Old school space masters

why do you show me a broodhome when you won't let me

I can't do a counter since the Ur-Quan Masters isn't exactly a steam game. Provided free, the UQM is a port of a thing of a something, of Star Control 2. I am old enough to have played the Sega Genesis ports of Star Flight (done by EA) and Star Control (done by Accolade) which gives me a pretty decent historical grounding in this game. I'd read about SC2 as a teen and always felt a bit sour I couldn't - or hadn't, really - get a copy of it. It sounded great.

The game is regarded as a classic and it's hard not to see why, assuming you can see past the dated graphics and woefully dated gameplay. To get all the positive out of the way so I can get my complain on, for a classic game - fuck, for a game AT ALL - the voice acting and story telling is excellent. I love just listening to people talk, and the stories they tell are richly varied, if 80s as fuck. The combat is based around simplified physics of inertia and acceleration, but this gives flying the ships a real learning curve. It feels rewarding, though the AI is a tragedy. The music is wonderful and the world is vast, if a little hollow.

So it's good, and I like it, on the most part. But let's complain, because man is this game easy to complain about. If you are a huge fan of this game, don't read on, because while I "liked" Star Control 2, I think it's largely a majorly overrated turd of a game (though I admit, this could mostly be down to issues with the port)

Rochard is a great crate shooter

There is an inevitable weird moment that comes up in gaming where you look dead ahead at the screen and just wonder. Games are constructs, stories if you want to be poetic, in which a bunch of dudes got together to assemble a narrative for you to push your way through. In most games, which are inevitably flawed, there's a moment where shit is just retarded. You question why, you wonder what the point is, your brain tries to figure how they came up with the idea to do this at all.

This moment comes up a bunch in Rochard. One might even say about half the game.

At it's core Rochard was sort of sold to me as a puzzle game with some shootie elements. It's a side scroller, with a vast array of tools slowly added to the game which on the most part base themselves around the usage of a gravity tool; either in lifting things with your "G-Lifter" or in lowering gravity which you can control.

Those elements are awesome. Hitting enemies - and there are enemies galore - in the face with crates actually never gets old. Hitting enemies in the fact with a crate which knocks them off a ledge then their corpse sails into another enemy killing them as well is pretty much a windmill slam of awesome. In fact, in an ironic twist given how much I hated the fucking "crate" in Dead Space, the crates are the best part of this game. I fucking love crates in Rochard. Just rename it CRATEZ. All the little puzzle quirks in Rochard are nice, the fuse system, recoil jumps, all the weird force fields - the game has tons of ideas for how to make crates fun.

Then again if you could pick up the crate in Dead Space and splatter zombies with it, the game would be actually twice as good as it was. I guess that would ruin the nonexistent atmosphere of the end of the game though!

Going back to the problems with Rochard - Well ok, I mean, at a basic level the game is an indie title with somewhat lacking voice acting outside of the main character, the controls are a little loose and the graphics may or may not appeal to you. I really like the art style, as it is clean and simple, with pretty solid conveyance of different elements at a glance. I think on an aesthetic level its objectively good, but subjective tastes may vary as they tend to. The plot is hokey and probably a little unnecessary given the overall context of the game but that's not something I like to get stuck on.

But the big issue is the game at times seems to really not want to be a puzzle game, and instead be a contra esque side scrolling shooter. With tubby, slow moving, goofball protagonist. I'm not entirely sure - hence the sense of wonderment - what they were thinking. Is it really hard to come up with fun physics puzzles when you have that many possible options? Almost all the puzzle bits are fun, and much of the game feels like it should just be puzzles as the hero sneaks his way through the underbelly of various facilities.

I know this might sound a little weird but I feel like the puzzle of "how do I get out of this room?" should have made more of an appearance. It's realistic that a tubby miner trying to sneak his way through an asteroid and the later levels would run into this problem, as opposed to armed guards finding their way into and throughout the duct work. What are they doing there? The game suffers tremendously from having an incredibly interesting set of, while not necessarily "unique" puzzling elements, at least cheerfully presented ones that it largely seems to have no interest in using. Instead it constantly throws a pair of puzzles at you I have little enjoyment of: How Do I Shoot These Guys With This Terrible Aiming System and Some Shit With Lasers

The Laser puzzles are obnoxious and artificially lengthen the game by lasering you to death repeatedly. Which then triggers a relatively slow reload (seriously, this game loads slower than dead space) and you repeat the puzzle. This isn't good game design by any stretch of the imagination, given I don't think that silly cute puzzles involving gravity and crates are all that hard to put in the game instead. I sort of gave them a pass in the early game, where it made sense for there to be lasers and other hazards - You're on a mining platform, in deep space, on an asteroid. Of course there's going to be demolition equipment! But in the later game, you're not on a mining platform, so why the fuck are there lasers. Lasers, I might add, which kill the enemies. So they're not exactly a 'security system' are they?

