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Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits – 21 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/28/2024
Posted in: PlayStation 2, Retro Consoles, Sony. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Publisher: SCEA

Developer: Cattle Call

Release Date: 06/25/2003


Available Exclusively On

As a child, I remember seeing this game everywhere. Every store had ads for it, BlockBuster always had it rented it out, and TV commercials for it were constant. What turned me off was the turn-based strategy aspect, and the graphics did not look that great even for their time. Arc the Lad was a new IP for the West, as the first three PS1 games never had a localization. I remember everyone raving about the story and characters, but I also knew the game was going to be very long and hard. That part was not incorrect.

You play as two characters in this game. You alternate between Darc, the Deimos, and Kharg, the Human. The plot itself is rather simple, but Cattle Call did a commendable job of trying to enrich the story with lore and fill the world with life. The story revolves around the basic concept of humanity polluting the Earth and never being satisfied with their achievements, always seeking more. It is similar to many Studio Ghibli films of the past, with stories of pollution and the need to love the planet more. There is also a fight over the balance between light and dark, and how one can’t exist without the other. Tribes and groups of species are constantly engaged in conflict with each other. The Deimos, the humans, the Drakyr, and numerous others engage in constant conflict. Everyone wants the five spirit stones, created a millennium ago, to gain the ultimate power. Thankfully, the story involves the characters quite a bit and fleshes them out, and I actually really enjoyed it.

The battle system is a different story. After the first couple of hours, most people may shut the game off. The story doesn’t really pick up until a few hours in which is long past when the combat can get on your nerves. The game is a turn-based strategy, but you move within a radius. Each character has an attack range and can use magic in the form of spirit stones. When a character has an aura surrounding them, you can unleash a combined power attack, but it requires proximity to another character and occurs automatically during an attack. Battles are slow, dull, and rather boring. The attack range never makes sense. Characters equipped with guns are limited to shooting only a few feet ahead of them, and retrieving dropped items consumes your movement turn, thereby limiting your action options. This significantly impedes combat and necessitates constantly grouping your characters together.

I also don’t like that there are auto-battles on the overworld map. This is the only time auto-battles occur, but unless you need to grind, you must wait for the battle to load, wait for the condition message to disappear, select your characters, enter the battle, wait for the camera to sweep, then retreat. There is no retreat option in the pre-battle screen, which makes no sense. Battles are also heavily unbalanced, ranging from dull and easy to a barrage of them with no save point or store in sight. There aren’t many bosses in this game, but most of the battle conditions just require you to kill everything. Given that this is a strategy RPG, this approach seems illogical. It would make more sense to be a traditional turn-based RPG like Final Fantasy.  It would help if there were alternate win conditions to easy the difficulty or add more strategy to the game.

The dull and dated visuals also detract from the game. The black voids and incredibly basic visuals clearly mark this game as a previously-in-development-for-the-PS1 game. No lip-syncing, terrible animations, blurry textures, and flat, dull environments plague this game. The towns feel void of life and are super tiny. Additionally, the voice acting is scarce, and what is present is mediocre at best. There is a significant amount of written dialogue and extensive reading. Sometimes I would go 15–20 minutes only reading dialogue in between fights. There is no exploration of the area. Outside of two object hunting quests, there are no side quests, and the armor and weapon system is odd and strange. There is just nothing to do outside of combat and watching cutscenes.

Instead of receiving brand-new weapons as in other RPGs, you receive weapon parts. You can equip up to three parts of armor and weapons to adjust various stats such as health, dexterity, and the usual stuff you find in JRPGs. Winning battles earns you gold, but enemies can also drop them, resulting in a wasted movement turn. Only chests can be found in the levels towards the later fourth of the game. Some dungeons are a little labyrinthine and frustrating to navigate, too.

Overall, the game has a story with a lot of heart and soul, and the characters are great despite the elementary writing and cliche personalities of the main heroes. There were a few plot twists, and I was pleasantly surprised by some of the turns the story took. However, this all comes at a heavy cost. The combat is dull, boring, and slow, and the difficulty is all over the place. The graphics are awful, flat, lifeless, and dated. The voice acting is barely passable, and some may hate the dozens of hours of reading. However, the game does have the world’s lore fleshed out, and you feel a part of it, and it feels alive. There are books to read, characters to get snippets of lore from, and it all feels like a living and breathing world. Visually, the game fails to capture this essence, which is truly disheartening.

The X-Files: Resist or Serve – 20 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/24/2024
Posted in: PlayStation 2, Retro Consoles, Sony. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Publisher: Sierra Entertainment

Developer: Black Ops Entertainment

Release Date: 03/16/2004


Available Exclusively On

The X-Files is one of, if not the biggest, cult TV shows of all time. I was a young kid when the series was at its peak in the mid- to late-90s, so I didn’t understand any of it, but my mother was really into the show. While I caught bits and pieces, I do remember the atmosphere the TV show delivered, and this has stuck with cult shows dealing with paranormal activities for the foreseeable future. While the entire show might not have aged the best by today’s standards, it’s still a highly entertaining show that really makes you want to believe. There weren’t really any video games on the show until this one. Long after the series final season debuted and long after the series peaked in 2004, 2004 was also the end of the Sixth Generation’s life cycle, with the Xbox 360 just around the corner. What did Resist or Serve bring to the survival horror genre?

