Personal update: The good news is that I’ve finally found somewhere to live up here. The bad news is that I can’t move in until the start of April, and while I can bang together a game review in three hours on a train I can’t do science posts without sitting down and doing research — which is kind of impossible when you have no fixed abode. This basically means no posts aside from Monday reviews until after April 1st. Sorry!
This is very disappointing.
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.
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.
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.
A review of a rerelease of a 15 year-old game on Steam. What has the world come to?
There’s plenty of old games on Steam these days. GoG has many of them cheaper and more easily moddable to work with newer operating systems, but Steam is the more appealing platform if you’re a developer/publisher both because of the large in-built audience and the DRM. This means it’s Steam which gets a lot of the XBLA HD rereleases like NiGHTs (which I will get around to downloading and playing one of these days), and it also gets Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition1, an update of the original Baldur’s Gate (and expansion) to work on modern computers at modern display resolutions with a whole host of bugfixes and even some extra content.
Red Faction: Guerrilla is an extraordinary game. I’ve never before seen such a collection of bland mediocrity hauled quite so far by a single great idea. This being the Red Faction series, that great idea is destructible terrain, and Guerrilla is the first title where the technology has finally matched the intent. The Geo-Mod engines used for Red Faction 1 and 2 were rather haphazard implementations of the concept with rockets scooping out huge and unrealistically-shaped geometric spheres from the surrounding terrain, and they never came close to their full potential due to coding limitations (realistic physics engines weren’t even a thing when the first Red Faction game was released, for example). Guerilla takes advantage of improved technology in that regard, but it also wisely narrows the focus: rather than making the entire world destructible, Guerilla just lets you blow up all the buildings in it instead.
So, who here has played Heroes of Might and Magic?
HoMM-style games are a fearsomely complex bunch. They’re part RPG, part Civ-alike and all fantasy. That’s not just a reflection on their theme, either; the chances are that if you can think of a single element from a fantasy game, book or film the chances are it’s made its way into a HoMM game in some form. The idea is that you start out as the lord/high wizard/immortal undead lich king of a single castle, with only a small amount of starting cash and the resources of the castle’s province to call upon. You use those resources to build buildings, train units and hire heroes, you use the heroes to form parties and armies, and you use the armies to go out on adventures and subjugate the surrounding provinces, adding them to your kingdom. The goal of the game is to kill all the other wizards who are trying to do the same thing.