JudasPhysicist

Okay slightly tangential news, apparently some of the original developers of Kabus 22 formed their own studio and are making a brand new 3rd person action/stealth game called Black State that honestly looks like a cross between Metal Gear Solid 5 and Death Stranding. Looks pretty cool.

Well Ross found another Turkish game. I certainly didn't expect two Turkish games in one year. Anyway I might dig up some Turkish game magazine archives again when I have some spare time. Although I'm not sure I'll find anything as crazy or fascinating that was the development of Kabus 22.

@ScumCoderThanks! Just did a little bit of digging into old magazine archives and translation that's all :)

Hey Ross, so a few things I want to say before the meat of the post. Kadıköy is actually located in İstanbul, so its not a city but rather a province of İstanbul. Not that it matters much in the game's story though. Something else I noticed is that the game actually has a ton of billboards that have product placements such as the "Fida Film" posters (Those guys went bankrupt back in 2016 or something) Your pronunciation of the word "Kabus", which means Nightmare, was more or less correct the first time you tried it in the video, your subsequent tries were pretty hilarious :) Almost sound like the word "Karpuz" which means watermelon xD Okay, since I'm a weirdo I tried finding the Turkish version of the game, but all I could find was the English and Russian versions. And I'm not about to try and find a box DVD copy that may or may not work due to janky DRM's of the day. I did manage to find the review of the game from the Turkish gaming magazine LEVEL, arguably the best Turkish gaming magazine at the time. The sentiment seems to be that since there haven't been many Turkish games made, this being a native home grown game excited them. They go on to say that initially the game fails to impress neither with its graphics or gameplay. But they soon realized that this was trying to be more like Resident Evil 3 and that sort of warmed them up. They give a plot summary of the beginning which goes something like this: - A mysterious cult emerges, initially with very few members. - The cult grows in size rapidly thanks to some Nation leaders also joining the cult (I think that's what they mean by Governors joining the cult in the intro, bad translation, just imagine the US President and the French Prime Minister holding hands and sacrificing goats or some shit and their approval rates reach sky high) - The cult does not appear to have a Leader, or no one knows who the leader is, if they even exist. (The guy writing the review must have typed "Ş" instead of "L" in the review, these keys are side by side on a Turkish-Q keyboard, the word "Şider" should be "Lider" which means leader) - The cult promises "Absolute/Certain Happiness" to those who have "Absolute/Certain Faith" to the cult. That's their whole motto it seems, pretty weak to be honest but maybe they do some extra parlor tricks to get people to join. - Soon after the cult grew in size, pseudo WW3 broke out minus the nukes, from what I can understand. The cult wins the pseudo WW3 and for some fucking reason decides to spit up the world into 22 pieces. Now are these pieces like districts or countries? I dunno, maybe they literally carved the planet. It's hard to tell when you are dealing with a cult that's got at least half the World's population. - After taking control of the planet, the Cult decides to make İstanbul it's capitol. Why? Because its a Turkish game and we want it to take place in İstanbul, that's why. - Soon after that the weird creatures called the "Madun" start popping around the place, which probably makes sense as the underground temple was located in İstanbul and they probably did some rituals etc. to release them. So this implies that the cult indeed won WW3 via conventional means by mass indoctrination of the people. That gives me C&C 1 Nod vibes, Kane manages to unify nearly half of the world's population just through sheer charisma and cult like mumbo jumbo then proceeds to conquer the rest via conventional warfare. - Demir is supposed to be a Turkish resistance fighter they are indeed lovers with Ebru. - Watching from your video, I can see that at the begging of the game the resistance fighters take the control of the Kadıköy district back form the cult, then the cultists released the weirdo Demons on the resistance fighters. So this is the first time Demir, or anyone else, is seeing these creatures. The reviewer goes on to say that the game gives of that RE3 Racoon City vibe but mixed with the actual city of İstanbul with Turkish culture, which impressed them. They go on to joke that the price of a Lahmacun raised to 5 lira and that was excessive, fast forward to 2023 and the price of a Lahmacun starts from 60 lira. They go on to make parallels with Silent Hill, RE2 and Devil May Cry, then say that Demir plays more like a tank and has a lot of ammo, Ebru is a bit more squishy and her pistol is bad and finally Inzar tries to play like Dante and that sucks out the survival horror atmosphere of the game. They say that mostly the puzzles are fine and sort of fun, but the need to try keys on like 8 different doors to find out which one it unlocks is pretty tedious. They thought the gameplay was okay, the controls were acceptable, the camera controls were better than most RE games and finally they were really impressed with the loading times between screens and commended that there was no door opening animation between areas. They say that this game took 4 years to develop with a team of 4-5 people and that should commended for the Turkish video game industry. They also have an interview with the game's developers in the middle, it goes something like this: Level - How did you think of making Kabus 22? Yasin - They always had a passion to make video games when they were children, always wondered how pressing keys on the keyboard made the characters move and do things. They decided in 1999 to learn how to make games and started researching and seeking some education on these matters. Their first game was called "SR-Man" (2002) a first person shooter, contracted to be made by a pharmaceutical company (I checked the game, videos of it exist on youtube, looks like a fever dream of Quake mixed with Asimov's Fantastic Voyage). Afterwards 5 more people joined their team and they wanted to make something more extensive. Level - Turkish video game development is still in its infancy, what were the difficulties you faced during the 4 years of development? Yasin - Goes on to say that financial investment was the biggest issue. Investors told them that the video game sector did not exist in Turkey so why should they give them any money. (Sadly very wrong, there was a thriving bootleg video game sector in Turkey, very similar to stories told by CD Project Red's Marcin Iwinski regarding the Polish bootleg video game sector.) They however managed to get investment from a home appliance company (Vestel) of all things. - Skipping one here with the Vestel company Level - Do you think that Kabus 22 will be an economic success? Mevlüt - They think that the game is by far the best video game developed in Turkey to date and deserves the success. They hoped that gamers would go and buy the original boxed DVD versions so they would profit. Level - Are you considering a sequel? Yasin - They are working on some experimental things but nothing is set yet. Level - Don't you think the game is a bit too hard? Yasin - If you play on Normal and get used to the controls, the game is actually easy as it practically showers you with medkits and ammo. But I can't say the same for the Hard difficulty as ammo and medkits are reduces and the enemies are tougher. He goes on to say that they tested the game on Hard and finished it multiple times, and there are some challenging spots where you don't have enough ammo to kill all enemies so you need to come up with alternative tactics. He suggests that people initially play and complete the game on Normal and if they want to play again go for Hard. Otherwise the Hard difficulty will be a real Kabus/Nightmare (nasty pun/word play, I love it.) Level - What do you suggest to amateur groups who want to develop games? Mevlüt - This game shows us that the efforts made in the last couple of years regarding video games is bearing fruit. You need ambition, talent and tons of effort to make good games. In order to make AAA games you need a lot of know-how and financial support. The (Turkish) video game industry is still crawling but there are also important changes happening etc. etc. So from what I gather this game was made by 5-ish people in 4 years and they probably starved while trying to make the thing. I can only guess that none of these developers were writers, they probably only knew how to code, make models, animate etc. They probably never consulted an editor or something either, probably explains why the story feels so bat-shit insane. One interesting thing is that the developer Mevlüt Dinç seems to be making games since the 1980's working in Activision etc. Finally the caption featured on Ebru's screenshot essentially tells her to drop her gun and become a house wife. Not surprising as this stuff wasn't even considered to be misogynistic at the time, aged rather poorly though.

