Alyxx Thorne

Body Parts Great movie, always a joy to see Jeff Fahey from this period even if his movie choices were a bit on the weird side with this and The Lawnmower Man. I do wonder if this movie at all inspired MGS though given the similar premises between this and Liquid Snake taking over someone's mind when they take his arm... 8/10

Welcome, Salika! Make yourself at home!

ENB's just makes the game run slower and more laggy in my experience without really adding much graphical fidelity. It's no longer as big of a leap as something like Fallout 3 and mostly just changes the colour palette. So I don't use ENB's. By cosmetic mods I mean hairstyles, mesh replacements and such. And yeah I do pay attention to mod conflicts and such, but even then the likelyhood you will eventually run into some kind of conflict increases with the amount of mods you install, and the increasing amount of mods makes it more and more difficult to find which mod causes the conflict. And I just wanna play the game with just a few mods to add a little more content to it, I don't need a million mods to change every single aspect of the game...

Really Loud Yetis Eating Haggis WJFLM

Making dinner.

Source: https://alyxxgameroom.blogspot.no/2018/04/pc-game-review-need-for-speed-3-hot.html GAME: Need For Speed III - Hot Pursuit DEVELOPER: EA Seattle PUBLISHER: Electronic Arts RELEASED: 1998 PLATFORMS: PC, PS1 When I grew up, I was pretty fortunate to have a father who not only was a PC enthusiast, but also a gamer. And one of his true passions was racing games, something that I of course shared as with many things. And one of the games I ended up playing the most growing up, and still do to this day, was of course the original Need For Speed games, with the third one, Hot Pursuit, being one of my absolute favourites to play. This was back when Electronic Arts were known for releasing pretty solid racing titles, and with this and Moto Racer they pretty much crafted some of the best racing experiences of my childhood. So since this game is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, I felt it was time to take a look at one of the defining racing gamers from my childhood! I've never had a ton of experience with the first two titles in the series, and in many regards, NFS 3 was my first entry into the series. One of the key aspects that drew people into the series was of course the fact the games had real life cars and some fantasy cars, which helped set the series apart from other racing games of its era. For me, the main reason I love playing this game is the ability to race 2 Lamborghini cars; the Countach and the Diablo SV. Though while these remain my favourite cars for purely aesthetic reasons, there's a lot of other luxurious sports cars to drive in NFS 3 including the Italdesign Schigera, the Ferrari F1 Spider, Chevrolet Corvette and a few secret bonus cars to unlock. All the vanilla cars have complete showcases with voiceovers presenting the cars and their technical specs, slideshows with amazing car pictures (basically car porn) and the ability to tune the car to your liking (and of course to the track you want to drive on). A rainy day in Hometown The game offers 4 game modes to choose from. The first is Single Race, which is self explanitory. You drive a single race on a track of your choosing with a car of your choosing against the opponents of your choosing. Everything is customizable, from the cars you drive against, to whether you want oncoming traffic, weather to deal with or to drive during night time (combining all 3 makes for a rather challenging drive). The second mode is the game's namesake, the Hot Pursuit. In this mode you race against a single opponent, although you will also be competing with the police who will chase after you. If you get caught enough times, the race is over as you're arrested for your reckless driving. This was the first Need For Speed game to do this kind of concept and especially back when this game was new it was an incredibly exciting game mode and by far my favourite mode to play. To this day I still love the simplicity of it and it remains rather exhilarating to play. The third mode is Knockout, a tournament variation where you drive a set amount of races and for each race, the last placing car is knocked out of the tournament, so in the final race you end up with a duel against the remaining car. It's a good mode and exciting for sure, but probably not as good as Hot Pursuit in my opinion. The fourth and final game mode is Tournament, where you race on on all of the game's tracks on either a Beginner or Expert difficulty in succession. In this mode you cannot choose which track to play and once you have chosen a car you have to stick with it during the entire tournament. Between each track you can save your progress in case you wanna pick up again later. It's recommended to do the Single Race mode to practice the tracks before tackling Tournament, especially on Expert difficulty. Most of the tracks feature some memorable scenery, such as this