Similarly to Jess Franco’s film Venus in Furs, this has nothing to do with the classic book of the same name. It’s probably just using the name of a controversial book to suggest that this movie teetering on the edge of taboo. The only thing taboo here are gross shots from within an actual slaughterhouse. The rest of the movie is a confusing murder mystery revolving around a secret scientific process that is being sought by various unconnected characters. The Haitian setting is ugly. The story is boring, confusing and, in the end, not really worth watching.
Ultima V is perhaps the pinnacle of gaming on the Apple ][ computer system. While I thought that Nox Archaist built on the basic mechanisms and presentation in a way that made this type of old school RPG more accessible to modern tastes (and is still a great game on top of that), Warriors of Destiny is unmatched in terms of scope, storytelling and core game play mechanics. Although the sprites are simple, the world of Britannia is filled with detail. This ranges from interactive world objects such as clocks, stockades, and harpsichords, to rich and evocative dialogue interactions. And even a set piece or two:
Oops, you’re caught in Blackthorn’s torture chamber!
It has taken me quite some time to finish this game. I bought it on release some thirty-plus years ago and played it on my IIgs for hours upon hours. I never was able to beat the game though. I think I got about two-thirds the way through, having defeated the Shadowlords and only having that final quest to rescue Lord British remaining. Simple, just descend through an eight-level dungeon, make your way through a uncharted section of the underworld, avoid lava, make sure you have the correct item to pass the magical barrier, have that final word of power ready, descend through another eight levels of the game’s final dungeon, and did you remember to pick up that secret object which allows you to save Lord British because if not, too bad.
The final battle screen in the final dungeon.
Did I mention that this game is really hard? My teenaged self really had no idea how to play role-playing games with any skill. Level grinding and balancing a party were not concepts I understood very well. On top of these basic skills. The early Ultima games were brutal in the early phases of the game. Players needed to try not being killed by low-level monsters all while having to maintain a stock of food, spells, reagents, gold, torches, and gems. One wrong step or random trap and you are poisoned with only a couple dozen turns to find a cure before your HP dwindled to zero. You really had to have patience and take the time to build up your characters before attempting to finish the main quests.
This is rather difficult to do on actual hardware. I could have loaded the disk images on to my CFFA3000 and played on my IIgs but there is a ton of disk swapping in this game. Also, we had a Mockingboard sound card on our Apple ][+ but the card version we had was not compatible with the IIgs. We got rid of that card with the original Apple ][+. This always sucked because the music is one of the best parts of the Apple version. The Dos version (which I own via GOG.com) looks tons better but is missing these musical cues too.
Playing the game in AppleWin made everything much better. I had all the music, could speed up the game during my many grinding sessions, and I had the ability to save the state of the emulator at any time. I guess that last item is almost cheating as I often would save a state before resting and reload it if I got ambushed at night. But that is not as bad as the extent of my cheating back when I originally played the game and would sector edit my stats. Believe me, I was tempted to edit my food levels during this play-through but resisted (Track $03 Sector $04, bytes #80 & #81). Also, there’s a point after delving into your first major dungeon when gold and food are thankfully no longer an issue. I tried importing my original character disks into my PC, but the disks were corrupted after years sitting in my basement. I just started the game from scratch. I was in this for the long haul.
Buying overpriced rations in the early parts of the game.
The core of the Ultima games has always been its innovative dialogue system. By using a simple text parser and giving the player control of the exact topic being discussed you are able to return to characters you met previously and glean new information on new topics. These clues emerge as chains of conversations between many NPCs, forcing you to pay attention and immerse yourself in the story. This system would be perfected in Ultima VI a few years later. As with that game, detailed note taking is essential.
Characters and story are icing on the cake but Ultima V was the last of the games in the series to remain true to the combat-oriented design of the original. The tactical turn-based battles work very well considering how simple they are. Magic is useful but not the be all and end all as it is in the Infinity Engine games. A dummy like me can just chop and slice my way through fights. The skirmishes really take shape when you start venturing into the dungeons. We still have a wonderful first-person shift in the dungeons that is punctuated by various custom chambers which switch back to tile-based view. The rooms are filled with treasure and secret switches that made dungeon delving much more fun than I remembered.
Roaming the halls of an Ultima V dungeon. Egads, a gazer!