Well, the short answer is zero. I feel like fans of The X-Files would enjoy this more than survival horror fans of Silent Hill will. You can choose between Mulder and Skully (the show’s two main protagonists, voiced by the show actors as well). Each side has slightly different events in the same levels, so it may or may not be worth playing the game twice. Once was enough for me. The game has fixed camera angles similar to Silent Hill, but nothing is pre-rendered. You can move around the environment well enough, and there is some light puzzle-solving and combat. Combat is on the rougher side. You can hold a flashlight and a gun at the same time, but you can’t run with the flashlight and the gun out. If you want to run, you can just hold the flashlight. In some levels, you get nightvision goggles that help, but they’re still annoying. There’s an auto-aim feature similar to Silent Hill, and it works well enough if enemies aren’t right on top of you. Enemies will bum-rush you, and a couple shots will knock them down. One or two zombies is manageable. Although the combat system is not the worst I’ve ever encountered, the narrow level design isn’t conducive to this kind of shooting. Many rooms are barely ten steps wide. When faster enemies, such as dogs, come after you, the characters can’t run faster than the enemies to gain distance, turn around, aim, shoot, and reload, which slows you down a lot. It’s better to do the age-old reload on the inventory screen trick.

Combat only becomes a serious problem during boss fights. These guys have a longer range of attack, and I could never outrun them enough to turn around, blast them, and then get going again. Most bosses are easier if you stand still and blast them. The challenge lies more in battling the controls than in the bosses’ design. Health bars in the shape of the show’s logo serve as a health meter for these bosses. The rest of the game is obtuse object hunting, but knowing what to do with these objects can be quite annoying, especially when combining multiple objects together or deciphering notes to gain access codes. At least the game’s pace isn’t all that bad, and there are many locales to move through, from a research facility to an underground occult lair. 

Three episodes, each with a couple of acts, make up the game, with the first episode being the longest. There are a few pre-rendered cutscenes, but most are in real-time, and boy are the graphics rough here. In 2004, there was no reason for this game to resemble a PlayStation 1 game. The environments are bland and boring; there are zero facial animations; and the textures are a muddy, molten mess of colors. On characters’ faces and objects, textures literally blend and bleed into each other. The animations are stiff and awkward, and this honestly feels like a budget first-gen PS2 title, not something that should be out at the end of the system’s life. When it comes to the horror elements of the game, they kind of work in the beginning, but the same screeching violin and piano banging sound plays one too many times at the wrong moments, and the theme song repeats way too often. It will work for fans of the show, but not generalized horror fanatics.

To be honest, there really isn’t that much horror in the game. There are a couple of neat scenes in which Skully dissects a human a couple of times in gruesome detail, but the hideous visuals don’t do it justice. Some very dark buildings have lighting that almost works, but it doesn’t. The zombies are cheesy and stereotypical, and the bosses are just hooded cult freaks. There’s no exploration here unless you just want to find first-aid kits and ammo clips. There are no hidden items, and the only extras are lame storyboards. I played through Skully’s story first, and I had no desire to repeat the entire game as Mulder for a couple of different scenes and altered boss fights.

Overall, Resist or Serve is worth a playthrough. Resist or Serve may take you 5-6 hours to complete, and while it has a fairly interesting story, it ultimately succumbs to the whims of the TV show’s cliches and punchlines. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson phone in their voice lines, sounding like they are falling asleep or bored (I guess Duchovny always sounds like that), but it’s not an inherently offensive game. The worst parts are the boss fights, and it could have gotten a lot more wrong.

Parasite Eve II – 24 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/20/2024
Posted in: PlayStation (PS1), Retro Consoles, Sony. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Publisher: SquareSoft

Developer: SquareSoft

Release Date: 01/12/2000


Available Exclusively On

Resident Evil significantly established the benchmark for survival horror games and 3D gaming in general. Games were still trying to figure everything out. Camera angles, movement, pacing, and combat. It was up to these developers to pioneer 3D games for the next 20 years. Parasite Eve may have been a short-lived franchise, but it made a lot of advancements in the 3D action/survival horror genre that Resident Evil was quickly trying to dominate. Despite its late PS1 release, this game felt ahead of its time, even though I haven’t played the first one.

The story is surprisingly simple to follow and fairly interesting. As a MIST agent, Aya Brea, you embark on a journey to the Nevada desert and the town of Dryfield. Here, your mission is to devise a permanent solution to halt the NMC (Neo-Mitrocondira Creatures). There is a lot more to the game. You also start out in a mall in Los Angeles. There are a couple of twisty endings, and the story is well-told and easy to follow. There isn’t really any voice-acting due to space constraints. The visuals alone explain why the game spans two discs.

