biosynth8

It takes endurance to get into it, I guess. I was scarred off when I got attacked by bats in the beginning.

My first impression: A cheap, buggy mess without any real story. The "alchemy" is so obviously stolen from Full Metal Alchemist that it hurts.

I'm going to try this right now, since its less than 3 Euro. I haven't played a really interesting first person game since P.A.M.E.L.A..

Man, that was a buggy mess. I bought it back in the day and tried very hard to like it. It was an open world game at a time when this feature alone was something special. The colorful, tropical, South American setting was cool too, when so many other games were brown colored military shooters. I think I deleted and re-installed it eight times. I just couldn't believe that there was nothing for me to like in this game. It was a patched re-release, but everything felt unfinished.

I fondly remember "Hard to be a God" by Akela, released in 2007, based on the Strugazky brothers' novella. Not only am I a fan of the source material, the game also fell in my favourite categorie of games that are kind of bad but charming and unique. It's a top down action RPG set in the future but on a planet that is currently in the renaissance/early modern era. The thing is, that it starts with the aftermath of what happened in the book. If you haven't read it, the game spoils the ending (which is kind of a big thing), but the proceedings of the game would be much more suprising for you - if the press releases and trailers hadn't spoiled it beforehand. It had a more or less half-assed system where you had to combine certain parts of clothing and armour to pose as people from different factions. The fighting system was interesting, with a lot of force behind the weapons, but it was buggy and tough as nails. The graphics, as with everything from Akela, were dated, both ugly and nice. There was also "Galactic Assault: Prisoner of Power" by Wargaming.net, also from 2007, also based on a novella by the famous Russian brothers. It's a turn based strategy game set in the same universe (Noon Universe) as "Hard to be a God". However, this time the planet is somewhere in a dystopian atomic age, with several totalitarian states warring against each other. Again, the story takes place some time after the novel, this time it plays out events that are hinted on in later books of the Noon Universe. However, if you haven't read "The Inhabited Island" (or seen the 2008 movie) you won't understand anything from the story. Not that it matters, as it is only told with voiceovers by bored actors. However, it's a very solid strategy game and I started playing it again recently as it's on GOG now. Even the early missions can be very though.

I recently watched "Silent Running" with Bruce Dern again. It has a lot of similarities in plot and setting and Alan Russell is definitely a bit modeled after Bruce Dern's character Freeman Lowell. Russell even has a poster of that movie in his house. The funny thing is, that it actually went that way: The movie Silent Running was the inspiration for the construction of the ill-fated Biosphere-2 project in Arizona, and Biosphere-2 was the main inspiration for BioSys.

Yes, it's a free update. To be frank, the gamplay and graphics enhancements are the main appeal of it anyway. The Breaking Dawn storyline is rather lackluster with copy-pasted bosses.

I think it was considered a "Myst clone" at the time, as it was a whole genre. It's far easier though. Even if you can't solve a puzzle (it's hard to call them puzzles, because they often seem more like workarounds to broken stuff) you might stumble upon the solution by accident. Most of it can be solved by real life logic. The only part where I got stuck was when you had to get a heavy rock lifted from a corpse. I did not think of that solution because it seemed to video-gamey at the time.

I finished it now and even liked the ending. No great suprises, but it was decent. All in all, the level design and architecture are best parts of the game. Really, it's a decent game made by a small team. You just have to give it some time and overlook some flaws.

I don't get what you mean. This is the base game now. There's no way to play it without Breaking Dawn.

The backtracking was a bit improved on in the last big patch. After some upgrading, you can warp from checkpoint to checkpoint.

