999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

 

Chunsoft, or I guess Spike Chunsoft as they are now known, are a developer I really like.  They've been around since the 80s but I was really made aware of them in the mid 2010s when I got my hands on a very cheap copy of Kamaitachi no Yoru for the Super Nintendo.  Kamaitachi isn't really a "game" per se, it's more of a choose your own adventure novel slammed into a SNES cartridge.  There is a game element to it, the process of combing through the story to deduce who did the murder that takes place at the start of the game but gameplay consists entirely of reading through long passages of text with very little actual input from the player.  It sounds boring as fuck when I write it like that but Chunsoft are quite adept at weaving a decent mystery and so the game is carried by strong writing and some clever twists and turns.

Fast forward from the Super Nintendo to 2009 and Chunsoft are still at it with the first entry in what is now known as the Zero Escape series, 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors.  No longer just a sound novel, 999 has graduated into a full on visual novel with character art and even, if you're playing the PC re-release like I was, voice acting.  The original version didn't have the VA so its a little closer to its roots in that regard, I suppose and the VA in both English and Japanese is sort of crap so maybe the DS is the way to go.

The gameplay is pretty simple with it consisting mainly of reading the story and making choices at various key moments.  Unlike something like Kamaitachi though, 999 splits its talky, novelly sections up with point and click adventure segments where you poke around a room and solve puzzles.  The puzzles are mostly pretty easy and getting stuck usually means that you've missed some clickable aspect of the environments you're in but they are a welcome addition either way.

They story is sort of hard to talk about in a review like this because the story is all there really is to this game.  If I go into any detail with it and spoil it then there's no real reason for you to go play it and I DO want you to go play this game, it's good.  To summarize in a not quite accurate way, the game follows 9 people who have been kidnapped onto a sinking ship and have 9 hours to get out or else die in a watery grave.  Doesn't sound too complicated until you factor in that each victim has a numbered bracelet which, through some simple math, allows them to access the numbered doors in the ship which block their escape routes.  The other problem with those bracelets is that they will send a signal to the bomb in their gut if they fuck up and kill them.  So think of it kind of like anime Saw.  That doesn't quite do it justice because writer Kotaro Uchikoshi was fucking ON something (good connotation) when he wrote this game but it's an easy comparison to make.

My one problem, and I will put a spoiler for one of the endings here so stop reading and fuck off to play 999 if you haven't already, is that mistakes in this game feel undeserved and bullshit.  For example, I stumbled into one of the endings where everyone gets murdered at the end but the choices that you make in 999 don't give any indication as to that being the path that you're on.  In Kamaitachi, when I got one of the many bad endings for that game it felt like my fault.  A bad decision somewhere down the line, a misunderstating of the facts.  But in 999 pretty much all the choices you make are "pick a door".  Imagine some guy comes up to you in the street and says "pick a card", so you choose one at random and then he shoots your dog.  You had no way to know that the card you picked was the dog murder card, you'd be pissed.

Thankfully the game doesn't twist and turn quite as much as other Chunsoft games and you can use a flowchart to jump to any previously viewed point in the story to make the other choice so I guess 999 actually ends up being more book-like than the SNES games despite the point and click editions.

Either way, it's a good game, worth playing and it's got a decent steam version that comes bundled with the sequel that, at time of writing, I have never got around to playing.  I'd probably suggest the DS version over the PC version just because I have fond memories of curling up in bed with my DS, a hot beverage and a good mystery but there's nothing overtly wrong with the port so just get comfy in your gaming chair if need be.

GoG's "Preservation" of Video Games

 

As someone who sees video games as an art form and not just a toy to kill time with, preservation is an important topic for me.  Not just me either, there are plenty of people online who will be happy to shout from the rooftops about how important the preservation of old media is for a laundry list of different.  Due to the fact it's such an important topic, it really pisses me off when people come into that space with a shitty attitude and shitty intentions, just like the people over at Good Old Games.

