Peggle

Unicorns, dragons and owls coming up.

It's hard to describe this game in a simple manner without it sounding like a pile of pants. Take a vertical drop board, add in a lot of brightly coloured pins and bricks, most of them blue, some of them orange and give the player several ball bearings they can drop in from the top of the play area. Watch it bounce around the area like some Two-Penny Shove It arcade until it hits the bottom and any of the pins and bricks it hits are removed from play. Rinse and repeat until all orange pins and bricks are gone or the player runs out of balls.

Doesn't sound like much does it. Thankfully, Peggle is a lot more than that.

Lots of levels on offer

Peggle, fundamentally, is similar to Pachinko where in balls are dropped down a table of sorts and depending upon where they end up and how they get there, players are rewarded with more balls and such. In Peggle, players are rewarded with points based upon various combos and qualifiers such as attaining a long shot to reach a target orange, or hitting several oranges consecutively. There's also other bonuses coming from hitting the randomly chosen pink peg which will boost your score for the remainder of that shot.

Annoyingly, the most prickish looking ones are the most useful.

Each usual level has a limit of orange blocks (not including special challenge levels), the more blocks that are removed from play, the higher the multiplier within the game for that round, boost this with the pink peg and you can really start stacking up with extra balls to help you clear the level of all oranges. On top of all this, there's the "bucket" that steadily sways back and forth along the bottom of the arena, land your ball in that and you instantly get another ball to play with.

Take aim, fire, wish for the best.

That's not all though, you've a selection of colourful characters that also have a special ability. Be it having a longer projection distance, explosive impacts, temporary flippers like a pinball table, flaming destruction that passes through blocks, a touch of the random selection, an instant return ball, multiball, improving shots and more. Though you need to play through the adventure mode first to unlock the characters, a second play through will give you the ability to choose whomever you wish for every level.

Ooh look, themes!

It's a simple game, almost too simple in some regards but there's a lot of charm and appeal here for people to enjoy time and time again. Whether it's trying to play through and beat all of the levels or taking on the task of beating high scores, or going one step further and attempting the challenge modes where players take on a multitude of tasks from beating levels with fewer balls, beating a series of levels with one set of balls, beating a level with a minimum requisite score and in some cases, a combination of all of the aforementioned criteria. 

The alien gets to blow things up, no fair!

Thanks to the easy 'pick up and play' learning curve, even the first few levels slowly introduce the bonuses and specials, allowing players to get to grips with the physics of the game before we start hitting them with a gradual trickle of new features but the crowning glory likely goes to the music and audio of the game, in particular the rendition of "Beethoven's 9th" every time that you succeed in beating the level which plays with enough frequency to always feel like you've earned the win that you've achieved.

Harder to see here, but parts of some levels also move.

It's a game for many. For those who want to master every possible trick shot and every single special ability to maximise their gaming potential and scores or for those that want a quick pick up and play session with little need to commit a huge amount of time to the game. Peggle is a peg that fits many a hole.

Unreal

Few games were ever so ambitious as EpicMegaGames (now just Epic... a rather modest title) and their attempt with Unreal. A wide open series of expansive levels, gorgeous scenery, various races of enemies, native creatures and a sprawling planet wide enslavement force that you just so happen of which to be caught up in the middle from the peaceful emaciated and pseudo aboriginal/ethinic-minority aliens and the techno advanced oppressors with their larger, faster, deadlier, creatures and weaponised technology.

You play as Captain McNoFace, a generic 100 hit point wonder with a background of pointlessness and has key useful skills in moving and using weapons, crash landing his way on a prison ship into an odd gravitational field of a planet and wake up on your cell floor as the only survivor of the ship. After a rather atmospheric and dark exploratory check around the wreckage, grab yourself a gun, escape from the shadowy INHUMAN thingies and step outside into the bright world of Unreal while your jaw hits the floor at the sheer size and scope of the first outdoor arena being larger than anything most games bothered to even make in their entirety. Yes, Unreal is an epically large game, particularly for its time.

