26th October 2020

07 – Water
04 – Ancient City
14 – Final Level

A blast from the past…well not exactly, but Turok is still a decent FPS.

This was a N64 exclusive for six months before it got a Windows release and it shows from the start that it was developed with console in mind and not PC and K+M combo. Guys from Nightdive studios who brought this game to Steam and updated for modern systems didn’t seem to touch that console-like aspect. For example you can kill pretty much any enemy by aiming in their direction but you don’t have to place crosshair exactly on their body. It feels like instead of having auto-aim on console they did that to compensate for pad aim and Nightdive left it like that. Enemies are not very challenging either, most of them shoot projectiles or try to melee you, so it’s fairly easy to not take damage most of the time, you can out run pretty much everyone by strafe running. But I hate how they did harder difficulty settings in this, they went with the most lazy solution ever, which is just give everything HUGE health buff to the point it takes fifty magazines to kill one of the first enemy humans and dino’s you encounter. I hate that kind of solution, so I just went with normal difficulty. Nothing else changes as far as I noticed, they still behave the same and do maybe more dmg, but it’s not challenging in any way when every enemy is dumb and tough like a brick wall at the same time. They handled it much better in Turok 2, but that’s for a next review.

I really like the visuals. They have a certain charm to them. OST is pretty decent too, I especially love that track that plays when you swim underwater, it sounds like something out of Mario game lol. There were some weird sound glitches at few points, where every sound was slightly muted and if something shoot or made other sound it was scratchy, not sure why it happened, but I feel like I had that happen in some other old games.

After clearing first level instead of having loading screen to next one, you discover your hub world with a circle of teleporters and key slots required to open the next one. Interesting thing, you can even do world 3 first instead of world 2 for example, if you choose to slot keys there, but you can never really go straight to the last world, as there are different key types and you won’t find the late game keys in early levels obviously. And it’s a little stretch to call it a hub as you can’t really do anything there, there’s no ammo pick up or anything to help you prepare, no fun or dumb stuff to do, not even an NPC.

Levels are sadly not very varied, it’s all slightly different flavors of jungle with one level being entirely in underground temple that’s also my least favorite as I got lost there many times. The last level takes place on some kind of alien underground facility that experiments on dinosaurs and before you reach that it’s more jungle set close to volcano so you get to jump around some lava. Another disappointment are boss fights, all of them play exactly the same, run backwards strafing and shooting the boss until it dies. Your arsenal consists of alien weapons such as Fusion Cannon and Pulse Rifles, to Grenade launchers, quad rocket launchers and ending on more classic weapons like Shotgun and Pistol. Pro-tip, if you kill something with a knife there’s a chance they drop a permanent HP boost, you can go up to 150hp if I remember correctly. There’s also an achievement for doing that. Oh I and would also recommend playing tutorial – it’s short (~10 minutes) and it teaches you strafe jumping, something that’s not around anymore and it’ll help you reach secrets most of time :) And for a “dinosaur hunter” there’s not that many dinosaurs, I killed way more humans, robots and aliens then dinosaurs. A minor complaint. But you do get to fight T-Rex with cybernetic parts.

I realize I maybe complained too much about the game but in the end I enjoyed it because I often had these moments where I immersed myself and mindlessly moved ahead shooting stuff and that’s a good thing and I like it when an FPS does that to me. The rating is after all just my personal enjoyment. There’s also a lot of secrets to discover and a secret weapon to assemble. I recommend this to boomers or people who grew up playing older FPSes.

Visual novel developed by Zachtronics. Yep, the same people that did Space, Opus Magnum and other mind-bending games.

Eliza tries to tackle a lot of topics that are IMO very important today – privacy, use of AI, technology advancements, mental health in today’s society.

We play as Evelyn, a software dev who quit her job years ago after a burnout and who worked on a new app that aims to help people with mental health. The program – Eliza – uses human proxies that read generated script based on clients responses. It is in practice, a chat bot that uses human proxies to make it feel less so like a chat bot and more like an actual conversation. The proxy must stay on script but we don’t get the choice to read off-script until later on. It’s a bizarre app where after hearing someone’s problems, just pretending to be mental health counselor, you get rated like an uber driver where clients give you 5 out of 5 stars, a leveling system and a tip if they so desire. If necessary the app can prescribe drugs to the clients, you wish them the best and “hope to see you soon!”. It’s so ridiculous but it wouldn’t surprise me if it happens one day for real.

