What Have You Been Playing... IN OCTOBER 2024?

Here we go again. As summer comes to a close and the days lengthen,
what's there to do but go inside and play video games? So the question
is, what have you been playing? Let's find out!


If Brevity is the soul of wit...
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* Jusant
* Star Trek (2013)
* Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria
* Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster


...this just proves my witlessness ;-)
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* Jusant
I'm pretty sure I didn't give this game a fair shake. But it seemed to
be doing everything it could to make me _not_ want to play it.

Which is strange, because "Jusant" seems the sort of game I really
_should_ enjoy. It's effectively a walking-simulator with mild
puzzling; a chance to wander around fantastic landscapes and take in
the atmosphere of a strange and wonderful world. It's got an air of
"Journey" (a similar game released to PS3 in 2012), with its vibrant
colours and simple models. I loved "Journey"; I really should have
loved "Jusant" too.

But literally from the first screen, the game was annoying me. That
first screen being a long notice assuring me that -though they were
going to happily harvest all information they could from me, they'd be
doing it in accordance with the law. And, yeah, I know that notice was
a requirement of the EU's GPDR, and you can turn off analytics, and
there's no evidence that the developers are doing anything worse than
any other publisher... still, it's not putting your best foot forward.

(Amusingly, there's a dire warning when you go to turn off analytics;
once done, you won't be able to turn them back on! Oh no! The horror!)

Yet it was all sorts of small things like that. "This game is best
played with a gamepad". Yeah, I'm on a PC. You're selling this game on
a PC. Make it so it can be best played with the dominant controllers
on the PC maybe, and not expect me to use a controller. Or the
visuals; the protagonist has orange skin. I'm guessing this is a
cartoony visualization of sunburn (the whole scene is bleached out and
he's wearing slitted sunglasses, so I'm guessing there's an excess of
ultraviolet light in this world), but it reminds me of those
kiddie-cartoons where the characters have unnatural shades of skin. I
never cared for those shows.

Mostly, it's the gameplay. The game is all about climbing and
platforming, something I normally enjoy -- they're the best parts of
games like "Prince of Persia", "Tomb Raider" and "Uncharted", as far
as I'm concerned-- but those other games all have much more natural
controls. "Jusant" has you alternating your right- and left- mouse
buttons to move (each button controls a different hand, you see) and
it never felt right. It was uncomfortable to maintain, and I never got
into the rhythm of the climbing. Maybe it would have been a little bit
better if I used a gamepad... but I don't think it would have been
that much of an improvement. It's just a clumsy way of climbing.

Which, again, is a shame because with better controls I think I would
have enjoyed the mechanics of the game; you've only limited stamina
and pitons, and have to figure out which ledges to grab, when to jump,
when to wall-run; it really _feels_ like it could have been fun. But
those controls made me opt out pretty quickly.

Beyond that, I just couldn't get too excited about the world. I didn't
stick too long with the game, but nothing I saw struck me as too novel
or exciting. It was another 'young child exploring a the abandoned
ruins of a green-apocalypse", reading notes that try to flesh out the
emptiness. Normally I go nuts prying into every nook and cranny
looking for hidden artifacts and secrets that tell me more, but very
quickly the generic nature of the world -and the awful controls-
caused a sense of ennui to descend upon me, and I started ignoring any
side passages. It wasn't worth the effort of exploring, I decided.

But even then, I couldn't stick with the game very long. It wasn't
giving me any joy, and the clumsy controls were getting in the way of
any fun I was having. When the camera got stuck (the game isn't
without its share of bugs) and I was forced to restart at the last
checkpoint, I'd had enough. There's potential in the game, but I'm
never going to see it. "Justant" wasn't worth the effort.



* Star Trek (2013)
This game really makes me appreciate modern movie tie-in games. It's a
reminder why that particular type of game was once so reviled; "Star
Trek" is just an awful, awful game.

Oh, it doesn't seem that at first. If you can get past the fact that
it's based on the "Kelvin" Universe (that's the one directed by J.J.
Abrams with all the lens flare), it actually seems okay at first. The
visuals aren't too bad (the character animations are a bit stiff) and,
while the controls feel somewhat clunky, the first few levels have a
nice mix of exploration, puzzle-solving, platforming and shooting. The
action is interspersed with some mini-games and it captures the feel
of the Abrams movies pretty well.