underwater tunnel in the appropriately titled Aquatica track All of the modes can also be raced with a friend in Two Player mode, where you play in a splitscreen view against each other. The game also offers online multiplayer in the form of "Connect Player" which I have never tried but it's an option if you don't have any available local friends to play with. During gameplay the game records your race, so after a completed race you can go back and view a replay of the race from different camera angles which you can choose from. Leaving it set to Auto can give some exclusive camera views from the track which you cannot access manually. You can also save your replays to watch again later. The game can also save your ghost data if you wanna do practice sessions against yourself or a friend. It also saves your Knockout and Tournament progress as I mentioned earlier. All of these can be loaded from the Load menu. Damn. Busted. Graphically the game looks absolutely amazing for its time. Especially with the night time lighting and the weather effects where at night time you can see lightning shoot across the sky. The world reflects in the cars as you drive with a very convincing chrome effect, dust and water splashes around your tires leaving trails behind you and the game has some rather amazing looking backgrounds. For its time this game was absolutely cutting edge graphically and running it with a 3DFX Voodoo graphics card or a modern emulation of such really shows how good this game looks with hardware acceleration, although I did run into a few bugs with the emulated voodoo graphics so beware of this when trying to play the game on a modern system. It's a 20 year old game after all, so running it on modern hardware can be a bit of a hassle and you may get some mixed performance. The best part of the game for me is without a doubt the sound and music. Driving in Hot Pursuit mode is a spectacle unlike anything at the time, with the police radio constantly feeding you information into your left and right ear, the incredibly realistic car engine noise constantly murring in the background and the sound of screeching metal stabbing your ears whenever you crash or rub against the opponents. On the tracks themselves, you can hear dogs barking or seagulls calling depending on your location giving that additional layer of environmental audio to really draw you into the game's tracks. And the music... good god the music... while the rock tracks you can choose from really do a good job, the standout tracks on offer here is definitely the Techno selection. Done by primarily Saki Kaskas and Rom Di Prisco, the tracks on offer here are outstanding. Tracks like Aquila 303, Hydrus 606 and Knossos are still on heavy rotation in my playlist now and then and it's worth playing the game just to hear these tracks. They really help give the game a hi-tech futuristic feel that I absolutely adore and they truly add to the feeling of speed and freedom the game offers. In the audio settings I always leave the music set the highest cause if I had music like this while driving in real life, you can be I would be blasting this shit as loud as possible. The weather option will even add snow fall on this winter themed track instead of rain. The game's attention to detail is amazing in this regard. All in all, Need For Speed 3: Hot Pursuit is a true racing classic in every sense of the word. It's definitely still worth playing today and while it may seem a bit simplistic compared to modern NFS games, it still holds up perfectly fine in terms of graphics, gameplay and sound. I swear, Rom Di Prisco's music sounds as fresh and futuristic today as it did back in 1998 and I honestly cannot find anything negative to say about the game. It's a feature packed solid racer that is surprisingly fun to play. If you can, pick it up on eBay. It's a bit of a hassle getting it to work on modern systems, but it's definitely worth it. It's a shame EA has never re-released this and the earlier NFS games, but if they do I would definitely grab it. And if you ever get tired of the game's vanilla cars, there are multiple places on the web where you can find more cars to mod into the game. NFSCARS.NET is probably my favourite place to grab extra cars. So if you want a classic late 90's racer, NFS 3 is probably the one I recommend the most! GAMEPLAY: 9/10 GRAPHICS: 9/10 SOUND: 10/10 TOTAL SCORE: 9/10

Need For Speed 3: Hot Pursuit

Yeah I'm a fairly vanilla gamer all things considered. I usually only do cosmetic mods for the most part and even so I try not to have too many as it tends to make the game increasingly unstable and just having more and more shit to deal with is a bit tedious.

Agents of Mayhem

I wouldn't know any of the technical details of that stuff, lol so I really have no opinion... I mean it's great in that it doesn't count towards your plugin limit but since I use Nexus Mod Manager I didn't even KNOW there was a plugin limit and I doubt I would ever have to care if it was cause it's NEVER been an issue for me.