As FuckHead McNoBrain, you will travel here, there and everywhere trying to get back off the planet by scouting mines, enemy ships, other human ships that crashed nearby (read: fucking miles away, as in, half the game away), sky lands, mother ships and final bosses sat right beside the highest point of escape, the pod.  On the way you'll encounter a myriad of helpful aliens (try not to shoot them, it makes them less amenable to your cause), guns of all shapes and sizes from a gem-shooter that fires like a machinegun or shotgun depending on your alt-fire. Miniguns (compulsory in 90's shooters) multi-load rockets, explosive grenades, 1-2-combo laser cannons, sniper rifles (pop those heads off) and a bogey gun with explosive bogies. I wish I was making that last one up, though it's called a different name and lets you fire rapid pulses of explosives bogies or charge up to hock a fat sticky mucus ball that slides down a bit on walls before detonating into lots of bogies.

Story/plot is told through a translator GUI that beeps when you walk past the relevant message prompting box to get you look and read the events occurring around you, much like Marathon did with its view screen/terminals. Each one will likely give you helpful information on your objective or some developing lore regarding the game's plot and such.

While it all sounds nice and pretty, get ready. Each enemy within the game acts like a death match bot, perhaps rather fitting and preparing for the later instalments of Unreal Tournament series, but every enemy will try to side-step, dodge, flank, use the level around themselves to hide, take cover, attack from vantage points and such. Most notably the predator-esque creatures that have claws on their wrists and fire energy balls, seen to be diving and dodging like mad-things much in the same way the player can (and should).

From huge fat lumps with rocket launchers, to the Predator guys, to suited and booted alien marines with lasers and grenades to the flying demon monstrosities, every creature is carefully sculpted and crafted to be physically unique and identifiable, yet seems to adhere to the same movement rules as the player, except the titans which act as the games "oooh fuck" element whenever you encounter one. (and as an "ah shit" when you meet two at once).

With such a size and scope, this game seems and feels empty at times. There's the occasional hut and so here and there, castles and outposts, a village at one point, but with so few people and enemies occupying the game (until the bigger battles at least) the sparse landscape and it's pretty appearance, are very devoid of life, perhaps as a limitation on the engine at the time or being traded for the processing power of the large scale maps and carefully intricate details. It just feels empty, even back in the day of playing the game.

Though when I say that the game is huge, you really do get the feel of being on a massive (if a little linear) planet, travelling across wastelands, lush meadows, canyons and caves, climbing towers to find sky-lifts into airborne towns, battling through giant spaceships and destroying power sources to enjoy pitch-black levels that atmospherically incorporate the flashlight into the fray. That said however, sometimes the game is TOO big and level design can leave a player very disorientated and confused, particularly in the more dungeon based levels where backtracking is expected and does occur. It can leave a player rather daunted as to where to go next and whether or not they've hit the right switches to open the levels up and unlock essential doors.

The controls of the game are the much used 8 way direction, mouse look, fire and alt fire, while using inventory spaces and extra navigation for items and extra buttons for using such items or bringing up details like the translator, it can take a little while to get used to where to use things and being in an intense and fast paced battle, mean the difference in winning and reloading with annoyance. Oddly, there's a dodge system in the movements, allowing players to spring in one of 4 directions to avoid attacks, which is great when fighting in an open landscape but a cause of death if trying to navigate narrow walkways and double tapping a direction sends you FLYING off the fucking edge into lava.

Bit of a balls up there.

Graphically the game is gorgeous, there's no doubt on that account, sound-wise the game sports a rich host of fine effects and audio garble from the inhuman creatures, though sounding more like foreign speak than something truly alien in presentation. The musical accompaniment never really gets beyond being a background ambience, the occasional pseudo-techno tracks during high speed/action areas which doesn't stop once you'll killed everything, can kill the atmosphere and plunge it into the shadowy, stinky recesses of dullness.

The unfortunate part of the game, is that you won't meet another character that helpfully explains the plot, or tells you why not to shoot everything, or where to go next, it's done entirely through finding the relevant hieroglyphs and in some cases, deciphering the details to ascertain where upon one might find the next snippet of plot or direction. Further confusion being raised when one is told to power something up (hit a switch) or depower something (hit another switch) with no indication on the location of the button or what it even looks like, which results in some awkward trial and error game play mechanics. Some piss-poor level design allows for you to jump ahead to a button or switch you WILL have to push but not yet, to be told "not yet" in far more descriptive terms with no real guidance on where the switch you NEED to press now is currently located.