Good Old Games was a website I used to have a lot of time for.  They would take ancient PC games that were an absolute bitch to get running on modern systems, get it running and then provide a DRM free installer so that instead of having to mess with things like DOSBox you could just double click an icon and be playing Ultima 7, for example, in seconds.  I do think that charging 10 dollars for a game from 1992 is sort of dogshit but whatever, better than nothing I suppose.

One thing that Good Old Games likes to harp on about is the fact that they are preserving video games.  That they are force for good in the gaming space by making old games accessible for all.  Maybe at one point that was true.  I remember a long time ago they had some kind of legal bother over the Fallout games and their response to being told to take the games off their storefront was to make the games completely free for like a week before they were pulled.  Obviously, to continue their efforts they have to fall in line with this bullshit but they did everything they could to make sure their installers for Fallout 1, 2 and Tactics got on as many computers as possible.  I'm not 100% certain that's exactly what happened but that's how I understood it at the time and that's what drew me to the website in the first place.  "It sucks that this happened, but have it for free and keep it forever"

But fast foward to today and it's a different story.  Warcraft 3 recently got an, apparently, shoddy remake from Blizzard and what I'm assuming is a result of this remake being launched, GoG were told to pull their Battle.net edition of the game from their store.  So did they make it free for as many people to download as possible before it's gone?  No, they made multiple social media posts about how the game is being pulled, how "they care" about preservation and that you can buy the game for 15 bucks, maybe a bit less if you use a discount code from their Facebook post comment section.  "Look at this thing we failed to preserve in any meaningful way, give us money before it's gone though!"

It just rings so hollow to me as soon as they start charging money for it.  Unwilling to do anything about it other than advertise its dwindling avaliability hoping that a few 30-40 year olds will open their wallets in light of the news.  An easy way to prey on people's nostalgia or computer illiteracy as a method to make a quick buck.  I was willing to pay for the convienience prior to this because I was under the impression that when push came to shove they would throw down but instead they shook the silver cup in our face and demanded payment for them not doing their fucking job.

If you want to know where the real preservation efforts lie, it's unfortunately in piracy.  The thankless, sometimes dangerous (in a litigation sense) work of making sure that as many games from the artforms history aren't lost to time and aren't lost to shit-head companies pulling crap like this so they can make a few extra sales of poorly put together or uneeded remakes and remasters.  There are plenty of sites doing it that I will refuse to name here because being underground is what helps keep them alive but THOSE are the people you should be rallying around.  The people making emulators, the people dumping ROMs, the people provding these old games for free and providing instructions for the less tech-savvy to get them running.  That's true preservation

Maybe all this is just overly cynical ranting from someone reading way too far into a shitty piece of news about Warcraft 3.  That said though, as far as I'm concerned, GoG don't care about preservation, they care about exploiting your nostalgia to make a line on a graph go up

Evil Dead: A Fist Full of Boomstick

 Confession time.  Despite being a massive fan of horror books, games and movies I have not seen ANYTHING Evil Dead related.  Not a single thing, not the original 1981 movie, not the new Evil Dead Rise from last year and absolutely nothing in between.  I have drunkenly watched some scenes from the various movies on YouTube with friends but never sat down and watched something from this franchise from start to finish.  Not that I have anything against it, it's certainly on my to-do list, but my watchlist is almost as big as my gaming backlog so its really just a case of being lost in the crowd.  

So as someone who knows fuck all about franchise, A Fistful of Boomstick was certainly an interesting experience.  Series main character Ash Williams (portrayed in game by the actual Bruce Campbell, very cool) gets embroiled in what I assume is yet another encounter with demonic monsters called Deadites and it's up to him and his trusty boomstick to make them go away.  This translates into a pretty generic (for the time) yet quite entertaining PS2 action game where you lay waste to demons while solving puzzles to progress a predictable yet decently entertaining enough plot.  The story certainly feels like a bit of an afterthought, a phoned in excuse to facilitate demon murder but judging from the fact that the franchise is about a man with a chainsaw for an arm I think moaning about the predictable twists and sub-par storytelling would be akin to moaning about the lack of story substance in something like Doom.  It's not what we're here for.