Sadly, that impression doesn't last too long. The further into the
game you get, the more the flaws become apparent. Released in 2013,
when the 'co-op' single-player craze was at its height, the game lets
you play as either Kirk or Spock, with the character you don't chose
controlled by your co-op partner or the AI. But there's really very
little interaction between the two except at the end of each arena,
when both players are required to do a mini-game together to unlock
the next section. The AI isn't totally incompetent but the whole
set-up feels pretty mechanical.

The further into the game you get, the worse the story and level
design becomes (the last level basically forgoes any sense whatsoever,
and just teleports you from battle arena to battle arena with little
explanation as to how or why). The various ships and space stations
you explore have no logic to them; it's all just 'wouldn't this be
cool if we had a battle here?' sort of design, which absolutely
destroys any sense of immersion. The characters are flat and
uninteresting, the story is the worst sort of science-fiction tripe.

Worse, the mission design is boring. That initial mixture of
exploration and combat is pretty much abandoned by the third or fourth
map, throwing it all away for combat against brain dead drones. The
game is heavily scripted, and pretty unforgiving if you try to stray
off the expected path (at the very least, your AI partner will get
stuck; as likely, some trigger needed to move you to the next section
just won't fire. Either way, you'll soft- lock your game and have to
restart from the last checkpoint). There's very little variety too;
oh, there's a good amount of enemies, but they're all off a basic
theme and the piss-poor AI means they can't really differentiate
themselves either. And those mini-games become /extremely/ tiresome;
there's only four in total, and you'll be doing them over and over and
over again throughout the game.

What's really unfortunate is that I got the impression the developers
really wanted to make a good Star Trek game. There's the hint of
competence in those first few levels that suggests that -with more
time and a budget more focused on development and not on paying off
the movie cast for their voice-acting skills- this might actually have
been a good game. But what we got was a rushed, hack-job of a game
forced to release on a movie's schedule and not its own.

The 2013 "Star Trek" game is not good. In fact, the only reason I even
bothered playing it is that I'd purchased it over a decade ago and
never completed it. Now that I have, I wish I hadn't bothered.



* Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria
So here's another game I have a hard time forming a specific opinion
about.

The game itself? It's one of many open-world survival games. You know
the type; you start the game naked and have to build up your gear from
local resources. This game's hook --the thing that sets it apart from
similar games in the genre-- is that it's set in the "Lord of the
Rings" universe. I suppose it does that fairly well; it doesn't quite
ape the Peter Jackson aesthetics, but the similarity is easy to see
and it looks quite nice, if a bit cartoonish. But it doesn't really
_do_ anything with the license; for all that it's called "Return to
Moria" and features some known characters and monsters, it all comes
across as pretty generic fantasy. Of course, this is somewhat
expected, given the genre of game (survival games aren't known for
their characters or narratives) but the use of the IP seems a bit
wasted.

Mechanically, the gameplay itself is fine. Set within the confines of
Moria, it's not really open-world. The maps are procedurally
generated, but there are very definitive borders; stone walls that you
just can't hack through no matter how strong your pick-axe. This
limits how expansive your constructions can become, and this may turn
off some fans of the genre. Similarly, being constrained by the "Lord
of the Rings" license, you don't get the same range of upgrades you
might find in other games. This isn't a title where you start banging
two rocks together but by the end you're building jet-packs and
robot-miners. An hour into the game you'll have a pick-axe and be
building wooden stairs; sixty hours later its pretty much the same,
even if your pick-axe is now made of mithril and your stairs of
adamant.

The mining is surprisingly fun; there's a lot of procedural
deformation that lets you hack away at the terrain and at buildings.
It's not quite up to the standards of "Red Faction: Guerrilla", as a
lot of that destructibility is limited to specific areas of the map,
but it's still fairly impressive tech.

My biggest problem with the game really has nothing to do with the
game itself. Nominally, I think the developers expected players to
enter the world, explore a bit, mine for resources so they could build
up their equipment and bases that would then let them explore the next
bit of Moria (there are five 'regions' in total, each locked behind
certain tech upgrades). There would be a constant sense of momentum as
you moved ever forward through the game.

