I’ve now been listening through a ton of folders in DeepSID while curating for the Decent and Good sort modes for each letter folder in MUSICIANS. If you are even remotely familiar with the High Voltage SID Collection, you may be aware that there’s a lot of garbage there.
Sturgeon’s law would have a field day with this collection.
After a while listening through so many tunes, a pattern of repeated rookie mistakes started to emerge. I repeatedly stumbled into the same mistakes over and over – surefire hints that the composer was subpar, or at least started off on the wrong foot. Of course, there are the obvious hints like bad harmonies or artsy noise experiments, but the following are much more common indicators.
A sign of a subpar folder is when…
A tune starts with filtered noise sounds resembling waves at the beach, then typically overstays the welcome. Yes, I get it, you thought this was awesome. We all did. Now get on with it.
Discovering that reusing the exact same notes in the other voices can make the tune so much louder. Especially annoying with thunks. Having to turn down the volume for a SID tune is surreal.
The beginning of the tune has a simple pattern, perhaps only one voice of bass notes, then repeating this for several minutes until something finally changes. Praise be the Faster button.
A conversion of Axel F, The Final Countdown, Crockett’s Theme or the theme of Airwolf are present. There may still be hope – great composers also converted those – but they usually do not bode well.
The notes for the leader is meandering in a pseudo-random manner, indicating that the composer just typed in whatever. Also, typically the next note is different than the previous one.
Repeating rookie mistakes, like pulse sounds pulsating past their boundaries thereby producing a nasty click, or sliding down then wrapping around to produce high-pitched squeaks.
There are also other things that you would think might be in the same vein, such as using Future Composer or Sound Monitor, but that’s actually not fair. Maybe the composer didn’t have access to anything else but was still talented. Even Deflemask has managed to produce awesome tunes in spite of its memory curse. I rarely let the choice of player color my first-hand impression of a folder.
I just completed the driving adventure game Night Shift. That was weird. Seriously weird.
It took me over two hours to complete it, which seems to be twice as long as it should probably have taken me. But it took a while to get used to the general weirdness and what the game really wanted me to do. It wasn’t just driving along the road – in fact, this was not about racing at all.
It was about getting the sun back.
The goal was to get a flame from each of six puzzle challenges which was made extra weird in the way I had to leave roads to find the next one. In between these puzzles there was a gray sphere showing the flames I had collected so far, rotating around it. Imagine finding this sphere first time with just one flame around it, knowing nothing about what’s going on. That’s how the game is.
It wasn’t completely void of tips, though. Sometimes a white ghost was standing around and if I drove close to it, it offered a light tip as a text line in the bottom of the screen.
The challenges themselves typically revolved around lighting street lights with an extra strong beam of light from my first person car. I could also eliminate other ghost cars with this flashing. Glowing butterflies could be placeholder hints, and sometimes I had to align things in a way that never quite got entirely clear (this was the part where trial and error took over). There was even sort of a different realm that the game shifted to whenever I was out of battery power. This was also used in a couple of puzzles.
More power was obtained by driving close to white ghost trees.
Whenever I was on the “right track” the looping music samples built up to get the sensation of things rolling. Both the use of music and the car itself gave a solid 80’s vibe, and completing the game played an animated piece. This animation was very nice, but I had hoped I could have driven up the sun-rising road while watching the dawn grow stronger. I think that might have worked quite well.
The game was weird, the 3D engine with sprites was deliberately retro (it looked like it belonged in the mid 90’s) and the goals frequently confusing, but I could also see that the game had a certain charm.
This is a post in a nostalgic series with transcriptions of my diary sessions of the games I played from 2000 2011 and onwards, translated and adapted from Danish. There will be spoilers in these diary sessions.
I’m back with this series again after quite a long hiatus. The previous entry was Outcast, a game I played and wrote about in 2001 in my diaries, and then translated to a blog post in July 2017. Originally I decided to abandon the series mainly because I was convinced I didn’t have any other readers but myself, but also because I wasn’t really sure the diary sessions of 2001 would be up to par. This was a point in time where 3D games was still a novelty to me and thus a lot of the session texts were somewhat naive.
Now I have this idea that I will jump past about a decade of diary sessions, up to 2011, and continue from there. There are several reasons for this. It would close the “hole” between my first failed blog attempt in 2011 and the revitalization in 2015, and it would have session texts from a considerably more experienced gamer, an older me with more games under my belt to compare with.
Dropping the blog in 2011 was followed by going from MMORPG back to single player games, with sort of a brief digression with Portal 2, and then this game – Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. This game was special at this time because it managed to kickstart my single player hobby.
But what is even more interesting is that it almost failed at that to begin with.
