biosynth8

I recently read about what a bad game the Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood had become. And I thought back at a game I still mourn for, even though it was allready dead when I first heard about it: Werewolfe: The Apocalypse - The Heart of Gaia. When I found out about this game, probably about 1999, my only source was a Polish video game magazine site I couldn't understand, but it had a lot of sceenshots. It was supposed to be an action RPG in first person, where you -naturally- controlled a werewolf. The little information I could gather was that it was built on the first Unreal engine. There was also some kind of morale system, letting you mutate if you turned to the evil side. Today, there's an almost thirty minute youtube video cut together from all the cutscenes of the game. The maker had the idea of reviving the game as a fan project, but nothing came of it, up to now. Link Do you have similar stories. For some reason, I dreamed of playing this game - litterally and several times.

Hah, both of them drove my brother half insane with their difficulty. I think he broke a keyboard over Myth 2. KKND is really a blast with the FMV scenes. It's on GOG, too. Myth was truly ahead of it's time and there are few games like it, even today.

I think P.A.M.E.L.A. is a really great game, despite being objectivly bad.

I played Just Cause 3 for about two hours now and think I've seen everything ther is to see. This game feels like you start with cheatcodes on. Very boring.

I just found it on myabandonware, too: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/biosys-f2f

I really loved this game when it came out. It's dumb and the graphics weren't good back in the day either. But the splatter effects, the gun choices and the action in general were really satisfying.

Archangel... I still have the box right here. I thought it was absolutely silly as a kid and stopped playing at the part in Berlin. At that point you get guns and the gunplay is horrible. You can't hit enemies that are too close, because the bullets appear behind them then. Other than that I only remeber that it was a very tedious but not very difficult game with horrible voiceacting and a bland story. Arx Fatalis is on GOG too and runs fine. It's a decent game with some flaws. The magic system is a bit of a pain as it only works when you are very accurate with drawing the runes. It's also very linear, but it doesn't tell you that! You are absolutely able to do quests in the wrong order and end up at a dead end after multiple hours of playing. This doesn't mean you have to restart the game, though - but you may be forced to walk all the way back almost to the start and later back again.

I completed it. I tried to get everything out of it because I just refused to believe there was nothing behind it at all. I felt a bit cheated. They give you half a novel of backstory to read before playing and then you don't even get a decent ending - no matter which ending you choose. As for exploration: Maybe if the map would have been a quater of the size it was in the game, I would have been less disappointed. Because after playing through that amount, I realized that there was no real reward for exploration. I still went everywhere, just to see nothing. I think this game can be summed up with one word: basic. Basic AI, basic map, basic enemies, basic story. The gunplay and general combat (if you don't count the very basic squad mechanics) , as well es the sound design (if you don't count the very basic music) however are really good. They lured me in and kept me going. I would have loved that in a more fleshed out game. I've read other people's reviews saying that in the end it felt as if they had missed part of the game. That's spot on, I think.

Meh. It works, the gameplay is challenging and the worldbuilding is interesting. The problem is that the pacing is horrible and the graphics are so generic and uninteresting. The same goes for the fighting system in general. I might give it another try one day.

I didn't get through the tutorials as they bored me to tears. That never happened to me before.

This game can be summed up in one word: Dull. There's just no point to it. You know the story isn't going to get anywhere from the beginning - it's a Lovecraft game and they tend to be one trick ponies. The gameplay tries to trick you into believing that you're actually doing something, with simple puzzles and RPG-elements. But they are all window dressings, facades only.

Still not out yet, is it? I know that feeling, I preordered the first Stalker back then.

The ten hours felt extremely long to me, since there's content for about four.