The game has both RPG and action-combat elements. There are plenty of weapons and magic to use, and the game is a tight balance of the two. This is also the era in which missing a key item could make the game artificially more difficult, so I suggest playing the game on easy the first time with a guide and then doing a New Game Plus on your own. Despite the game’s linear structure, the vagueness of your objectives could lead to many missed or lost opportunities. At times, your map displays the locations of your objectives, while others do not. You can pull up the help in the map menu to see Aya give you a single hint; sometimes that’s also enough, and other times it still leaves you clueless. There are only a couple of puzzles in the game, but there is still a lot of item hunting. You need to find key items that not only advance the story but also optionally unlock new weapons or items to aid you.

Parasite Eve II‘s combat is surprisingly excellent for the time. 3D movement is tank-based, but it feels more fluid thanks to better camera angles than most games in this genre. There is an auto-lock system with a large reticle that you can easily swap between enemies. The game is fairly smart and usually picks the enemy closest to you, but not always. You can fire rounds off, and reloading happens when your clip reaches zero. Secondary attachments on some weapons can stun enemies or deal massive damage. These all cost money, and it’s imperative that you acquire the best weapons as early as possible; however, this becomes a juggling act with inventory vs. your attachments. You need to upgrade your armor to increase your attachments, but you can also find small pouches on the field. You should always have a single weapon in hand and equip at least one other. It’s good to know what types of enemies are in the area to be able to balance this just right.

Weapons vary, from pistols to shotguns, assault rifles, grenade launchers, and attachments that help you miss and match. You can equip an M4A1 assault rifle with the AS1S shotgun attachment, allowing you to combine both types of weapons without requiring two inventory slots. However, you must acquire precious BP by killing enemies to purchase these attachments. Bosses give the most, but it’s important to kill everything around you so you can get as much BP and EXP as possible to level up your powers. There aren’t random battles or respawning enemies, but opponents will spawn in the same area after each objective is complete. Harder enemies start popping up, as well as more of them, so it’s really important to know their weaknesses and what weapons and magic attacks work best. Some will attack you in swarms, so stun attacks are best for these enemies. You can’t move around much, so make sure you really get the hang of the combat system.

Magic is interesting, as you will use it for stronger enemies and large groups. As you level up, you acquire new magic in different categories. You can level up Fire, Earth, Wind, and Necro magic to a maximum of three per power, and utilize the magic wheel to activate these powers. This requires MP, so you will need to boost your MP to use it in combat. You should equip some key items instead of using them, as they can significantly increase attack damage and even magic. Therefore, it’s crucial to utilize a guide during your initial playthrough, as inadvertent use of these items, such as boosting a magic point by one level or similar effects, can result in waste. While you can’t use an auto lock-on (the game pauses when in the magic wheel), magic is incredibly useful for bosses. Green vector lines indicate the path, and enemies will flash green to indicate potential hits.

The map system is rather useful. Rooms in red mean there are enemies in that room, and once they are all defeated, it will not be red anymore. When you initiate combat, the screen briefly turns white and you hear the sound of a heartbeat. Sometimes, if the enemy doesn’t see you yet, you can quickly change weapons, heal, or do back attacks that cause more damage. Aya automatically reloads after clearing all enemies in the room, and your winnings window appears. Item drops are incredibly rare. They only become more common when you start fighting the game’s most powerful enemies, the GOLEMS, towards the last fourth of the game on the second disc. There are only a few shops in the game, so this leads to a lot of backtracking. Additionally, the game does not allow you to sell items, meaning that if you inadvertently purchase something, you are unable to return it. This means you can only discard items not needed in your inventory or store them in a box. I recommend saving before buying anything; in case something doesn’t work out, you can reload.

The visuals push the PS1 to its limits. We still get pre-rendered backgrounds with some 3D objects in place, but the character models look good, and there is a lot of detail in everything. While the game looks mostly generic style-wise, it is a technical showcase for the PS1. Sadly, the lack of voice work and infrequent FMVs kind of hurt the game presentation, but what’s here works. Overall, Parasite Eve II isn’t perfect. It’s a product of its time, with developers trying to figure out how to do action games in 3D. The weapon balancing act is frustrating, and missing out on key items to make the game more enjoyable can cause a lot of problems later on when you realize it’s too late. The combat system works well enough, and there are plenty of weapons and magic. The game’s main issues were mostly backtracking and a lack of knowing where to go. The story is interesting, surprising in depth for the time, and well told.

