Seneste anmeldelser af Draven Crow

If you missed the good old narrative heavy days of Ragnar Tornquist's work where point and click adventures were part of the experience, The Medium restores those days to a point. The difference is it is more The Longest Journey meets Silent Hill, what Dreamfall attempted to be apparently but the Medium from what I read is a pretty short game compared to other games today where there is a ton of content to cover. However, for the humble point and clicks to today's open-worlds there is a noticeable difference there, one can focus on the art while the other has to focus on filling the space it made and we all known for the devs there is a point of burnout which is far too easy with open-world/sandbox games but takes far longer when you consider games of the 90's as they could easily fill said space.

The game's protagonist is projected as a 'weird kid/person' who only one person ever tolerated and thus they are by all means a social outcast. This same person apparently grew up under the soviet realm and probably in the Chernobyl area according to some of the previews I read. Their mission is investigating strange paranormal anomalies and finding who keeps guiding them there ultimately for the purpose of understanding a recurring dream.

The gameplay is once again The Longest Journey's style of object puzzles in the art of problem solving meets pretty much any Capcom game's camera view which many people found in the west, disorienting but if that's how the Medium wishes to present itself then that is its character. I'm told there is no combat so you won't have to remember to stock up on ammo or remember the button rigging for drawing your lucky knife, but apparently there are sections where you'll need to be cautious.

The voice acting is pretty good in its own right as is the writing and next to the ending of The Evil Within 2 there is no other game effective at tugging at your heartstrings the way this one manages to do but it merely goes to show how execution is vital to a good game otherwise it is simply another story or another game for another time left to fan speculation and fan-fiction.

The music again is definitely worth it since it can be tiresome to hear a rock record, an electronic track or a sweeping symphony over and over again as awe inspiring as they are, if your like me then you want something fresh and not what you heard for the umpteenth time. The misfit thrashers of 2016-2022 are nice and fine but they are for the hardcore crowd like how my generation had ours in 1997-2002, they are fun for a time but then the soul needs art and to explore the unknown which is what this game gives.

While there is no lean left or right mechanics this game still soars well past the likes of big name shooters but that's the way of an Indie title, even the CBGB was making better music than the radio and MTV in the 80's and 90's but that is how real art is. In this day of allowing the pharaohs of the industry to rule what artists do is reduced to emojis and maybe a song that anyone with cheap low-grade equipment could make, real artists bleed for their art especially financially but they are at liberty like a kid in the playground. Now why the lecture? Because the makers of Trepang 2 made it with love and passion and were inspired by the kings of the industry, some who were railroaded but became legends regardless. I guess the decision to make it a single player exclusive was to avoid today's online gnats and the drama they could cause as well as being able to avoid having to come up with a safeguard against hackers and cheaters. The sound is its own realm and adds to the atmosphere especially the headbang fest of the combat when entered because metal and violence seem to go together and I believe that is fact, it keeps you pumped just like skate rock for skaters. The horror takes longer to appear but it does appear and noticeably as it comes across a black ops company that is working on a twisted experiment which creates monsters and your character is basically a form of superhero and your mission is to shut down this black ops company which also seems to double as international mercenaries as well as an international cartel once and for all. After finishing it I can simply say they did action films right, as well as shooters right, something Call of Duty with all its historical representation could never do and no other shooter wants to do in fear of losing money.

Good enough sequel by story but not by gameplay, it dismissed what made the original so good in favor of a more Call of Duty centeric gameplay style while still having some of the mechanics of FEAR intact but that's like hitting Hot Topic and calling yourself punk because you got the gear for it. Everything went rock bottom by FEAR 3 but the principle of entertainment since the 90's was 'sequels always suck' because they are suddenly cashcows instead of works of art and thanks to The Matrix Trilogy it became 'threquels are always the worst' because the soul of the series has been sucked out by then. FEAR 2 maintained the horror atmosphere for the most part but it still attempted to be a Wachowski Bros version of horror which once again is still miles better than when John Carpenter chuked out with FEAR 3. Then came FEAR Online which was a poor rip-off of FEAR Combat which I'm still pissed they dropped it like it never existed, as far as online shooters go it kicked every other to the curb.