So gameplay is king in this one and it's decent enough.  One button for gun, one button for chainsaw arm, kill most things that move until a cutscene happens and then do it again until credits.  Sounds like something that might get repetetive and boring but the game isn't long enough for that to really happen.  I played through the whole thing in one sitting that took around 6 or 7 hours and right as I was maybe starting to get fed up it had the good sense to finish.  Just the right length.  Aside from the boomsticking and the chainsawing Ash also gets access to a spell book which comes with a few offensive options but is mainly used for solving puzzles.  The problem with the spellbook is that it's such a crap offensive option that it's easy to forget that you even have it and then that forgetfullness causes the game to stall horribly as you flounder around with a puzzle that's easily solved with a quick incantation.  For example there was one part where I got a Possess Deadite spell, a spell that you are supposed to use in order to grab a couple of items stashed behind an unkillable horde of the bastards.  A simple puzzle meant to show you how to use the spell but I died there multiple times trying to run in and brute force it (despite the game telling me not to) because I just flat out forgot that I had even picked up the spell.  I was so comfortable in filling everything full of buckshot that the function of my R1 button had completely left my brain.

Despite my own stupidity in that one instance, the other puzzles in this game aren't much better.  There was one puzzle that required the possession of a dog, a spell I DID remember but it then fails to show you that there is a live dog enemy behind an automatically closing door which led me to run around a mostly empty map for about 20 minutes looking for a different dog enemy to possess.  Like trying to solve a jigsaw where someone has just hidden a couple of the pieces around the house and not told you about it.  Aside from that there was a couple of annoying "put the McGuffin in the right sequence in the thing" which would have been fine if the menuing wasn't so slow and one puzzle that involved finding gems with an alarm thing which gave me Sonic Adventure 2 Knuckles flashbacks and I'd rather not thing about those sections of that game.

The bosses are also an incredibly weak aspect of the game pretty much consisting of low-tier Zelda dungeon bosses.  One where you tennis a projectile back, one where you make him run into a wall and the final boss is LITERALLY just stationary King Dodongo.  I would have liked a bit more out of its bigger fights and it's a shame we got this lame, generic, My First Video Game Boss tier shit.

All in all though, these problems aren't enough to ruin what is a pretty decent movie tie in game.  I'd argue that it's worth it just for some of the Bruce Campbell one liners.  It's not going to blow your mind or change your life but Fistful of Boomstick will give you a decently fun action game experience and a sensible chuckle

Horror Month Roundup

 

Well, horror month is "over" and for the first time in years I failed to finish all 31 games on the list.  Technically, at time of writing I still have one day left but the next game in the list is Murdered: Soul Suspect and there's no way in fuck hell I'm finishing that in one day.

So why did it fail? The first and probably most obvious reason is the fact that I'm a dad now.  Being a dad reduces my stream hours a fair bit even at the weekends so while in previous years I would maybe go from like, 6am to midnight, this year I'd have to do 9am to 6pm and then 6pm to 11pm.  That's a whole bunch of hours, even an entire games worth of hours in some cases to get shit done.  Now while it would be easy to scapegoat my 1 year old if I'm being honest I don't think I could have pulled it off this year anyway because I'm an idiot.  In previous years I have put short indie horror games in the list to account for the fact that Monday-Friday I have to do my 9-6 job but this year I put far too many big boys on there.  Resident Evil 3, Fatal Frame, Bioshock, Fear 2, Manhunt, Disaster Report, what the fuck was I thinking.  Then I also got sort of blindsided by games that I thought would be a bit shorter that ended up taking way more time like Tormented Souls, FOBIA and Hollowbody.  My impression going in was that they were short and they were short in the sort of "6-10" hour definition and not the "1-2 indie experience" that I was thinking.  My fault for not doing the research in enough detail.