Heart of Darkness – 26 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/12/2024
Posted in: PC Reviews, PlayStation (PS1), Retro Consoles, Sony. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Publisher: Interplay Interactive

Developer: Amazing Studio

Release Date: 09/08/1998


Available On

In the early to mid-90s, FMV games were all the rage, but they never really panned out, and almost all of them were bad in their own spectacular ways. There was a refinement to the genre in terms of cartoony and claymation FMV games that were mostly adventure titles, but Heart of Darkness took pre-rendered animations and scenes, so it felt like you were playing a 3D cartoon, and added a new spin. While the graphics are pretty bad, the art style is whimsical and indicative of what could have been a great 3D movie for kids.

You portray a little boy who is full of imagination. In the beginning scene, you get a bunch of sweeping camera angles, whimsical adventure music, and what seems like an invasion by a dark evil lord and his minions. Of course, all of this is happening in the boy’s mind as he plays in his treehouse, but that’s not the main focus. The story progresses as you decide to save a tribe of flying creatures from this evil lord, who is turning them into shadow creatures. There are a good number of FMV sequences, some ranging from 30 seconds to a few seconds. There isn’t a significant amount of voice acting, and what is present is difficult to discern. The FMV videos are very low quality and run at what seems like sub-24 fps. 

The only gameplay is jumping, running, and shooting, which are too difficult. The sluggish controls and unresponsive animations artificially inflate the game’s difficulty. When you possess a gun or firepower, a plethora of creatures flood the screen. The opening scene alone could deter many players, as it leaves them uncertain about whether they should run or shoot. Many background pieces blend in, and it’s hard to tell what is interactive and what is not. Trial and error is key to this game, as is saving frequently. I have to admit that at least the checkpoint system is mostly fair. I rarely regressed too much, but when I did, it was a particularly challenging section that I had to repeatedly complete. A lot of times, traps and enemies will pop up on screen before you can even take in what is going on. This is a screen-to-screen game with no smooth scrolling. I would run to the next screen and immediately die. The placement of these traps and enemies is unfair and not necessary. It feels like there was little to no playtesting involved.

You can shoot in eight directions, but it can be challenging to align shots precisely. Certain sections and puzzles involve swimming, and defeating enemies necessitates a specific strategy, which also applies to you. Contact with enemies often results in instant death. A health bar would have been nice, especially during the final boss fight, which was aggravating. Jumping also requires precise timing, as there’s a little hop, a running jump, and a regular jump. Each one is a pre-canned animation, and you can’t interrupt it. There’s also an issue with ledges seemingly needing to be pixel-perfect to jump off of, as some platforms are exactly the right amount of pixels apart. I also disliked having to wait for a slight pause to load between platforms when switching screens.

Despite all of that, the game does possess its own unique charm. The puzzles are the strongest aspect of the game. When you are just walking around pushing buttons and climbing ladders with no danger involved, the game shines. If the combat had been cut, I could even deal with the platforming woes, but the combat seriously drags the game down, as the animations and controls aren’t responsive enough for something like this. The game can be completed in a couple of hours, but due to the constant trial and error you will spend a full afternoon on this game. It’s worth it for the charm alone, but just be prepared to repeat sections over and over again.

Reviewed On

Dark Seed II – 29 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 05/20/2024
Posted in: Mac, PC Reviews, PlayStation (PS1), Retro Consoles, Sega, Sega Saturn, Sony. 1 Comment

Publisher: Cyberdreams

Developer: Cyberdreams

Release Date: 11/30/1995


Available On

The marketing, box art, and even screenshots are quite misleading for the type of game this is. Even the fantastic artwork doesn’t accurately convey the tone of the game. The first game was a chaotic combination of trial and error, resulting in its incredibly short duration. The second game follows more linear and traditional point-and-click adventure gameplay with digitized scenes and full voice acting. While the voice acting isn’t half bad, the sprites could have used a few more animations and don’t mash well with the H.R. Giger art style of the Darkworld. 

Dark Seed II focuses mostly on a murder mystery. You play as Mike Dawson, who is recovering from the events of the first game. The local sheriff has charged you as the prime suspect after the murder of your high school sweetheart, Rita. You then wander around various locations in town, talking to people trying to move the story along, and this is where the game really falls apart. Like most point-and-click adventures of the time, the game is very obtuse; there aren’t any puzzles, but knowing what items to pick up and where is a real chore. The first game had issues with objects blending into the background, but in this game, you just wouldn’t know where to start. I had to play this game with a full guide, or I would have spent hours wandering around, not knowing what to do or where to go. The lack of a button or other mechanism to access the map makes the significant amount of backtracking even worse. To get to the map, you must walk back to the edge of the area, slow walking speed and all.

Once you get to the Darkworld, things get a little more interesting. The artwork is fantastic, and it’s a shame the low-resolution visuals don’t do it justice. The voice acting didn’t mesh well with the characters in this world, which put me off. They are meant to represent people in the real world, but come on. Why is there a strange statue of a gargoyle that Giger created speaking with a silly New York accent? It just doesn’t sit right tonally. I still loved the bizarre architecture and surreal atmosphere that the Darkworld gave, but the repetitive music, sound effects, and half-assed animations just don’t do any of this justice.