Ok, after some updates and some time spent in the game, I can say I really do enjoy it. I don't have the peformance issues other players complained about, so that's something. It's still a very clunky game and has an amateurish air to it, even an unintended retro feel. I can't help but to think that I enjoy it because of all the issues it has not despite them. The environments are one of the main appeals, the others are the rewarding exploration and leveling of the player character and equipment. I really like the dissonance between the clean, futuristic architecture and the cluttered mess that fills its halls. Heaps of body bags, corridors filled with broken equipment from provisoric quarantine stations and barricades between luxury apartments, shops, libraries and clinics. The buildings have a lot of glass surfaces and mostly have a vertical layout giving you a nice illusion of a vast city, even tough it is supposed to be small. It's more or less an open world game, the limiting factor for exploration seem to be overpowered enemies that roam some areas. As I said, exploration is very rewarding, because there is a huge amount of equipment you can use. I played five hours in one game and haven't even filled all possible equipment slots. You can find objects to upgrade your equipment, your player character, weapons and even the AI that guides you through the game. That's all really cool - it's just that the game doesn't really explain anything of that to you. Even after several updates, tutorial screens don't seem to trigger in the right moments. I just stumbled upon the menu to upgrade my weapons. Here are some tips to get some enjoyment out of the game. They are only valid at the beginning of the game, once you gathered enough resources and upgraded armor, it's much easier: - don't try to be a though guy and play on a higher difficulty setting: Fighting is clunky, the enemies are strong can kill you in seconds if you haven't found a shield module and armor yet. I haven't found armor beyond a helmet after some hours. So turn the strength of the enemies all the way down and, by god, don't activate the "always wanted" option. You can leave the slider for food and water where it is, there's plenty around. -find a flashlight: The game is very dark and the power goes out constantly. You might stumble around in blackness for hours if you don't have a flashlight. The good part is, that the game has a variety of different upgradable flashlights and they don't drain your batteries. A game where the flashlight doesn't need batteries! That alone earns respect. The bad part is that it might take hours to find one, since the placement seems to be random -upgrade your weapons and equipment: Nearly every part of your equipment can be improved: Some through the "engineering" screen (press C) and some over the upgrade screen on the far right of the inventory. -who needs sleep?: You can avoid sleeping (I didn't find out how to build a bed for a long time anyway) by drinking coffee, energy drinks and certain injections. This is especially important in the beginning, because you might not be able to build a bed yet. -you need electricity. Sometimes. The lights often don't seem to work with normal power anyway, so you only need it for lifts, recyclers and vending machines. The latter ones are rather important, though. Start repairing the power lines and generators early. -don't build a bases where enemies spawn: Sadly, this game has crafting and base building. It hardly tells you anything about it, but at some point you need it to create certain parts. The game gives you a variety of defense objects like energy barriers, traps and turrents you can use to protect your belongings. That's just a trap to drain your resources. Build your base in a small room where enemies don't go. I recommend the back rooms of Garrison stations or the apartments on the top floors of Arcadia. The latter ones aren't completely safe, but they have the plus of getting enough sunlight to set up photovoltaic and and a garden. -don't pick fights with enemies that look dangerous. They are. You'll die. You don't want to die in this game because it only has few respawn points and you have to get all the equipment back from your corpse. This doesn't count for those glowing burnt corpse-things. They are whimps. -don't try to fight more than two enemies at once. It's not that you can't handle that - it's just that I have observed that if there are three or more enemies around, they tend to respawn immediately. That's an overall unfixed issue, I'm absolutely not fond of: Enemies tend to respawn everywhere in the corridors. Just turn around and a new, even stronger enemy might have spawned directly on the corpse of your last victim. This means if you are barely able to survive a fight, you should probably get out of there. All in all, I'm rather glad that I'm getting something out of the money I payed for it. I wouldn't really recommend spending the asking price for it, but it has a lot of rough charm to it.

I bought a box with old games at a flea market years ago. It only contained different releases of War Wind and War Wind II! I guess I'll have to try it some day.

I remember reading a review of that game when it came out. I think the score was extremely low.

I can live with those, really. As long as there is no crafting. I hate crafting in video games from the bottom of my heart and there's hardly any way around it nowadays.

You mean The Eternal Clyinder. That's going to be released this year. It's not that obscure, I heard a couple of reports about it. https://eternalcylinder.com

No, not at all like that. It's all public domain. And just one book where the public domain status is disputed made and it got blocked. But thanks for the link, I forgot about that site too and I can use it at the moment.

That was the first game on DVD I owned. I didn't like it very much, though. I thought it was a bit shallow.

That's a site where you can download public domain ebooks.

True. You know that the whole of Project Gutenberg is blocked in Germany because the heirs of Thomas Mann sued them over offering "The Buddenbrooks" for download? That's the direction we are heading!

I think it's not a grey area in most countries, it's just unlikely that someone cares.

