Terminator: SkyNET - PC/DOS

T-800 is going to shoot you in the FACE!

The Terminator franchise has a lot going for it and sadly not a lot really been done all that well with it, arguably beyond the second film. The potential to have stories of multiple Terminators being sent back and forth to fight and protect various people has been played around with by the comic books and the films mash up a few things here and there that the TV series ignores and acknowledges in multiple incongruous ways. Terminator SkyNET, is the follow up to the original Terminator Future Shock (Of which I'll likely review next week).

Unlike the films, the shotgun is rather effective.

The idea is simple (ish...) enough, it's set after the wars, after the first two films and based in the future where you, Captain McNoFace and Generic Hero WITH a voice (little off-putting actually) are already in the Resistance and fighting alongside John Connor, Saviour of the Human Race from deadly robots. It pays a level of homage to the source material which makes slightly more sense with that context. Rather than pumping humans and robots back through time, this game deals with having to confront the eponymous SkyNET and stop one of its plans.

Battling robots amongst skeletons of old buildings.

You start with a selection of nice weapons from the start including grenades, pipe bombs, an Uzi, Assault Rifle, Shotgun and Plasma Rifle with slight zoom scope based on the first film. (This actually was ground breaking in that you began the game with more than Sweet Fuck All but more about that later). You're tasked with running into a robot compound filled with murderous robots that aren't too happy that you're alive and fleshy and will try to make you relatively unfleshy as soon as possible. It's here that you do a bit of snooping around with all the subtlety of a suicide bomber. Upon which you find the super secret weapon... A nuke.

Found it? Wasn't exactly well hidden now was it?

For those that don't know, nukes caused all this devastation in the first place and the super weapon is to use the same weapon again. So for a computer that can calculate how to traverse time and space, seems someone left the Read-Only option on for the "Learning Lessons" section of the AI. Either way, it's your mission soon to investigate which nuke this is (Like it matters?), find out how and where to disable it if possible, attempt to take it out and finally get yourself to where it is and disable it in a series of 8 or so missions. This will also involve driving cars around and flying one of the Hunter Killer machines to get this done.

There's quite a variety of Terminators in the game.

Terminator SkyNET uses and slightly improves upon the previous engine of the game with a little extra in the physics department (Bouncing grenades) and manages to also negate issues like game flags not triggering where multiple options are not performed in EXACTLY the right way and time. As such the missions in this game aren't exactly that difficult or taxing beyond "Find place, hit button, run for it" though some of the layouts require taking a BIG leap of faith (Looking at you level 3... and your bullshit building jumping madness) and some are just a straightforward slog through the environment.

Bigger guns please!

Given the time and capacity of the engine, SkyNET makes a very good go at giving a real sense of doom and gloom with the game's graphics and appearance. Locations look destroyed and the inclusion of pockets of radiation do take away any real sense of accomplishment in that if you win or lose, this planet is still looking like a Scorched Earth situation. Buildings can be entered to scavenge for supplies but will require a loading screen that takes the edge off the immersion a little while derelicts can be trawled through to find dead soldier's supplies here and there and to get higher vantage points in the game. Bonus points to the game for including the night club from the first film complete with hologram dancers and lots of dead bodies.

Yes, the legs WILL keep coming for you.

The music and sounds in the game compliment SkyNET with various remixes and rehashes of Brad Fiedel's famous composition for the film The Terminator. While the guns sound hefty and meaty and add to the feeling that you're packing a punch with these implements of robot-dismantling. It's a shame though that the graphics haven't fared too well over the years as this would be a good game to return to from time to time. Having said that it remains a solid game with a key flaw to it...

Get ready for bad acting in cutscenes.

Overall, the game is a patch that was released as a standalone. This set of missions should have been part of the original game and formed a cohesion in the main story rather than being as it is here, a set of side-missions masquerading as a full game in itself. Though having said that, it does remain a rather plot driven, plot focused game with no hints on how to achieve objectives beyond the initial blurb of the introduction to the mission, so there's no way points or guides on the HUD, you have to work it out for yourself. Not that THAT is a bad thing, it just would be nice if the game was longer or part of the original and followed the initial intentions laid out for this add-on pack turned full title.

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...

Half-Life

Dare I review this? Dare I sit there and look at this piece of work and do what nearly everyone else has done since the day it was released? Of course I do. It's not that I have the bollocks to do it, it's quite simply because it's a game that everyone should play at some point or another (if they haven't already, or even if they HAVE already) just to re-familiarise themselves with what a high standard of gaming should look like and should feel like to play.

Half-Life was very unlike most other games of the First Person Genre. The majority of games were (some still ARE) the simple affair of getting from point a to point b and kill anything that rises up in the way. Doing that in Half-Life will get you... barely out of the first room as your plot based exposition/conversation has to take place with an NPC for them to get the door to open. It's an odd situation when you're used to seeing ANYTHING move and trying to kill it.