There isn’t much gameplay. You can change your action icon with the right mouse button and have a pop-up inventory, but you won’t be using it much. Most of the game involves walking back and forth and talking to people. While the overarching murder mystery is rather interesting and the ending was a surprise, I wanted more of the in-between stuff. There was a significant opportunity to bring the Darkworld to life, and even in the mid-90s, this could have been feasible. There was a hint of this happening when you converse with certain creatures; they mention the Darkworld briefly, but the worldbuilding simply lacks depth. The adventure titles of that era, like The 11th Hour, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, Full Throttle, and others, didn’t follow the same pattern. Many other games did this just fine, without the macabre legacy of Giger himself lending a hand to the art department. 

Without the artwork, this would be a ho-hum adventure title. While there have been many improvements over the original title, I would still like to see more Darkworld architecture. I wanted more time spent here. Yes, there is more of the dark world. There are more screens, buildings, and creatures in the Darkworld than in other adventure titles of the time. There is a layer of cheese that you just can’t look past when it comes to certain events or scenes in the game, and it made me roll my eyes or frown. H.R. Giger’s art is my favorite of all time. There’s so much that could be explored here, but instead we get an obtuse, backtrack-heavy game with an interesting murder mystery and the best parts taking the backseat.

Reviewed On

Keyboard & Mouse

MotorStorm – 17 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 03/10/2024
Posted in: PlayStation 3, Retro Consoles, Sony. Leave a comment

Publisher: SCEA

Developer: Evolution Studios

Release Date: 03/06/2007


Available Exclusively On

I remember seeing the trailer for this game during the PS3 reveal when Sony briefed the world on their latest console. The trailer blew my mind. No one knew if it was real-time gameplay footage or not. I remember being impressed by the mud deformation effects and how light reflected off the water in the mud. After playing this game, I realized that it never looked anything like that or that the trailer was pre-rendered. MotorStorm still looks pretty good even today, but there are other problems than my foggy memory.

The game is fairly basic, but for a first-time effort for a new franchise, the game isn’t too bad. This was also what feels like a slightly rushed title to get it out the door for the PS3’s launch (which it missed). The game consists of only circuit races around nine different tracks. The draw of MotorStorm is the different vehicle types and how they interact with the terrain. There are trophy trucks, rally cars, buggies, motorbikes, ATVs, and even big rigs. Each vehicle does feel unique, and the interaction works in terms of agility and jump height. There are different paths on each track that are best suited for a different vehicle type. Motorbikes are best at jumping large gaps, but big rigs won’t make the jump. Buggies are great at lots of small bumps, but some cars might slow down a lot here. There are even areas with a lot of junk that you have to maneuver around, or you will crash.

Crashing is incredibly annoying in this game. Every crash activates a slo-mo cam, and you can’t skip this. Your car resets back to where you crashed, but the game has some serious rubber-band AI as you fall way behind after just a couple of crashes, and sometimes you can’t catch up depending on your vehicle. You have to memorize each track well and master them to get first place, or even think about qualifying. Sharp hairpin turns can send you off a cliff; the wrong path can slow you down too much if you’re not in the right type of vehicle; and the signs posted on some tracks for the vehicle aren’t helpful. I wish there was a vehicle recommendation during the ticket selection so I didn’t have to trial and error with each vehicle. Vehicles are also all the same in each category. You get to pick between three styles and three colors. There are no stats at all. Annoyingly, each vehicle must load in during a real-time vehicle selection screen. 

The main campaign is played by advancing in tickets by winning points. You must place third or better in each race to continue. There are 25 tickets and up to five races in each ticket. Races all have three laps, so you can imagine it gets tedious. And boy, does it. The same tracks repeat over and over again with no variation in even types. Why not drag races? How about tracks with lots of jumps? Something, anything, to break up the monotony. After tickets 7-8, I got tired of the game and shut it off for good. By then, I had finished around 40 races and had raced every track multiple times.

That’s another big issue with this game. The tracks are all similar. There are only desert or dirt tracks that mostly look the same. It’s just dead brown flat textures with nothing in between. The layouts themselves, in terms of jumps, turns, dangers, etc., are well done. Once I learned a track, it felt good to race around flawlessly and know what paths were best for the vehicle I picked, but after 3–4 times on each track, I got tired of it. Not to mention having to constantly restart the same one over and over again (some were a dozen times) because one crash too many made me fall too far behind. You need to flawlessly race around these tracks, and it can get super frustrating and punishing.

