Legend of Grimrock brings the real-time dungeon crawl formula of Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder to the modern age. Perhaps the best single improvement is auto-mapping. I know that filling out that sheet of graph paper was half the fun in the originals but I really didn’t miss it here. You are still exploring the layout and looking at your map to guess where secrets might be located. You can even jot down notes if you want to be thorough. But because I was not constantly having to look away from the screen, I was able to get a feel for the spaces much more quickly and look more carefully for secret buttons and loot. This is crucial because, in reality, Legend of Grimrock is a puzzle solving game at its core. The goal is to figure out the correct combination of levers, buttons, and pressure plates to trigger in order to open doors and make your way deeper into the dungeon.
The combat works the same as in the old games. You have four characters with a front and back row. Right-click a weapon to perform an attack and use the WASD keys to dodge and move around your enemies. The magic system is much improved too. Your mage will have a sub menu of nine tiles and the various spells are triggered by quickly clicking runes on the tiles. Weaker spells use a single rune, more complex ones have more complex patterns. Remember, all this is happening in real-time, so the combat feels much more like an action game than a tactical RPG.
As far a story goes, there is only the barest amount of narrative to follow. Most of the details are in various notes you find lying about and the occasional vision while you rest. Nothing fancy, but the final boss fight brings it all together into a satisfying finish. What the game lacks is a diversity of environments. There are only three wall tile types and when everything is laid out in a concise grid, lots of visual detail would have brought it up a notch. Thankfully, the game is just about the right length for the minimal amount of content in the game.
This quarantine has been hard on all of us, but let us not forget the dedicated work that still continues for our nation’s homeopaths. They’re out there in the middle of the fray insuring that the correct dosages in parts per million are being applied to their tinctures. All this despite the disruptions in the world-wide rhinoceros horn supply chain.
Why do I do this to myself? I am always disappointed with classic science fiction. This stuff is so boring. Of the two books, The Sands of Mars is the better one. It is wildly off-base with its depictions of Mars. He just nonchalantly assumes there is plant life everywhere and you can walk around without a space suit. Many of the plot points from the film 2010 are in this story and the ship’s description is very much like that of the Discovery. I don’t remember much about the first story except that it involved the last city on earth or something.
The only thing Transistor has going for it is a beautiful art style and high-quality voice acting. The rest is an exercise in tedium. Despite the artistic detail there is little interactivity to the world. The level designs are dull. The combat tries to be original but is just frustrating in that it lives uncomfortably between turn based and real-time. Plan your moves, take your actions, then run around. Boring. All this might be forgivable if not for the deliberately obtuse story telling. You’re a singer in a computer or something? With a talking sword that speaks in circles. It’s horrible.
I appreciated the 19th Century art direction, especially the hats, but it was way too long for such a simple story. Kid tries to make it at a gangster only to confront the gang leader is like the plot of half of all kung-fu movies. Also, there was some really sloppy editing throughout the early parts of the film. That’s the sort of thing that normally doesn’t bother me, but I kept being jolted by actors’ heads being in different positions as shots switched.
While I think it is a reasonably good wire-fu martial arts movie, Sword of Destiny isn’t really a worthy sequel to the near-perfect original. For one, the decision to film in English is regrettable. The native English speaking actors seem out of place and the Chinese speaking ones have trouble delivering. Second, there’s also a bit too much of those made-for-TV CGI effects. Finally, it tries a bit too hard to hit the same beats as the original but doesn’t quite understand why things like the extended flashbacks worked in Crouching Tiger. But, it’s easy to look past its flaws and just enjoy it as a well-executed martial arts picture that manages to muster a few fun original moments like the ice fight and tavern brawl.
Followers of this site (ed. yeah like that’s a thing) will remember a few years ago I created a in-browser playable version of the Applesoft BASIC game Haunted House for this site. Over the past month or so I got it in my head to push my skills as a programmer and make a much more fully realized version of the game. Today I am releasing my new version of the game, Haunted House: Remastered! It’s a vast improvement on the original in almost every way possible. In other words, it’s actually fun to play.
While it’s nowhere near the level of sophistication of an Infocom game, I think it does some pretty impressive stuff (for my skill level as a programmer). It’s still a two word parser, but the vocabulary is increased. There are full-page help screens, triggered story events, a retro-styled monochrome monitor look, and a bunch of scary sound effects! Please take a few minutes and give the game a try. It’s not too long and I try to keep the puzzle reasonably fair.
Wire has been on autopilot since their 2015 self-titled release. There’s nothing wrong with the records, just none of them rise to the brilliance of Change Becomes Us. Mind Hive starts off with some pretty good rock songs. There are some strings buried in the mix and other nice touches but the record looses steam by the end. That said, Wire remains one of the few bands left whose albums I will still buy without question (5.6.7.8.s and the various remnants of Cabaret Voltaire also included).
This was the last of the ink drawings I created for the Nox Archaist game manual. At the time of this writing I don’t know whether any of these will make it in to the final printing, but we’ll see. This is supposed to be a “cultist.” I tried to make him look a little like one of the healers from The Bard’s Tale. I own a know that looks like that.
Tonight I just started to watch The Legendary Weapons of China again by mistake. This is why I keep blogging these movies. I will eventually forget I’ve seen them before. In any event, I forgot how awesome the first ten minutes of this film is (the rest is not that great). Leave it to the Shaw Brothers to create movies that are written for eight year-olds but filled with all sorts of graphic violence. The best moment is when a fighter is commanded to rip his crotch out. At first he has a very dainty technique:
But it ends with a quick grab and, a backwards flop, and then a fistful of gore flying through the air:
