A little more retro this week, with another excellent Bitmap Brothers theme for the Chaos Engine.
The Scientific Gamer
Science, gaming, and all things in between.
Category Archives: gaming
Thoughts: Tomb Raider.
Despite being old enough to remember rolling my eyes at the original media sensation over Lara Croft1 I have a confession to make: I’ve never actually played a Tomb Raider game. Well, except for the excellent Guardian of Light spinoff back in 2011, but that game’s fixed isometric perspective and focus on co-op means that it doesn’t really count. They didn’t make Tomb Raider games for the N64, and when the first reboot rolled around in 2006 the gameplay looked distinctly dated since there were other, fresher games doing the same sort of thing – Prince of Persia, Assassin’s Creed and so on. In a peculiarly ironic twist, the Tomb Raider series itself always seemed to me to be just as much of an archaeological relic as the collection of ancient ruins that Lara explores in every game – and with five games in the original series and three more after the reboot, there were a lot of games. It’s no wonder the franchise looked a bit tired.
- It went roughly along the lines of “It’s A GIRL! In a game!” and led to her being mentioned in the same breath as the Spice Girls, Girl Power and all that other tedious mid-nineties guff when Britain temporarily convinced itself it was young and vibrant and etc. etc. ↩
Sunday Soundtracks.
Baldur’s Gate 2 has a decent enough soundtrack, but Throne of Bhaal took things in a completely different direction by embracing a very early 80s fantasy movie sound. (Note: do not ever actually watch any of these films, because the music is by far the best thing about them.)
Personal update: I am not dead, and will try to get out a full spread of posts next week. Going to be a while before I get my accommodation issues sorted though, I think — the Oxford rental market be crazy, yo.
Thoughts: Sang-Froid.
Note: Sang-Froid is technically a beta right now, but it’s scheduled for release on Steam in March and you can already pay for it and get it downloaded to your computer so I don’t think I’m being too unfair reviewing it as a finished product. Hell, I even overlooked the two CTDs I got while playing it.
Sang-Froid is a tower defence-cum-RPG game that both looks and plays like a game from 1999. In the latter case, though, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Sunday Soundtracks
I’m starting a new job tomorrow and posts on here may be a little bit sketchy until I get my accommodation issues sorted out — there’s one in the hopper for tomorrow, but past that I’m either going to have no time to write, or more time to write than I know what to do with. To keep things thematically appropriate, though, have this track from a game about another man’s first day on his new job.
In Praise Of: Another World.
I vacillated shamefully over writing this post. It’s my blog, and I can do whatever the hell I want, but Another World is one of those games that’s already quite well-respected by the gaming establishment and has had plenty of words written about its storytelling and depiction of an alien world. I prefer to cover the less well-known stuff on here and was doubtful I could say anything useful about it that hadn’t been said already.
On the other hand, I really like Another World. Seriously. It made a hell of an impression on me as a kid, to the point where I stole the box art twenty years later to make one of the header images for the site. In my opinion while there have been games that have been superficially similar – including the also-excellent Flashback made by Another World’s publisher, Delphine Software — there’s never been another game quite like it. It’s not quite an adventure game, not quite a platformer, not quite a puzzler; the cliché here would be to say it combined elements of all three but I think instead that Another World is its own thing entirely, and just happens to resemble that particular genre mishmash because it’s the best way of describing it given the way games subsequently evolved. Another World is, for lack of a better term, unique – and truly unique games are very rare, and totally worth discussing further.
Thoughts: Karateka.
I doubt many people reading this will have heard of the original Karateka. It’s an old game originally released for the Apple II in 1985, at a time when Choplifter and Pacman represented the cutting edge of gaming. You controlled a tiny man in a karate gi who ran from left to right through a castle. Every so often he’d have to stop and fight a guard using his pro karate skills, and eventually he’d defeat the evil lord of the castle and rescue his kidnapped beloved, a princess. Apparently it was quite good by 1985 standards despite looking tremendously ropey today, but the only reason I’ve heard of it is because it was the first game by Jordan Mechner and basically functioned as a prototype for many of the elements he later implemented in the much better – and better-known – Prince of Persia1.
- If you’re interested in games at all and ever get the chance, I highly recommend reading the Prince of Persia Journals. They’re a fascinating glimpse into the creative process involved in trying to make a game pretty much singlehandedly. ↩