MotorStorm has a lot of potential to be a great arcade racing series. There needs to be more focus on terrain deformation, more track and event type variety, and a bigger distinguishing difference between vehicle types. I also felt the menus were sluggish with constant loading, and the game suffered from texture pop-in a lot, but in the actual races, the gameplay and framerate were smooth. Can we also get another color in the sequel besides brown, please? Please, and thank you.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars – 15 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 03/09/2024
Posted in: Android, DS, iOS, Mobile Reviews, Nintendo, PSP, Retro Consoles, Sony. Leave a comment

Publisher: Rockstar Games

Developer: Rockstar Leeds

Release Date: 03/17/2009


Available On

I never thought that a GTA game would be in handheld format. We had the original two games on the GBA, but that was kind of expected. Chinatown Wars is a brand new hand-tailored experience for the DS and later shoehorned onto the PSP. There are touch-screen controls, a whole new interface, and mini-games galore. This game feels like what GTA 3 would have been if it hadn’t gone full 3D. You get the over-the-top perspective, but everything is still in 3D. The game looks really good for a DS game and feels like a unique GTA experience.

The story is your typical GTA gangster revenge story. You play as Huang, whose father was murdered for an ancient sword that was passed down to mark the next mob boss leader. Huang flies to Liberty City to avenge his father’s death, get to the bottom of the Triad and gang squabbling, and get that sword back to help his uncle move to the top. The story is full of deceit, betrayal, deception, and revenge and is mostly uninteresting. It doesn’t have the charisma, flair, or flavor that the console versions have, mostly due to the lack of voice acting. The story is told through stills and text, which makes sense on the DS, but definitely doesn’t give the characters any well-being. Many of the mob members are stereotypical drug and sex addicts, power-hungry, stupid, and Huang can’t trust anyone. The story has around 50 missions, and they play out similar to the console version.

The main interface is custom for the DS. You get a PDA-style screen that you can touch. The map is displayed here as well as your radio stations, throwables, and weapon switching, and the menu in the PDA will show your trade info, emails, settings, stats, etc. It’s very intuitive and just makes sense. New story missions are given via red emails. These will also give you a shortcut to place a waypoint on the map leading to that new story. There are a lot of quality-of-life things like this thrown in. The GPS map has shortcuts for everything you need, from odd jobs to your safehouses. You can also order ammo and weapons from Ammu-Nation on the PDA as well. They show up at your house, and you get an email telling you when it’s ready.

Running around the world of Liberty City feels lively because of the limitations put in place. You can run and jack cars, drive off and kill everyone on the road, and gain your infamous wanted stars. Stars can be dropped by making police cars crash, which will help lower your wanted meter faster. I did feel there were way too many cops around in this game. It seemed every 5–10 cars was a cop car or a pig walking around. I was constantly caught carjacking or running over someone, and I was always running into cop cars. This felt way overdone in this game. Driving around Liberty City does feel great. The game never slows down, and the ambient sound effects of the original radio tunes (they’re instrumental and not licensed due to space limitations on the DS carts) make it feel like a living and breathing GTA game on the go.

Missions are varied, but some elements of missions can get quite annoying, causing multiple deaths and restarts. The auto-lock-on feature for shooting isn’t that great. You don’t always lock on to the closest enemy or an enemy at all. This caused many deaths when I locked onto a car instead of a person shooting at me. You can roll around and dodge people, but many times I was stuck without a weapon and would have to order something from Ammu-Nation, go to my safehouse, wait, pick it up, and go back and restart the mission. Thankfully, you can trip skip if you get to a certain point in longer missions, which saves you time, and you can skip cutscenes. A lot of mini-games surround missions, such as tapping the screen to break locks, mini-games to use cranes, plant bombs, scratch cards, tattoing, and many others. These were a lot of fun, and I was always looking forward to the next one. However,  trying to jack a car and being stuck in a mini-game of hot starting it for the 100th time got old and would make me get busted as you can’t back out of it. Most missions vary from shooting, following, and chasing, and some put you on turrets or throw bombs out of a car. Overall, the mission variety is awesome, and I never got bored.

The biggest setback in the game is the new feature of drug dealing. You can use your PDA to see the drug turf map for who buys and sells what. This is required to actually make money for weapons and sometimes even start missions. Some missions require a certain drug type or a large amount of cash. This means setting a GPS waypoint for a dealer who sells said drug and buying some from them. You need to make large profits, so it’s best to wait for an email when a dealer is selling at a discount and then turn around and sell it. This takes a lot of time—driving around and waiting around, however. Buying and selling drugs at market value won’t get you anywhere. Odd jobs can give you a few bucks, but they don’t pay out enough. This really slows the game down and hampers an otherwise fast-paced game. 

When it comes to visuals, the game really shines on the DS. There are small, subtle things, like street lights turning off when you hit the poles. Weather patterns such as lightning strikes casting shadows on the ground, sparks, fire effects, and even being able to close the driver door if it’s still open while driving (let go of the accelerator and Huang will close the door). These small changes help make this a high-quality DS experience and set it above the rest in terms of production values. Chinatown Wars may have a forgettable story and characters, some control issues when shooting, some frustrating missions, and a drug dealing mechanic that hinders more than helps, but overall the game is miles above what I thought a portable GTA game could be and in some ways feels better than the PSP GTA games.