Most people probably never heard of Biosys, a PC game that came out in 1999, as it only saw the light of day in the UK where it was made and Germany. That fact alone leaves me puzzled why it wasn't offered on a wider English-speaking market. Sales were terrible and a planned sequel was cancelled. It's my favourite game to this day, though I haven't played it in maybe 15 years. Most of what I write is form my memories alone. I'll try not to spoil anything past the first hour or so, but it's generally a very short game, so that might be too much already. It's basicly a puzzle-adventure game done in a myst-like style, but with a more or less dynamic environment and survival mechanics. The latter, a common theme nowadays, was extremely rare in the late 90s and early 2000s. I think this is because it was always badly implemented and therefore either meaningless or extremely punishing (Robinson's Requiem, anyone?). Biosys, however, handled the survival mechanics in a relaxed but still realistic way. Health and wellbeing of the player character could become a major issue if you didn't take care, but wouldn't stand in your way if you kept it in mind. Most of it felt natural - except that you were able to sleep everywhere, including a swamp hole, but rain would always wake you up. You play as Dr. Alan Russell, a scientist who wakes up in the middle of a jungle with - how else could it start - amnesia, only remembering what you saw in the intro sequence: You running away from fire through some kind of tunnel. You soon find out that you are trappend in a complex made out of four giant glasshouses, biospheres, containing different biomes. The structure, called Biosphere 4, is a billion dollar research facility, isolated in the Andes. For some reason, you seem to be alone there. Here's where it gets really interesting: First, the main character is somwhere in his 70s. He's an old man. He's still fit, but you have to keep his age in mind as you play the game. Putting him under too much stress, carrying too much weight, pressing on while tired - these things might be detrimental to his health. You might not notice now, maybe he starts getting tired sooner, maybe he seems weaker... Yeah, you can get yourself in an unwinable situation like that. Out of convinience, I once had him eat too much canned meat over weeks. The game wasn't much fun to play with coronary heart disease and high blood pressure. You have a meter that tells you how good your diet is. Chances are, though, you‘ll never look at it before it is too late. Second: Russell's backstory seems to be extremely dark. You soon find out that he once was a major environmental activist, head of an international group on the way to influencing legislation in many countires. Then, out of nowhere, he abandoned his organization, effectivly killing it. Instead, he started working for Subtech, a company developing technology for oil drilling. They bought him by making his dream, the construction of Biosphere 4, come true. And, as it seems, they also keep him quiet by blackmailing him: Russell seems to have hired a hitman to murder an old friend from his environmentalist days decades ago. It gets even worse. After years of paying for the research project and not getting enough out of it, Subtech planned on turning the glass houses into a luxury resort. Ignoring Russell‘s angry protest, the construction of „Club Eden“ started. You find notes written by the foreman complaing about Russell snooping around the construction site, stealing stuff and sabotaging machines. Then the fire happend, with toxic fumes killing every single worker at the site, their corpses slowly rotting (yes, they visibly decay!) there as you play through the game. If you get Russell drunk on mescal, he‘ll shout out how they all deserved it. And that's just the beginning. If that‘s not an interesting character for a PC game, I‘ve never seen one. The game start by telling you: You fucked this up, because you are a terrible human being. Oh, but at least you didn't play Dr. Frankenstein and create a monster, too. Or did you? Of course, many things are not as they seem, but they never are, are they? But there you are, haunted by nightmares (I still know the poems from them by heart) and you are probably going to die from an overdose of prescription medication or by pouring water on electrical equipment. So what is Russell trying to achieve? He‘s trying to get out of his sealed glass domes to escape the wrath of his former boss and possibly justice. But for that you have to get all the systems damaged by fire and toxic smoke back running. You slowly gain control of the enviromental controls, water purification, energy production and so on. Sometimes it can feel like an educational game, making you remember what kind of biome needs what at which time of the year. And it is educational! As a teen I got an A in biology because I could explain how exactly reverse osmosis water filtration works due to this game. Nevertheless, it‘s always more of a quite dark adventure. From todays standpoint, the graphics are rather ugly. The resolution is low, as well as the colors. While I always loved the environments, I thought it was rather ugly back when I bought it in 1999. The puzzels are varied, mainly employing dumbed down real life logic, that is kind of hard to explain sometimes. Most of it is rather simple, though. The game has its fair share of bugs and was never patched. For example the meters for thirst and hunger are swapped, forcing you to eat much more often than to drink. This probably makes the game much easier, because the ways to transport water are limited, open water is often polluted or full of germs and drinking from taps drains hundreds of liters of water from the system for some reason. Some scenes failed to load properly in my version and there were game-breaking graphics issues. I never finished the game. I always stopped before taking the last step at the end. I don‘t know why. Maybe I felt so at home in the environment I could control. So how can you play it today? Well, if you get your fingers on an old copy, forget it with anything more modern than Windows 95. But there is a free version floating around the web, an all-inclusive installer that contains a virtual machine of the OS. That‘s probably not legal, though.

