Jolt Country

I can't play games for very long but I can play them for 10 minutes. I've probably done a thread like this before. I just want to try some stuff out! Some of these will be old games. I'll talk about technical issues running them and my impressions in the first 10-20 minutes.

DEAD ISLAND: RIPTIDE

It started in windows mode at like 5000 pixels in length. It wanted me to do the thing where I tell it how dark my monitor is. I don't do that any more! It's MAX BRIGHTNESS for me, from now on. But because my two monitors have different pixel setups, I couldn't see the "ok" button, I had to guess where it was. I guessed where it was.

I set it to full screen mode and it seemed ok with that.

And then it wanted to do the endless story and movie thing. I apologize to the creators and readers: I had like 10 minutes, I could not sit through one opening movie, a character biography read by a voice actress of unknown length and --

Power is flickering ! Saving this, more tomorrow!

I don't care how "epic" your game is, if the intro is taking more than about 5 minutes then you are completely losing me. We didn't put up with this shit in our story driven graphic adventures from the late 80s and early 90s, and neither are people of all ages today.

With the new game I've been planning, the intro is a huge deal. Has to look cool, have an interesting environment and PC, and basically just state "The year is 20XX, my name is XXX, I am a detective for the X Agency, I am here to do X, and BOOM look at how fucking cool this environment we are in where we are gonna do it." I'll most likely flesh out the intro way before finishing most of the prototype as I learn Unreal5 better.

I've started quite a few modern games where by the time I got through the intro I hated the PC, was annoyed by their friends, heard too much whining and explanation, then promptly quit after about 10 minutes. Cut scenes as well should only be so long.

We did not lose power. I am excited to reply to you and finish the Dead Island: Riptide post.

DEAD ISLAND RIPTIDE

There is no colon in there!

Ok, just to circle around on this, there was a moment of fun in this thing. What I played had me do the obligatory pieces with learning what the crouch button is, and how to use a ladder. ZZZZZ! You're running around a ship that is flooded. At one point there were four zombies trying to kill me at once and I just had a crowbar that had a reasonable (stamina-based) cool down period. So I was dodging, smashing a brain open with a crowbar, dodging, etc.



I don't remember why I bought this game. There's nothing particularly offensive. I will give it credit for letting me skip the story. It's kind of a paradox. On one hand, I have been so bored with game stories that unless I've heard a backstory to a game is amazing or the story is the point, I'll just try to skip out. But then, I ding the game for putting me in a spot where I don't care about the characters. But I guess that is the problem of game creators - they have to make us care without droning on and on and on. (RPGs are the worst with this - if I hear a second made-up person, place or thing in an RPG intro, I will tune out. You get one noun. One King Jessof of Molestorton or whatever. Make it count.)

One more thing. I have been doing a lot of renders in Daz3D for Cyberganked. I have been on all the asset sites. I am starting to recognize common assets. Definitely hair styles, though things move too quickly in this game for me to really recognize anything. But there's been some "oh, that can looks familiar" thing. Not that I am saying that Dead Island didn't make their own stuff! They probably did! And in fact, it's probably a waste of time for them to make them. But all these ..... "Unity" style games are starting to blend together for me.

DUKE NUKEM FOREVER

It isn't great, I don't even know if it's good. When the twins show up in one of the first cut scenes, the graphics are terrible. Terrible! And the UI is messed up at the 3000xsomething resolution I was playing at - the context sensitive button info overlays on top of itself with something.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Thu Dec 29, 2022 7:49 pm DUKE NUKEM FOREVER

It isn't great, I don't even know if it's good. When the twins show up in one of the first cut scenes, the graphics are terrible. Terrible! And the UI is messed up at the 3000xsomething resolution I was playing at - the context sensitive button info overlays on top of itself with something.

I played several hours of this game. The "good" part is at the start of the game. It gets worse afterwards.

NHL 94 REWIND (PS4)

This is a modern implementation of "NHL 94" but with rosters that were accurate a couple of years ago.

Well, it's amazing. It is the Sega Genesis / PC version I remember. When I was going through exoDOS the other day, I had to ask myself - why NHL 94? Why is that the one that is remembered? Why not NHL 95?

Well, on the DOS version, there is an unskippable developer splash screen when you start. I should time it, but it feels like years. PIONEER PRODUCTIONS and ... the thing was a floppy disk game. Installed to a hard drive. There was no disc it was loading. Not having to stare at the stupid splash screen is enough for me to say, yea, 94 is better.

Anyway, back to the Playstation version: my blood pressure spiked for the first time in ages and I don't know why. This game helped and is helping me relax. So a billion out of 4 starts for that.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Wed Dec 28, 2022 9:41 pm It's MAX BRIGHTNESS for me, from now on.

MLB 2020 on PS4 actually made me get my eyes examined, wherein it was discovered I had early-onset cataracts! I got pretty good at batting, then, after a month or so pause in playing, came back to it, and realized I couldn't really see the pitched ball anymore. Everything seemed darker. Got eyes checked. Had cataract surgery. All good now, and I owe it all to MLB 2020. I still use MAX BRIGHTNESS though.

Years of fans saying "get your eyes checked!!!!!!!!!" to people involved in baseball and finally, a success story.

INTERSTATE DRIFTER 2000

I thought this might be a modern interpretation of Autoduel, but it may be more like Skate or Die? The Steam method of taking a screenshot didn't work. I'll edit this post later. But what it appears to be is:

- Pixel graphics
- You're in control of a car
- You can't seem to adjust the speed of the car
- You run over batteries and thing to recharge your car?

It looks great, there's fine pixel work here. But I am not sure of the goal of the game at the moment.

