Shadowman Sucks

 

I managed to knock yet another game off the endless stream request list and it was such a slog to play through that I feel compelled to write a thing about it.  Shadowman was released in 1999 for N64, PS1 and PC with a Dreamcast port also coming out a few months after the initial release.  It's a massive piece of shit that a decent number of people seem to have played but seemingly very few people have actually finished and after finally beating it for myself its extremely easy to understand why.  

The plot of the game is that Jack the Ripper is helping some asshole build a big fuck off castle in the land of the dead and this going to cause an apocolypse so you, playing as Shadowman, have to go and collect "dark souls" and shoot some guys in the face with a gun in order to save the day.  If you thought a game with such a simple plot would be a simple experience then you are quite mistaken.

From some of the footage I had seen prior to playing I had expected the game to be a generic 3rd person action shooter but instead Shadowman turned out to be a weird Metroid-like.  You start the game and make your way into "Deadside" where you are being blocked at almost every turn by soul gates or environmental obstacles that you do not have the skills to get past.  As you slog through you'll collect dark souls to unlock the gates which will unlock more areas which will contain items and skills that allow you to get to more areas to get more dark souls.  Standard stuff.  Part of the issue though is that none of the items or skills you get are interesting at all.  For example, in Metroid when you get the ice beam a number of core things about the game are changed all at once and suddenly you have a lot more options.  The gun is stronger which is satisfying and now you can use enemies to make platforms so your brain might light up as you remember some out of reach areas you might have seen previously.  In Shadowman, I slog through some boring ass beige dungeon to find a knife that lets me use teleporters.  I find about 3 of the fucking things and then the knife sits in my inventory for the rest of the game just as unused and unloved as I imagine Micheal LeRoi to be outside of his time as Shadowman.  The other major things you find, Shadowmans version of finding the Varia Suit, are tattoos that grant you certain abilities such as being able to walk on fire or swim in lava.  Two out of the four of these upgrades, which are a real pain in the ass to get, are only used briefly in very specific sections of the game,  so while in Metroid the varia suit is only useful in a few rooms, at least it has the knock on effect of reducing your incoming damage as well.  The toucher ability in Shadowman, for example, does nothing outside of its stated using and practically speaking it means that you push about 4 cubes and can shimmy across one ledge.  What a fucking waste.  

Maybe none of this would be an issue if it was fun to explore but that sucks massive shit too.  The levels have 2 themes, beige looking caverns or rust colored interiors.  That is the only thing you'll be looking at for the majority of your playthrough.  This isn't just visually boring to look at but causes an issue because this game is labyrinthine as fuck and doesn't give you a map at any point so the samey looking environments just cause constant confusion.  There was one level near the end of the game where there were 3 rooms in a loop and I didn't know I was looping because every corridor looked like the previous one so it was only when I hit the entrance again after about 30 minutes of exploring did I realize that I had double backed on myself.  This then led to another 30 minutes of scanning the muddy graphics for a hole in a wall that I had missed.  Maybe if any effort at all had gone into the visuals or a map button had been implemented maybe so much of my life wouldn't have been wasted.  

Then there's the combat and like every other aspect of this title, it sucks massive dicks.  Your main weapon is a pistol that shoots blue blobs and is the only thing that can kill monsters in Deadside.  You do get a regular pistol, shotgun and machine gun but I don't think I used them a single time since they can't actually deliver the killing blow.  I THINK the idea is that you equip one "real" gun in one hand and your soul pistol in the other and then weaken then enemy with bullets before killing them with shadow-powers.  That still doesn't make any fucking sense though because you also find shadow weapons in Deadside that can kill monsters in exchange for the use of some MP or some shit.  All of these weapons are hot dogshit and I got some use out of ONE of them against the games singular large enemy type but otherwise, total waste.  The pistol powers up as your soul meter goes up and allows for a charge shot so there's basically no reason to use anything else.  When the weapons aren't out here being ass though, the combat itself, along with the rest of the controls are basically unusable.  Most of the enemies in the game will just stand in place and shoot at you or run at you in a straight line so you don't feel just how bad it is but every so often a boss will turn up that is significantly more mobile than you and things get real miserable real fast.  Shadowman controls a bit like a tank which is fine for the most part.  Like I said, most enemies just stand and shoot so controlling like a S.T.A.R.S. member with broken legs is manageable.  But then you get some enemies that are fucking Dragon Ball Z teleporting around the arena on you and shooting your from all angles and you just have to sit there and impotently watch your life bar decrease as Shadowman takes 4 business days just to turn 180 degrees.  The final boss in particular is flying around a giant arena while shooting homing missles at you from directions that the camera can't see so good fucking luck with that.  Thankfully, if the final boss kills you, instead of returning to a check point you just get a bad ending and after I saw what I was up against I just threw up my hands and let the world end.  