After finishing the game I would correct my rating to "pass". Why? Because it clearly feels unfinished und lazy. The 50-page backstory document you mention is a big part of that. They claim you can enjoy the game without reading it and that's a lie. Like you said, you don't get the slightest bit of information about the backstory in the game. I think a two-minute intro could have changed that. I read the story, it's not really complicated. They just couldn't be bothered to tell it in any better way. There's also a fifth enemy type I forgot about: Some kind of four legged spider walker that eats a lot of bullets but is otherwise completely harmless. It's too immobile to flush you out of your cover. This thing pissed me off, since it's just copy-pasted as a "boss" enemy to a few areas that are supposed to be ominous, creepy and important. It's even used as kind of a final boss for the two different endings. And that makes me feel like the cut corners. They could not be bothered to create a final boss. The two endings are equally lackluster - they are sequences that are about ten seconds long, without text. Without having read the backstory, you don't get what they really mean either. I get it, it's a small independet game studio. But 90% of all games I play are from creators like that. If you can't afford doing anything else, why not at least an into with a textcrawl. They also could just cut the crawler enemy from all other places and just used it as the final boss. It wouldn't have affected the gameplay.

It's clearly a hate/love game. It's kind of repetetive and bare bones, especially in the beginning. While the scenerey is nice, many assets are repeated over and over again. There are only four types of enemies (robots, drones, turrents and flying energy sparks ) and effetivly only four different weapons - of which one is your default pistol that is completely useless for anything and one is kind of useless, so you can make it two. You task is to find data and signal fragments, collect scrap and take bunkers form enemy forces. You seem to play some kind of AI and can transfer yourself to a random robot chassis at checkpoints after you die or as a method of fast traveling. At first, that's kind of easy and you repeat your same tactics over and over again. Then, after about two thirds of the map are conquered, it suddenly gets all tough. Suddenly you can't go in solo, guns blazing, anymore. You have to use a recruitment tool, which takes one of your two weapon slots and take fellow robots along. As much in the game squad management is extremely basic. I haven't even found a command to kick a robot from your squad and the only command, rallying at a selected point, usually doesn't work. While the AI of your allies is braindead, they work as extra fire power and usually do the job. Except if there is a turrent, then they get killed every single time. So the best tactics is to go in solo, destroy all turrents, go back to base and come back with a squad. Tedious, but effective. Especially since the turrents are droppend from orbit and sometimes, very rarely, a second one will appear when you just have arrived with your mates. Still, I think combat is pretty fun in this game. You have to manage raising and lowering your shield and your AOE, while trying not to get surrounded and looking for cover to recharge constantly. The guns have a feel for energy weapons and sound great, especially over long distances. The graphics are dated, but work very well with the gigantic ships and ruins strewn over the landscape. The exploration aspect is kind of so-so. While most objects you discover all look the same and just give you a piece of story you can read through (there are no voiceovers in the game), there are one or two small highlights among them. The story itself is interesting, but the presentation -again- is rather basic. The music could be more present, in my opinion, it's generally hardly noticeable. To sum it up: Very basic game with not much variety but interesting, tactical combat and a nice feel and atmosphere.

After spending some hours with the new expansion, I have to say that they tackled a lot of the issues I complained about. The bland backgrounds are now a lot more lively and they implemented an improved but rather well hidden quick travel feature. That makes the game quite a bit better. They also changed the design of some NPCs, but I'm not sure if I like that.