Martian Gothic

 As one person put it in the comment section of Youtube:

"The story and design of Martian Gothic is as beautiful as the gameplay is terrible and disgusting."

I agree.  Overall, it's a terrible game, but there are a few gems tucked in with all the garbage.  For example: 

"I'll not survive to hear midnight's chimes.  The bad dream has come true." 

Keep in mind when the player hears this audio log they're down in the Necropolis, vast and cyclopean, with what sounds like synthesized pipe organ music playing in the background.  It's such a great bit of audio design.  Also, Martian Gothic: Unification really earns its title when you meet that ghost of a man buried out on the surface and he says:

Soft and slow, we are flowing back

like sand, like time, back to the beginning

I am the first, reborn of the red soil

Come with us, down into the dust

and rise again, transformed.

Anyway...enjoy a few screenshots from a survival horror game that wasn't very good, but perhaps would be a interesting candidate for being remade. 

16-bit Mazes and Monsters

Oddly enough the Japanese name of the game is
"Shining and the Darkness"

Before Shining Force there was Shining in the Darkness - a dungeon crawler in the traditional sense.  By that I mean no automapping, random encounters galore, and a fair amount of grinding.  It's not a bad game, but playing it has reminded me of why I like the SRPG spin-offs that followed a lot better.  You see...every battle in the Shining Force series is a set piece encounter.  This originator of the franchise has room for a small amount of tactical thinking, but for the most part it's about navigating a multi-level maze filled with hazards in the form of monsters and traps.  There's treasure to be had too, although much of it is of little importance.  The goal of the game (as laid out in the opening) is to rescue the princess Jessa who has been kidnapped by the sorcerer "Dark Sol".  It's about as generic a plot as you can get.  Even so, it's presented well.  

The art style for the early entries in the the Shining IP are distinct in that they subtly blend 1980s Disney with a bit of an anime aesthetic.  In terms of setting it's more Narnia than Middle-earth when it comes to demi-humans.  To this day, I must admit centaur knights (complete with armor and lance) look pretty dang cool and are something you don't see a whole lot of in fantasy settings these days.  Unlike some dungeon crawlers, players only go it alone during the early stages of the game.  After defeating a giant crab (and mini-boss of sorts) the hero of the story gains two companions (Milo and Pyra) who can help him on his quest.  At first glance this team of three seems like a fairly standard warrior-healer-mage combo, but in truth the lines between them are a bit blurrier than say...Dungeons and Dragons.  While it's true that the meat-shield warrior protagonist never gains the innate ability to casts spells, his pious looking companion (Milo) hits pretty hard and has magic that overlaps a bit with Pyra the mage.  Meanwhile, she can deal out decent damage while still having a repertoire of AoE and utility spells.  She's also the fastest of the three when it comes to turn order.  Monsters vary quite a bit - ranging from the simple (bats, wasps, slimes, and slugs) to the standard (goblins, ape-men, skeletons, and minotaurs); all the way up to slightly weird foes like ax-beaked ostriches and "clodhoppers" (hat-wearing puppet-like enemies that consist of a head with a pair of legs sprouting from underneath).

The variety is much appreciated, but it isn't enough hold my interest.  As far as old-school dungeon crawlers go, Shining in the Darkness is very well made example of its genre.  It's just not the kind of game I can really get into.  Still, there are plenty of worse ways to spend your time, and if you are the kind of person that enjoys titles like the Bard's Tale Trilogy or the original Wizardry then this Sega classic might be right up your alley...or maybe I should say up you subterranean corridor?  Actually, never mind...that sounds kind of gross.           

Double-Edged Nostalgia

It's easy to get a rose-tinted view of the past.  One of the saddest things I have read so far this year is a Reddit user post that states  "it's depressing when you play one of your old favorite games and realize that you haven't missed the game, but rather how you felt back then."  You'd think with all the hardships that are happening in the world right now I would have gone with something else, but it hit me hard.  It hit like the ending of the "Great Gatsby" or that scene in "Amelie" wherein she returns the tin box of childhood keepsakes.  It felt very personal, and yet it's an emotional reaction that many people know all too well.

Reaching back to the furthest recess of my memory, I can still recall some of my earliest experiences with video games.  I grew up in the golden age of arcades so it's tempting to say that I was there from the beginning.  However, the truth is arcades have been around in one form or another all the way back to the 1800s.  Originally the machines were purely mechanical, but eventually gave way to electromechanical designs.  Oddities of that bygone era include Mutoscopes, Baffle Ball, and fortune telling machines.  Some featured elaborate dioramas.  In general though, the vibe was similar to that of a carnival (seedy atmosphere and all).  A few of these electromechanical games are around to this day such as Skee-Ball, air hockey, whack-a-mole, and pinball.  I actually got to see all these machines growing up, but the purely electronic arcade games were where the future was headed.  They were fairly ubiquitous even outside arcades, and could be found tucked into the corners of bars, laundromats, restaurants, college campuses and even supermarkets.  The games were, what are now considered classics (Asteroids, Centipede, Galaga, Pac-Man, etc.)  For me, the big draw of video games wasn't the flashing lights or bombastic sound effects but simply the fact that players could influence what was happening on-screen.  Unlike film, television, novels (excluding choose-your-own-adventure stories), or stage theater - video games have an interactive component that sets them apart from other forms of media in a big way.

Of course, there is an equally bad flipside to video game nostalgia; newer is better.  It's hard to argue with older games being inferior to some degree simply because they were designed to run on what is now outdated hardware...not to mention that a lot of really old games were sadistically hard...and not in a fun challenge (i.e. Dark Souls) kind of way.  Strange as it might sound, there are some games that straddle those two opposing views surprisingly well.  The point-and-click adventure genre is one example, but there's another I have been getting back into after a very long hiatus.

