Πρόσφατες κριτικές από τον Wild Potato Industries

Witnessed Konami put this game down like Old Yeller IN REAL TIME!

Is it odd to call a game like this "cute"? Because I think it's just that, and I mean it in the best way possible!

I found this game thanks to Steam's random suggestion page, and for whatever reason I clicked on it. Initial impressions based on the screenshots and the old banner were not great. I had assumed that it'd be another Unity asset flip with a PS1 filter over it, like a bargain bin Puppet Combo game (but probably less harmful to my ears). However, the really high ratings it had got, alongside the good praise everyone was showering it with had me interested, so I checked out the demo and was pleasently surprised. I was going to snag the game, but my friend Sputnik34 snagged it for me (thanks pardner), and I now I have seen it through to the end, and I'm really glad I did!

Nightmare of Decay is a love letter to old survival horror games, and most specifically, Resident Evil 1. It lifts a lot of the design cues and gameplay beats from it and translates it really well into a first person perspective (fun fact, RE1 was supposed to be an FPS originally). The game takes place into a mansion split into two wings, two floors, and a few side areas on top of that. There are a healthy amount of puzzles and lots of zombies that you can dispatch. The game does such a great job and capturing even the smallest minutiae of RE1 that jumping from a fixed camera perspective to a first person one doesn't feel as chasmous as it otherwise would. Small things like pistols having a random chance of exploding the head of an enemy or zombies turning to walk into walls after pursuing you for a bit to give you a small chance to squeeze past em in tight hallways are all here, and it's these little details that shows Checkmaty's love for their inspiration (also, the game has a pretty nice sense of humor, which is a plus).

The game is pretty short, only clocking in at around 2-3 hours long, but it's a very tight 2-3 hours and classic survival horror games have always been pretty short compared to other games (the average survival horror game clocks in at around 5-8 hours for a first playthrough), and they all incentivize multiple playthroughs and mastery of the game for speedrunning. This isn't even covering the replay value the unlocked hard difficulty and randomized dungeon mode bring to the table.

It's been a while since I've been this charmed by an indie title. I hope this game continues to bring people in and I hope Checkmaty continues to turn out solid games like this in the future!

These days, it feels as if the game industry has been split between massive, multi-morbillion dollar titans and smaller, shorter independent ventures, with very little in the middle. The 7th generation of consoles ushered forth the HD era of gaming, which meant that developing games would cost way more than it ever had before. Because of this, AA Devs and publishers who didn't have the biggest budgets could no longer turn out the more varied games with little investment as they had prior. Each game was more costly, and each failure was more dire. Many shifted focus to the Nintendo Wii, the last major Standard Definition console with a huge install base, but by the time the 8th generation of consoles hit the market, many of these AA devs and publishers had bit the bullet (notable examples being Midway and THQ).

Yet, despite the odds, Sandlot and D3 Publisher have endured.

Earth Defense Force (EDF) has been going strong since it's humble origins as a Simple Series game back in 2003. These were low budget games with sold for 2000 yen, and EDF (alongside Onechanbara) got it's start here before becoming the cult hit it is today. The first two games never came stateside, but the third entry in the series "Earth Defense Force 2017" did back in 2007 as an Xbox 360 exclusive, and I believe it's where most longtime fans in this part of the world first experienced the series. I remember picking up a used copy when I was 8 or 9 in one of those used game bins at a Blockbuster near my house that we'd visit if the Hollywood Video literally right across the street didn't have anything good for sale. I think I just picked it because I saw bugs on the cover (which was the same reason I picked up Escape From Bug Island), but I am really glad that I did.

When I got back home, I popped the game in and was CONSUMED by it's fun, stupid ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for hours and I have been still for 15 years and multiple games! All EDF games are basically the same, you kill everything that moves in impressively massive maps set in various locals across Japan (or abroad in EDF2). It's really simple, but the game offers so many tools to murder these massive ants, spiders, mechs, kaiju, etc that it rarely (if ever) got dull. The games' charm stem from it's almost 1950's throwback vibes (the game's premise is an amalgamation of THEM, War of the Worlds and Gojira, and a fair few of the music tracks being played on a Theremin) and it's over-the-top-ness. You level entire skylines in your quest to murder all the alien bastards who've invaded earth as your team mates shout the most ridiculous lines put to a script and it's just so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fun! Tell me, how many games can you order helicopters to air drop and multi-story high rock-em-sosck-em robot to fist fight (LEGALLY DISTINCT) Godzilla as your buddies call in air strikes to tactically nuke thousands of bugs in the middle of Tokyo?

