Fnord

Bit of an eclectic mix of games this time around. Licensed action game, really outdated FMV game and a weird and mostly forgotten spinoff chapter to one of the most famous turnbased strategy games of all time.

Transformers: War for Cybertron

7.6 hours, no achievements
SG win

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Finally got around to completing this old SG win!

Transfromers: War for Cybertron is a 3rd person action game set in the Transformers universe. It takes place in the earlier stages of the war, before the robots reached earth, and functions as a bit of an origin story for Optimus Prime, and the Ark (the ship that they flew to earth)

This game is fun, but a bit of a missed opportunity. You've got big stompy robots who can transform into vehicles, but this particular bit was a bit under-developed. The vehicle mode felt like, for the most part, something you used to traverse longer stretches, while the robot mode was for fighting, and very rarely did it feel worth it to use the vehicle mode in fights. I wish they would have integrated this defining feature of Transformers more heavily into the gameplay (that said, in the old comics and cartoon, apart from the ones who could transform into tanks or fighter planes,most transformers stayed in their robot form during fights, but still, it would have been fun if they found some uses for the vehicle mode).

Another gripe I have with the game are the weapons. Why go with projectile weapons in a setting that so heavily favours energy weapons? And the weapons themselves are really what you would expect from any generic 3rd person military action game. You've got your shotgun (comes in 2 flavours), your assault rifle, your rocket launcher, grenade launcher, sniper rifle and so on.

The game also has a serious lack of enemy variety. There are two campaigns, one for the decepticons (evil) and one for the autobots (good), but the enemies you face are pretty much the same through the entire game. Small grunts, shielded guys you need to shoot in the back, big heavy guys with miniguns, annoying cloaked enemies, snipers and flying grunts. It really could use more enemy types.

That said, the gameplay is solid. While the level design might not win any awards, the different arenas you end up fighting in feel varied enough, and the gunplay is fun, if a bit generic.

So overall, it's a good game, just one that should have been so much more!


MegaRace

0.8 hours, no achievements
GOG version

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Now this is a type of game that could only have been made during a very brief period of time! MegaRace is an FMV racing game, and if you've never played one of those before, let me introduce you to the concept!

CDs were just getting popular among the general public, and suddenly game developers found themselves with a lot more space than they had ever had before. A floppy fits 1,44mb, an early CD 650mb! So what do you do with all that extra space you suddenly have? You fill it with videos of course! Filming actors (or people on the dev team, the boss's neighbour's gardener and so on) and making games out of these movies was easy enough, and so a lot of companies did.
And at roughly the same time, someone got the bright idea that you could just play games on top of these movies. And that's a good fit for racing games, after all you're only going forward, right? So what they did was that they just made a short movie for each track and then they defined where at any given point in the movie the player's car could be. Anything you can interact directly with and changed in any way is just added on top of the movie, and the movie itself plays at different speeds depending on how fast you're going. This of course resulted in a lot of limitations, as you can't turn around or in any way go off course. But on the other hand, these pre-rendered movies could look far better than anything the hardware of the time could normally produce.

And MegaRace did just that, you're racing on top of a pre-rendered movie, showing futuristic race tracks, while trying to shoot enemy cars. And between these races you get a wonderfully hammy performance by an actor, who's really giving it his all to ham it up (in a good way!)

MegaRace is a fun game. It's not spectacular, and had it been a longer game it would have overstayed its welcome, but it was a fun and very quick playthrough.


Heroes Chronicles Chapter 2: Conquest of the Underworld

14.7 hours, no achievements
GOG version (not actually HoMM 3 HD, but close enough!)

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The Heroes Chronicles series is a weird one. Back in 2000 & 2001 New World Computing released a series of standalone campaigns. The idea was that these would be sold for a lower price than the normal game, and thus would get more people to try the game. They worked as a bit of an introduction to the HoMM series. And they also filled in the gaps of what happened between Heroes 3 & 4. At launch these cost about 20€ each, but they were later sold in packs of 3 campaigns. Now to make matters even more confusing, not all campaigns were sold, if you bought a certain amount of them you could then download additional campaigns from their website (a website that obviously is no longer around). And because they messed up the release, chapter 5 (which as one of the free ones) could not be downloaded if you had any other version than the North American ones.

You can buy the complete set on GOG now, so the bit above is just some history. A further oddity about these is what they removed. These games just offer the campaigns, and nothing else, no skirmish or multiplayer. So these are just for those who have a hankering for more HoMM 3-style campaigns. And that at least they deliver. I've just beaten the first two (and I beat the first one a while back), but while the first one was really easy, the second one was a bit more challenging. Something that I think they do quite well with these, better than the base game ever did, was injecting more story during the levels. You frequently get text boxes giving more information about what's going on, often representing talk between important characters or observations from the main character.
Where I do feel that this campaign falters a bit is with making it clear what the mission objectives actually are. You're often supposed to find certain objects, and these are very easy to miss when you just move around the map. And the campaign makes heavy use of gates that require certain conditions to be met, one might require you to have visited a specific location, another might need a specific character to open it, and then a third one might need you to bring a few creatures of a specific type, and you don't know what these want until you visit them, and they do go overboard with them. Level 5 in particular is tedious due to this. But still, this game offered 8 above average quality HoMM 3 levels, so I can't really complain. Now I just need to beat the remaining 6…