But enough about my failure.  More importantly, how were the fucking games?   Well good, mostly.  Stuff like Fatal Frame and Bioshock were in there because I already knew they were good and I wanted an excuse to replay them.  I was actually surprised at how much I enjoyed Resident Evil 3 actually.  Usually when I have played that game in the past its because I've been marathoning 1-3 back to back and by the time I hit 3 I'm burnt out.  Playing it fresh gave me a new perspective on it and while it's still sort of frustrating and feels like an expansion rather than a proper sequel, I liked it a lot more than I usually do.

Then there were the first plays like Disaster Report which I really enjoyed although I have played later games in the series and enjoyed those so I sort of knew I'd like that one.  Crow Country was also a great old school survival horror throwback with a cool visual style.  Tormented Souls I liked less but still thought was pretty solid.  I really enjoyed the fact that someone was doing the modern day "rendered" backgrounds thing because I love pre-rendered backgrounds of old and I wish more people would make really crisp, detailed shit on modern tech.  That technique is seen as "dated" though and isn't used so much so big props to Tormented for doing a take on it.  Of course, I cannot mention the great games from the horror games I finished without mentioning Faith.  Absolute belter of a game despite the fact that it looks like an Atari2600 game.  Interesting plot, actual effective horror, some decent replayability that I'm excited to go back to offline, absolutely a contender for best game of the marathon. 

Finally there were the stinkers.  Moons of Madness was a pathetic and boring foray into Lovecraft.  Hollowbody was a complete snoozefest which is crazy considering how much it was copying the homework of much better games.  Finally there was FOBIA which I won't go into detail on here because that might be one of the contenders for worst games I have ever played in my life and therefore I need to save all my bile for the blog post its going to get soon.

Just because horror month is over, doesn't meat that I'm just giving up on that playlist though.  It's being incorporated into the regular schedule and played to completion.  My weekends will also continue to be long horror streams until it's done so tune in over at Twitch or Youtube to check it out.  The one good thing about failing the marathon is that the last game on the list is Deadly Premonition 2 and while before I was planning to b-line it to the end to make pace, now that I've failed I can kick back and engage with more of it's content, which I think is a much better way to do my first playthrough.  

Good times were had, more to come

www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

Silent Hill 3's Weird Bad Ending

 

Silent Hill 3 is my favorite entry in the series.  Unlike the vast majority of the fanbase that seems to hold 2 as the best one, I actually like the occult stuff from 1, 3 and 4 and I think the third entry in the series has some of the best scares of the entire franchise.  But they are all (all being 4 and before, anything after 4 can fuck off) good, really that just comes down to personal preference but despite having played SH3 a ton and it being in my top spot since my teens I have never gotten it's weird bad ending.

I didn't even know it was a thing.  Silent Hill as a series is known for its multiple endings thing but 3 didn't really have that. 1 had the Good/Bad + or not plus thing, 2 had endings based on actions you took in the game, 4 has a bunch of endings based on how you treat the escort and how good of an exorcist you are but 3, I thought, only had 2.  It's a definitive story about the aftermath of the first game, there's not really a lot of wiggle room for an ending.  Heather has the unawaked demon god inside her, some shit happens and then she kills it, done and dusted.  Of course, there's the UFO ending which basically every game has to have as a tradition but then there's the "Possessed" ending.  I only found out about it when I was drinking with my friend and he mentioned it in an off-hand comment and it took me completely by surprise.

First of all, you can't even get it on a New Game, you have to be in New Game + or else it won't play even if you do the other requirements.  Once you've done that, you have to get your Hotline Hill on and kill over 100 enemies while also letting them smack you around because you yourself have to take over 1000 points of damage.  Forgive the woman in the confessional near the end of the game and then kill the final boss and boom, bad ending.  I won't spoil what it is exactly here, you can either go look it up on YouTube or go do it yourself.

So it's no surprise I never knew about it really.  Silent Hill 3, despite it's quality, is not the kind of game I tend to play more than once at a time.  The game is so exhausting (in a good way) that after I'm done I'll put it down for a handful of months and then come back for another playthrough when I get the itch.  It's like crawling under a nice blanket....made of flesh and it's bleeding, but it's comforting nontheless.  Usually when I come back to this playthrough I don't do NG+ from a completed file, I usually just do a flat new game on normal/normal.  I've done the UFO ending long ago but that's one of the only times I've engaged with the plus stuff but I'm mainly here for the narrative and not to shoot anime beams at flesh beasts.