The enemies though are the real stinker of the game and perhaps speak extremely poorly of the game's development team. While I'm loathe to call someone else's hard work poor when I'm writing poorly crafted sentences on a blog, I'm at a loss to explain why the enemies are even in the game in such numbers to begin with, especially in light of their inept coding.

Enemy AI is a delicate balance: An AI that is "too good" frustrates players. An AI that is utterly incapable and toothless is also irritating, as it is more or less a waste of time. The Enemies in Rochard are both. They are perfect, crack shots, nailing a moving target behind cover with near perfect accuracy. If they can hit you, they will. In fact, once activated, enemies will fire on you from off screen, plastering you over and over as you flee to break line of sight. Cover has little impact on their ability to kill you, as their shots are completely steady and relentless.

But enemies are also rubbish, easily tricked and exceedingly dopey. The only reason they're a threat at all is simply a matter of their accuracy being perfect, while your ability to hit a moving target can be less than perfect. You are then thrust into battling them in mostly linear hallways, where they fire on you from a screen over. With little recourse, you often simply end up gunned down.

It's baffling. Not only are they entirely needless within the relative framework of what makes the game good, you are even denied the means by which to deal with them in a fun way. Dropping crates on enemies or smacking them with exploding turret debris is "fun". Shooting the enemies is irritating - the aiming system is clumsy, possibly as a mix of both needs the game puts on it. The puzzle elements, I think, suffer for this as well. The game is thankfully less than excited to give you stacking puzzles, since stacking crates is actually pretty tedious.

I think at it's core Rochard was a really great game, but then needed to be lengthened out and they settled on something a little less than optimal. The puzzles, though usually simple, have this earnest hands on feeling that makes them surprisingly satisfying. Had the game been 75% puzzles, 25% run and gun instead of 50:50 I think I'd be giving it high praise. As is, it's about half a great game, half an exercise in mediocrity and I'm not at all certain why.

Worth getting if you can put up with there being less puzzle in your puzzle game, not so much if you get to the first run and gun section and slam the keyboard down in rage.

As an aside and sort of a foot note - I could do without the odd racism mixed with the extremely strange selection of accents on the sky police.

In space, ships are made of grey with splashes of Red

The first thing that stood out about this game, especially after playing Mass Effect 2, is how wonderfully quick the saving and loading is. Seriously! I was like wow, it saved that fast? Loads up that quick? It's delightful. The weird thing, I mean, is that this actually seems really important to a horror game. If the game had long loading screens you'd end up like ME2, where I often accidentally misclicked after tabbing back into the game.

The second thing is holy cow is that ever a ton of blood. I mean there is blood everywhere, on everything. There's more blood than there is much of anything else. It starts to completely lose impact, as blood doesn't really indicate violence coming to you. It just looks like you're actually on some deep space raspberry jam factory ship.

The blood and its over-abundance sort of defines the main thematic thrust of the game. It is horror executed through absolutes. It's not violent, it's ultra violent. There is little in the way of pacing, little in the way of slow build up in encounters. Shit goes bad quickly and then it just blasts it in your face. The game is a fire hose of gore, violence and blood to the point it's a weird mix of comical and gross, but not really horror.

What confused me at first is the fact the game does in fact understood horror. There are bits where it is decidedly creepy and atmospheric, with some really nice attention to detail. Little tricks of the lighting and odd well placed sounds that tickle you just the right way. Then some corpse smashes its skull against a pipe and all atmosphere is instantly lost. I think the end conclusion is they simply firehosed the game with absolutely everything: ultra violence, atmosphere, weird sci-fi ideas, blood, gore and every spooky anything they'd ever seen.