But what is Unreal, ultimately? An experience more so than a game, it's an adventure into the alien architecture of unreality (geddit?) and the fruits of labour of some visionary individuals, culminating in a slightly off-centre aim leaving an audience with its breath-taken one moment and frustrated in the next.

I still don't get why the last boss would be so close to the escape pod that it cannot fit inside...

Blood

Sometimes, you just want to blow everything up. Sometimes you want to play the hero and save the world, beat the bad guys and just be all that is "awesome". Sometimes, you just want to cause as much misery and suffering on everything standing in your way through physical, electrical, magical and incendiary manifestations and as many of those combined as possible.

Welcome to Blood, please wipe your ichor-stained feet.

Built using the same engine as Duke Nukem 3D, with a few bonus features in the engine such as seeing through sector teleporters, Blood offers 4 episodes of chaotically filled levels with enemies, weapons, power ups, gore, keys and horror references. Yep it's one of those games. If Duke Nukem took the hero genre through sexist tones of adrenaline and muscles in gaming, Blood takes the horror genre through guts, gore and some of the blackest humour to grace a computer game.

It's hard to tell where the references stop and where the originality begins at times, even the enemies pay homage to zombies everywhere, evil dead films with the dismembered hands running around trying to choke you, cultists in garbs firing shotguns and tommyguns at you while tossing dynamite back and forth, gargoyles of various ilks from basic to boss standards, fire breathing dogs, spiders, rats, fish creatures, mimes, innocents (unarmed idiots), malevolent spirits and more await to be dealt with in many, many guises.

The plot and premise of the game is very simple. You're a former badass bastard in a Demon-God's army; you get thrown out along with your 3 pals and killed. Sometime later you awaken and go on a revenge spree against the creatures that took your place in the army and the God/Demon of the cult you had previously signed up to, while not realising the severance plan was rather harsh. Starting off by quoting straight from Army of Darkness with "I live, again", before running outside to stab a zombie to death with a pitchfork. There's no messing about here, if you down it, it will likely get back up again and attack, which if you're not expecting this, can be a killer. It's a quick and fast lesson on the subject of "Watch out, this game might be slightly more than you're expecting".

Blood does boast quite the assortment of ass-kicking and pain inducing weapons one could expect to find in a game. Pitch forks for the melee stabbings, flare pistol to light up enemies and have them running around screaming in various guises from pseudo arabic-latin to the hilarious "it burns it burns", shotguns and tommyguns for the bullet and pellet crowds, Napalm Launcher for the rocket fans, dynamite bundles for grenade fans, prox mines and remote mines for the wankers in multiplayer, aerosol can and lighter for a flame thrower or explosion of fire, Tesla cannon for the electric fans, the life leech which takes health off enemies or yourself if you've no ammo for it and the Voodoo doll while hits enemies when you stab or can kill them outright with obscure effects. There some extra items in there for scuba gear, health packs, reflective shields and so on though some of these cause a game to crash depending on the patch you have in the software.

The potential for causing mayhem and pain is nothing short of over kill. Blow enemies up and watch their flesh get ripped from their bodies, set them on fire and have them running around, use magic to disintegrate them in ways that the Nazi’s from Raiders of the Lost Ark would be proud of. Though the real interest comes when you're up against enemies that are outright immune to specific attacks or just very resilient to them. The Cerberus dogs and boss is a fire breathing monster group, so flame and explosions aren't going to be useful against them. While the Stone Gargoyle is rather resilient to bullets, and guess what you're only really going to be armed with the first time you fight one. (Though an alternative attack with the voodoo sorts the men from the boys on that one)

It still gives me a chuckle to have someone run out from cover, on fire, screaming.

The game's enemies also have a selection that not only cause damage but can mess your visuals up. Dismembered hands, if they get close to you, can choke you and turn the screen black; green spiders blind you with poisons while the red spiders make your view shake slowly back and forth. Sadly, that's it, which leaves you feeling there were some ideas and greater potential that just wasn't utilised to the fullest, even in the update/add-on pack where there's newer enemies but no newer effects.

