|
|
|
Your Weekly Kusoge
|
The full index of Your Weekly Kusoge entries |
|
Isle of the Dead - IBM PC (1993) |
|
American Cover |
Isle of the Dead |
Isle of the Dead |
|
Combining a point-and-click adventure with a first person shooter, two hot genres in the computer gaming scene in 1993, should have been a brilliant idea. It wasn't. Isle of the Dead, developed by flight-by-night outfit Rainmaker Software takes the worst elements of both genres and turns them into an overtly shlocky mess. You play as a random guy who crash lands on an isle filled with zombies, and must fight them to rescue a damsel in distress of some kind, and destroy the local mad scientist. The first person segments are created using something akin to the Wolfenstein 3D, and looked immensely dated compared to Doom. Other games, like Blake Stone and Corridor 7 had also been released around the same time using similar technology, but at least those were playable. Isle of the Dead starts off having you run around in circles on nearly identical looking maps until you find the textures that look slightly different from the rest, allowing you to chop them down with a machete or otherwise enter them. There is a map screen, but it only shows the immediate area and doesn't indicate any exits, making it largely useless. There are tons of items strewn about, but you need to hit the G key in order to pick anything up, which practically requires that you stop in your tracks to grab anything. Whenever you enter somewhere that doesn't involving shooting or exploration, it changes to the adventure segments, which also utilize a first person perspective. The only real goal behind these scenes is pixel hunting - there's no real writing and attempting to look at the scene of bloodied, crushed bodies in the airplane crash will only be met with the response "Nothing of interest". Looks pretty damned interesting to me! Per usual protocol, missing items in one spot will result in unwinnable situations later on and there are plenty of instant deaths. The first weapon you find is booby trapped with an explosive, and it will blow up in your face if you fire it without oiling it. Death is pretty much everywhere, obviously. There are roughly half a dozen zombie-types who all act the same way, but their quality is roughly the level of a Wolfenstein 3D fan mod. Although they have no distance attacks, they do attack in great numbers. Mowing down legions of them with a shotgun and watching their absurdly overdone death animations is briefly amusing, but there's little feedback to indicate that you're taking damage, especially from behind, resulting in many situations where you appear to die out of the blue. The only real reason this game seems to exist is for the numerous death animations, done in animated comic book-style format. They're unnecessarily gruesome, and while watching a horde of zombies feast on your entrails while tossing your decaptiated head to the side is a little bit goofy, quitting the game results in a scene of your character blowing off his own head with a shotgun, which verges too close to the side of tastelessness. (The video scences are all in FLIC format in the directory, so you can watch them outside of the game if you have an appropriate media player.) Given the cheesy introduction and general scuminess, it's clear the developers really wanted this to be more no more than a Z-grade Troma-style game, and in that way they almost succeeded, but that's not really a high bar to reach for, is it? |
Isle of the Dead
Isle of the Dead
Isle of the Dead |
|
The Orion Conspiracy - IBM PC (1995) |
|
American Cover |
The Orion Conspiracy |
The Orion Conspiracy |
|
Many PC games in the mid-90s desperately tried to handle mature subject matters, and practically all of them failed with varying degrees of spectacularness. The Orion Conspiracy is a standard point-and-click adventure that fumbles around aimlessly and tackles the subject matter about as well as a sub-average soap opera. You control Devlin McCormack, who has recently lost his son Danny during an accident in deep space. After flying to the space station Cerebus to attend the funeral, Devlin receives an intriguing note - the death was no accident, and Danny was actually murdered. Eager to not only track down the killer but to piece together the life of the son he never really knew, Devlin begins investigating and uncovers the titular conspiracy for himself. The story is a pretty standard murder mystery with a sci-fi twist - nothing terribly interesting. Its drabness has to do with the setting - space stations should be awesome, but the Cerebus is perhaps the most boring one imaginable, filled with identical dark, gray corridors and laid out in such a confusing manner that you'll spend half your time looking at maps and figuring out which elevator to take to which section of which floor. Outside of the violence, the "mature" themes come in when Devlin eventually learns that his son was gay, an issue never before tackled in a computer game. Alas, it doesn't have any real effect on the plot. The language is also salty and often quite silly. You can, for example, walk up to a female crew member and she'll volunteer tales of her sexual exploits in great detail. You've met but seconds before, and it's absurdly inappropriate. It also doesn't help that the voice acting is consistently terrible, with British actor Patrick Mower, who supplies Devlin's voice, providing some awful readings of what is already some pretty lousy writing. (The butchery of his son's eulogy is on the levels of William Shatner.) Combined with the silly puzzles (freeze a rat to distract the bartender to steal his pie) that contrast badly with the overtly serious nature of the plot, The Orion Conspiracy is alternatively excessively boring and hilariously awkward. |
The Orion Conspiracy
The Orion Conspiracy |
|
Lifeline - Voice Action Adventure / Operator's Side (オペレーターズサイド) - PlayStation 2 (2003) |
|
American Cover |
Lifeline |
Lifeline |
|