It was a nice thing to discover though, gave me an excuss to do two more playthroughs of one of my favorite games on the PS2 and I suggest you give it a go too.  If I'm being honest it's not REALLY worth the effort to get but if this post can get even one person to replay SH3 again then that's good enough for me.  Go play it

Pathetic Imitations

 I've put some real stinkers on this years horror marathon playlist and one of them that really stood out for having a particular odor was FOBIAL: St Dinfna Hotel.  I'm not going to spend this blog post going into the details of just specifically how terrible it was, that's another post for another time, but not only was it a bad game, it was also a pathetic imitation of something much better.

We live in an age where remakes and remasters seem to be all the rage, constantly barraged with updated versions of shit from games past and when those aren't being shoved into our faces by developers and publishers there are constant talks of what "deserves" a remake (whatever that means) and what "needs" a remake.  Pathetic discourse for pathetic people who have buried deep into their comfort zones and built nuclear bunkers so that they don't have to suffer the torment of playing something new or from an unfamiliar IP.

But one thing we don't seem to pay much attention to is the imitators, the weird malformed cousin of the remaster.  Not part of a well established thing but copying the well established thing closely enough that the people will still clap their hands together like seals and fork out the money for it.  It happens a lot in the indie sphere with a great many games cribbing from things like Zelda, Metroid or even just copying whatever big indie game came out in the last six months.  If I had a dollar for every Vampire Survivor clone that exists then I'd probably have enough money to pay off the rest of my mortgage.  Again, a post for another time but I do feel the indie scene does have a bit of a creativity problem going on.  

Not that this ALWAYS results in terrible bullshit.  Touhou: Artificial Dream in Arcadia springs to mind with it being just a straight up, slightly weebier, clone of Shin Megami Tensei 1+2 but clearly done by someone with a lot of love and passion for the older MegaTen games so the imitation feels sincere.  Not a quick way to make a fast dollar off two established franchises with a fan game but someone who clearly likes Touhou a fair bit making a game in a style that we don't get anymore just because they like it so much.  Go check that game out, it's pretty fukken neato.  

I suppose you would call it a tribute, rather than an imitation

But then there's FOBIA: St Dinfna Hotel, a pathetic attempt to make money off the fact that Resident Evil 7 exists by a studio of inept, creatively bankrupt morons.  Everything about that game from the graphics to the UI to the gameplay feels like a cheap knockoff of what RE7 was doing.  The very epitome of the "we have Resident Evil 7" at home meme that you see so often around the internet.  Unlike the Touhou game, it seems to have been made by not only cynical idiots out to make a quick buck from the back of another IP, but also a group of people who have ONLY played RE7 and literally nothing else. I will, for now, refrain from going into massive detail but FOBIA is the exact kind of game to cause veins to pop in heads with just how hollow it is and it's just one of many offenders that have popped up thanks to platforms like Steam and Itch.

Another, slightly less (but only slightly) offensive example is one I'm currently playing at time of writing called Hollowbody.  A game that at first glance looks like it might be doing its own thing and then quickly devolves into a particularly shallow Silent Hill clone that isn't so much bad as it is just painfully boring.  Usually I say that boring games are worse than bad games because at least anger is an emotion and art should be there to illicit emotions but there's something especially grating about a developer that copies another games format so closely only to still make the interactive equivalent of wallpaper paste.  A group of people who played Silent Hill 2 exactly once, followed it up with a single viewing of 28 Weeks Later and then churned out a low effort game because those two things made money, so surely that will too.  It's pathetic to see developers engaging in this trash behaviour and its even more pathetic to see consumers giving it the thumbs up in a steam review.

