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My interest in Tunnel Rats was seeing how terrible it would inevitably be, not necessarily experiencing it for myself. Luckily GameSpot and IGN describe the horrors of Tunnel Rats in sufficiently excruciating detail.
Reading about tunnel snakes "...who have, for all practical purposes, forged an unholy alliance with the Viet Cong" really made my day.
Progress: Gave Up
Speaking of finding out more about Knights in the Nightmare - this gameplay video shows perhaps too much of the game, or more precisely, how utterly terrifying it apparently becomes. Look at all the dodging, item collecting, attack making, timing, numbers, explosions, what the fuck?
It appears to demand more expertise in schmup-style reactivity than in RPG number-crunching, which is definitely not how I'd prefer it to lean. Ehhhhh I've lost interest.
Progress: Gave Up
Black Sigil's reviews have been, in a word, bad. To the point where it sounds like traipsing through the game, even with no expectation of fun - just to witness the sheer rip-off-itude at work - sounds like it could be painful. Consider that Metacritic's sole user review includes the compliment "Mine havent froze yet and im up 6-7 hours of gameplay." (emphasis mine)
Progress: Gave Up
Based on the obtuse explanations of CIMA I'd been reading since its release (in 2003), I thought it was a tactical RPG with a puzzle twist. In fact, it's a puzzle game with an action twist. Also, it's terrible.
The plot is that you're protecting a bunch of hapless civilians from the CIMA, which are either aliens, or monsters, or an organization of alien monsters, or, actually I don't really know. But they terrify the people, and it's your job to keep them safe. By helping them to dungeon exits. This game is nothing but escort missions. Amazing.
The game starts on a train passing through the countryside. Luckily there aren't any CIMA out here-- wait! It's a CIMA portal! Fiddlesticks. So a portal transports you into the alien dungeon world. The CIMA apparently control spacetime and, well, frankly I don't understand what the point of resisting them is. Oh! It's because the CIMA feed on hope, and so to foster that hope in their victims, they always create an opportunity for escape. Yeah, that seems ... right.
The dungeons themselves are isometric puzzles. Your character, and another one that follows you, can attack. The civilians can't; you just order them around, between safe spots, toward the exit. Meanwhile you have to hit switches and defeat enemies and stuff, to clear routes for the civvies.
Presumably the gameplay gets a little more complicated later in the game, but I really don't care about that, for two reasons.
1) The pathfinding is retarded. If you order the civilians to walk from one area to another, and if they can't go in a straight line, they will get stuck. Your partner will get stuck behind things, too. Wow.
2) There are 14 of these douchebags, and ordering them individually just doesn't fucking work. The selection menu allows you to either select ALL of them, or one at a time, based on miniature icons of their heads, many of which look quite similar. And most of them are disabled at any given time, because of a fucking stupid 'group' organization mechanism that doesn't make any sense to me.
So you order these idiots to walk to the next safe spot, while you attend to repelling monsters (read: pressing the A button over and over). Some of them get caught behind a wall. You go back to get them, but ordering them individually is almost impossible. And the act of moving to them screws up the route again. And they walk incredibly slow.
It's neat, I guess, that the game doesn't really resemble anything else out there. But that doesn't really excuse the fact that the core mechanics are mediocre to begin with, and the control issues make it unplayable. I guess there's a reason this game faded into total obscurity.
Progress: Gave Up -- Didn't finish first dungeon
Last time I neglected to mention my only significant complaint about the game, which was the second-string voice acting. Despite Mark Hamill, Kevin Conroy, and the other main characters delivering absolutely stunning performances, the asylum guards' lines really failed to move me. The writing was mostly trite, and the fact that only three actors voiced all the guards (one of whom is that guy who's in everything) was pretty distracting.
Now, though, the guards don't really come up very often, so the point is effectively moot. Instead, I get to creep up on the Joker's goons and, rather than instantly knock them all on their asses, listen to them tell crazy misanthropic stories. The last one I heard was about a guy who killed his sister because the Joker told him to - but he "didn't really like her anyway." Another thug said the Joker ordered him to kill his sister, too, but he didn't have a sister, so he just killed "the first bitch he saw."
I struggle to come up with adequate praise for Arkham Asylum's pacing. The entire game is checkpoint-based, and no one room or sequence is ever terribly long - not to mention, there's almost always plenty of leeway to recover from a mistake before Batman will die - so repetition is a non-issue. And though the game flow does have portions of high- and low-action, e.g. some detective work inbetween fights, it never really cools off; there's always a persistent tension, a palpable drive to the next goal.
It's hard to put the game down, not just because it's fun, but because it has that carrot-on-a-string quality of always making me want to see what's next.