I played the game again after more than twenty years and finally completed it. It has a nice, short ending cinematic. It really made me wonder whether there are different endings nobody has discovered yet. I'm sure it was planned, but never implemented. It holds up better than I thought, just like most Myst-clones do. The controls are very simple, everything is smooth, no cluckyness like in most action games of the 90s. It took me a bit longer to complete as I thought because there are actually many different solutions to the technical problems and I chose the ones that take longer. Furthermore there's just so much stuff to do that is completely useless. There's for example a huge amount of survival equipment you'll probably never need. Come to think, I don't know how I managed to die that much in the game as a kid. It's very lenient with food and water intake, the liquids can also be completely satisfied by food with high water content. In this playthrough I only died when trying to die. Though, of course, you can easily die from spider bites, malaria or poisonings if you don't manage to reach the medical lab early in the game. Sadly, the scene when you are shot was as buggy in this version as in the one I had as a kid. I couldn't read the obituary of that either. That's a shame, since it was one of the main reasons why I wanted to play this game again: To see all the different obituaries and the one you get after being murdered by Devlin's lackeys is totally different from the ones you get when you get yourself killed. One that note: Is it possible that Sam Devlin is supposed to be Steve Bannon? People from the original Biosphere 2 project worked on the game and Biosphere 2 was aquired by Bannon after it had failed so miserably. All in all, it would be a great game for a remake as it allready ticks many boxes of a modern survival game. Just add crafting and base building and you are good to go. The technosphere management could also be expanded, as it is easily one of the best parts of the game - keeping everything running, look after the health of the plants, managing the different water and air tanks... And there are allready unkillable enemies that - kind of - pursue you. Of course, nobody is mad enough to do something like this. But hey, one can dream - and a biosphere management game really would be the game of my dreams.

I can't agree. The first Ori was a deep and beautiful challange but Hollow Knight is defenitely on another level in style, gameplay and mood. The creators of Ori obviously thought so too and lifted every possible gameplay element from Hollow Knight they could get away with. Sadly this made the game worse, it didn't feel original anymore.

Yes, this is a major point. Most games with a moral system give you a choice whether you want to play the game seriously (play as a good guy) or just mess everything up (bad guy). The old Fallout games and Fallout New Vegas tried to mix it up by putting most of the factions in some grey areas - but the player choices are nevertheless rated good or evil and do feel that way. I can imagine that Bioshock was planned that way, but also why the publisher didn't allow it.

There are many good things to say about this game. From the technical standpoint, it‘s very well made, the graphics are fine, there are almost no bugs and everything works as it should. That‘s quite a lot for a modern game. Still, I was angry at this game most of the time while playing it. While the game is generally sound, it‘s troubled by many design choices, mainly not knowing where to stop. Less content would have done the game a serious favour. First, there‘s the music. Like much in the game, it‘s very Myst-like, but lacking the more dramatic tones of that series. It amounts to a monotonous plinking all the time, everywhere. The game would have gained a lot by more silence and more ambient noise instead of this constant barrage of muzak. Then there‘s the story. The idea is good in general, but the execution fails on several levels. The developers didn‘t feel confident enough to design moving character models, which is fair enough with a small team. Telling parts of the story through narrated letters is a good workaround. Telling other part through a talking, flying green orb is not. It made me feel the creators‘ inability or lack of time, while just a disembodied voice might not have. It doesn‘t help that this character is meant to gain your sympathy, but feels very hostile. It tends to appear out of the blue and starts nagging at you. At some points later in the game, it‘s also responsible for some very slow and tedious scripted sequences, combined with making you do some minor menial fetch quests. The worst part is when the game stops for a ten minute story monologue presented said glowing blob with a cave wall power point presentation. You are told all the background of the game in one overly long sequence instead of hints along your journey. And in the end you don‘t even get to see what happens at all. You just have to take the characters‘ words for it. At least there‘s an ending where you are given the satisfaction of seeing the green orb sulking and muttering. It also takes the puzzle island idea from Myst – but you never leave that island. Besides some rusty tunnels and a brief underwater section you are always in the same environment. Well made, but boring after some time. There are a few good puzzles in this game. I just got the feeling that they are almost all at the beginning and then decline in quality. After three quaters it starts throwing pipe puzzles at you and requires you to play a game of Mastermind. This is also where the game starts to become just a long narrow tube of puzzle after puzzle. There‘s nothing in between anymore, every piece of tunnel is just another puzzle, no environment, nothing. It would have done the game good to cut out most of the weaker riddles for some exploration – since ther are many very weak puzzles. As I wrote, you get Mastermind at one point, along with other well know riddles. On the other hand, most of them are way to tedious. Many require an ungodly amount of running around just to check what you are doing. Some aren‘t even riddles, but just list of easy to mess up chores. Brewing potions was the worst offender here, in my opinion. Many others are repeated in different difficulties, something I could have completely done without. Sometimes you get what feels like tutorial puzzles. A general theme of the puzzles is, that the solutions often seem to be a bit too long to be fun. If you have to dechipher runes to enter into a doorway, you don‘t have to enter four or five, you have to enter eight or ten. This is especially infuriating in cases where you allready have the solution, but the game wants you to repeat the same process several times. It seems like the developers had a serious case of horror vacui with their puzzles. The game feels like the they wanted to cram every kind of puzzle, short of crosswords and sudoku, into it. (They even inserted a joke about that, I‘m not going to spoil.) It feels like the they wanted to keep the player in the game as long as possible. But this really harms the experience in my opinion. In the end, I went from room to room hoping I wouldn‘t find another easy to sovle but time consuming and click-heavy puzzle. Quality over quantity would have been the solution - and the developers show that they can do the quality.