Saints Row IV.

No opinion since I use Nexus mods.

Yeah, just saying that's how it came off...

Pretty much. OT: Heading to bed, playing Metroid Samus Returns.

Bethesda made it so that anyone using mods that were not downloaded from the Creation Club would have their game saves wiped. They removed this after backlash from the community. They've also never gone back on disabling achievements for people using mods, making it necessary to use a mod to enable achievements again. but I can sort of understand that. It definitely came off as them trying to make it so that the Creation Club would be the only way to mod the game, even on PC.

I generally love the crafting system in Fallout 4 and while the settlement building mode does have its quirks, I do find it generally fun to use when I'm in the mood for it.

GAME: Duke Nukem DEVELOPER: Apogee Software PUBLISHER: Apogee Software YEAR: 1991 Hello, followers and fellow gamers! Today I'm taking a bit of a brief look at one of my favourite DOS games, the first Duke Nukem. Duke Nukem is a game that brings back some of my earliest gaming memories. It's 6 o'clock in the morning, my dad is asleep on a saturday morning when I walk over to his computer and turn it on. Using a simple to use DOS menu, I navigate to the game I love playing the most. Duke Nukem. I load up the game and I am greeted with the familiar PC speaker sound effects and the EGA 16 colour graphics. To this day whenever I play Duke Nukem, those memories come flooding back and I'm instantly back in that room, only lit by the glow of the CRT monitor, surrounded by the sounds from the PC speaker below me. It is probably my earliest gaming memory as far as I remember and during a lot of my childhood, Duke Nukem became a borderline obsession for me. It was my first encounter with a sidescrolling shooter (this was before my mother had gotten any video games) and it blew my young mind. A typical level in Duke Nukem. Duke surrounded by barrels of nuclear waste while gathering footballs, flags and floppy disks of his own game. The story in Duke Nukem is pretty simple. Doctor Proton, a mad genious, has created an army of advanced "tech bots" to take over the world and it's up to the pink shirt wearing special agent Duke Nukem to put a stop to his plans. The game is divided into 3 episodes, with the first episode taking place on Earth, the second episode taking place on the Moon and the third and final episode taking place back on Earth in the future. All the episodes have distinct visual styles and unique levels. Gameplay wise the game plays like a run'n'gun shooter, with focus on collecting things for points and killing enemies, as well as finding keys to open doors in the level (a game mechanic that survived through the entire franchise). However, there are some things that helps keep the game interesting. For one, the health items can often be interacted with, an example being turkey legs you can shoot to get a whole turkey (which makes no sense but just roll with it), and soda cans which you can either pick up for 200 points and a health point, or you can shoot them, causing them to fly up in the air and if you catch them before they are gone, you gain 1000 points but no health points (I guess since the soda vaporized). This offers a little bit of tactical choice since you can either go for points, or go for health. Another is the various upgrades you get throughout each episode, like the robot hand which can create bridges to walk across, the grapple hook which can let you hang on to ledges, high jump boots which allows you to jump much higher. These upgrades may seem a bit similar to Metroid though given the linear design of the game, they're more there to mix up the gameplay a bit as you get further into the levels, and less to give additional options for the player. The game makes good use of static bakgrounds upon which the gameplay moves, keeping it visually interesting, and fairly impressive for the time. The level design can be a bit obtuse at times. Especially in some of the later levels. At times it's downright maze-like and relies a lot on making the player perform tricky jumps, which the somewhat blocky movement sometimes can work against. That's not to say the game is entirely unenjoyable, just that it hasn't aged all that well in some regards. Each episode ends with a showdown between you and the mad doctor himself, usually all you have to do is just shooting him until his floating chair blows up. It's not really that interesting and kind of an anticlimatic boss battle in all honesty. Graphically the game looks alright. It utilizes the 16 colour EGA graphics to a fairly decent degree and offers a lot of variety in the level designs, giving different backgrounds and settings to explore. Granted a lot of it was ripped from other games, but it all does feel somewhat cohesive in a strange way. The sprites are very easily visible against the background and there's nothing I can really complain about. The scrolling effect is also very effective for the time and shows off what Apogee could do with strict limitations given the game had to run in EGA and with PC speaker sound effects only. And the PC speaker sound effects are all pretty good. It's a shame the game has no soundtrack unlike Dark Ages and Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure which came out around the same time, but I guess you could just put on something in the background while playing the game and it'd work fine. More barrels of nuclear waste. And a space ship being refueled in the background... All in all, Duke Nukem is a bit of a flawed classic and looking past my own nostalgia it's really not the best game in the franchise. But it definitely is significant in that it was a successful character for Apogee and a shareware hit for the time, eventually leading to Duke Nukem 3D which itself was a bit of a reimagining of this game, and it's easy to see why. The gameplay is addictive, the sound effects and graphics work well together for being so limited and it's still really playable today, although it does feel dated and a bit aggravating in terms of level design (which is sadly a bit of an Apogee staple). Even so, I would easily recommend Duke Nukem as a classic DOS game to try out if you haven't, even if that's largely due to my own nostalgia with this game. Now, Duke Nukem is a bit difficult to get a hold of these days. It was possible to get it via the 3D Realms Anthology, but after Gearbox Software bought the rights to Duke Nukem, any digital copies of the game have been pulled from online stores. It's still possible to get hold of the game if you do a google search, but be aware that obtaining free copies of the full game is still illegal. Finding the full game on eBay can also be a bit tricky. That's not to say it's impossible but it may be expensive. Though keep in mind that some copies of Duke 3D (the big box version) contained full versions of Duke 1 and 2 as well, and those are really easy to find on eBay so if you want a legal way to play the game, just get one of those. STORY: 8/10 GAMEPLAY: 7/10 GRAPHICS: 8/10 SOUND: 5/10 TOTAL SCORE: 7/10 Source: https://alyxxgameroom.blogspot.no/2018/04/pc-game-review-duke-nukem.html