I love these games, I love that many others have come to love them as I have, and I love that they are still able to make them despite the odds!

Long Live the EDF!

The way most people these days remember the original Resident Evil from 1996 is pretty skewed. Most folks see the "classic" Resident Evil games through the lens of this 2002 remake, which was stark tonal re-evaluation of what the series was at that point: Action-Horror.

I know some of you are rolling your eyes right now thinking "Nah, RE was always SURVIVAL HORROR bruh" or something along those lines but two consider these two things:

A. "Survival Horror" is just a marketing term that Capcom made up. It's not a real genre, and no one agrees on what actually counts as a TRUE SURVIVAL HORROR GAME™ or not because the term is so vague.

Do Survival Horror games need fixed camera angles? Because the classic Silent Hill games (1-4) do not employ them for 90% of their runtime.

Do Survival Horror games need inventory and item management? Because once again Silent Hill and even Fatal Frame eschew limited inventory in favor of a more streamlined method of item management.

Do Survival Horror games need tank controls? Because Fatal Frame and Obscure dropped them completely and Kuon, Deep Fear and Silent Hill 2-4 gave you the option for a 2-D control style.

So miss me with that "UM, AKSHULLY IT'S SERVIVUL HURRUR" ♥♥♥♥...

B. Consider how fast-paced, action oriented and unabashedly goofy RE1 is compared to other horror games from around that time.

Yes, some of that goofiness is due to age, but there were horror games that came out before RE that were a lot more serious, more tonally grounded, and didn't give you a small military arsenal to deal with any and all problems in your way.

People just seemingly forget there were horror games that came before or around the same time as Resident Evil (Alone in the Dark, Doctor Hauzer, D, Enemy Zero, just to name a few) that were better at nailing the horror experience than RE1 did in 1996. That's not to say they were better games than RE1 (Enemy Zero was, though), but they actively tried to be straight horror, unlike RE1.

Resident Evil since day one has always loved goofy action ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. You use a bazooka to blow up kung fu lizards and annihilated a buff naked dude that a weirdo who wears sun glasses at night was trying to steal with a big ♥♥♥♥-off rocket launcher, all before the mansion itself self-destructs. Ya' bro, that's straight horror right there...

The series would only get more bold with that sorta thing as it went on, even before Resident Evil 4. RE2 went hard on it's action, raising the stakes through the roof, and RE3 doubled down on that even harder by adding dodges, a 180 degree turn and ending with a you using a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ RAIL GUN on a blob and saying "You want S.T.A.R.S, I'll give you STARS!" before Raccoon City gets nuked. And you know what? It's cool! It's really cool that Capcom knew that the action element already embeded in RE1 was key to the series going forward.

But that's the funny thing about 2002 remake, it has all of the goofy ♥♥♥♥ that the original had. All of it! But it's presentation is flipped, as it plays everything with a straight face. Now blowing up the kung fu lizards and the big naked dude feel tense and even scary, so much so people forget that all that actiony meat is still there in underneath the surface.

Now because the remake and the original are so very similar, and the fact that this version of the game is more readily available to play, newer fans who've never played the original before, old fans who haven't played the original in a while and old fans with little context as to the horror gaming landscape at the time think "Ah, this is what RE1 was trying to be all along!" and then ask "Why did RE4 turn RE into an action series?" when it always partially was one. I've done it myself, and I know a lot of you have too.

RE Remake is a good game, a great game even. I personally prefer it over the original by a fair margin myself. But it isn't really the best representative of what classic RE was either. It's its own thing, and that's cool, but it and the original trilogy (and I'll through CV in there, begrudgingly) set out to do things a bit differently from one another.

TLDR: Good game. Play it. Stop being Survival Horror boomers cause you have no idea what you are actually talking about. Good bye!

You know, it's kinda funny to think that Condemned: Criminal Origins was some people's introduction to the dawn of the "HD Gaming" era. This is because it was actually one of the handful of launch titles to drop for the Xbox 360 WAY BACK in 2005. We sorta forget that now, but it's probably not quite as odd as one might think.