Developer: Carlos Coronado | Released: 2014 | Genre: Adventure, First Person
This was a first person adventure game with more or less surrealistic vistas, and puzzles typically involving moving and dropping “nerve clusters” that looked a little like tumbleweeds. How to use these balls is actually a spoiler, so as always I will discuss the details of this in the spoiler section below.
It took me about 4½ hours to get through it and I liked a lot about it. Especially the way it looked. Just like Deadfall Adventures, the level environments and the graphics were definitely the high note of this game. A few levels were even so pretty it made me forget myself for a minute or two upon arrival. Puzzles were for the most part okay, but sometimes involved some traipsing – and there was no sprint button. It also had a smell like being a borderline mod for an FPS. It had a very basic title screen and there were glitches.
But even so, I still had a good time completing it. The idea of using the balls was cute and made for relaxed puzzles, apart from a few overdone exceptions that I will mention in the spoilers. If I went back in time knowing what I know now, I would definitely play it again.
The sequel to Grow Home was much more of what made the first one so charming.
It was clear that although it was expanded in almost all directions, it was still built upon the same code base. Same climbing, same growing star plants, same graphical style, same rag doll animations. But where the first one took place on a small island and you grew one star plant into space, the sequel took place on a spherical planet with lots of floating islands around it, and four star plants could be grown.
However, growing star plants was not the objective this time around. M.O.M., the spaceship computer, had its parts spread all over the planet after a meteor storm, and I now had to find the crash sites. To help me a new assistant, P.O.D., could be used to view the planet from above, and it moved M.O.M. parts to a small moon using a magnet that I had to align like a seasoned oil worker.
P.O.D. looked like a satellite and sometimes also came with tutorial tips and observations.
Crystals could still be found for upgrading abilities, but these abilities were now initialized by finding “tubs” with expanding red parts. It made B.U.D. more of an Inspector Gadget this time around. The dandelion was now permanent and didn’t lose petals. Rocket jumping could be improved with crystals to actually lift me upwards, and the glider could be expanded with a jet boost.
I could also become a rolling ball but I didn’t use that one much.
You could argue that these improvements made the game too easy, but honestly it was essential now that so much more landmass had to be explored. Without the ability to glide and rocket boost around without the help of growing star plants, it would have gotten stale fast. So it was all good with me.
It took me just a couple of minutes past 4 hours to complete it, and I loved it.
Such a charming climbing game, with the low polygon style making for great vistas with almost all of the grown stems and floating islands in view. The goal in itself was simple – find red flowers on the massive star plant and grow them towards energetic islands. Connecting to all of these special islands would grow the mother plant itself. Reach 2000 meters and its main flower opens, grab a star seed from it and win.
Implementing this required a lot of climbing with left and right mouse buttons, which reminded me a lot of the old arcade game Crazy Climber to begin with. The robot in control, B.U.D., was essentially a rag doll and it made for deliberately weird climbing at times. Keep on rollin’, baby.
A side goal was to find crystals growing on islands and in caves. This wasn’t just for collecting as it also increased my powers; jumping, a zoom-out camera, and a limited rocket boost. B.U.D. made cute winning sounds whenever I managed to grab a crystal. Another side goal was to drag plants, fruits and animals into one of the checkpoints for analysis. This gave more text to read about them in a data bank.
Cute, but not all that important. Crystals and growing was the main concern.
Helping with the climbing, I could also grab a dandelion and use it for floating as a parachute. The flower slowly lost its petals while floating, so it was a limited ride. Later a leaf could also be used for gliding, but I preferred the dandelion. Jump off an island, float back towards its side, then grab hold and climb.
This was an FPS from 2013 with puzzles to be solved by an ancestor of Alan Quatermain. It took place in 1938 in Egypt, Arctic and Mayan ruins, and usually together with Jennifer, a female partner. It was all very Indiana Jones. Together with waves of Nazis, it made it feel like Wolfenstein meets Tomb Raider.
It was also an unremarkable game in many ways, with a B-movie plot featuring cliché-riddled dialog and stereotypical characters. The fights were simple and predictable, but luckily also not quite as common as I expected. There were a lot of calm moments solving puzzles or finding treasures. The latter could upgrade my health, marksmanship or my flashlight, but it honestly didn’t feel like it mattered much.
At the bottom line there were a lot of flaccid elements of this game to give it an equally mediocre score, but at least the level design was almost worth the price of admission. It wasn’t phenomenal – get up close and some circles were octagons – but from a distance, the environments actually looked quite nice.
But the game design wasn’t always solid. There were a lot of cutscenes without interaction for many levels, then about halfway through I suddenly had to hit keys and mouse buttons in what the game considered a typical QTE. That was late for this change of heart. Most puzzles were easy and took only seconds to solve through, but there were confusing exceptions where the solution was pretty obscure.