Redneck Rampage

Enjoying the burn my hot as hell pasta sauce gave me. Forgot how potent powdered chili is.

Not really, some cereal tastes fine on its own. Am I weird for having a side cut hairstyle?

GAME: Shadow Warrior DEVELOPER: 3D Realms PUBLISHER: 3D Realms YEAR: 1997 Note: Screenshots are from the Classic Redux version of the game. Riding on the immense success (and soccer mom notoriety) of Duke Nukem 3D, and despite Quake's massive success with its fully 3D engine, 3D Realms decided to utilize the somewhat less graphically impressive but still versatile Build engine for several more projects, of only one they ended up releasing themselves in the end. A horror themed game (which ended up being the Monolith published Blood), an Egyptian themed game (which ended up being PowerSlave aka Exhumed) and a game spoofing Kung Fu movies (Shadow Warrior), which is the game I'm taking a look at today in the second part of my Build Engine Retrospective. The overarching theme of the 3D Realms Build Engine games seem to be that they all take inspiration from other genres. Duke Nukem 3D was a spoof on action movies (and sci-fi to an extent), Blood was more of a horror/slasher movie spoof and thus Shadow Warrior is a spoof of Kung Fu movies. Granted, this is not to be confused with spoofing Asian culture (although it does that to a fair degree as well) but rather spoofing the kind of Asian culture typically depicted in Kung Fu movies. Like Duke Nukem 3D the story is rather thin and mostly consists of spoofing movie clichés and tropes. She looks happy to see me... The game puts you in the shoes of Lo Wang, a reference-spewing hunk of one-liners of the Chinese persuasion who is pitted against an evil corporation named Zilla (get it...?) and finds that his master has been killed by their henchmen and goes after them for revenge. What follows is a rampage through numerous levels of elaborate castles, volcanoes, construction yards, facing a couple of bosses before finally facing down Zilla himself. So needless to say the story is practically on par with pretty much every shooter of the era and it serves just enough to give you a backdrop for the game's levels, but never gets in the way of what really matters, the gameplay. Truth to be told, I've never really been a huge kung fu movie fan, and while the game does contain some anime references, most of them are of stuff I've never seen so it felt a bit difficult for me to really "get" a lot of the references and such in this game (outside the ones that aren't strictly kung fu movie references). But that's not to say I didn't enjoy it as this game still offers some classic 90's FPS charm in spades, at least for the most part. And while a lot of the silly stuff in the game might be considered slightly culturally insensitive nowadays, it's not really meant to be taken seriously. Konami would love this game. The gameplay is pretty much identical to that of Duke 3D and other similar Build engine shooters, so if you've played those games you will most likely feel right at home in Shadow Warrior. It does however do its own spin on things and even does some things that could be considered upgrades from Duke 3D (which we will get back to in a bit). Most of the things are pretty much equivalent of the same things from Duke 3D. For instance, the main gameplay still consists of hunting keys to unlock doors, and the inventory items function have some of the same functions (such as the medkit and the night vision goggles). The weapons are also somewhat similar to Duke Nukem 3D, though with the similarities out of the way, let's focus on the differences and what makes Shadow Warrior unique, and so much fun. The first thing you will probably notice is that you actually have a melee weapon in this game (you still have fists if you absolutely wanna karate-chop enemies to death), and it's actually a fairly powerful melee weapon too (befitting the game's title a fair bit). Another thing you will also notice is that enemy death animations are also dependent on which weapon you use to kill