This is a the first in a new series of gallery blog posts showcasing how a particular object or theme was shown in the many PC games I’ve completed.
A few years ago, I was dumb enough to embark on a new project which I called game tropes. I’ve always taken a lot of screenshots of the hundreds of PC games I’ve played the past couple of decades, and the goal was to go through these thousands of screenshots and sort them into categories. It could be anything. Bridges, goblins, fountains, floating rocks, keyholes, tents – the sky was the limit.
I’ve always been incredibly disciplined and stubborn when it comes to finishing really big and monotonous projects, but this time I had really bitten off more than I could chew. Since I had folders with sometimes more than a hundred screenshots for more than 500 PC games, the amount of work multiplied into truly astronomically big proportions.
Still, I kept at it for many months collecting and sorting screenshots in various folders before finally burning out. Then I set the project aside for some years only to take another look at it again. Why did I abandon this project? It was such as good idea! And yet again, I started collecting and sorting even more screenshots before burning out for the second time. And again the project just collected dust for years.
I’ve always wondered how it would feel like being Sisyphus. Now I knew.
But I still think the original idea is really good, so I’ve decided I’m going to start publishing gallery blog posts with the material I managed to collect before giving up. There is still a ton of screenshots to be shared, and there’s a lot of good stuff there.
The benefit from publishing these galleries is twofold. First, it could be interesting for game designers to have a look at how various game developers showed a certain type of object in older games. It could serve as inspiration. And second, it’s just plain entertaining to see how the same object or theme works across games of different styles and genres. At least I think it is.
Yes, you could just google this, but it’s my hope that my images may offer something in an easy way that may actually be useful to someone. Also, it would be a shame to let all of my work go to waste.
8/10Developer: Starward Industries | Released: 2023 | Genre: Adventure, Facile
Take the excellent Firewatch, throw it in a blender together with Lifeless Moon, maintain the first person perspective, hit the blender button – and you’ll end up with something much like The Invincible.
As Yasna, a female astronaut originally party of a small team landing on a barren planet, you wake up in the sand much like Matt Damon did in The Martian – albeit with amnesia. Thankfully the amnesia part is not a significant part of the game. Soon she remembers most of what she needs to remember, except for the main purpose of the game – where to find the other astronaut team members.
It doesn’t take long until she has another person on the radio that she talks to throughout most of the game. Commander Novik is in orbit and can only hear what she is doing – she has to describe the things she finds. Often this evolves into interesting discussions, and sometimes they even get mad at each other. If you have played Firewatch, this is the part that reminded me so much of that game.
This was a beautiful side-scrolling puzzle platform game with great variety, featuring a boy looking for his sister abducted by mechanical aliens. Early in the game, the boy rescues a small pet which opens up for cooperation puzzles. The kind where the pet can do things the boy can’t do, and vice versa.
The pet is really cute and you can pat it.
Although the game does have its challenges, for most of the game they were spaced out far by stretches of easy jumping and contained cooperation puzzles. As always it does get a little more challenging towards the end, which also introduces a few QTE – including the quick tapping kind. I would say these are not the worst QTE I’ve encountered, but you do have to pay close attention.
I also liked that many puzzle set pieces had an exit with a rope on a ledge that required the pet to go fetch it for the boy to climb. First, this made sure the puzzle couldn’t be exited until both characters were able to leave together, and second, it made it impossible to leave until the puzzle was solved. Later on in the game, the rope on a ledge is replaced with a tentacle creature but it serves the same purpose.
I’ve have used PaintShop Pro for decades, even before Corel took over from Jasc Software. It has been my companion for everything that required graphical work. Game images, web development, ideas. I learned about filters, layers, selections and various other modern editing techniques through PaintShop Pro.
I’m not really a graphics artist per se, but I could usually get things done in PaintShop Pro.
Why did I choose PaintShop Pro and not Adobe Photoshop? It wasn’t really much of conscious choice. Since I knew I wasn’t going to use it professionally, I just chose whatever was cheaper at the time. That quickly painted me into a corner. I got used to the way its many features had to be used, the hotkeys, and all the subtle differences in general. I knew early on that it would probably be difficult to replace it.
PaintShop Pro did have some features that many other graphics programs couldn’t be bothered to have. It had built-in screen capture, something Affinity Photo 2 and GIMP didn’t find important to have – at least not when I checked them out shortly before writing this blog post.
I also used its batch feature a lot for processing all the game images you see in this blog. And those are just the tip of a mountain of game screenshots I have collected for decades now. Several DVD ROM images have been created to hold all these. I’m not even sure why I always saved them aside. I almost never go back and reminisce over my old gaming days anymore. I guess you could call me a screenshot hoarder.
But PaintShop Pro also made me angry at times. Even though I had bought the program, quitting it sometimes showed a dialog box with an advertisement about upgrading to a newer version. There was a check box in the bottom for not showing this dialog box again. It never worked, and I just knew it was never supposed to. No event had ever been bound to it. That frequently pissed me off.
7/10Developer: Tensori | Released: 2024 | Genre: Adventure, Facile
Not much to say about this one. It’s a genuine walking simulator through underground halls and corridors frequently populated by pools – and a few surprises along the way. It was very pretty and worth it as kind of an interactive art piece – even if it didn’t even last two hours.
With a solid focus on atmosphere, the game is at times unnerving and sometimes even scary, although it’s devoid of jump scares and monsters. It’s just you. Well, almost. Don’t let the simplistic beginning with tiles and swimming pools fool you. It does get much more interesting later.
9/10Developer: Geometric Interactive | Released: 2023 | Genre: Puzzle, Third Person
What an amazing game to look at. It may look simple in screenshots, but the way it moved and animated the isometric levels and its layers was so beautiful. If you have sometimes wondered what it would be like to play a demo scene production turned into a game – this is it.
The game was centered around grabbing spheres, placing them in holders for teleporting or using their powers. The orange one could be used to walk on spawning tiles, the green one for materialized elevators, and so forth. Sometimes a sphere could get temporary legs for it to follow you around like a dog. Towards the end of the game you have accumulated up to four spheres.
Although the puzzles are not complicated in a manner that requires real pondering, they are sometimes still convoluted in the way spheres require you to think outside the box. Each sphere has its inherent world that you can teleport to when placed in a specific placeholder, and other spheres can be brought into that world and put in temporary placeholders there.
My previous PC from 2015 lasted nine years. Lately it started rebooting randomly whenever it got busy with something. A few days later while enduring multiple restarts, a BIOS error claimed the overclocking didn’t work well anymore. I never overclocked the PC myself, but it’s possible it was setup like this when I bought it. I tried turning a lot of overclocking values down in the BIOS settings, but to no avail.
It kept rebooting to remind me it was time to retire it.
This time I bought my new gamer PC from Føniks Computer, a Danish shop that impressed me by how fast they managed to send it. It arrived the very next day. I selected one of their assembled setups, because as with the previous computer, I didn’t want to put the thing together myself. I just wanted it to work straight out of the cardboard box. This time the computer featured…
Casing: NZXT H5 Flow
CPU: Intel Core i5 14600KF with 120 mm water cooler
Motherboard: Gigabyte H610M
GFX card: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER 16 GB
Solid-State Drive: 2TB NVMe SSD
Memory: 32 GB DDR5 RAM
So it’s not the biggest beast in existence, but certainly more than capable of running the exploration games and the web development I usually do. It’s also got Windows 11, which is a first at home – but I was already plenty familiar with that from work.
Windows 11 didn’t even work at first. Its settings app was showing nonsense items, rendering it completely useless. I tried repairing it or Windows 11 using various tips from the internet, but it was FUBAR. So I was forced to completely reinstall Windows 11 from a USB flash drive. Luckily that fixed it.