Shine: Die Angst hat einen Namen is a German horror-themed fmv-game from 1996. It generally recieved bad ratings and I've yet to talk to someone who as actually played it. I only knew it at the time because there was some kind of demo on a CD in a magazine back then. I couldn't start the demo for some reason, I only could access the individual video files. They were gruesome, strange and absolutely trippy. Having nothing from the story to connect them in any way made it even more insane. Two or three years ago, it came back to my mind and I bought a copy on ebay. I never managed to run it on a modern machine with emulations. So I have just the weird ideas of those haunting contextless videos. Maybe it's the best it remains that way. It's more mysterious, while the game is probably just bad. Maybe I can use them in a short story. If you want get an impression of the game, here are two videos: https://www.kultboy.com/testbericht-uebersicht/6108/

Everyone likes S.T.A.L.K.E.R, but I don't agree with this guy in several points: Fist of all, Stalker is a terrible example for a faction system. His only point is that all the factions are relatable. Great. What does it mean in the game? Nothing. The factions don't influence the story progression in Shadow of Chernobyl, they are basicly a minigame in Clear Sky and play no real role at all in Call of Prypiat. He even says it correctly that there are no real moral decisions in the game. I get that he likes the idea that all sides have a point, but that's easy to do if it doesn't matter in the end. Furthermore, he makes exactly the opposite point I gave in my example with Elex: He dislikes faction systems because they tend to make you choose the lesser of two evils. I can't understand why this is supposed to be a bad thing. I just think this is realistic. If you're not the leader of any faction and forced to work with them, you'll just end up with their goals, not yours. The great thing about Elex is that you have many ways to decide, but no decision is going to be a good one. There's no lesser evil, you just pick the evil you like. If you think one of the factions might have the right idea, you probably missed something or are an extremist yourself. I think he mixes some points up there, because with mentioning Bioshock he's on the right track. This is a game where you can either choose to be a monster or an angel. No grey areas and the moral decision is so utterly obvious that it's painful. I can completely agree here. But I don't get why he is complaing about games only offering bad solutions to problems. Stalker only escapse this situation by having no faction-specific endings! Otherwise it would be exactly the same as, say, in The Outer Worlds.

I like this one. It's silly, clunky and buggy, but the atmosphere is very nice and it reminds me a bit of the old "Last Half of Darkness" games. You die every few minutes from going in the wrong direction or touching something you weren't supposed to touch. The puzzles are rather simple, but at least among the first few there are some that are clerverly integrated into the environment. I would recommend it on sale for people who are into atmospheric, slightly broken puzzle games.

I played some of Wasteland II, but can't remember much of it. The moral system didn't strike me as especially interesting, as it concerned mainly tactical decisions. Plus, as far as I remember, most missions do have a "right" way to play them. Most of the time it's still "play a good samaritan or murder everyone".

I really liked how much this video emphasized the importance of fantastic architecture in games. There simply is too little of it. Even fantasy games don't dare very much in this category. After the great and often alien architecture in Morrowind, both Oblivion and Skyrim were a disappointment architecture wise. Sci Fi games tend to have very few setpieces and fill everything else with tunnels and machinery.

This post may contain massive spoilers to Prey (2017) and Elex. I just finished Prey (2017). I think it's generally a good game. Rushed in some areas and tedious in the end, but generally good. What really made me think, though, is the system of moral decisions it has. That sucks. Of course, it can be argued, that it's not as bad as in Bioshock, which is probably Prey's half-brother. However, since the gist of the game is that it's one giant test of your humanity, it's kind of more important. In most cases, the game makes you decide whether you help people or not. Save someone by completing an extra objective or don't. If you don't help, sometimes the people die, other times they will just be disappointed - but you always miss out on game content and rewards. On the meta-level the decisions don't come down to moral ones, but whether you want to spend more time in the game or rush through it faster. Whether you want to know more of the story, or whether that's not important to you. And even inside the game world, the decisions are rarely difficult. The game balantly asks you whether you want to be a monster or not. It's similar in many games. Even ones that have more nuanced worlds, like the Fallout series, make it hard for the player to play as an asshole. Most of the time, the "evil" decisions are just kicking puppies, figuratively, but also literally. If you go by the healthy moral compass of a human being, you end up as the knight in shining armor. Evil decisions are generally wrong, good decisions right. Does it have to be like that? I don't think so. However the only game I know that did it in a decent way is Elex. Now, it's not really a good game, but I think they nailed that aspect. Few people played it here, I assume, so I'll explain the basics. You play as a guy who was recently kicked out of a faction of technologists who brutally murder people to extract a drug from them that grants special powers and keeps their emotions down. Since you don't have access to a constant flow of the drug, your emotions come back. How they do, that's for you to decide. I think that's a clever way to have a blank slate RPG-character without the amnesia trope. Instead of a karma meter, the game keeps track of your "coldness": Emotionless, utilitarian decisions count as cold and raise the meter, emotional decisions, whether from anger or compassion, lower it. The good thing is, that this never tells you whether your decision was right or wrong. For example, early in the game you find a man who is trying to care for his brother who was turned into a monster. The human decision is to keep quiet about it, since the local authorities would kill both of them. If you do that, the monster brother kills the other man anyway. This "moral" system is set in a world filled with assholes. There are five factions that can be summarized as bigots, bullies, supermacists, terrorists and mass murderers, and you get to decide whether you want to ally with the first three. I've read reviews of people who complained that they stopped playing because they hated all the factions. Well, that's the point! When I played the missions of these factions, I found myself constantly trying to screw them over while still meeting the mission requirements. Sometimes that works, sometimes it gets back at you later. Even the first companion you get in the game only stays with you if you help him frame the cold blooded murder he comitted on an innocent guy. I the end, I agreed with that, took him back to the camp, ratted him out and killed him. There I realized it: In this game playing as an asshole has a point. Often you only have questionable options and you'll have to go with the one that helps you with your own goals. If you try to be the good guy all the time, you are not only going to get used, you are definitely going to make things worse for everyone. Because the people giving you quests lie to you. I find that really fascinating. What do you think? Is there any game that implimented something similar?

Search for Zomb's Lair. There's a package including a virtual machine with Windows 95. It's almost impossible to run any other way. I wish I could run my German version again, I really liked the voice acting. Those weren't spiders, they were aggressive plants. They don't appear before quite late in the game actually. If you have come that far, you almost got it. But that's also the point where you have to start messing with the environmental controls. Come to think, I guess you can beat the whole game in less than two or three hours.

Checks all the boxes of things to have in a modern rouge lite. The same basic map gameplay you have in other titles from Fictorum to Void Bastards. Somewhat real time combat but on a tiled field, which makes it strangely static. The plot is interesting, but after an hour or so I came to the conclusion I can have a much better experience by just reading any sci fi novel.