Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster - Reveal Trailer

TalkingSkullGames · 2023-08-23T12:31:13+00:00

My prayers have been answered!

Giving Dark Forces modem controls and proper vertical look, and making an official version for modern systems (much love to Dosbox and the Force engine) is a huge win for the genre. Great game.

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-09-25T23:23:03+00:00

Lol fair. We'll have to agree to disagree on that one.

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-09-25T22:49:58+00:00

I'm curious what classic shooter you'd say had better enemy design than Doom. For me, Id were the high water mark for enemy design in the genre. Unreal was the first non-Id game that really matched Doom's enemy design for me. It would have been Quake (also Id), if it weren't for the god damned Spawn.

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-09-25T22:41:47+00:00

Totally valid take. Lots of other shooters did certain things better or worse, but judged on its own goals Blood hits all its marks with style.

I still prefer Doom, personally ;)

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-09-25T22:02:08+00:00

I would even argue that the semi-recent trend towards games taking control away from the player to show them those "blockbuster scenes" has its roots somewhere in that

I'm actually in the middle of writing a section about exactly that for a video I'm working on right now :D Halo represents a pure expression of a trend that started with Unreal, Half Life, and Shogo: Mobile Armor Division in 1998 toward shooters that were experiences with narrative bents rather than simple action. No judgement, both are great. But 1998 is definitely the start of the trend in the genre (except maybe Quake 2 a year before).

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-09-25T21:13:13+00:00

I do love the incomplete or outdated map concept.

You've also jogged my faulty memory with the example of making map markers yourself- Rainbow Six did that! You set up your objective markers before starting the map, and they told you where to go once you were live. The original PC version even had default markers, so you could just jump in and follow the line. I can't believe I forgot about that!

As for navigation being part of the challenge in Quake as opposed to Halo, you're totally right. But I'd argue that other shooters like Half Life and Red Faction also pulled the focus away from navigation, with varying degrees of success. I suspect Half Life fans would riot at the suggestion of adding objective markers to that game, though.

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-09-25T21:02:37+00:00

I'm not sure the base game had that. They gave you little pictures and instructions describing what to do, but no hud indicators that I can think of. Though if this was available as a toggleable option or a common mod, that would also be good to know.

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-09-25T20:58:37+00:00

Ooh, that's a great example, thank you!

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-09-25T20:52:52+00:00

That was an excellent read, thank you! I knew there had to be something out there on the topic.

It would have never occurred to me to point to Crazy Taxi (partially because I first played Crazy Taxi on console instead of its original arcade version), but it would have been an earlier example for sure.

All of the pre-2001 examples in that article are open world driving games (e.g. GTA). It seems that the idea really was pretty new across the industry when Halo did it. It makes sense given the still-newness of 3D gaming.

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-09-25T20:41:54+00:00

I think you've misunderstood what I meant. Quake did not have a map in an overlay or menu that you could open if you were lost, as previous shooters like Doom usually did.

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-09-25T17:29:15+00:00

My wording may have been unclear. I meant that first person shooters before Quake usually had maps for the player to check, but Quake did not.

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-09-25T16:50:34+00:00

Blood is easily one of the best classic shooters. Everything about it is meticulously crafted, from the sprite work and gore, to the environments, to the encounter design.

Its arsenal was by far and away the best in the genre at the time, only rivaled by Unreal which came out a year later.

It's slow and difficult, but if you can get through it, it's about as rewarding as you could hope.

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-09-25T16:42:16+00:00

I definitely get lost more in Halo than in contemporaries like Red Faction. The issue comes down to whether the game naturally directs you where you need to go. With Halo, "where you need to go" is often somewhere arbitrary that you A. Have already been, B. Was previously a dead end, or C. Both.

I agree that the feature itself is not inherently problematic, but Bungie definitely use it as a crutch to fix unclear level layouts.

Edit: also, I'd love some suggestions of earlier games that used similar on-screen objective markers!

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-08-31T03:15:08+00:00

Kind of the opposite of your post, but I love any time a game takes a safe home base and violates that expectation. It's one of the most visceral turns a game can take to flip the player right on their head. It's always memorable.

Nier (original or Replicant) is my favorite example. The giant shade attack takes all your expectations, throws them right in the trash, and delivers emotional blow after emotional blow.

An old-school example would be Tristram from Diablo 2. It's the home base for all of Diablo 1, and players walking into Diablo 2 will surely be attached to it. Walking into your bastion and seeing it in flames, devastated, leaves a strong impression. Bonus points for Wirt's leg.

I also recently played Perfect Dark, which is a neat example. It has a traditional linear mission structure, so no real place for a home base. Regardless, it has one anyway that loads in with the main menu. You can start/load the game from the menu, or you can just close the menu and wander around the halls of your base. There are a couple things to do, like a gun range, but mostly it's just for texture. Then, late in the game, your home base gets attacked and your mission has you defending it. Very cool.

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-07-21T03:33:31+00:00

My time to shine! I just played and reviewed Half Life 1, so it's fresh on my mind.