them as slicing them with a sword will give a different result compared to peppering them with UZI's or splattering them across the room with a Missile Launcher. Speaking of which, let's discuss the other weapons. In addition to the sword, you have Shuriken/darts (which you throw 3 at a time of, and can pick up from the environment again), the Riot Gun (basically a shotgun), the UZI (which can be dualwielded once you find another one), the Missile Launcher, the Grenade Launcher, the Sticky Grenades, the Railgun, a Guardian's Head (yes) and a Ripper Heart (an actual beating heart). As you can see, some of the weapons are fairly standard for the time while others are... let's say, more unique. Especially the Railgun since it's probably the earliest FPS to use one as far as I know, a whole year before a similar implementation in Quake 2. Given the movie Eraser came out around this time, it's easy to understand why Railguns became such a hot topic in shooters for a while. The game is fairly bloody for its time with unique death animations depending on the weapon used. Now in addition to the more unique weapons, a lot of them also feature something new for the time: alternate firing modes. For instance, you can activate an auto mode on the Riot Gun, turning it into a pretty devastation auto-shotgun that fires several barrels instead of just one, and you can obtain "heat seeking cards" for the missile launcher, granting you missiles that home in on targets, as well as FREAKIN' NUCLEAR WARHEADS! If anything isn't a sign this game was made in the 90's, that definitely is, because this makes the missile launcher the most devastating weapon in the game (mostly to yourself mind you, but still...). The game is fairly difficult, even on easy mode... at least early on. Once you get into the further levels, ammunition is fairly common to come across for pretty much all your weapons, and weapons like the Railgun completely OWN smaller enemies, at times gibbing them in single shots, and ammo for the Railgun is surprisingly not that scarce, I don't think I ever encountered a single instance where I ran out of ammo on that thing (I was playing on Easy difficulty mind you and I was using it somewhat sparingly). Not to mention fortune cookies (which function as the game's equivalent of the Nuclear Health pickups from Duke 3D) are increasingly common in later levels as well as medkits. This kind of makes the game's difficulty curve a bit uneven as you'll start out pretty weak with weapons that aren't capable of dispatching enemies quickly so on the higher difficulties where the enemy count is higher you'll most likely have a really bad time in the beginning of the game, but then the game almost becomes too easy once you get your hands on the more powerful weapons in the game. Splat! Some of the inventory items are also fairly unique to the game, giving you smoke bombs (which function as invisibility powerups and increase your fist damage), repair kits (can be used to repair broken vehicles (yes the game has vehicles...)), gas bombs, flash bombs (kinda useless), and Caltrops can be tossed onto the floor to hurt enemies (these are kinda useless too). For most of the game I ended up not really using much of the inventory items and mostly stuck to the riotgun, UZI's, Railgun and the grenade and missile launchers. The guardian head is a cool weapon but most of the time I just kinda forget it's there. The ripper heart is kind of useful as it summons a secondary Lo Wang who goes around killing enemies using a railgun but these are kinda rare pickups anyway. I mean, it kind of suffers the same issues as Duke 3D in that sure, the unique weapons are unique and cool and gimmicky, but when it comes down to it, you'll most likely use the other weapons since ammo is much more common for them. I don't think I ever used caltrops a single time because the enemy AI isn't really that smart and will just kinda wander around aimlessly or shoot at you. A giant sumo wrestler using farts as an attack. Classy. And as has been mentioned in other