Being inspired by another person or studios work can lead to some really great things.  Some Lost in Vivos, some Okami's, some fuckin Undertale type shit but making those kind of games requires not only love for the thing you're imitating, but love for the medium itself.  The two games I talked about here are just recent examples of a problem that has existed since the dawn of games, but I'm begging just a few more indie devs to maybe try at least a little harder.  Play a little more widely, go experience some things that aren't games, draw from many things to make something cool instead of just copying the flavor of the month to try and line your pockets.  Steam is already full of shit, stop adding to it

The Game Awards Are Dumb Bullshit

 

It's that time of the year again! The time where everyone gets together to discuss what the best games of the year were.  The time where we celebrate all the cool titles we have played throughout 2024.  The time where shallow hype merchants peddle their crap opinions at you in the hope to generate some dollar for their high profile buddies in the industry.

Maybe I'm cynical but The Game Awards are something I've always had a certain degree of disdain for but I think even this year the lineup of nominees for the hype machine are sort of grim.  For those that can't be bothered to go look what they are I'll list them here.

-Astrobot 

-Bolatro

-Black Myth: Wukong

-Shadow of the Erdtree

-Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth 

-Metaphor: Refantazio 

This is just the GOTY category but I find that no one gives a fuck about the other awards.  All discussion revolves almost entirely around these titles so who gives a fuck about anything else?  That aside though, this lineup is just fucking depressing.  Astrobot is a shite mascot platformer that failed to push PS5s, Bolatro is the token indie entry in a thinly veiled attempt to make it look like the awards aren't just a AAA circle jerk, Black Myth Wukong is just "another souls-like", Erdtree is a fucking DLC for a game from 2022, FF7 is a padded remake that butchers key scenes from the original and Metaphor is about the only thing on the list that skirts the line of being an "original" game, despite at it's core just being fantasy Persona,.

This lineup has even had the effect of turning me into a tin foil hat conspiricy crackpot.  DLCs have won awards in the past in minor categories but this is the first time that one has been in the running for actual GOTY.  My dumb theory is that some money-men have greased the palms of award show organizers for Erdtree to be entered and for it to win so that FromSoft can make extra dollar of a "Elden Ring: GOTY Edition" that includes Erdree.

But if you ignore the specifics of this years show in particular, The Game Awards are just a pile of dumb bullshit as a concept.  90% of the votes for winners are peformed by a jury consisting of people from various games media outlets and I wan't you to think very carefully about that.  Think of the kind of absolute dumbfuck that works for any big gaming website or publication.  An entire enthuisast press made up of easily manipulated morons that barely have the motor function required to operate a control pad or keyboard pumping out the most stock standard gaming opinions day after day so that they can maintain funding for their site and access to developers and publishers.  These idiots are the ones who get to say what the best games of the year are.  I'd be willing to bet money that the games these people have played over the course of the year can be counted with just your fingers.

But even if it was a completely public vote, a vote where dedicated communties of niche weirdos could push for whatever game they love to get some recognition, it wouldn't matter because deciding a game of the year in the current year is just daft by design.  Not one person, nor group of people has had the time to even scratch the surface of things that were released this year.  I'm not saying that in order to make an informed decision on what a potential game of the year is you have to play EVERYTHING that year, but I guarantee that the judges for this show, along with most people (myself included) have barely scratched the surface on things that came out in 2024.  

There is a channel I quite like on YouTube challed YourMovieSucks who does these "best of" videos.  One example of this is his best films of 2015 video which was released in 2018.  He gave the year of 2015 some breathing room while watching as many films as he could from that year both big and small, and then made a list based on that much broader viewing.  I feel like that's what The Game Awards should be doing.  Fuck GOTY 2024, we should be crowning GOTY 2018 around this game thus giving judges and general audiences a bit more time to experience what 2024 had to offer outside of the big budget, heavily marketed titles. 

At the end of the day, none of it really matters, it's all just twats shouting their opinions from the rooftops.  I base my personal GOTY selections on stuff I played that year rather than stuff that was released that year, none of this affects me on a personal level really.  But these are award shows are somewhat important to developers and publishers and their outcome will have an effect on the industry at large in some way and if you ask me, it's making things considerably worse year on year.

Fuck you Geoff