For the controls, you have your now standard setup of forwards, back, left, right, use, jump mouse looking, shooting, alternate shooting and crouching. Nothing particularly fancy compared to games with going prone or using parkour to navigate levels like some hopped up prick on coke with springs up his arsehole. Yet the engine works well and the movement/control system is practically faultless, though it can take a little time to realise that sometimes you need to jump THEN crouch to get into some awkward spaces.

The game starts off with the player riding the monorail in a huge underground complex and in an odd twist, can do NOTHING for the first few minutes while you're being conveyed around a place that is showing off the engine's capabilities. Yet nothing is held in such a way to force you to look at the events taking place, in fact you could be watching one thing and miss something else just equally as awesome. Rather than some games that control a player’s vision and forces them to watch something they might necessarily NOT be looking at immediately, just for the designers to show off a complex special effect. It's jarring to the players to see and to watch what's going on while interrupting the flow of play. Not here, not in this game. You CAN miss the special effects and likely will.

While riding a fixed box for around 5 minutes, you'd think it'd be boring, but with so much eye candy to be shown, especially for the time, large areas showing off the detail with little slowdown, it makes for a rather grand opening and gives way to people being treated to a story without exposition, seeing into the world laid out at Black Mesa, the experiments being conducted, the machines being used, the size and scale laid out in multiple maps as well as the oddly hidden, and decidedly NOT ominous involvement of the military with a helicopter.

The action doesn't kick off until nearly 20minutes into the game (or 5 hours if you're that much of a prick acting slowly) and you shove a shopping trolley with a big gem into a bright light. Tits go up, shit goes down and you're suddenly teleporting back and forth between one reality and another before it all goes dark and some aliens are staring at you. Back to this world and all that glittered and was pure is now smashed, blown up (or blowing up) misfiring, malfunctioning and generally hazardous to your health.

Once outside it, you start to realise that you're going to need some of these survivors to help unlock doors and such to let you progress. In the meantime, you'll grab some guns and work your way through air vents and complexes in your journey back to the surface. Before long the military start killing anyone they find so your job gets harder while fighting back the gung-ho cover up attempt while at the top and running across the desert fighting tanks and helicopters.

Eventually you meet the group that could fix the problem and start to delve down into firing up the processes to begin hunting through the alien world and killing the problem at one of the sources (which we know is not the case thanks to the event that was Half-Life 2).

The whole time you're being attacked by aliens left and right, ninja assassins, marines, psychic dog beats, huge shark monsters, armour-plated aliens with bee guns, giant tumour carrying crab beasts, walking tanks with flame throwers, lightning blasting monsters and the almost cute, head crab creatures. The selection and variety of enemies and situations is vast and almost different in every situation, sometimes being shown things, sometimes alluding to future meetings.

The game tells a very rich and developing storyline told through varying guises of over hearing conversations, direct conversations, listening in on radio broadcasts, watching scenes of combat unfold around one's self whilst trying to sneak around the combat or plough through it with some big tanks firepower etc. Nearly every situation has multiple ways of defeating the enemy/traps until you get to the alien world where the game becomes intergalactic leapfrog time. Which is a shame, as the lack of cohesive plot seems to drop by this point and it almost seems like the alien levels were tacked on when the game should have jumped to the end point with the spooky G-Man, a character who has been following you around during the whole game and now finally presents himself to the player in the grand finale with the ultimatum of "join up or get fucked", in much more eloquent fashion than I've stated.

It brings about a rather disappointing end with too jarring a change not only pace and atmosphere, but also in style and game play, bringing in the long-jump mechanics into the fray when there's very little of the game left to play. But at this point, I'm nit-picking; it's a mild annoyance but a very memorable one while the rest of the game is a steady, solid progression from start to near-finish, then to go to pot very quickly unfortunately.

It doesn't take much to remember some of the more impressive moments, be it running from a Goliath, navigating train tracks to get from one depot to another, avoiding drowning by using barrels to raise a lift to jump across, going toe-to-toe with tanks, APCs and helicopters, avoiding collapsing buildings, utilising alien and experimental weaponry, and all in a way that is a lot more rewarding than just going from a to b.

Admittedly it looks a little dated given today’s standards of gaming, but as a blindingly powerful example of how to do a FPS shooter right with a rich with storyline, progression, scaling difficulty and not making the player feel like a rat in a maze, THIS is one of the longest running examples of how to do it that you would have hoped many others would have taken the time and consideration to sit down, make notes and study this gem.

It's not a perfect game however, not by a long shot and the flaws and bugs become more evident the longer that you play it. The AI can be fairly easily tricked and duped once you recognise the patterns of play they utilise and set pieces can be completely over looked/bypassed once you realise the tricks of the engines to make jumps that the designers never really accounted for. The Strafe Jump technique can be rather a large boost once momentum is on your side.

Aside from the game itself, it should be mentioned that the modding community took to Half Life like a duck to water, spawning some of the biggest and most profitable mods, eventually turned full games in their own right on the same engine (counter strike being a prime example and Team Fortress after their stint on Quake engine), while these have little impact on the review of the game itself, they still deserve a level of recognition from the starting point that Half Life gave them.

Dated, certainly. Flawed, in places. Fun, definitely and all the more reason I want to keep playing it.

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.