reviews, yes, the game features a fair bit of platforming but it never really got to the point of tedium for me, and moving into third person mode (using the F7 key) really helped with these parts of the game anyway. So I don't really consider it a negative aspect of the game and it does bring some additional challenge to the levels without being overbearing like in the modern remake of Rise of the Triad. Graphically the game looks fairly impressive for a Build engine game, featuring some 3D objects in place of sprites for stuff like weapons, powerups and keys. It achieved this by using voxels (3-dimensional volumetric pixels) to give objects a 3-dimensional appearance without actually using polygonal 3D models. But for the most time, the palette looks kinda brown and ugly (not sure if this was done intentionally) and while I like some of the more urban industrial looking levels, a lot of the other levels just look kinda bland and a bit drab aside from the numerous Chinese style buildings and such. I can remember some levels standing out a bit to me, like an airport with a crashed airplane, a train station early in the game and a volcano as the final level, but a few of the levels just kinda blend together in my head. That's not to say the level design is bad or anything, I just found that a lot of the time it felt a bit uninspired and a bit of a product of its time. Most of the time, navigating the game was a breeze. Jesus, Lo Wang, can't you let a naked Anime lady with diarrhea have some privacy? What I really love about these Build engine games is just how visceral some of them feel and using the game's arsenal feels incredibly satisfying. Hearing the chunky shot of the Riot Gun, the peppering bulletspray of the UZI's, the intense ZAP of the Railgun and the slashing of the sword all brings to mind classic action movies and you just don't feel this kind of combat in games anymore. It definitely has its own style from this era. I also love the delivery of Lo Wang and while he may come off as a bit annoyingly stereotypical at times, his somewhat dopey delivery kinda makes some of his lines pretty funny. The music is thematically fitting, and was probably the first Build engine title to utilize CD Redbook Audio for its soundtrack rather than relying on MIDI. It's not that memorable for the most part compared to some of the tunes from Duke 3D but it's there, sets the mood and gives the game the kind of Asian vibe it needs without feeling in the way. Andrew Hulshult also remixed the title theme for the Classic Redux edition of the game and it sounds suitably rocked up, giving it more energy than the original. I'm sure this scenario has occurred in some Tomb Raider fanfics... With all of its naked Sailor Moon influenced girls, protagonist constantly trying to sound funny, and somewhat bigger reliance on fart jokes and scat humor, I can't help but feel like this game wasn't really made for me. I find it a bit harder to get through than Duke Nukem 3D, and a lot of it doesn't hold up as well today in my opinion in regards to both content and level design, but I was still having a good time for the most part when the game wasn't making me cringe too hard, but it was still a bit of a chore at times. I had never finished this game before doing this review and I doubt I ever will again. I had a few moments where I giggled a bit, sure, but I wasn't enjoying myself as much as I wish I was. With that in mind, I still recommend this game. Out of all the Build engine games, Shadow Warrior isn't really that high on my list and for that reason I can't really score it as high as Duke 3D, but if you love oldschool FPS's, especially using the Build engine, it's worth a shot, and hopefully it will click with you more than it did for me. STORY: 6/10 GAMEPLAY: 8/10 GRAPHICS: 7/10 SOUND: 7/10 TOTAL SCORE: 7/10 Source: https://alyxxgameroom.blogspot.no/2018/04/build-engine-retrospective-part-2.html

I'm still around.

Shadow Warrior 2 with Kira.

Well then....

BTG is around, now and then. Haven't seen him for a while though.