The first-person dungeon crawler has been around since Wizardry released back in 1981.  My first delve into the subgenre though wasn't until Tales of the Unknown: The Bard's Tale in 1985.  The last time I played one of these games in earnest was fittingly enough Bard's Tale 3: Thief of Fate which released in 1988.  So after three-and-a-half decades I'm playing Labyrinth of Zangetsu and not all that much has changed from a gameplay standpoint.  Granted, there have been some much needed improvements - automapping being the big standout.  Overall though, I see little reason why a fan of the earliest dungeon crawlers wouldn't also like Legend of Grimrock or Undernauts: Labyrinth of Yomi.

When it comes to evolutions in game design, I feel like it tends to be one step back for every three steps forward.  A lot is gained, but something is also lost along the way.  Thankfully, there are retro throwbacks and even the originals (preserved by emulation software) for us to go back to should we wish to be reminded of where we came from and where we are going.

Inspirational Failure

Trespasser is one of many games in the Jurassic Park franchise.  Released in 1998, it was a commercial failure and winner of Gamespot's worst-game-of-the-year award.  Disappointing to see considering that it spent three years in development with a very talented team of designers.  Just to stress that last point, Austin Grossman (the writer for Deus Ex and Dishonored) along with Seamus Blackley (father of the Xbox) both worked on this game.  So, what happened?  In a word - "overscoping".

As is all too common in game development, the team behind Trespasser bit off way more than they could chew.  There were a lot of ambitious "firsts" such as large open outdoor environments, a diegetic interface, a physics engine, and a complex AI to give the dinosaurs life.  That last point is especially noteworthy because all of the half-dozen or so dinosaurs species (as well as sub-types) found in the game move and act in strange ways due to them literally being puppets on strings.  It's kid of surreal to see in action and hasn't been emulated since (the one exception being the creatures found in Rain World).  

The physics engine also ties into this due to how players interact with the environment.  Much like the mannequin dinos controlled by the AI, the main character has a single working arm that they use to pick up, manipulate and throw objects with via the mouse.  Again, it's kind of weird and not a game mechanic you really see outside of quirky indie titles like Octodad and Surgeon Simulator.  Nonetheless, Gabe Newell cited the physics engine in Trespasser as an influence on a similar system Valve used in Half-Life 2.

Not having any kind of HUD was hardly a new concept in 1998, but doing so in an action-oriented FPS was courting disaster.  To work around the lack of a health meter the protagonist has a visible heart tattoo that indicates their status based on how full it is.  Ammunition for guns is tracked by the player character vocalizing how many shots they have left after each pull of the trigger.  Weird as these ideas are, they eventually popped-up in games much later on.  Dead Space for example has a life bar on the back of Issac's suit.  Meanwhile Alyx (from Half-Life: Alyx) sometimes comments on her ammo supplies.  The official game for "Peter Jackson's King Kong" movie features a particular button that (when pushed) causes the player character to exclaim how many bullets they have left.  In truth, it kind of makes sense in that game since King Kong features a lot of teamwork.  Maybe you'd want to let your allies know how you're doing ammo-wise from time to time...?

Lastly is the outdoor areas which were quite expansive for the time.  For the most part, FPS games released around that era were of the corridor shooter variety.  Obviously, Trespasser was brutally difficult to run on 1990s hardware because of the sheer amount of geometry on-screen at any given moment.  Even so, the idea of wide open environments was a direction that game development would expand toward; Halo: Combat Evolved and the original Far Cry being two big steps the industry took that way later on.

While it certainly deserves to be called a very flawed game, Trespasser ultimately attracted a cult following of sorts in the form of mod makers and bug fixers.  These individuals actually poured in a considerable amount of effort in order to make the game run with fewer issues and even significant improvements.  In some ways the fan updated (i.e. current) version of the game feels like a VR title.  Incidentally, someone is working on a mod for that.  There's also an unofficial pseudo-remake of sorts in the works, but it's anyone's guess if the DNA of the original can be revived or if it will simply live on as little bits and pieces in games that have come since.   

Regressions

PC gaming these days seems to be on somewhat of a backward slide.  Actually, that's not entirely correct.  The indie scene remains as vibrant and varied as ever.  However, larger budget computer games are in serious trouble.  The nature of the problem is a bit hard for me to explain.  Not being an expert on computer hardware and software, I'm not sure if I can do the topic justice...still, I'll try to illustrate in general terms.  

Graphics on PC games are handled in no small part by specially designed software such as Vulkan and DirectX.  For the sake of simplicity I'll focus on the old DX11 and new DX12.  As one might expect, DX11 is less capable in terms of potential performance.  On the other hand it's also a lot easier to use.  DX12 allows for far more optimization and customization.  In theory this means nicer looking games, but only if coders know what they're doing.  In fact, if you don't have the time/knowledge/skill it's possible to make games that are a downgrade.  To be exact, we are seeing games that look objectively the same or even worse in DX12 and yet have higher video memory requirements than they would have had in DX11.  PC gaming woes don't end here though, there's also shader compilation stutter.  It's a persistent problem that many game developers don't seem to know how to fix.  The end result is games with frames-per-second counts that dip periodically regardless of the in-game performance settings or processing power of the PC.  It appears that without the "guardrails" that come with DX11 and console dev kits, many programmers can't properly optimize their own work and, worse still, can't devise antiquate solutions (at least for certain game engines such as Unreal).

One might be tempted to say it's time to go back to the drawing board.  However, I think (in many cases) computer programmers need to go back to school and (re)learn the basics of memory usage and allocation.  Also, what is up with all these bland looking video games that take up over 100GB of SSD space?