While certain aspects of Monolith's police brutality simulator might have aged (notably the character models), 17 years ago (just saying that makes me feel old) this game was really something else. It lived and breathed that game-ified "realism" we all love. From it's grounded, visceral combat to it's derelict settings wrought with urban decay, Condemned is a game that truly wanted to have a real 'tangibility' to itself and that's the sort of stylistic sensibility that would reign supreme 7th generation of consoles. Eschewing the arcade-iness of previous generations in favor of mature, desaturated gritty, grimy, self-serious "realness", and with that, Condemned's place as a sorta of first wave system seller makes a bit more sense (at least to my dumb ass).

However, despite the "7th gen-ness" of Condemned, it has held up really, really well in most of the ways that it matters for games. The narrative ain't up to snuff, sure, but one can forgive Condemned for this quite easily as it's combat is just as gruesome and as intense as it was 17 years ago, the atmosphere is still thicker than soup and MAN the environmental design is remains top notch! It's the real star of the show here and hasn't aged a day, in my books at least. Criminal Origins is all about immersion, and it does a fantastic job of getting players engrossed in their little adventures in urban exploration and violent assaults. It's neat!

F.E.A.R. (Monolith's other game from 2005) released just a month prior to Condemned's launch on the 360, and the two have always felt like two great companion pieces. While I prefer F.E.A.R. overall, the two compliment each other perfectly and exceed in areas that the other one lacks.

It's a shame that Criminal Origins is often overlooked in the pantheon of great horror games. You'll instead hear endlessly about Silent Hill, Resident Evil, and if you are lucky, Fatal Frame. There all great games, mind you, but I feel like we do folks a disservice by hyper-focusing on just a few titles instead of pointing folks towards more unique ventures within the genre, cause I'm sure if more people played Condemned, they'd have another horror game to add to their list of favorites.

id Tech 4, my beloved...

Y'know, I'd honestly argue that it's probably more interesting to play Deus Ex in the 2020's than it probably ever was to play in the 2000's. Don't worry, this isn't one of those "DEUS EX PREDICTED EVERYTHING" posts you see scattered anywhere this game is ever brought up, largely because it really didn't. More than anything, Warren Spector and co. were just pretty well versed in general history. Their "predictions" were more informed by actual events that happened in the 20th century and prior than, y'know, Ion Storm Austin pondering the same orb the folks at Gracie Films apparently do when making Simpsons episodes.

See, when it comes to discussions about Deus Ex, folks tend to focus on what it got "right", 'cause yeah, that's kinda neat. But I think they often overlook what else has changed in the 22 years it dropped on store shelves. Because while certain aspects of what Ion Storm laid out here feel at least somewhat forward thinking, the game itself is firmly a product of 90s sensibilities, for better and for worse.

Deus Ex was developed during the post-Cold War 1990s, where Bob Lazar was still in the public conscious, X-Files was airing across the globe, and this new thing called "The Web" allowed for any basement dweller to spout mad ♥♥♥♥ about JFK's assassination and UFOs for the whole world to see. Deus Ex lives and breathes that era, but things have changed A LOT since then, and no one knows that better than Spector himself.

"Interestingly, I’m not sure I’d make Deus Ex today. The conspiracy theories we wrote about are now part of the real world. I don’t want to support that." - Warren Spector, 'Warren Spector Thinks Deus Ex Is Too Real For 2021', Kotaku

Today, in the year of our Lord, 2022, conspiracy theories have a lot more impact on American society (and by extension, western society in general) than it ever has before. There is a non-insignificant portion of the population that have convinced themselves that vaccines cause autism, that neo-libs are sucking blood from children or something to stay young, and that the Legend of Zelda Ocarinia of Time is the best game ever (it's not, ♥♥♥♥ off).

So with this "2020 mindset", people's examination of this game went from "Huh, it's neat how some of this stuff is pretty applicable today" to "♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, DEUS EX REAL (sexual style)!" And that latter view becomes less and less ironic, and more and more prevalent every year... and it's kinda scary.

Deus Ex is a great game, no doubt. It discussed some truly interesting concepts, ideas and themes, and was probably people's first time actually engaging with such things in an easily digestible way. It managed to do that all through it's then-typical 90's irreverence and masked it with a whole truck load of then-popular whack job conspiracy theories that it ironically and comedically treated as all equally true and valid. Deus Ex was a game that was well read, and discussed it's subject matters in only way it knew how, but people tend to miss that context these days. They forget that nothing is truly timeless, and the way we discuss issues today is different to how they discussed issues then, or how we will discuss issues years from now. There's a mix of media illiteracy and disconnect from reality when folks talk about this game in the 2020s, and I honestly don't know what that means for us...