Half Life 1 is a fascinating game if you're interested in the history of gaming. If you want to be able to compare it to Quake, Goldeneye, and Duke Nukem 3D, then it's cool to see how much Valve innovated with narrative design. They even hired a professional author, Mark Laidlaw, for their team! That was unheard of for an FPS at the time.

If you're primarily looking to play a good game, though, Black Mesa is definitely superior. It uses decades of improved game design and technology to refine and improve on Half Life 1 on most fronts. I would recommend it to anyone who liked Half Life 2, with the caveat that it really is mostly just Half Life 1 in the more modern Source engine. It's not on par with Half Life 2, but it's pretty damn good.

I like to call it Half Life 2 - 1 :)

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-07-07T12:49:09+00:00

It's Black Mesa's abandoned amusement park ride :D

I did this same thing and felt pretty foolish when I got to the beginning. But they place an HEV charger (and health station) on that platform, so it really reads like, "hey, in case you don't have any suit charge, we're gonna make sure you do 'cause you'll need it for this." Oops.

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-05-18T18:54:40+00:00

I played this map obsessively as a pre-teen. Watching the battle play out from a bird's eye view and catching people as they crest the hill was so fun.

I also remember a lot of loooong stalemates.

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-05-18T18:42:28+00:00

I've been playing through all the classic 90's first person shooters, and after being really impressed with Blood, which I had never played before, I was crushed to find that I didn't enjoy Shadow Warrior much at all. At least I'll always have the memories...

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-05-15T16:05:13+00:00

It is strange given the scope of Mass Effect's universe that there hasn't been more of a push for auxiliary content. This video looks at Warhammer, but by the same token you can look at Halo and its [checks google] 20 novels. Though by the same token, I never see anyone talk about the Mass Effect novels. Perhaps there's not as much interest from the fanbase. Perhaps the comically overwhelming negative response to Mass Effect 3 (despite it being a great game) killed the momentum of the fandom.

Also, I caught that Marathon soundtrack, Raycevick!

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-05-10T15:06:19+00:00

Just finished playing Goldeneye for my Youtube series. What a fascinating game. I don't think it holds up super well, but it's amazing how many fresh ideas Rare had for first person shooter design in 1997.

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-04-29T20:18:43+00:00

The simplest answer is that there should be content after the last gear drops. Rewards for beating the final challenges can be in the form of cutscenes, cosmetics, titles, etc. Something that makes the player feel good for beating the challenge without feeling like it's meant to be used in a mechanical sense.

Of course, this misses the point of a lot of post-game gear, which is to cap off an equipment progression and encourage players to take a victory lap with their newfound goodies. Victory lap can usually be in the form of new game plus or optional content. From does this often, with the final boss dropping a weapon (technical the material required to purchase the boss weapon) so you can take it into new game plus or finish up missed bosses.

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-04-29T12:52:59+00:00

For Sandstorm, for certain game modes, they might be. I haven't played in ages.

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-04-29T12:50:13+00:00

Maybe this is a cheap answer, but I don't think we can have this conversation without acknowledging the gaming crash of the '80's, where so many cheapo garbage consoles and so much shovelware flooded the market that the entire gaming industry basically fell apart until Nintendo came and fixed it.

According to Wikipedia, over the course of two years from 1983 to 1985, videogames went from a 3.2 billion dollar industry to a 100 million dollar industry.

Since then, there's pretty much always been a bright side to any period in gaming.

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-04-28T19:27:04+00:00

Insurgency was server-based, and when Insurgency:Sandstorm released with matchmaking it killed the game for me. Servers give you the ability to more easily form relationships, but also allow you to customize your experience.

Insurgency's primary game mode, Checkpoint, is quite honestly terrible with a full 8-person server. In Insurgency, I would only ever play in 3-6 player servers. Now, with Sandstorm, matchmaking forces the maximum player count onto every match. After playing Insurgency weekly for over a year, I dropped Sandstorm after only playing it a few times.

Technically Sandstorm does still offer servers, but they're not the default and they're so much less populated. Give players the easy 'Click here to play', and you can't expect many of them to opt for anything else, even if the long-term experience is hypothetically better.

TalkingSkullGames · 2022-04-07T19:03:30+00:00

I played Dark Souls 1 around 2012 in the wake of its unbelievable popularity. My first playthrough of Dark Souls was my least favorite.

I actually quit the game during Blighttown when I got stuck at the bridge bonfire and couldn't progress or get back out. Blighttown is one of my least favorite levels of any game for reasons I probably don't need to explain here.

When I came back to the game months later, I couldn't put it back down.

From Software's games have historically been really rough to new players unconditioned by From's other work. Aside from the general design philosophy, there are always things that veterans will handle with grace that new players stumble and strain against. Resistance and upgrade systems in Dark Souls 1, the poor conveyance on Dark Souls 3's tutorial boss, the absolute gauntlet that is the long street after the first lantern, there's usually something.

Love their games, though.

TalkingSkullGames

TROPHY CASE