An old game but still a classic, essentially the full length of the Burj Dubai better than Call of Duty or any other major named shooter that releases uninspiring modern shooter titles to keep the fanboys happy per year. It has one spiritual successor and that is Trepang 2 which I also have, it does what few shooters these days care to do any longer. Make it fun, have interesting but simple mechanics, choose a more realistic color palette especially considering its theme and setting and above all, have normal gameplay that anyone could enjoy without having to think too hard about teamwork in a competition. Apart from Doom and the other dead shooter Blacklight Retribution (which I did grief a lot in before understanding it was its own brand of shooter) which took the mechanics of popular shooters and made them at least unique, there weren't a hell of a lot of shooters I was really into. I tried out Call of Duty and found it as bland as a sandwich for lunch every day, variety is the spice of life but apparently not the winning ticket for big companies. WB bought out Monolith and bleached out everything that made their company stand out, they got them to make some darker and more sexualised versions of Lord of the Rings because they apparently felt Tolkien's universe wasn't deadly enough. Still, Monolith does creepy and sometimes dark humor games best but I haven't heard a peep of them doing another series in the same vein, not while WB wants to capitalize on winning IPs and do the typical corporate MO, make more money or the MMM principle. They don't appear to be interested in letting a company do what it does best, just what other companies cannot afford to divert themselves to. F.E.A.R. will stand up as a legend of horror shooters being a unique breed of shooter altogether and WB has no idea what it had until the devs who made it are completely gone. They could have gone toe to toe with other popular shooters releasing a F.E.A.R. title per year or two years with all sorts of offshoots while doing their damndest to keep the art direction alive and make it to where the others would have to come up with a game like F.E.A.R. to compete or maybe use their imaginations and come up with other styles of shooter like say, fantasy shooters where they shoot spells rather than guns or maybe a steampunk shooter, hell any brand besides the yearly modern soul sucking, mind warping, chuke it out of a vending machine shooter per year.

This game was one of the most unique shooters that distinguished the 2000's from other decades but sadly the bigs never took the mechanics to their own games probably until far later years. Yeah, gaming was pretty wacky during the 2000's but there were several titles that stood out that made being a gamer feel good. A time when AAA skullduggery didn't own the scene and AA game studios were popping out classics and iconic games left, right and center. Indies took over by the late 2010's as the AAA skullduggery got out of control and into the hands of the console realm. Now the gaming industry (AAA titles by YouTuber standards) is where the music industry was in the 2000's, producing lousy titles and broken promises as well as half-baked games while their mainstream ego rules the market, considering YouTube rescued the music industry, hopefully something comes along to rescue the gaming industry making dependence on AAA companies a thing of the past.

Note: There are certain weird bugs that prevent progress such as high settings can cause the 'disconnected from server' bug near the final maps. One of those holes that the devs never plugged.

I liked this game, a decade old but still holds a candle up to other Star Wars titles save maybe KOTOR and is canon as far as I'm concerned even if Disney found a way to discard this into the legendary version along with any other Star Wars not owned by Disney. This series was a staple in Hollywood aside from maybe Neverending Story and other franchises milked for all they are worth. Back in the day when Devil May Cry was the cream de la creme of action games apart from its attempted competitor Kingdom Hearts, guess who TFU took after? If you said DMC then I'd agree since they didn't require timing prompts, just cool combos on the boss until they fell flat for you to get a cool new weapon. I remember playing this game on the PS2 back when PS was gold standard console gaming for nerdy gamers who watched anime on weekends, went to FYE at the mall, engaged in online chat role play when Cheetah Chat and Yahoo were king there and playing JRPGs was the only other thing they enjoyed as they weren't the rocker kids who were headbanging to nu-metal or industrial nor the public school preppy kids who were listening to pop/dance pop or hip-hop and rap... Nope, they were into whatever people found dorky. I however think this game was released prior to 2010 which is telling of graphical quality and general design. This PC version however, I noticed glitches, bugs and crashing galore meaning it clearly wasn't optimized for PC like any console port, causes you to wonder if the devs even know what a porting is and my PC is more than adequate to run the game that is over 15 years old. The sails got holes in them Lucasarts or Disney, patch them up or this game is in peril in turbulent seas. Still a classic, still needs loose ends neatly tied up.