Oddly for such a game, the music within it is rather fitting, suitably haunting within specific levels and even catchy to the point of becoming an ear-worm and having you humming along to the music while you set about murdering everything in sight.

The levels within Blood are a little disjointed in presentation. Some of the levels are rather generic and a few of them blend together too well in such a way that you can't help but feel "oh great, another fucking demon church" but the ones that stand out more are significantly more appealing to the player. From graveyards and churches, to churches and temples, to cathedrals (I'm not selling this well am I). Yes there's a gothic theme in the majority of levels but the variances can be rather vast. The most memorable levels are the Train, where falling off will get you killed; A theme park and secret level of a whole rollercoaster (yes you get to blow most of it up), frozen hotels that look like they're straight from the Shining (even has Jack frozen solid in a hedge maze at one point), War zone cityscapes, industrial complexes, maniacal genius' castles, a level of living flesh, and the final level... another fucking cathedral.

You cannot help but feel that there's something not quite heart-felt about the game when you're crawling through another frozen tundra, or another cave system. Yes, ok, plot wise the 4 big nasties aren't exactly holed up in cities and such but even so, why do the bosses reside in a mountain top cathedral, a cave, another cave and another cathedral? As you progress through the levels you start to realise at about level 7-8 that it's aiming towards the boss and it's getting SO very generic.

That said, the shopping mall level is hilarious with that muzak playing which later become elevator music in Blood 2. Given the music is so cheerful and upbeat, it somehow becomes more appropriate to the character and the game when butchering armies of zombies and cultists, watching them explode, burn and scream, to the sound of this piece of music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L928CmhAPQY#

It just happily fits the game, giving me the idea that Caleb, our hero-antagonist, is gleefully just butchering people left and right and it just so happens to coincide with defeating a greater evil. There's no real "good vs. bad" here, it's just "Which is more evil?" I suppose it could raise questions of what is the definition of "bad" and "evil", is it merely relative to the situation or circumstance and is someone automatically good if they oppose evil? But ultimately it doesn't do that, we could pretend it does but it's just a kill fest with a nutcase character butchering everything else in his path. You don't root for either side, but you sit back and just go mental on anything that sticks its head up for the purpose of being gunned down.

As with any good single player fight fest of guns, there are bosses and a final boss. (Halo 2... can I see you over here please for a moment). The culmination of level after level after level of conflict resulting in a one-to-one showdown with the big bad of that episode. The Stone Gargoyle (later just an annoying shit you can find in the first level of some episodes), A giant spider (spawning more little spiders, annoying now and later) A 2 headed fire breathing dog (incorrectly named Cerberus, which had 3 heads, come on people do your fucking research!) and the final boss being the demon god that started the whole cult, Tchernobog, which has the ever-so-lovely ability to just set you on fire as soon as look at you. While launching fireballs.

Of course with any boss battle, the higher the difficulty, the more health it has. In some cases having nearly 5x as much health from easy mode to insane mode, though with the same ammo available as there was in easy mode, players can find themselves running out of ammo, meaning you'll fight the boss with weapons that won't do any damage, or have to use the pitch fork, which is an instant death if you're against the final boss as it kills upon contact.

The game is certainly entertaining but it does have need for a little of what one might call, an acquired taste. Particular with the pop-cultural references to horror films, and while the game gets older, the references of course, become more obscure to the younger audience. But that's not a criticism of this game, but any game that uses pop-cultural references. In this case, the game becomes a sort of treasure trove of hidden snippets of referential material, a bonus for finding it and even more of one for understanding the origins.

But then, in the case of this game, take away the humour, the references and the aesthetics and you're left with a Duke Nukem mod. Yet in Blood's case, this is such a heavily adjusted game that it does stand up in its own right and actually plays and feels more like a different game than just being a Duke3D modification. It's rare given the high population of modifications being nothing more than a few tweaks and adjustments, but Blood stands proud as a game apart, a sick sense of humour, claret pissing from every crack and orifice with a huge grin on its face inviting people to come and take part in the insanity.

I'll be there every step of the way.