The thing that really killed my enjoyment of the game though, despite all of its awful design, was the bugs and technical issues.  If I had a dollar for every time I got stuck on some level geometry and was unable to move then I could provide the Alzheimer's charity that we are raising money for here a pretty significant research grant.  Then there's certain enemies that look like they should be just minor annoyances but can kill you in seconds because Shadow Man doesn't get any I-Frames on hit.  Tiny fish in bodies of water and dogs, enemies that seem like they are designed to harrass you and deal minor damage while a bigger threat leads a big attack are actually the most dangerous thing in the game as they can drain your HP from full to zero in a matter of frames.  The worst technical problem, though, came in the form of a wall in the final temple en route to the upgrade that lets you swim in lava.  In that temple there is a wall of rotating blades.  The blades move slow and you have to shimmy across a ledge suspended above a death pit to reach the other side.  It's a pathetically easy trap to avoid but due to the gaps in the ledge the game just bugs the fuck out and Shadow Man gets stuck between the two ledges.  Being locked in places means you cant avoid the blade and then the blade knocks you into the death pit.  SOMETIMES the bug doesn't occcur and you can just shimmy through but its basically a dice roll every time and there's a easy but lengthy platforming section you have to restart from EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. the bug kills you.  When the environment isn't killing you then sometimes bosses or enemies might push your shit in because the targetting system just decides to take a day off in the middle of a fight.  It happens mostly with flying enemies  where Shadow Man just gives up on the fight because I guess he has chronic neck pain.  Maybe these complaints aren't true for the Dreamcast and PS1 versions but I'm sure as shit not suffering this crap game again just to find out 

What blows my fucking mind is that this piece of trash got a remaster.  Who the fuck was out there wishing they could replay Shadow Man again with beefed up graphics and a morsel of extra content.  Weirdos, that's who.  If this game ever gets requested on my stream again you can catch my ass taking a voluntary trip to Deadside

Doom64 is absolutely horrible

 

I play a lot of games in a lot of genres and as a result of that I also play a lot of complete and utter shite.  Every so often, though, a game comes along thats so rancid in its design and content that it lodges itself in my brain and I can't stop thinking about it for a long time.  It's like seeing a horrible road accident where the images of people being sliced in half by pieces of car metal stick in your minds eye for weeks after the event.  It happened with Outlast 2, it happened with Holy Diver and now it's happening again with Doom64.

Doom64 was released, unsurprisingly, on the Nintendo 64 in 1997 and unlike previous console ports of Doom where it was just Doom 1 or 2 being brough to console, this was a whole new thing.  A unique Doom game for a brand new system, fucking wow, but in terms of the larger conversation of Doom and Boomer Shooters in general, 64 is a bit of a black sheep in the series and the genre.

On it's surface its a pretty competently made Doom game.  It's basically just more of what we got with Doom 1 and 2 with some redesigned monsters and a new gun to play with, what could possibly go wrong? Well fucking everything really.  

The first and most minor problem is the controls.  The N64 controller is already a gigantic piece of garbage made for octopus people (and even they don't like it that much, they told me) and playing an FPS on it feels like pulling teeth.  Running with the stick and walking with D-Pad is irritating but but the absolute worst thing about the controls is weapon switching.  The number of times I fucking died because I got ambushed by a large number of pinkies or imps and either couldn't pull the appropriate gun out fast enough OR accidentally switching to the rocket launcher and blowing my own face off made me want to rip and tear my own throat out.  There's a reason these games were originally made for PC where you could switch guns with a number key.  It's because using the right gun for the right situation is key to gameplay and having that shit hindered by having the guns just be in a list makes for a fucking awful time.  

Then there's the level design just being generally fucking awful.  When I was playing Doom 1 and 2 on stream I'd often complain pretty vocally about how I dislike the majority of levels designed by Sandy Petersen but I feel like I owe him an apology now because the Doom64 levels make even his most diabolical outings look like a walk in the park.  Sudden pits, crushers out of nowhere, pitch black rooms full of enemies, PLATFORMING are all common features in Doom64 maps that are likely to drive you insane.  One of the worst examples of this is a level early on where you are expected to sprint across a number of platforms that change height as you touch them.  I didn't know that's what was going on at first so I had 3 or 4 attempts where I just fell into the black pit of pinkies and ate shit.  The point of the section was so poorly conveyed that I had to look up a fucking YouTube walkthrough just to be able to tell what was even going on.  That's just one example too, go watch the VoDs on my YouTube channel of the playthrough I did recently for many, many hours of similar and equally frustrating bullshit. 