Same thing about finding the treasures for upgrading my abilities.
I can’t play an MMO as a single player game these days. I find it oddly, echoingly lonely to explore a vast world without having the buzz of guild or buddy chat quietly in the background.kedaha, Quarter to Three forums
I’ve been able to solo some of the later expansions of World of Warcraft lately, but I do feel this problem in every MMORPG I touch these days.
In fact, probably the main reason I got so much into EverQuest 2 in 2008 and even tried raiding was that I got headhunted into good guilds that immediately spawned some good chat and companionship. Without that I would probably have given up on the game.
Developer: Animu Game | Released: 2015 | Genre: 3PS, Adventure
Another really short game. This one took me about 1½ hour.
It was a third person jumping game with a little bit of sword fighting and puzzle themes. The anime look, with the princess protagonist and her silly bows, gave a few Final Fantasy vibes too. But this was a simple game with just six short levels, of which the sixth one was a boss fight in an arena. The fighting itself was incredibly basic. I could mash a button or click another to back off. That’s it.
Every level was a hotchpotch of blocks and stairs with puzzles mostly based on buttons and levers. The princess arrives on a balloon and leaves on one as she finds it, usually at the top. Enemies drop coins and I could get a lot more by smashing secret statues. If I dropped off somewhere, she whistled for the balloon to come grab and drop her off at the latest checkpoint. So far, so good.
What was not so awesome was what happened if the enemies got rid of my health bar. Level restart.
I bought this game expecting it to be a walk in the park. And for the most part it was. The smaller enemies were pushovers, but sometimes a skirmish included a few of their bigger brothers that required many hits to die, and they could get lucky and eat more than half my health bar. After the first three levels I decided not to let myself be frustrated by this and installed a trainer.
Infinite health. No regrets. And peace at mind to concentrate on the puzzles.
Each level had its own gimmick. The first had spears and pushable crates, and the second had blades and spinners. Both took place in daylight. The third level went into nighttime and had windy loops and annoying draft paths that could push me off the edge. In the fourth level, pillars had to be spun around to send dots into crystals that regenerated solid matter to walk on. In the fifth, I could walk on big boulders.
As mentioned before, the sixth level was a boss fight in an arena. I can’t say how difficult it really was as I was still blessed with trainer ignorance, but it felt difficult. The fight had several phases and the princess antagonist shot all kinds of magic fires, crystals and beams, and some of it even seemed to be downright impossible to avoid getting hit by. I sure hope that fight had its own set of checkpoints.
There were a few other things from the basket of pain as well. The protagonist and antagonist had this thing about talking to each other all the time, and just as in games such as e.g. Bastion, I was far too busy with fights and puzzles to pay attention to any of it. The voice of the princess hero was also squeaky and made it painfully obvious that this really was a game for kids.
Developer: Frictional Games | Released: 2015 | Genre: Adventure, Horror
I completed this first-person science fiction adventure in a little over 12 hours, and it was magnificent.
After a surprising start mostly in a contemporary apartment, my protagonist self was switched to the 22nd century on PATHOS-II, an oceanic underwater research complex. From then on the game felt like the little brother to Alien: Isolation with a smattering of BioShock mixed in.
This is probably the closest I have ever seen a game be an FPS without actually being an FPS. It had all the elements of a good AAA level FPS – a good story, great details, roaming monsters to avoid, audio logs to be found, and computers to be searched and operated. Sometimes I felt the influence of both Half-Life and Doom 3 as well. And it’s all compliments on my part. I don’t necessarily need to shoot stuff too.
SOMA made me feel at home, back when video games did so much more for me.
The game switched to PATHOS-II after a peculiar time jump explained by the brain data of our protagonist having been recorded and then reused. The game then takes place among several ocean complex buildings that I had to explore, and sometimes walk across the ocean floor to reach the next complex.
After a few eerie encounters with robots believing they’re humans, I found one self-aware exception in the form of Catherine, which I uploaded to a handheld omnitool I was always carrying around. From then on I could sometimes attach the omnitool to a computer panel and she would appear on a monitor, complain a little about the sensation of awakening like this, and then talk to me about what to do next.
The game was pretty much linear, with many doors to open and obstacles to bypass. Sometimes monsters appeared roaming a dark area, and just like in their previous game, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, I then had to stealth around it. Luckily I had chosen the safe difficulty setting so they wouldn’t be able to just kill me over and over. I never once regretted this decision.
The overall goal was to find a vehicle (or an alternative way of transportation) to reach the deep abyss and launch something called the ARK into space using a rocket. Yes, from the bottom of the sea.
