Category: Abandoned

Games I have not completed.

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Death Stranding: Director’s Cut

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Developer: Kojima Productions | Released: 2022 | Genre: 3PS, Adventure

This game was essentially Hideo Kojima discovering walking simulators and then saying:

Let’s make an AAA game out of that!

The human characters models and their facial animations were out of this world in this game. Probably the best I have seen so far. The pimples, the eye colors, the perfect lip sync. Really amazing work.

If anything, the camera was often too close to their faces.

Being late to the party as always, I actually didn’t want to play this for the longest time. It looked like it could be frustrating. While it was certainly not devoid of enemies and boss fights, it had enough interesting treks across Icelandic landscapes to warrant me spending some time with it.

Another reason I liked the game was how refreshingly different it was. In a world dominated by hackneyed tropes such as fantasy games with sword-wielding warriors and wizards with fireballs, first person shooters with reloading guns and bullet sponge enemies, and point-and-click adventures with object-combining inventories and dialog choices, this AAA game dared to try something entirely different.

A package delivery simulator. A more apt definition than walking simulator.

Kickstarter Backer
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Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut

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Developer: inXile Entertainment | Released: 2015 | Genre: RPG, Turn-based

Even though I never played much of the first Wasteland game, I still backed this one. It looked really promising, but the reports of it being difficult kept me postponing it – until today. And I’m happy to say that even playing it so late to the party, I was still grabbed by it and found it really atmospheric.

At least until California.

Taking place in a post-apocalyptic world, it felt like much more of an earnest successor to Fallout 2 than the games Bethesda produced after buying the rights to the franchise.

I played with the preset party featuring Pills, Slick, Bear and Cold-Eye. It started with General Vargas giving my party their first assignment as Desert Rangers – figure out how Ace died while putting repeater units on three radio towers in the wasteland, complete his job, and optionally revenge him. I made sure to accept Angela Deth as my fifth party member, and into the wasteland we ventured.

The atmosphere was excellent. The music and the ambient sounds were spot on, and the random radio calls from someone asking for help an excellent detail. In between the settlements I was traversing a larger map and it was important that our water supply would suffice. This is also where random encounters could happen, or we had to cross nasty clouds with radiation.

In the settlements themselves, it was typical party management and turn-based combat. It felt like I was allowed to move around further each turn than in other turn-based games, which was great for reaching cover behind crates or stones. I won’t get into too much of the story here, but the dialog with NPC’s were well written and their settlements had interesting quests and tasks to do.

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Legend of Grimrock

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Developer: Almost Human | Released: 2012 | Genre: RPG, First Person

Legend of Grimrock was another one of those that I kept postponing for years because of the majority of reviews claiming that it was very difficult. It did have a difficulty selector though, and I made sure to choose the easiest one as I usually do anyway, when this is available. Fearing a level of ruthlessness I try not to allow myself these days, my plan was for an hour of gameplay for Short Sessions.

But damn, this game was fun! I ended up playing it for almost 5 hours.

This first person RPG is supposedly a modern take on Dungeon Master, which I wouldn’t know since I never played that. However, I did know a lot more about the another inspiration, Eye of the Beholder, both from seeing the game on the Amiga back in the day, but also because an awesome version of it was recently ported to the Commodore 64. I’ve watched a lot of development videos of this.

If you’re still tinkering with the C64 today, go check it out. It’s fantastic.

Going back to Legend of Grimrock, the game moved in grid steps like on a chess board. I could move in all four directions and also rotate. Mouselook was there, but I rarely used it. I selected a premade party of four that was thrown almost naked into a mountain dungeon for crimes I could only guess at. Time to walk around in the dark dungeon and pick up armor, weapons, solve puzzles, and fight monsters.

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Just Cause

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Developer: Avalanche Studios | Released: 2006 | Genre: 3PS, Sandbox

This is a post in a nostalgic series with transcriptions of my diary sessions of the games I played many years ago, translated and adapted from Danish. There will be spoilers in these diary sessions.

This is about the first game in the series.

February 10, 2013

It actually surprised me a bit when I discovered that the game developers were Swedish, as the game was set in some fictive Spanish/Mexican/Colombian republic and had a lot of furious Spanish guitar mixed with modern rhythms. The description of the game made it sound like the bright green islands from Far Cry meets the typical game rules from the Grand Theft Auto series.

You get missions and side missions to kill targets or to dust something important, targets in the form of icons on the mini map and the larger map, and you can steal cars, motorcycles, jeeps, trucks, speedboats, police cars, even later helicopters and airplanes. There was a solid road network on the islands – more than I had thought, complete with quite a bit of traffic on the roads. As an added spice of its own, Just Cause and its sequel were notorious for the many stunts you could do. Jumping from car to car, throwing a grappling hook at other cars and helicopters, hang gliding with a parachute, even throwing yourself off high cliffs and popping an always available parachute. And there is probably much more still possible.

However, the game turned out to be too similar to the Grand Theft Auto series for my taste. No saves anywhere but only checkpoint saves at the end of a mission or in a hideout. The latter was much like in Far Cry 2, with the possibility to renew weapons, ammunition, heal, and obtain a new vessel.

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Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris

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Developer: Crystal Dynamics | Released: 2014 | Genre: Platform, Isometric

This is the sequel to Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light which I completed back in 2015.

It was basically more of the same. Platform jumping from an isometric viewpoint, solving puzzles and occasionally shooting monsters. Because I was playing solo, the other three coop characters were always left behind. I even had the staff that one of the other guys usually wielded. The staff was good for blasting vases for gems, but could also raise specific platforms when held up.

Better weapons and amulets could be found and equipped in an old-fashioned inventory that looked like it was nicked from an RPG. I also had access to a torch for lighting braziers, and a rope for ascending a wall when clicking on a specific wall ring. Big spheres returned to be pushed onto switches or into cages. There was even a time bomb version that could have its timer slowed down by raising the staff.

I must confess I wasn’t always a fan of using the mouse to move a cursor for indicating the target of my weapon fire. When the going got tough and there were a lot of monsters chasing me around, I sometimes couldn’t see the cursor and I ended up firing away from the monsters.