Then there's the thing that really stuck in my brain which is the games penchant for teleport ambushes.  In original Doom, ambush rooms were a common-ish thing.  You would walk into a room where there would be a gun or a key and when you grabbed it the walls would open.  The concept is introduced in E1M3 (I think) where picking up a blue key opens a wall to a few shotgunners and then you know its a thing you're supposed to look out for.  You can walk into a room and maybe predict if the walls are going on open, for a new player its a guessing game that keeps proceedings intense, keeps you on your toes.  Doom64 said fuck that though and just teleports enemies into a level, usually in positions that will completely fuck you with no warning.  The second to last level in the game is a great example of this where killing a Mancubus (at least I think that's the trigger) will spawn in an ARMY of imps, directly in your face.  If you know its coming you can move out of the area as your rocket travels through the air and avoid too much damage but for a new player it's just a shitty rookie trap.  Kill the enemy, OH WHOOPS NOW YOU'RE TRAPPED, dead and restart the level.  Imagine if you were playing something like Dungeons and Dragons and then when you kill a monster the dungeon master suddenly goes "oh by the way, there's 100 goblins in the room with you now".  You'd call him a piece of shit, break his teeth and never invite him to DnD sessions again.  That's what teleporting ambush spawns makes me want to do in Doom64.

The final and most irritating thing in Doom64 though is the final level.  It's a simple stage, a small room with a bunch of guns in it and then an arena.  At one end of the arena are 3 portals that spawn in an absolutely unreasonable amount of demons.  Once you kill them the final boss appears in the middle and starts barraging you with what I can only describe as a Mushihime-sama style bullet hell pattern.  Here's the kicker though, if you were thorough enough in the previous levels to find the secret maps then you may have also found 3 Hell Keys.  The hell keys upgrade one of your guns AND allow you to close the portals early, meaning the number of pre-boss demons you have to fight is significantly more reasonable.  The game makes no mention of this at any point and I don't care if its written in the manual because who the fuck ever kept manuals for N64 games? No one I knew that's for damn sure.  I have seen footage of people beating this stage from a pistol start without the keys because my initial reaction was that it seemed impossible without them but in order to pull it off you actually have to be some kind of Doom God.

Here's the thing though.  The game fucking sucks.  I don't WANT to explore the levels because the levels are ass and full of bullshit, I just want to get through them as fast as possible so I can stop fucking playing Doom64 and move onto a better game like Action52 or Video Cart-8: Magic Numbers for the Fairchild Channel F.  Getting good at something or taking the time to explore something is only worth doing when the game is good and Doom64 is certainly not that.  Therefore, I fucking cheated to see the ending.  Usually I'm extremely anti using codes and stuff to get through a game but when the thought of playing it any longer was actually ruining my mood and the prospect of streaming it further was ruining my entire DAY before going live, I don't give a shit.  Maybe if there was any indication of the existance of those keys, even in the form of a cryptic comment or something, I would have grinned and beared it because then its my fault, but to be blindsided by a sudden key requirement on the final level that would require me to go play the majority of the game over again?  Get fucked.

Doom64 got re-released for PC where you can use mouse and keyboard and they brightened the game a little bit so its not so unplayably dark at all times but even then I can't imagine it being any better.  Maybe my point about the controls being ass would be fixed but the rest of the broken, rancid design of Doom64 still remains.

Fuck this game, send it to hell along with the people who made it

The N64 Was A Bit Crap

 I still remember the Christmas I got the N64 from my parents.  I ran downstairs, hooked that shit up and spent my entire morning playing Mario 64 and having a grand old time.  Later I was given copies of Banjo Kazooie, Goldeneye and Zelda: Ocarina of Time and I remember playing these games with friends and having quite a bit of fun.  However, despite the fond memories, looking at the N64 now and even thinking back to how it was back then, the system was actually just a bit shit.

First of all the hardware itself was just a bit shit.  The N64 is home to what is probably one of the worst controllers I've ever had to use to play a game with.  Sure, we all got used to it and in the end it was fine but that doesn't change the fact that it's clearly designed for a weird species of Octopus people that live on the ocean floor.  Plus the addons can also suck a fat one the expansion pack can suck an especially large fat one.  I remember my friend coming to my house after school and bringing Majoras Mask with him but he forgot his expansion pack so we were just up shit creek and I had to wait another 2 weeks for him to come over again before I got a chance to play it.  

Which leads nicely into the next issue which was pricing of the damn games.  Literally nobody that I knew growing up who also had an N64 had more than about 3 or 4 games because the carts were quite literally DOUBLE the price of anything else at the time.  You would walk into a game store and all the new games were about 30 Pounds and then there were the N64 games in their stupid ugly rectangular cardboard boxes demanding that you fork out 50 or 60 Pounds.  On a side note, the SNES boxes can also suck a fat one but that system was actually good so I'm not as bitter about it.