Evelyn after not doing anything for the last 3 years decides to get a job as a proxy to see it working in the field and finds out it changed since she left the company. She keeps working and starts feeling that it really doesn’t solve anything, that it’s missing something. It’s also where we meet our first potential friend, our supervisor Rae who worked there for years and while she knows it doesn’t fully work now, she believes it can be better if they could actually track if people take their medicine and if they follow advices given by Eliza. We later get contacted by an old friend who worked with Evelyn on Eliza and who wants to catch up with her, we also run into our old employers, who are very happy to see her and want to recruit us. One of them still leads Eliza, a narcistic boss that uses Eliza as a foundation for something bigger, the other who left the team and started his own project and wants Evelyn too for his grand project. They also both want fuck Evelyn and that’s perhaps one sub-topic that’s touched in this game is the sexism in tech industry, but it is not the main topic like the ones I included at start.

I don’t think I played any serious visual novel before, but I would say the gameplay is very standard. You mostly keep going, listening to conversation, sometimes you can make a choice who to trust or what decision to make, both have consequences later on. Story is pretty good, the people you meet during your proxy work are varied and some interesting, some were really annoying to me, but I think you can relate to all of their problems. I ended up choosing friendship over all this mess.

There’s only one achievement and it’s to win solitaire game on an expert difficulty. To unlock this you need to beat it on easy, medium and hard. The easy/medium/hard weren’t that difficult, but I think spent like an hour trying to beat in on expert lol. So take that into account when looking at my time playing this.

01 – Morning Mist
02 – Waves of Ships

FTL-like rogue-like strategy-lite litelikelitleliktelike.

Bad north starts you with two commanders that need to run away from Viking horde that is pillaging every nearby island and leaving just ashes behind. You need to make it to the last island which will be your last stand and toughest island to defend. On your very first run you’ll only can pick the portrait of your commanders, but it is just an icon as in game all your troops look like blue blobs with tiny hands and legs. Later on you’ll unlock starting items and traits, but at start you don’t get anything.
The islands and enemy types and their group size that will attack are randomized. You pick an island from a map, you defend it, get gold depending on how many houses you save and you spend it on your troops, their abilities or their items if a commander has one. It’s quite similar to FTL where you have to run away from rebel fleet Viking horde, you take turns on map but on island it’s real time passage. However unlike FTL, if full might of Viking horde catches up with you it’s game over, whereas in FTL you could still fight and maybe outrun the fleet, but the fight was always tough and rewards very small. But unlike FTL you can visit more than one location per turn if you split your commanders. It’s risky at the start when you only have few of them, but you can have up to 10 later on so it’s possible to do 3 islands in one turn, get ton of resources and ahead of the horde. And you can only send up to 4 commanders to defend one island. There are three classes you can upgrade your militia to – archers, pike man and sword & shield. It’s all very simple and each class is a counter to some enemy type, but you learn their weaknesses and strengths through playing, you never get any pop up what is good against what.

As you hop from island to island you’ll meet new commanders and they’ll join you if you defend their home. It’s also the only opportunity to unlock starting traits. Every commander carries a banner that also tells you what trait their group has. If it’s just plain color then they have no trait. Traits vary from stuff like “weapons do more damage”, “upgrading skill/item is 50% cheaper” to “resistance to stun/knockback”. And some work better for one class, others less so. Archers on level 2 can knock most units off the boat with increased knockback trait instead of needing to be upgraded to level 3. Pikeman with sharp weapons at lvl 3 can stop pretty much any charging group at them.

The game is pretty tough at start when you try figure it out and you have no advantages at start. It reminds me of Rogue Legacy where you start with nothing, but over time build your castle, but here you unlock starting traits and items. I have to admit, I was very very very lucky because the first item I unlocked was philosophers stone, which gives you one extra gold if commander carrying it survives the island. Upgrade it to level 3 and you get 3 extra coins. And add to that trait that makes item upgrades 50% cheaper and I could have level 3 artifact on turn 3. After unlocking this combo, it made first 2/3 of every run a little too easy.

Super meat boy wanna-be.