This one is on Early Access at the moment. It is developed by a single person and the scope is pretty massive. You can think of it as Mount and Blade but in space.

Oh thanks! Never realized Ross saved this game from abandonware status :D

Here is something weird, while this is technically a Ubisoft title, the game engine and the game itself is developed by Massive Entertainment. On their website it says they are a Ubisoft company https://www.massive.se but the studio's roots go way back till 2001 with their first title Ground Control, a very competent fully 3D RTS, and Homeworld + Ground Control were the first fully 3D RTS games that I know of. In 2004 they released a sequel to Ground Control, which I love none of them have base building etc. they focus soley on the action and tactics side of things. Finally in 2008 they released World In Conflict and almost went bankrupt and Ubisoft bought them out. And at this point the story goes pretty bizzare in typical Ubisoft fashion, they had Massive Entertainmet cancel their work on the World In Conflict console ports and potentially any other RTS game they were making before their acquisition. Massive is at this point a studio known for making purely RTS games and have ~8 years of experience under their belt, so naturally Ubisoft tasks them to make the tacked on multi-player portions of their Far Cry and Assasin's Creed games for years on end and also puts them in charge of developing and maintaining their Steam competitor DRM thingy Uplay (now it's called some other weird thing but whatever even Blizzard changed their DRM name but people still kept calling it Battle-net lol). I was massively surprised when I saw this Massive Entertainment's name attached to the Division because I thought they went poof under all that AAA published slave driver culture, similar to what Activision did to Raven Software. The game was pretty much so so in my opinion and I have no idea why they made it an online only looter shooter when it could have been a solid single player game. But the talent is still there, the amount of detail and effort poured into making that city, that amazing winter storm atmosphere, I've never really felt any other game conveyed a cold winter city any better. To my knowledge the music in this game was made by Ola Strandh, who also made the music to Ground Control back in the day and that was pretty awesome. But I suppose corporate meddling or whatnot mandates that games don't have any musical identity anymore. I mean just listen to this track from 2001 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir74RSi-5Gs&list=PLCF6ACD0618F0879D&index=5

If you pause the video right around 7-8 seconds it says Eternam. I guess a left over from copy pasting

Is there a way to get the soundtrack for this game apart from directly recording from the game itself? That intro music is pretty amazing, I think Ross has a new rendition of that he used on the Dream Software video. Searching for Eternam soundtrack brings up Doom Eternal soundtrack, while it's also pretty metal, that's not what I want ?

Yep, duly noted. I don't actually have a microphone I'm just using the laptop's integrated mic, and some ancient hd cam corder I found which had a tripod.

Hi everyone, After years of procrastination, I finally decided to something because of the quarantine. I made an amateurish review of Hitman 2016 here: I'd love some feedback on the vid. Also I could remove the vid if it's against the forum rules to self market, but since this is the general gaming section I thought it would be okay. Cheers, have a happy new year.

Oh well, it's just how some old games are coded I guess. It's just a shame when a 3D game has arbitrary resolution limitations

If you could edit the resolution but not the aspect ratio, why not use 1440x1080 as a resolution? It's still 4:3 so the game assets look normal, you get more resolution out of the game, plus it looks nice on 16:9 monitors when it's centered.

Wow you really should upload it, that's proper archeology right there. Someone might even translate it if they have the time.

Hey guys, the rebelmind.com website seems to be dead. Therefore the game is sort of abandonware. I couldn't find it on steam or gog (even though the game is Polish). I wanted to download Frater and give it a go, but I suppose it's not possible anymore. Does anyone have a downloaded version standing around anywhere?