Trifles: Click
Going into details. There are spoilers here.
Meeting real humans was very rare. The only “real” encounter was in the beginning, back in our time, where a guy in a blue shirt instructed me to take a seat.
Just as in Amnesia, I had to click and hold things like doors and drawers then move the mouse to open them. It quickly felt so natural that I was wondering why this wasn’t more common in video games.
Sure were a lot of chairs in my way when approaching desks that I had to move away. I get why they had to be there, though. I guess it couldn’t have been any different.
Sometimes windows had to smashed through, and only a fire extinguisher could be used for this.
Lots of audio logs. Sometimes by “sensing” past dialog when clicking corpses or on wall recorders. At other times there were audio logs on the computer, or an old fashioned tape recorder in a drawer.
In the beginning of the game I sometimes had problems understanding when I could jump and crouch versus clicking the edge of something that the protagonist would then climb.
Most of the ocean floor sequences were pretty much walking simulator territory. Sometimes a cute spheroid-type robot would tag along and open a door by welding it. It reminded me of ABZÛ.
Tables or desks in the more “important” rooms typically had a few photos or documents I could zoom up and rotate with the mouse. Almost all of them were only to satisfy the player’s curiosity.
Being exposed to the water of the ocean was a surreal experience at first. I was wondering why I suddenly had some sort of diving suit on. It later turned out I was kind of a cyborg, but still.
Health rechargers sometimes occurred as organic sphincters that I had to put a hand into. I did that after e.g. a drop, but I’m not sure if it was ever necessary because of the safe difficulty setting.
Did those surveys really matter or were they just a waste of time?
In the flooded vessel complex I had a hard time bypassing a monster type with light dots scattered on his face. I decided “starface” would be a lovingly fitting name.
Sometimes the game made me feel bad by turning off life support to a “human” connected up with fungus and electronics. At one point I even had to use a stun baton to zap a robot and get its chip.
I liked the puzzle where I had to turn an antenna to match up lines on a radar panel in order to call a zeppelin. The rail track area itself was a bit confusing at first, though.
Searching Catherine’s room (while she could comment on it from a computer panel in another room) brought a smile to my face. I bet she was secretly furious about it.
The first attempt at entering the abyss was by using a vehicle called the DUNBAT, but when we finally found it, it had merged with human intelligence and agonizingly destroyed itself. Think Robocop.
There was a cute part where we had to put the chip of a human consciousness into a computer, then also simulate his surroundings and his girlfriend. He wouldn’t calm down and give us info until then.
That computer where modules had to be toggled and rebuilt really had me confuzzled at first. In hindsight I don’t even think it was a bad puzzle. Just… so very unexpected.
In a maze of rooms, a “humpback” monster was roaming around. A computer could lock doors and I tried for a long time to lure it into a room. However, I think it was cheating with teleportation.
In the meantime, I was stuck for too long in that maze because of not understanding how to plug a chip into a door panel. For some reason I didn’t catch at first that it had to sit behind two small levers.
There was as a part in the game with a bit too many blind monsters around for my liking. I was afraid the rest of the game would then be like this, but luckily the developers backed out of it.
Nice touch with those spheroid ocean floor cages.
After collecting three important components, I had to sit in a chair and transfer my consciousness to a deep dive suit. This let to a duality problem with great philosophical implications. I loved that part.
After a long elevator ride into the abyss, I had to follow blue lights in a “storm” of rivers featuring a big fish monster. When I finally got inside, the hero said, “Never been happier to be inside.” So very true.
In the abyss complex, I met a roaming “oil human” that just followed me around in a creepy manner. I also found the very last human, a woman tied to a machine that I turned off. She asked me to do it.
I found the ARK container and sent it away on a monorail. I tried to follow it but the corridor was blocked. I was stuck here for way too long before I found a small opening to a cave.
This led to an organic “heart” where “starface” wanted me to put a hand into it and kill it. It’s was not even a boss fight, but it did eat my mechanical hand. Then “starface” got eaten by the fish monster.
Another nice touch was how I climbed ladders with only one good hand. Lots of rung hugging.
I sat in a chair, moved the ARK into a rocket tube, then launched it into space while transferring our consciousnesses to it. I think it was meant to gain speed through a tube all the way up to the surface.
Then came another duality situation I probably should have anticipated coming. We were still left behind while our second selves were in the ARK too. Our hero was absolutely not happy. Bad ending.
After the surprisingly short credits, a good ending had me in control of my ARK counterpart walking out of a cave and into grassy surroundings with birds singing – then finally meeting Catherine.
I had problems switching to a lower resolution. The game took up part of the screen with the desktop still being visible in the rest of it. I had to override a high DPI scaling in the compatibility settings to fix this.