To Starfield fans who won't be getting a coop or an MMO game just play Elite Dangerous + Odyssey expansion to fill that void, nuff said.

Though Fallout 4 feels like it takes Arthur Radebaugh's visions of the future from the comic strips to reality and asks 'what if the cold war never ended, what if the USSR and Communist China continue into the deep 21st century where culture never moved past the 50's and 60's? What if all that preparation for nuclear war in the 50's became a reality ironically years later?', you know the old speculation of the now old industrial world this game still has a decent grounds for 20th century nostalgia. The story appears like most of the movies and stories told in the mid to later years of the 20th century save for that whole 'they killed my lover and stole my family, I want revenge and to set things right' it also gives us an essential restore the world as you'd have done it survival thing. I'm not all that into the lore of Fallout universe but I got this game particularly for a bit of simulating an industrial age with a preferred narrative of fiction watered into it to make it less ho-hum, get ahead and get rich like we all remember the 20th century being. Nowadays, such a world seems like a museum piece of history whereas Cyberpunk 2077 feels like the present almost and we set Starfield as the future. It does have a bit of Disney's old 'be happy, let's party' attitude which is a bit of fondness of what once was though that wasn't the entirety of it, the culture and entertainment is the better part of it. I got Fallout 4 Script Extender for a better intro for the game which now comes across as more an Iron Man/Avengers music style (orchestra with hard rock) intro as seems more fitting to Fallout in general. The music in some cases does seem to head into a bit of a Silent Hill/Evil Within direction especially when you get into the dark mysterious parts of the game. I even went for a bit of x-men superpowers mod to bring in the superheroes to Fallout 4 or something of my own genre with a modern industrial setting. The themes keeps the game a sheer 20th century theme of 'family friendly on the surface, adultified deep below' with small hints of its steampunky predecessor but more its own dieselpunk style that makes Fallout what it is. Themes are a big thing to me as are vibes but this game has more right than wrong, I haven't done the settlement mechanics yet but will in time get into it. It's not nearly as blatantly cheery as Destroy All Humans or some of those more cartoony mid 20th century games but close enough.

If I were to explore this game like Tale Foundry then I'd say narratively this game from the protagonist perspective is essentially you are screwed and no prophecy says you'll have a better life or become great, you simply have to have the willpower to become great like Alexander who had no one waiting for him or greeting him like a figure of respect as he passed, you simply have to prove yourself worthy of admiration. Ultimately there is pain, anguish, death and the endless torment of doubt even if you aren't Dante going through the inferno, personally I call this narrative refreshing because you can truly become a badass without need for the crutches any other story would offer you giving you less agency on your path to becoming a legend, you can really become a legend by your own efforts and die-hard willpower whilst telling your own story. With the randomly soft or tough monsters this goes back to the arcade-ish days or the Super Nintendo days of genuine challenges that makes you battlecry like a real warrior when you've conquered a monster that really is difficult to kill having other players often die on that monster, that screaming adrenaline will feel most satisfying then. I know a guy who's played a lot of games and feels disappointed in today's stuff for not giving him the challenge he craves most, as in he's annoyed that so many games hold the player's hands or make the enemies sponges instead of formidable and worthy foes that he could slay as easily as they could crush him or turn out a puzzle of a being he'd have to find a weak-spot on to win so in a fashion he's much like Aoi from One Punch Man who's mostly pissed he can't find a monster that is actually very hard to defeat for him or a task that he can really sink his teeth into so he ended up creating his own tabletop game. I think he'd probably find this game able to wet his appetite for a challenge that works for him and that he can actually sweat it out trying to overcome the challenge. Me, I don't do a lot of challenge but hopefully this game can make a real challenge worthy of my willingness to tackle it head on. Yeah, yeah, I'm a wuss and could hardly call myself a 'real gamer' because I never took on challenges that could earn me boasting rights but I'm not interested in boasting rights, rather I'm interested in simply enjoying myself and I find grouping up with people isn't always enjoyable for me less I know those people well enough and I don't make a fool of myself by misusing or rather misunderstanding gamer terminology which is the only slang/terminology I even use besides 90's or Y2K slang/terminology and of course otaku slang/terminology where I find the rest as useless as pickup lines (though I might use Shakespearean/medieval/renaissance slang/terminology). I haven't met the universe beyond the start of the game so I'll need more time with it before commenting on the entire plot.