Progress: 26%
The overall theme of Overlord is one of the best I've seen in a video game, ever. The game creates an absolute farce of common fantasy tropes: Halflings are wicked little drunken miscreants; Elves are lazy emo assholes who piss and moan about the loss of their magic forest; a virtuous little woman I rescued from a dungeon wishes me luck on my evil quests. Oh, also, I subjugated some maidens from the village of Spree, so now there are a bunch of half-naked chicks in my throne room. It's good to be the overlord!
As much as I love the ideas of the game, though, I'm still having a spot of trouble with the mechanics. Overlord really needs a map: the overworld areas are sprawling and difficult to navigate - the teleport locations don't appear to follow any pattern - and some dungeons are scarily labyrinthine. Some of the level design in these areas is pretty good, but often I feel like there are corridors just for the sake of making me get lost.
The minion controls have something of a learning curve, although I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. Blue minions can resurrect fallen minions; but only if they're placed nearby on a Guard Marker, which I had trouble figuring out for a while. It would be immensely helpful if something in the game clearly illustrated their effective range - since there's a small window of time for them to revive minion bodies, if they're too far away, I won't really notice until it's too late.
Also, while the minion pathfinding is excellent - I'm really impressed by some of the routes they're able to figure out - it's not always clear when they'll pathfind or when, instead, they'll follow you to their doom. I have no problem with my store of summonable minions, but if my entire fighting force dies at once, it can put me in a real pickle.
Progress: In the sewers of Heaven's Peak
Yeah, this is pretty awesome.
Something that surprised me in the full game, that I didn't expect based on the demo, is the exploration aspect. The game's environments are so heavily detailed and, well, great looking, that I'm always stopping to look around. Also the Riddler has a ton of little puzzle-like challenges all throughout the game, so keeping an eye out for those is a ton of fun. Topping off the game's map is Arkham Island itself, which isn't purely a hub, per se, but does function as a central, well-traveled part of the game. I still have a lot to explore on the island, and I can't wait to get to it.
Another thing I didn't anticipate in Arkham Asylum is the depth of the upgrade system. Batman gains experience for killer combos, stealth kills, and other cool stuff, and when he levels up, you can spend an upgrade point to enhance an ability - or activate an entirely new one. Early in the game I picked up an explosive foam device; now with an upgrade, I can lay the foam down in a room, and it'll detonate automatically when someone walks by it. Sweet.
With the exploration and the Riddler's puzzles, I'm playing the full game in a slower and more deliberate way than the demo, which I like. But one of the really impressive design accomplishments of Arkham Asylum is that you can basically play it as fast or as slow as you want. For a game that incorporates action, stealth, and puzzle elements, it's surprisingly malleable.
Progress: 11%
Glitches and camera problems are occasional enough to be frustrating, albeit not enough to make the game unplayable. So, it's playable, at least.
Other than that:
Not really worth the time or effort, but Beast Rider is, ultimately, mostly harmless and inoffensive.
Progress: Complete
Beast Rider displays a mystifying amount of ignorance on the part of the game's creators. Not only does it retain zero of the enjoyable traits of the original Golden Axe - it's also oblivious to any concept of fun. The game is really only about running through its stages, solving insipid "puzzles" and mashing down hordes of stupid enemies. This isn't an interesting game idea that's broken by a shoddy execution or a few design mis-steps; this is, from scratch, a bad game. Did they really never notice this?
Often, an enemy is riding a beast and you have to take it from him. How? By attacking it, repeatedly. This will eventually get the enemy to dismount; it also damages the beast. So you can only inherit it with about half of its health. Also, the beasts use their health bar for special abilities. The net effect is that beasts usually die almost as soon as you get on them.
Here's a weird one: there are checkpoints and continues. You start with three continues, and find a few more (very few) as you proceed through the game. If you die, you use a continue and instantly resume the game. If you run out of continues, you restart from the last checkpoint.
You don't get more continues by starting a new level or anything - once you use one, it's gone forever. So effectively, as the game becomes harder by virtue of more and more challenging enemies, it becomes doubly harder because your extra lives disappear. What?
Progress: Titans Wastelands
Alright, let's get one thing straight right off the bat. There is no multiplayer. Yes - this is a Golden Axe game without multiplayer. One could argue that this makes it not a Golden Axe game. (I would, for instance.)
If you can find it in you to look past this flaw, don't worry; there are plenty more. The camera is, while not the worst in game history, pretty shoddy by 2008 standards. The block/parry mechanics - core to the basic combat - are awkward and unwieldy. The titular beasts, which you ride, are also clumsy. There is a vapid, totally unnecessary story. Some extremely poorly designed sequences require slow and dull backtracking. The music is completely uninspired. And the basic hacking and slashing is, well, boring.
On the plus side:
It's kind of terrible. I paid $15 for this, and feel like that's just on the cusp of an acceptable asking price. Beast Rider is playable, but as for why one would want to play this, I really don't know.
Well - hopefully there are some tits later on.
Progress: Diyar Highlands