Video games are the perfect vehicle for voice recognition; nothing would aid immersion better than being able to communicate verbally with on-screen characters. Yet few developers have attempted anything, with only a small selection of virtual pet simulators and some military games involving giving orders. Konami's Lifeline though stands as the most ambitious of all voice games, featuring a lengthy survival horror adventure where you talk with and guide a young woman to safety - not to mention instruct her during battles. Incredibly, despite being developed in Japan, it was localized for release in the US. Referred to as the operator, the player has been invited along with his girlfriend to the inaugural Christmas party aboard the JLS Space Station, which consists of a giant space hotel conveniently bolted on to the side of a military-run research lab. Obviously the proverbial happens and all hell breaks loose, whereupon the player wakes up in a control room with access to the station's camera system. Finding one of the hotel waitresses, Rio, the task is to guide her via cameras and radio chat to save your girlfriend and other survivors, discover what went wrong, kill several xenomorphs, and get out alive. Cliched perhaps, but Rio's ability to almost mimic human conversation adds to the atmosphere considerably. You can tell her to examine and collect objects, walk to different areas, shoot specific enemy limbs, bark like a dog, and even get her opinion on barium enemas. She's quite cheeky too if you're impolite. Unfortunately a few hours play reveals why developers don't touch voice recognition. When it works it's possibly the greatest gaming experience you'll know, but when it doesn't work it effectively means the controller does not exist (tested with the recommended official Ghost Recon USB headset for PS2). The blurb claims Lifeline can recognise 5000 words and 100,000 phrases, though its limited ability to do so is agonising. English speakers with non-American accents will suffer the most, though American players have themselves complained about its haphazard accuracy, implying the game wasn't tested enough - or that the technology wasn't ready. Rio continuously mishears words regardless of enunciation. Often she thinks you've said "RECOVER", thereby wasting a precious and rare health pack. Battles are excruciating as she only attacks on command and regularly makes mistakes. Later on there's a quiz where you say which arm Rio is holding up, except if the game mishears an answer it forces you to restart, along with several minutes loading. Most will give up at the air ducts, where it's seemingly impossible to have her understand the word "GREEN", quickly resulting in Game Over. Lifeline isn't difficult in that practice will yield success. It's a game where the interface rarely functions, making it in the truest sense of the word: unplayable. Which is sad, because it is both unique and fascinating, offering a glimpse of what could be if the technology worked. Mostly though it's just mind-bogglingly broken. |
Lifeline
Lifeline |
|
Big Trouble in Little China - Commodore 64 / ZX Spectrum / Amstrad CPC (1986) |
|
Cover |
Big Trouble in Little China (C64) |
Big Trouble in Little China (C64) |
|
Kurt Russell is a phenomenal actor, starring in various comedies in the 1970s before making a string of awesome action films during the 1980s. John Carpenter likewise is legendary as a director of gripping horrors and thrillers. Putting these two men together resulted in the cult classics of The Thing, Escape from New York and Big Trouble in Little China. We defy anyone to watch all three and not glean enjoyment from them, BTiLC stands out especially for its blend of comedy and hilarious one-liners, high-flying kung-fu, epic gunplay, great special effects and animatronics (for the time), and an unmatched tongue-in-cheek atmosphere. Making a videogame from such a rich source material should have been easy. Except the BTiLC game, released across three 8-bit computers and nowhere else, is not only a travesty in gaming terms, but its lack of ambition is utterly astonishing. Often a terrible film-to-game adaptation will at least have some kind of wacky shtick to amuse you - like absurd plot deviations, or strange enemies and goals (like Rambo or Back to the Future 2 on the NES). BTiLC though, instead of trying to match the fantastic silliness of the film, seems to have been coded over a weekend by a guy who never watched the film, and consists solely of shuffling from right to left. There are three "levels", plus a fourth which palette swaps the statues from level three. The backgrounds scroll jerkily and repeat so often you could fit their entire range on a single screen. The levels don't affect gameplay, except on level two where that dragon monster appears from doorways. You control Jack, Wang and Egg, except Egg doesn't even have a walking animation and just floats along. Occasionally an enemy appears and the two guys in the back run away. Fighting is slow and cumbersome; outside of battle you can switch characters, but all three are crap. Every thousand points or so you get weapons, but it doesn't improve things. If you can walk from right to left and survive for 15 minutes you reach Lo Pan, who seemingly can't even be defeated! Even if he can it doesn't matter, there is no ending screen on Earth which can redeem such abject mediocrity. The C64 version is colorful but the sprites are chunky. The ZX Spectrum ups the resolution but suffers from the expected lack of colour. The Amstrad version appears to be a cheap port from the Spectrum. Outside of the title screen none of the versions have any music, and the sound effects suck. There were hundreds of great games released for these computers, so the epic laziness is shocking - was it perhaps on purpose? What's worse, is that a genuinely great film never got (and probably never will) receive the game adaptation it deserves. |
Big Trouble in Little China (C64)
Big Trouble in Little China (ZX Spectrum) |
|
The full index of Your Weekly Kusoge entries |