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Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare – 17 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 02/23/2024
Posted in: DS, Mac, Microsoft, Nintendo, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, Retro Consoles, Sony, Steam Deck Unknown, Steam Deck Verification, Wii, Xbox 360. Leave a comment

Publisher: Activision

Developer: n-space

Release Date: 11/05/2007


Available On

While the main next-gen console version of the game is considered to be an all-time classic and helped revolutionize the online FPS genre, the lower-powered hardware versions were completely different games. While they share the same name, you wouldn’t know these were Call of Duty games if you played them and no one told you.


Modern Warfare for the DS loosely follows the plot of the main game but instead takes liberty with its own unique levels and design choices. Obviously, we are working with barely better-than-PS1-level hardware here. n-Space really had to be creative and make entirely new games, mostly “themed” around the franchise. The game is still in first-person view, and you can switch between two different weapons. By default, you always start out with a pistol and another firearm. You can pick up weapons with the touch screen (a hand icon) and use that as your main weapon will not have any extra ammo available when you run out unless you die. When you die, you start out with your default weapons again and lose whatever you picked up, but your ammo is refilled. Weapons in this game feel decent, but the slowdown from the DS being pushed too hard (especially when enemies pop in) makes aiming a bit sluggish and janky. 


Aiming with the touch screen feels fine. Using the D-pad or face buttons to strafe isn’t an issue either, but using the R or L button to fire can give you massive hand cramps even with larger DS systems. Most everything is controlled by the touch screen. Double-tap to bring up the ADS (Aim Down Sights), switch to grenades, and tap the weapon icon to reload. There are a few quality of life things that n-space did think of, such as when you reload, you go back to ADS if you are in that mode already, and spriting pulls you out of ADS mode. My issue with ADS is that while it’s more accurate, there’s a delay in bringing it up on screen, and that delay can cost you your life. When enemies pop in and the slowdown happens, it won’t respond to my double-taps fast enough, and I would constantly bring up the ADS and back out a few times caused by the delay. It’s not game-breaking, but very annoying.


There are two mini-games when setting explosives and defusing bombs. I found the pipe puzzles annoying, and following the wires to defuse bombs isn’t really fun or challenging. These were just thrown in here to make use of the touch screen. Honestly, who wants to solve puzzles while playing Call of Duty? It’s weird and just doesn’t fit. It really breaks the flow of combat. The enemy AI is also pretty dumb. Enemies just stand there and shoot at you; don’t take cover or move out of the way. This is literally an on-rails shooting gallery and is insanely linear. Levels are way too long, and some objectives have unfair checkpoint placements or none at all. Objectives range from collecting something to planting a bomb or just shooting everything in sight. I found the scripted mounted machine gun levels pretty fun, but the AC-130 level (similar to the console version) is awful and boring. You can barely make out any enemies, and you can’t use larger weapons against smaller enemies. There are only a couple of buildings to blow up, and you just mow down dozens of enemies over and over again in almost complete silence. It was a bad level, for sure.


The visuals are decent for what the system can do. They are definitely sterile and boring to look at, with no artistic flair. The game tried capturing the hyper-realism of the consoles, and the DS just can’t quite do this. It’s a very brown and beige-looking game. There’s no personality put into this game. It feels like a copy-and-paste FPS that you could attach any name to. Multiplayer is the same as single-player, but with another person. It’s not very exciting, and your friends will get bored fast. I appreciate n-space for trying to capture the excitement of the console versions on the limited hardware, but it needs something else. Better enemy AI, less linear-feeling levels, more interesting scripted levels, and fewer storyboard-cut scenes. It’s a great first start, but it has a lot of work before it becomes a staple DS shooter.

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Three Fourths Home: Extended Edition – 9 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 02/18/2024
Posted in: Mac, Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Sony, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Unknown, Steam Deck Verification, Switch, Xbox One. Leave a comment

Publisher: Digerati Distribution

Developer: [bracket] games

Release Date: 03/20/2015


Available On

Minimalistic, story-driven games can be quite memorable and fantastic. The lack of gameplay requires you to have a laser focus on the story and characters, and the subtle gameplay can bring a visual element that no other medium can provide. Three Fourths Home isn’t one of these, sadly. While the visuals are striking and minimal, the story and writing have so much potential, but they are let down by a short and disappointing ending.

You play a teenage girl named Kelly who is driving home in a violent storm in rural Nebraska while talking to her family on the phone. Gameplay consists only of holding down a button to continue driving and choosing a few dialogue options. Holding down a single button for the entirety of the game is a really dumb idea. It introduces hand cramps and constantly breaks your focus on the story. You can honk your horn and turn off your lights, which is entirely pointless, and you can’t move the car at all. You can also choose to turn the radio on and off. There is no spoken dialogue in the game, but this requires you to make up voices and visuals for the game in your head. This may sound really dumb to most people, and some might argue that you should just read a book, and in this specific context, this would be a better medium for this story.