AT:TP is a tough platformer to the likes of SMB and The End is Nigh. It has a slight mobile game feel to it as you get rated in stars with one to three stars and it’s the type of game you just pick and go. It is on android, but honestly I can’t imagine playing this on the phone, unless you’re okay with getting one star on every level lol. There are 3 worlds, each having over 50 levels that you can beat in 10-20 seconds if you know the mechanics and layout. Of course the game is not easy, so you’ll spend a lot more on each level. First world focuses mainly on teaching you how to jump and it gets harder and requires more precision as you go. You can endlessly wall jump as long as you have wall to jump on and you can even bounce just before you hit the wall again, you’ll need to learn it for later levels as sometimes you need to get up really fast or just for the sake of getting 3 stars. And you jump around obstacles like spikes, sometimes spikes move and sometimes they are stationary until you get close and they charge at you as a “nice” surprise. Second world introduces platforms that fall off if you stand on them, jumping platforms and sawblades, one more thing from SMB. Not just that but I’m pretty sure some parts of SMB levels are copy-pasted in here. And sawblades get their own variations too, moving sawblades, stationary sawblades, saw blades that are shot from turret.

Third world is all that but we are introduced to turrets – rocket turrets, homing rocket turrets and laser turrets. So generally more fuckery. And it can get really frustrating at times to the point I sometimes wanted to smash my fucking keyboard.
There’s no story at all, the visuals are very minimalistic. It is one-man game after all, so taking that into account it’s not a bad game. Ignoring the levels that are just copied from SMB, the level design is not that bad, some even have slightly two different paths you can take, though I’m not sure if that’s by design or dev just didn’t think you could do something different. I just wish the music was better. It’s one song per world that just loops, ok fine SMB was the same in that regard but IMO the soundtrack there was much better and it fitted thematically with every world. Here it’s just a weak electronic music, I got bored of it very quickly and just turned the sound off and played my own music in the background. Music on world 3 is pretty decent and fast but it gets tiresome too after hours of listening.

Overall when I played with my own music and wasn’t trying to beat absurdly hard levels, I had some fun with it. It’s pretty good at times and found myself immersing in this game trying to push on. But would I recommend it? Eh, that’s difficult considering SMB and TEiN exist, but if you already beaten everything else and looking for something new, then you could give it a shot.
Lastly, I mentioned mobile version. Looks like it’s free, but it is flagged with “in-game purchases” on Play Store, so just mind that. What exactly you buy in this version I’m not sure, on PC you just pay for the game and that’s it, there’s no in-game stuff to buy.

02 – Intro
09 - Scrooge McDuck's Office
15 – Transylvania
19 – The Moon

Well that’s one more “blast from the past” but slightly worse than Turok.

I hope the audio-visual department got a nice bonus for this game, because this is the strongest aspect of this game. Characters look awesome and the soundtrack is absolutely amazing, what’s neat is you can change it to it’s 8-bit version and hear the original, switch back and hear their recreation. Background visuals look good too when they are drawn, but everything at front and not so far in the back is 3D and quality varies. Most of you will see through the level looks ok, but some models have pretty bad textures.

I haven’t played original NES game, but it feels the remaster left gameplay mostly untouched. Enemies are very basic, do one thing, are easy to kill but sometimes game likes to throw many of them at once and it’s easy to get hit. Bosses are easy too, tbh I find the levels themselves harder than all of the bosses. You kill everything by jumping on their heads using pogo jump, which you also use to jump on floor that would normally damage you or to reach secrets. There’s one really annoying thing about this pogo jump though… It has it’s own hitbox and it’s a pretty small cane. And it’s possible to not hit someone as you fall down on them, but your character will touch the enemy and get hit. You can also miss the floor, say you land on the edge, the cane landed outside the edge but part of your character did not, so it breaks your pogo jump and you just stand there. It was a cause of a lot of frustration for me with this game at start as I didn’t understood why it was behaving like that.

100%-ing this is a small chore, you need to beat this pretty much 3-times and grind a little to unlock all the stuff in vault, but I like some of stuff you unlock. Things like art pieces, drawings, original TV series art and sketches, new and old character models. But like I said unlocking all this is a chore.

The game is overall ok, it’s simple and when the frustrating parts don’t get in the way it can be fun. But I played better and I can only recommend buying this on discount. If you already have this and want to play a platformer, give it a try but don’t expect anything big.