QUAKE II RTX

I feel this should look better. It's ray traced?



I last played on December 12th, 2021. I tried to load my saved game. It said I couldn't. It expected version 8 but got version 2.

Oh.

Goodbye forever, Quake II.

Quake II RTX is cool for replaying single player stuff but I’d never use it for MP.. which really is the only Quake 2 mode I ever play when I’m running that game.

Starflight and Chronotrigger are getting this treatment today.

This - Chopper Defence - is a single-screen ZX Spectrum game. A modern homebrew video game for it.

https://psychicparrot.itch.io/chopper-defence

I know nothing about British computers! This was my first time using the Retro Virtual Machine emulator. You create your own Spectrum according to taste to play the games. There's no nonsense about having to go out and find ROMs.

The game itself is perfect for what it is - "Q" to fly up, gravity brings you down automatically. Space to fire and O and P to move left and right. Guys parachute in and you gotta get 'em to the safe zone. There are other aliens/enemies trying to shoot you. So it's a little bit Choplifter and Joust. I love it.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Tue Jan 24, 2023 8:58 am I know nothing about British computers! This was my first time using the Retro Virtual Machine emulator. You create your own Spectrum according to taste to play the games. There's no nonsense about having to go out and find ROMs.

The thing that I didn't realize about British computers of that time until I read a book in the mid-00s (and that was also a long time ago so the next thing I say is probably false) is that they shared a chipset with Commodore so all of those Mastertronic games I played on the C64 had been previously released on the Spectrum and such.

This also explains why the game "Nonterraqueous" would always crash on me when I got to a certain room, because assumedly, people didn't properly test ports back then.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Thu Dec 29, 2022 2:56 pm DEAD ISLAND RIPTIDE

I was always curious about the Dead Island games, despite the lukewarm reviews. If people recall, the series first made a splash when they released their first commercial, a sad little story with a Devotchka soundtrack (back when there was a rule that all videogames and movies had to add this Devotchka song to everything):
[media]https://www.youtube.com/embed/ialZcLaI17Y[/media]

People were quick to point out that the commercial had almost nothing to do with the game itself.

Years later, I picked up their followup game, Dying Light, and I have to say, I loved the hell out of it. The plot is basically paint-by-numbers, but the setting feels lived in and exploration is fun. Even silly side quests like chaperoning a salesman as he visits all of his usual business stops (despite the zombie apocalypse) have a touching humorous humanity to them.

So when the previous games would go on sale for like $3, I picked them up, hoping for at least some saving graces. The first one starts off with a movie that makes you instantly hate your protagonist (although I guess which character you choose helps you decide the degree to which you hate them), and I couldn't really go more than 20 minutes before I gave it the mediocre-Netflix-movie treatment and read the rest of the plot on wikipedia- which all sounded terrible and made me uninstall the game in disgust.

I also gave Riptide a try, hoping that it had taken some steps in a good direction, but it also wore out my patience almost instantly.

I'm of the mind that Dying Light's brilliance was somewhat of a fluke, as Dying Light 2 doesn't seem to be as good as the first one, either. Still, as good as Dying Light is, I thought that its expansion, The Following, was even better (plot-wise and atmospherically), so maybe Dying Light 2 will somewhat redeem itself with some future DLC.

Roody_Yogurt wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 11:23 am

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Thu Dec 29, 2022 2:56 pm DEAD ISLAND RIPTIDE

I was always curious about the Dead Island games, despite the lukewarm reviews. If people recall, the series first made a splash when they released their first commercial, a sad little story with a Devotchka soundtrack (back when there was a rule that all videogames and movies had to add this Devotchka song to everything):
[media]https://www.youtube.com/embed/ialZcLaI17Y[/media]

The only thing I remember about that game is that the woke parade hated it:

https://www.polygon.com/2013/1/15/38788 ... nger-shock

I don't know how much influence the woke parade had over most review sites though. It got "meh" reviews.

RealNC wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 2:13 pm

Roody_Yogurt wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 11:23 am

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Thu Dec 29, 2022 2:56 pm DEAD ISLAND RIPTIDE

I was always curious about the Dead Island games, despite the lukewarm reviews. If people recall, the series first made a splash when they released their first commercial, a sad little story with a Devotchka soundtrack (back when there was a rule that all videogames and movies had to add this Devotchka song to everything):
[media]https://www.youtube.com/embed/ialZcLaI17Y[/media]

The only thing I remember about that game is that the woke parade hated it:

https://www.polygon.com/2013/1/15/38788 ... nger-shock

I don't know how much influence the woke parade had over most review sites though. It got "meh" reviews.

"Jesus Christ, what kind of sociopath would actually want this 12 inch resin nightmare?!"

..that would be me. Haven't even played the game but that statue looks bad ass lol

And yeah, I recall playing the first Dead Island and thought the pools and zombies looked cool and it was fun for maybe 20 minutes then just seemed repetitive. Dying Light I found much better, but never finished it. That game gave me an awful nightmare one night too so that makes it a winner.

I predict that within 25 years, it will replace the pop culture relevance previously held by the leg lamp in "A Christmas Story"!

Pac-Man World: Re-Pac is a 3D adventure / side scroller game by Namco that came out recently.

It looks beautiful and it is clearly an attempt to try to again make Pac-Man the sort of draw that Sonic and Mario are. It would appear to be great for kids, which I suddenly care about.

I will say that while I have seen many games not support save anywhere, I have ...... I haven't seen that many not support quit anywhere. There was no way to quit this in the first stage, I had to hit Alt-F4.

I had to get to bed, Pac!