I've heard of the great outdoors but this is

The sci-fi elements are surprisingly a step above my expectations. I'm not necessarily saying that the game spews chemistry and physics at you, but sci-fi concepts like cloning labs, zero gravity and air production at least show an interest in outlandish concepts. It does, on some level, feel like some fifty year old crappy spaceship would perhaps feel. Or at least feels like someone sat down and thought about the possibilities - There is a serious attempt at world building. The storyline angle world building is mediocre, but the ship itself is truly awesome.

So then we move onto the "game" in and of itself. Gameplay is pretty simple stuff: You're an engineer, you shoot the monsters du jour with various weapons that actually feel like less than military hardware. Gunplay is pretty accurate and monsters feel tense without being overwhelming. The game is generally pretty fair about combat in a way I like - I find myself looking around and wondering where the freshly arrived enemies are, but usually they don't go for me before I get a chance to find them. It seems weird to complain about this, but going into a "horror game" you expect a ton of cheap ass bullshit. The game is mostly well paced and fair in that regard, at least on normal. I did say mostly - There's some crap, especially in zero gravity environments, but also awkward 'lockdown' scenes where you're jammed into a closet.

Enemies remain scary, even though they're not much of a threat in the true sense of the word. They're at least dangerous enough that you pay attention to them, though scary in this context may not be quite the correct word. Combat is surprisingly interactive, as you need to aim to remove limbs, not just body and head shots. You don't just find the target and hold down fire, but quickly move to tear it to pieces.

Puzzles, unfortunately, vary between interesting and totally boring. One of the issues I have with the game is that save points, as a rule, should always come before and after puzzles that take a couple minutes to solve. I mean literally the save point should be right there. It's all well and good to have checkpointesque system, and I can live with that, but several of the larger puzzles have combat in and around them. That's irritating. More frustrating is the fact that the game basically loses its stride in regards to puzzles, eventually just using them to burn time. The crate shit at the end is beyond obnoxious. I honestly don't understand the purpose of boring me to death (ha) with moving boxes around or fetch quests.

The storyline is ... I don't know. I started to pick up that there were going to be derpier elements as I went. The game didn't go outright berserk with them, rather it keeps much of it pretty low key, but there's some definite macguffin action to try to tie things together.  There's an especially odd moment where one of the cast just ... Screws you over. For reasons I'm largely not altogether too sure, other than the needs of the narrative, really work. The macguffin itself is at least given a sense of, if not personality, then at least a certain feeling of inevitability that governs its "actions" in the game. The subtle difference between a plot object that people just do things crazy like around, and a plot object that drives people crazy to do things around for it, is enough that the story never really catches itself too harshly.

There's a couple other elements that felt bent in to feed the needs of the narrative. I've mentioned the game just has too much blood, but it also has too many corpses. Now this may sound odd, but the game implies that the necromorphs are made from the dead, very actively at that. And yet there's just random bodies and bits all over, just to add to the gore factor. Thing is, those bodies should just be necromorphs, not gorish decorations. Also you're generally supposed to smash bodies, which is just more hassle and chore added in. There's also way too many of the "baby" necromorphs - which do actually have an explanation in game for existance, but they make up like half the necromorph population in game.

This wouldn't bother me if they weren't more or less a chore to deal with.

The other thing that becomes such a chore is the audio. Now, I understand the idea that you want spooky sounds in a horror game, but Dead Space's audio direction is just goofy nonsense. About halfway through the game, I just muted it. That's really bad. The big problem here is that yes, a horror game should have spooky and tense sounds, but after a while you just get sick of all the goofy noises the game constantly makes. It's just constant grinding, irritating slop bucket noises, off key chanting and Isaac panting just to fill dead air. It's entirely fine for a horror game to ease up and just have normal sounds for a while, you know?

there's a hole in your plan

So in summary: A largely good and interesting game, bogged down by overwhelming audio direction, puzzles that slip into terrible and way too much pointless gore. The boss fights especially where mostly neat, though the end of the game (past about chapter 9) just turned into a monstrous chore. I get that you need a macguffin to justify all this gore, but seriously, I shouldn't spend multiple hours of my life pushing the fucking thing around. If I were to assess the game by its ending, I would actually call it "terrible" but that's probably a little unfair.

Though seriously, pushing a crate around? Like, seriously? What the fuck is wrong with a development team that honestly thinks a human being wants to spend more than an hour of their life pushing around a box, clearing the way for a box, pushing the box some more, so on?

The last boss, though, was pretty good. Neat and epic. Ended the game on a far better note than I was expecting. The boss fights really were, on the most part, the stand out elements of the game.