My final assessment of the game is that it ranks up there as one of the best installments in the series. It surely is the best one on the Apple ][ series and would recommend to anyone wanting to play a game on that system to start here. The brutal difficulty and old-school quirks keep me from giving it a 10, but it’s well-worth the effort. And now here are some cool screenshots:
New MaginciaHaving a chatBattle in the swampsRats in the dungeonA treasure roomBlackthorn’s castleThe final sceneSatisfying denouement33 years later, a winner!
This game goes out of its way to let you know that it’s about mental illness; and that they hired doctors and experts to make sure that got it right; and if you are a bit touched this may trigger you because it’s scary, intense and realistic! Well, as realistic as any game about fighting mystical Norse demons and beasts with a glowing sword. Not to nitpick, but I was really distracted by Senua’s period-inaccurate pristine dental hygine. When she’s not hearing disembodied voices she must be regularly brushing and flossing.
It takes a while for the story to settle in, but when the pieces start to come together it’s pretty satisfying. The basics are that her man has been killed and Senua is on a spiritual journey to release his soul or something. All the while she is taunted by the voices in her head that feed her with doubt and guilt over having possibly caused his death. Thus follows a series of levels that slowly build on puzzle mechanics and are punctuated with the occasional sword fight. The combat is pretty simple: dodge then swing sword. The puzzles are mostly built around spatial perception and, if you’ve played The Witness, it will seem like old hat to you. The Steam package also includes the VR version of the game which seems very apropos to the mechanics.
I, however, wasn’t completely smitten by the experience. At times its linearity makes it feel borderline like a walking simulator. There’s a bunch of boring, filler backstory about Norse gods and myths which is triggered by interacting with runes. And, I hate to say it, but the schizoid voices start to become a bit much after a while. I get it. That’s part of the point, but I hear enough from kooky-brained people in real life on my Facebook feed.
Nox Archaist (no relation to Nox) has come up several times before on this site as it was a Kickstarter that I supported. As part of the project, they asked contributors to submit artworks for the game’s manual and several of my images were used in the finished book. You can see some of that art here and here and I will probably post more drawings in the future.
The game doesn’t just look like an old Apple ][ RPG, it is an actual Apple ][ game playable on real hardware. A custom version of the MicroM8 emulator is also included for playing the game on a PC or Mac. For the most part I used AppleWin as it is much easier to switch between system speeds.
Look at that big castle sprite
Towns are bustling
NPC portraits!
Text parser dialogue
Various modes of transport
Set sail
A quest log!
Lots of underworld to explore
Multi-tile enemies!
Get used to sleeping a lot
The final battleground
I claimed sweet, sweet victory!
Nox Archaist’s design is mostly inspired by Ultima (featuring an important cameo from Lord British), but makes several advancements in terms of interface and gameplay. This is especially evident in the inventory/stats management screens and the large, animation-filled tiled maps. The dialogs retain the excellent parser-based system with highlighted keywords alá Ultima VI. Note taking is still essential, but there is a simple quest log to keep you on track. Many NPC interactions feature lovely character portraits and there is a bit of Mockingboard music that plays as you enter new locales. It still feels like an Ultima game enough to make me almost forget just how tedious those old games were. I’m am thankful I didn’t have to avoid being poisoned every three seconds, manage stores of food, or endlessly mix spell reagents.
Even beyond the nostalgia, I enjoyed the game quite a bit. The combination of the dialogue system and the need for careful note taking helped me to immerse myself into the story and the world. I even kept a journal of my progress from session to session. Conversations and in-game books always lead to more exploration and more areas of the world opening up.
The other half of the game is combat and leveling up your party. This can get to be a little grind-y at time. You will find yourself being slaughtered without much warning and it’s at those points that I would switch to grind mode in order to make progress. That’s when it helps to throttle the emulator to full speed and just blast through minor enemies collecting XP and gold. Then parts of the map that seemed impossible all the sudden are a piece of cake. It didn’t really pay off to try and build well-balanced characters. Just dump all your points into the relevant stat for your class and don’t think much about it. Other character traits are skill-based meaning, for example, the more you pick locks the better at picking locks you become. Over time, the characters begin to excel at the play style you push on them.
With the grinding and limited resources the game can feel a bit repetitive at times. Usually, just when I thought it was a bit much, a new means of travel would be discovered and/or a new area would open up piquing my interest once again. Overall, I enjoyed Nox Archaist and was glad to have played a miniscule part in its creation. I’m hopeful that something may grow out of this project to see more tile-based RPG games of this style released. I would love to have a game like this with an integrated noted taking and map making system built in (like a Steam overlay).