But all of that shit is in the past, all that REALLY matters are the games.  Well, it's not much better in this department.  The lifespan of the N64 according to Wikipedia was 6 years and whenever anyone talks about the system the same games always come up; Zelda: OoT, Goldeneye, Banjo, Mario 64, Lylat Wars (sometimes Mario Kart, sometimes Mario Party) and that's fucking IT.  6 years of life and the number of games people actually give a shit about can be counted on one hand.  There are a few more games than that, but not many and even of those most of them feel like utter shit to play now.  Have you tried actually playing Goldeneye 64 today? It's grueling.  Granted it was cool as all hell at the time but playing it now is the gaming equivalent of putting toothpicks under your fingernails.  The Dreamcast, again according to  Wikipedia, had half the lifespan of the N64 and yet there are significantly more games on that system that were good and still feel good to play even today.  

I understand people having fond memories of the thing and I have to admit that despite it's absolutely embarrassing library the games that were good were VERY good (except Goldeneye, fuck off) but lets stop looking back on the system like it was some overall landmark of gaming quality.  It was an overpriced piece of shit that mad a fat man in overalls go "wa-hoo" and that's all it was ever good for 

Did I become stupid?

So recently I've been working my way through my small collection of 3DS games.  The first one I pulled off my shelf was Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D and I'm having a grand old time but holy shit does it make me feel stupid.

A lot of the stuff I'm doing in the game I'm doing from memory but I decided to stop and take my time and talk to some of the NPCs.  A lot of the time I can get what certain characters are hinting at but I can't help but feel like I have become considerably stupider when it comes to this kind of thing.  I have NO fucking idea how my child self, without the internet, figured some of the shit out in this game.  Granted I've not resorted to using GameFAQs yet for my current play through but I'm putting that more down to my memory than my smarts.

It's the same kind of thing with old action games on things like SNES and Mega Drive.  I die a lot more now than I remember doing back then and I can't seem to get as far as I used to.  Granted, I think it's because I'm out of practice but I just don't have the patience for multiple attempts at old games anymore.  As a kid my collection was a lot smaller and my backlog nonexistent so I guess I didn't mind sitting there and grinding runs in order to get good.  Now, when I start dying I just shut the thing off and play something else, my skill is being ruined by my vast choice of games.

I think there is an argument to be made that the internet does spoil a lot of gamers nowadays.  Way back then, when Internet access was extremely limited we couldn't just resort to a quick Google search for an answer and we had to play a bit smarter and be a bit more persistent in order to see those endings.  I also can't help but feel that modern gaming is a lot easier than it used to be.  We are constantly having our hand held by overly long tutorials and way point markers telling us where to go at all times and unfortunately a lot of people, including myself, become overly reliant on shit like that.

Doing a bit of retro gaming is good for you I think, gets those old gaming senses that you may have lost to brain dead current gen shit going and the end result of beating a game that doesn't hold your hand is super satisfying.  I think I'm going to force myself to be a bit more persistent with these older games and not just give up to go play something else.  Can't moan about current gen being too easy if I give up on the retro stuff too quickly for being too hard. 

Next Gen is Really Grinding My Gears

OK, this is fucking stupid. 

Not too long ago we saw the release of the PS4 and Xbox One, something that should be an exciting time with all these new games and fancy hardware to play it on.  But no, it's not an exciting time, it's a time filled with loud obnoxious noises, sighing and eye rolling.  Let me show you what I mean.

That's a montage of the Xbox One making horrible grinding noises when you put the disc in, and there is a PS4 version as well.  Not to mention that since the release of these systems, a great deal of my twitter feed is "oh, my PS4 broke" or people asking questions like "just how many people have faulty systems?" and then getting a ton of replies.

This is fucking unacceptable!  When I bought my fat PS3 when MGS4 came out, I had absolutely no issues, and until it got stolen there were no problems.  Same with my slim PS3, which is preowned as well, zero problems there.  I had no problems when I was gifted my first Mega Drive, no problems when the N64 came out, nothing for the Dreamcast and then in 2013 suddenly the cutting edge systems have stupid high failure rates.

Microsoft and Sony...why fucking bother?  I don't want to have to worry about my potential purchase of a PS4 or Xbox One maybe failing because YOU can't fucking quality control.  One or two faulty systems is just tough luck, that shit happens, but THIS much faulty hardware being sold to people is a fucking joke and you should be ashamed.

Just go look at twitter for a while or do some searching on YouTube and there are tons of people with videos or tweets about how their shit isn't working as intended or just flat out not working at all.  Hell, the systems are less than a month old and already the term "Blue Light of Death" has been made up for the PS4.

So until this shit gets fixed, fuck next gen.  Right now there aren't any games I even want to play and even if they were I wouldn't want to spend the money because my system probably won't work.  So yeah, get fucked Sony and Microsoft, how about making something that works before taking peoples money?  Bunch of arseholes need to go drown in a lake of dicks.