mix, and the relative straightforwardness of the storytelling and mechanics seals it. Blue Dragon really wants to be a Dragon Quest sorta thing, with a Final Fantasy-esque job system thrown on top for good measure and a protagonist who said “I won’t give up!” no less than eight times in two hours. It’s weird seeing the amount of production assets, including some very nice-looking cutscenes (3 DVDs worth!) being put into an incredibly… straightforward story? A weirdly paced one, where our initial setup is quickly setup, the group of plucky kids gets their blue stands, and then… JRPG grinding and dungeoneering happen? I dunno man. Once the cutscenes dried up and I could no longer goof on them, I lost interest very quickly.

But actually I think the biggest minus for me here is that Blue Dragon just seems on the competent edge of dull. To reinvoke the comparison I made with Tales of Zestiria, it’s what I thought Dragon Quest was before I played a Dragon Quest game. No amount of generally jamming Nobuo Uematsu soundtrack and tantalizing *job system* prospects can distract from a game that did jack-all to differentiate itself from anything else I’d rather play. With something like Tales I can at least count on the combat being relatively fresh, and with something like Dragon Quest I can expect an aggressive barrage of charm that didn’t quite come through the same way in Blue Dragon. I’m sorry about this one Phil, but I think Lost Odyssey might be the early 360 JRPG that was actually worth them exclusivity dollars. Actually, I take it back. Whatever you paid for this boss theme was worth it.

And that’s it for me this week, but not quite all. You see, during my GB Community Endurance Run stream, we managed to reach the stretch goal to play through the entirety of not one, but TWO of the dubious games I played during those three days of streaming. I’ve already finished Project Snowblind, which is a… baffling disaster, but now the impetus comes to you, dear viewers. Do I stream a playthrough of the “maybe actually totally okay” Hitman Absolution, or do I continue the punishment session and my own tortured relationship with Survival Horror with The Evil Within? VOTE NOW. No seriously, I’m putting up a strawpoll. It’ll be open until the end of the week. You’re welcome.