While it’s almost structured as a defense of the “misuse” of words such as literally and like, McWhorter’s book is a very thorough investigation on how and why language evolves. I listened to the audiobook as I felt it would be better to actually hear a book on language rather than read it. My only quibble was his pronunciation of the word Neanderthal as Neander-THALL rather than Neander-TALL. You see, I have had a single semester of anthropology and that pretty much makes me an expert on the subject. I have made it my life’s goal to correct people who say it with the TH sound. My expertise is my gift to the world.
A dystopian novel that predates Orwell’s 1984 by a decade or two and was banned in Russia until the 80s. Unfortunately, I found this to be a bit of a slog. A lot of the setting is barely described or approached in a poetical manner that makes everything confusing. It’s a “perfect” society based on rationality and numbers where there is no privacy and your entire day is regimented. A small group of revolutionaries lure in the main character into a plot to escape to somewhere else where there is more grit and individualism. And birds or something.
An alcoholic archeologist (aren’t they all?) is at the center of this murder mystery that jumps from scene to scene without much cohesive logic. A couple is murdered at the dig site in a manner that matches a heretofore unexcavated tomb. Next thing you know we are following a conductor in a patterned jumpsuit as he abuses everyone working around him. The film’s only saving grace are the few scenes of the mustachioed lead actor raging in his alcoholic flashbacks.
A British mystery thriller featuring Suzi Kendall. The more I see of Suzi the more I like her acting and her style. This is by no stretch a great movie. It’s hardly even a good movie but there’s a certain charm to it. For one, is bright and colorful. Not in a Bava lighting sense, but an overall color palette that permeates every frame. Second, the soundtrack is truly awful to the point of wrapping around and becoming ironically funny. It’s like something you’d hear in a 70s television drama. And then there’s the ridiculous plotting. An art teacher thinks she sees Satan killing a teenage girl and she paints Satan in hopes of luring out the killer. Britain is weird. That’s all I have to say.
On the surface, this a horror movie about a small mountain town that has been plagued with a number of murders of which many of the locals are beginning to suspect there might be a werewolf involved. But horror takes a backseat to the story of a recovering alcoholic policeman who is desperately trying to emerge from his father’s shadow and prove that he can actually accomplish something in the world besides his drunken fits of rage. Overall there is an underlying comedic tone to the grim goings on. The horror elements feel like they are happening in the background and it isn’t until the end that you realize that it has all been a carefully crafted and subtle build up of clues leading to the final climax. So subtle, that a Agatha Christie style wrap-up may have helped ring the right bells at the end. The point is moot because I would gladly re-watch this in a heartbeat.
The original Mirror’s Edge was one of only a handful of games that I had gone back and replayed almost immediately after completing it. It was an excellent game that had you puzzling through levels using parkour skills. This sequel does not hold up to the original at all.
First, it’s open-world. I’m really beginning to dislike this gaming format. It tends to make games longer than they should be by filling game-play with mindless item collection and dull side missions. Also, in Catalyst every place in the world has the same white minimalist design so there is no way to get your bearings. It’s cool art direction but it hinders game-play.
That brings me my second gripe. The first game was built upon well-designed levels. A single object would be colored red and that would guide the player’s eyes in the proper direction. There was just enough there to make the player feel like they were instinctually finding their way through the world when it was all a finely crafted race course. The new game does this dynamically and it just doesn’t work the same. You follow a ghost image which is referred to as your runner’s vision. This really just ends up feeling like following a standard RPG quest arrow.
Finally, the story here is just a dud. Turns out this is a reboot and has nothing to do with the first game (which wasn’t exactly Moby Dick either). It’s not just a grittier retelling or something like that. Faith’s backstory has been changed and now major characters that were good are now bad guys. And, of course, in this world corporations are evil and have no incentive to be good to their customers (let alone not kill them). Lazy, lazy, lazy.
At least the parkour aspects remain pretty solid. I don’t think there have been many new moves added to your repertoire except for maybe swinging around corners and a grappling hook attachment. Combat has improved. There is no shooting and it’s all just fists and kicks. This makes mastering parkour a more integral part of fighting.
In the end though, completing the main mission was about enough for me. I have no desire to test my skill in all the user-created races that pepper the world. Races in which the leaderboard is always topped by some player that managed to complete a two-minute race in twelve seconds. Hmm.