Back into the good old days of D&D RPGs when they aligned with and were not distant from tabletop style. This game is a treasure for every Nerd out there along with Baulder's Gate or anything from late 90's to early 00's RPGs. These were the days of even if the popular kids rolled their eyes at you and the joint smoking rocker kids wrote you off as a poser, you were basically authentic in the eyes of chess club, book clubs and most after school programs including those who's weekend fun was stargazing, watching cartoons of your favorite comics or buying collectibles of your favorite anime was a thing. Nowadays, Neverwinter Nights is amongst the few existing classics there are any longer as the RPG scene is dominated by Bethesda, BioWare (though Bioware partly helped make this game), CD Projekt Red and Blizzard and in the east Square-Enix, outside of that there are only startups and indie studios who make RPGs the way they used to be made. Neverwinter Nights is campaign based and each campaign was the length of a single long Elder Scrolls main zone quest in an open world of a lot of narratives waiting to be explored, you usually can only explore one with this one but the side quests are simply a quick trot into zones swimming in foes where they act by dice rules hence why the combat is calculated and slow. I'm pretty sure someone if they tried could complete the game in less than a day along with the other campaigns, short as it may be it is still a nostalgic trip before games started focusing on a depressing reality like The Last of Us. The music is the early days or maybe of Jeremy Soule when fantasy RPG music was still in peak performance and likely he had to train others to make epic fantasy music for RPGs or even epic Sci-Fi music for RPG shooters (though that requires training in electronic music). Jeremy Soule I imagine was making music before Howard Shore made the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It's a bit too bad that his last work was on Skyrim before some socio-political quagmire railroaded his career as it did with a lot of brilliant creators. Even for as simple as this game is it holds a special place in my Geriatric Millennial heart, it was one of the first RPGs besides Dungeon Siege I played and no I never started with tabletop, in fact my first tabletop experience was a game my bro-in-law made. I will not declare I feel old until 50 but when I do this game will merit an honorary place in my library as I'm sure it will with a lot of old school role players. It is owned by Wizards of the Coast and Atari and now Beamdog who preserved it even if we'll likely remember it as one of BioWare's first games before fame came knocking and they got too big to like and EA bought out and ruined them. Take heart this isn't wholly considered a BioWare game, it is at its heart a classic and a WotC game at that.

Some on the 'club of intellectuals' level might call this game a rehash of other genius stories much like William Shakespeare's rehash of Tristan and Isolde famously called Romeo and Juliet only with the same iterations of later Stephanie Meyer's 'Twilight' mood and setup before it was even published, however in the current environment of gaming where the AAA games clog the air with over-the-top cartoony slog, superhero action bashes, dark universe slogs like Cyberpunk or Elden Ring or frankly the entire drought on any good high graphic games that aren't the product of copy-paste franchises or maybe remakes of beloved classics, this game manages to wet that appetite. It feels like there has been a lot of adultified 'let's throw in some sex, drugs, gore and maybe characters who talk like they live in some pirate port weening off of the big industry's garbage' games lately and it is a bit refreshing to see a game mostly shy away from that. It isn't a T rated game but close enough I guess, I rarely play action games that often, side-scrollers and isometric games are just as significant to me... Once you beat it, that's all you get. Like a candy bar, once you finish you are left with the wrapper. This sits on my rare, maybe every once in a blue moon shelf but still yanks me along for the ride. I've yet to finish it but some reviews say it isn't nearly as earth shattering as say The Evil Within or Half-Life 2, but you can never beat the classics anyways. Classics always become legendary, their creators reach paragonhood and that's how that story ends. The gameplay for me reminds me of Star Wars The Force Unleashed where you can grab anything in the environment and thrash it about. It's more fun if the world were persistent and yet the world isn't. Again and once you beat it that's the end of the rollercoaster.