All's I know is that Warlockracy makes this ♥♥♥♥ seem easy, and that my eyes are augmented...

Y'know, Looking Glass Studios is kinda like the Human Entertainment of western game developers. Overlooked in their time, these two teams are well beloved now because of their solid library of influential titles, and because of the folks who got off the sinking ships in time. Human gave us Goichi Suda and Hifumi Kōno, while Looking Glass gave us Warren Spector and Ken Levine. All unique folks that would go on to make some really stellar (or at the very least, interesting) work down the line, however I'd say that between the two, Looking Glass's output was certainly more influential when it comes affecting mainstream gaming overall.

While they still had their doors open, Looking Glass produced over 15 games, much of that library included a few ports of more popular games to the N64, a few sports games, a handful of flight-simulators, and whatever Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri was. But Looking Glass is mainly remembered for three series in particular, Ultima Underworld (which is basically the first true Immersive Sim, building off of the concepts introduced by Ultima VI, at least according to Spector), Thief (which revolutionized the stealth genre) and System Shock. System Shock 2 is of particular importance as it added in the standard RPG stat elements that Immersive sims are now often associated with.

But beyond just being a revolutionary game, System Shock 2 is just really, really good.

Sure, some aspects have aged. Very few 3D games from 23 years ago can claim to be all that pretty, and the game certainly isn't as balanced or as forgiving to all play-styles as later immersive sims would be, but this is to be expected from a game this complex this early on into the genre.

Yet in the places where it matters, System Shock 2 is almost always firing on all cylinders. The atmosphere is impeccable, with the Von Braun feeling like a floating metal casket in the void of space. In all honesty, only two games capture desolation half as well as System Shock 2, those being Silent Hill 2 and The House in Fata Morgana. The sound design is amazing, as to be expected from the folks who brought us Thief. Each enemy type sounds unique and pants-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ grotesque. Hearing the call of a Cyborg Midwife down the hall is always cause for alarm. The story is always engaging, and while it does heavily rely on the trope of 'Everybody recording their inner most thoughts and door codes onto an MP3 player', this was the first series to really do that, and I'd argue in System Shock 2's case, the best one to do it too.

And of course, there's the game play. And yeah, the player-on-enemy combat is not the greatest, but the fun really lies in how much freedom there is for the player to engage in each scenario. With so much build variety, no two playthroughs will ever be exactly the same and it makes this game almost endlessly repayable.

But I'm sure almost everyone reading this review knows that by now. System Shock 2 is one of those "cult classics" that really ain't all that "cult" anymore. Anyone worth their salt and has a PC made after the year 2002 has played this game. I am basically preaching to the choir at this point.

But on the off chance that you haven't, and are coming off of one of it's more famous spiritual successors like Bioshock or Prey (2017), or are somehow coming in completely blind, I IMPLORE YOU TO PLAY THIS GAME! It's only 10 bucks, and even less on sale, and I KNOW you buy worse ♥♥♥♥ for $60! SO JUST GET IT, NERD!

For all intents and purposes, this game is not good, like at all... but I kinda love it.

Not in the "SO BAD IT'S GOOD" ironic way cowards do (because God forbid anyone admit to liking something that's less than an GAMER CERTIFIED 8/10 or whatever), but like in a "Yeah, this game is my homie. He's addicted to huffing spray paint, but that doesn't stop me from kissing him goodnight" kinda way.

Behind all the bugs, ♥♥♥♥♥ game design and awful A.I., the devs (who would also make Drake of the 99 Dragons, which explains a lot), put so much heart and passion into this one that it's impossible for me not to love it.

F.E.A.R. (and especially Extraction Point) is actually my favorite FPS game(s) of all time. No FPS, before or after, has ever 'NAILED IT' like F.E.A.R. did back in 2005. The combat is stellar and the enemy AI is still basically unparalleled to this day.

That being said, Warner Bros has decided to lock this game behind a bundle that'll cost you over 50 bucks to get, with no way of buying the game separately on Steam. And that just sucks...

Luckily the game is on GOG with it's expansion packs for just 10 bucks and physical copies of this game are still pretty cheap if you wanna go down that route. So if you want my advice, just get them from anywhere else but Steam.