Choices in dialogue don’t seem important at first, but your response to your family plays into how they react to you on the phone. I guess multiple playthroughs could be worth it as there are a couple of different endings, but with how mundane the gameplay is, no one will want to sit through the hand cramps to make it worthwhile. I had issues with the controls, causing me to choose the wrong option as well. You need to skip through dialogue with a button to advance each line while holding down another to keep driving, and some times you wouldn’t know that a dialogue option would be coming up and you would just advance forward.

See, with minimal games like this, you need some sort of gameplay hook to keep it interesting enough. Three Fourths doesn’t do this at all. The mom, dad, and brother are all interesting characters, and you slowly learn about this family dynamic through this phone call. You learn about why you “ran away,” what kind of person the dad is, whether or not this is a broken home, etc. The dialogue is tight and interesting enough to keep you glued until the end, that is, if the hand cramps don’t send you packing first. I also wish more was going on visually. Occasionally, a background object will be brought up in the conversation, but it’s just black-and-white visuals without any type of payoff. The visuals, gameplay, and everything else are just an excuse to call this interactive story a game, and it does the bare minimum to qualify as that.

Most games like this have a story that ends in sudden tragedy to flip the entire thing on its head and stun the player, but this one doesn’t really do that either. If it did and the pay-off was incredible, all of this could be worth it, and there are plenty of games similar to this that pull that off. As it stands, Three Fourths Home is a well-written story in a terrible game with an even worse gameplay mechanic.

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CounterSpy – 10 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 02/04/2024
Posted in: Android, iOS, Mobile Reviews, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Retro Consoles, Sony, Sony Consoles. Leave a comment

Publisher: SCEI

Developer: Dynamighty

Release Date: 08/19/2014


Available On

Tongue-in-cheek comedies about the Cold War are something I quite enjoy. Movies like Austin Powers that make fun of the time period can be downright hilarious. CounterSpy tries this with the player working for an unknown neutral agency called C.O.U.N.T.E.R., and everything they do and their plans are all spelled this way with no actual meaning. You play either the Americans or Russians’ bases to steal sets of plans to stop nuclear weapons from destroying the moon. The goal is to keep the DEFCON level as low as possible (5), and if it reaches zero during a level, a one-minute countdown starts, and you need to find the computer to finish the level to stop it. Thankfully, if it does reach zero, the level ends, and you start from DEFCON 1 again.

The only way to lower the DEFCON level is through passive items or getting officers dressed in white to surrendy by pointing your gun at them. This can make having to repeatedly repeat levels very difficult. The levels are randomly generated each time, but that doesn’t mean the difficulty doesn’t increase. You will need to search more rooms while plans for weapons and items are hidden better. More guards will appear and there will be more open areas. These can be the most difficult to navigate, especially when security cameras come into play. The green ones can be shot down with weapons, but the orange-armored ones can only be taken down with explosives. You can dodge and roll your way through a camera’s cone of vision, but you need to be fast. I found the randomness of levels to be frustrating, as a lot of guard patrols just don’t line up to be able to be stealthy. A lot of times, you will need to mow down every guard, and some levels can be multi-tiered. Thankfully, the alertness only lasts for that section of the level. Once you go through the door to the next section, the guards don’t know you’re there.

Cover is your best friend in this game. Yellow arrows on the cover will tell you which way you will face, and lining up your shot is important. The longer you pop out of cover to aim, the quicker guards will notice you. Guards are pretty dumb, and cameras won’t even notice dead bodies, so shoot them out to your heart’s content. This is the only saving grace for the randomness of these levels. If this was a more realistic stealth game, it would feel impossible to finish. However, I still wound up getting each side to DEFCON 1, so I had to constantly restart a level once the countdown timer started. It’s futile to try to run to the exit in 60 seconds unless you’re already close. If you quit the mission, you just restart back to where you were prior to that level.

Once you do get all the launch plans, you can continue to play either side to get more weapons and item plans and lower the DEFCON level as much as possible. The final mission will start on the side with the highest level, so this can lead to a lot of frustration unless you really want all of those weapons. I honestly felt the game got pretty tedious towards the end and just wanted to get the game over with. I didn’t feel the need to continue playing, as the randomness kind of ruins the fun gameplay elements with poor guard patrol patterns, making it impossible for really perfect stealth runs. The Vita version suffers from frequent slowdowns when the action starts. The game will pause for a split second, causing accuracy issues when shooting.

Overall, CounterSpy has all of the elements of a fun arcade-like action stealth game, but the randomness of the levels makes it hard to get that perfect run, which can discourage the player from wanting to collect all the weapons. The tongue-in-cheek humor does the job just fine, and the controls are well thought out. Just be prepared for some frequent restarts.

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