Except... that's just not how I play games. Give me a map, and I'll
want to explore every bit of it. Give me a map where good chunks of
the maps can be picked away, and I _will_ mine every bit of rock until
I hit the inevitable unbreakable borders. And when I entered the
fourth region --a vast underground city of ruins-- I gazed at the
wreckage and sighed, knowing I'd just have to repair every single
building before I'd let myself move forward. You can imagine, this
slowed by progress to a crawl... but what was I to do, _not_ explore
every nook and cranny, and not vacuum up every piece of loot or
vendor-trash? Nosiree! I'm leaving Moria in a better state than I
found it. It's only considerate, after all!

Which is why, I am embarrassed to admit, I didn't actually _finish_
the game. (Actually, it being a procedurally generated survival game,
I'm not entirely sure it _has_ an end, but I didn't even get into the
fifth region). Ultimately, after 70 or so hours, I just ran out of
steam. I don't entirely blame the game --a lot of the tedium I faced
was of my own making-- but I might have lasted a bit longer if there
was more variety and atmosphere. As it was, by hour fifty I felt as if
I was just exploring for the sake of exploring; there was nothing
driving me forward except for the fact that the game expected me to do
so.

The TL;DR is that the game is fine; it's an average example of the
genre that will probably satisfy most fans of survival sims. But it's
definitely not a game for an obsessive explorer and collector like
myself. There's too much to explore, and not enough to collect. But at
the same time, it did occupy me for over 70 hours, and I don't
consider that time entirely wasted. So like I said at the start, it's
really hard for me to decide whether I liked the game or not.



* Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster
I love the original "Dark Forces", considering it one of the best
DOS-era first-person shooters (we called them 'Doom-clones' back then)
ever created. But this remaster feels utterly pointless.

Because despite the fact that the original is just a few months shy of
being 30 years old, the classic game holds up amazingly well. Run it
in DOSBox with an HQ2X filter and the game looks quite good, given its
age. It's biggest flaw is that by default there's no option for
vertical mouselook (you have to manually tilt your view up and down
using the keyboard) but otherwise? The game plays great. Yes, its
pixels are still chunky, the music is still MIDI and the AI is
pathetic; I'm not saying it's comparable to modern titles. But
considering it released in 1995, it still feels amazingly modern.

And that's the problem, because the remaster does incredibly little to
improve any of that. Yes, you now have widescreen support. Improved
mouselook is incredibly welcome. The higher resolutions are nice. But
beyond that? It's hard to recommend.

Ported to Nightdive's Studio "Kex" engine, movement is glassily
smooth. This is an issue I have with pretty much every Kex-engine
game, but it's particularly bad here because very often "Dark Forces"
relies on pixel-perfect jumps over bottomless pits and the speed of
the Kex engine makes these leaps more difficult than it need be. The
updated cutscenes are poor, especially anything featuring human faces.
And what did they do to poor Mon Mothma? Her arms hang down past her
knees! There's been little work to the graphics in general; it looks
as if all they did was AI upscale the textures and call it a day.

Despite the improved mouselook, the new engine fares poorly with
vertical aiming. The original had issue with this too, but it used a
2.5D engine where the vertical didn't really exist. Kex is nominally
true-3D and yet aiming up and down remain critically inaccurate. There
are too few other improvements; lighting is as flat as the original.
The music is still MIDI (albeit using a wavetable soft-synth rather
than pumped through a SoundBlaster's frequency modulator).

The point of it all is that isn't really a remastered version of the
game. It's a no-effort port to a supposedly modern engine that doesn't
really add much to the game, and has as many downsides as up. The
gameplay itself is still solid, but that's thanks to the mechanics and
design created three decades ago by LucasArts.

Nightdive Studios has the gall to sell this for $30USD. It is
absolutely not worth the price. The original is still available for
$5USD and looks and plays almost as well, and is a more honest version
of the game. This game is a cash-grab and the most pointless remaster
I've ever owned.


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Well, that's how I occupied my time this October. Did you have a
similar range of titles? Let us all know!

What Have You Been Playing... IN OCTOBER 2024?