As with most of the great shareware titles of the 90s, I played the free episode of Wolfenstein 3D a gazillion times but never bothered to buy the complete package. Once again with thanks to GOG.com I have been able to finally complete in its entirety. This is the progenitor of first-person shooters and the basic game mechanics are still pretty solid. Its main problem is that of repetitiveness. There are only four kinds of enemies to fight. That isn’t including the bosses at the end of every episode which all have a unique sprite and some even have an elaborate death sequence:
But even those bosses all kinda fight in the same manner.
Levels are built on a grid of right angles so that most can be navigated by simply always going to the right. There are no realistic shadows or lighting. The overall effect is that of being in a sterile, strip-mall dentist’s office. Playing this again really made me appreciate the giant step forward that Doom was. Despite these complaints, blasting away Nazi’s is still fun.
As you can probably see in my screen grabs, I was using a mod that gave me a minimap and also, more importantly, mapped the controls to the modern WASD layout. The map does break the game a little in that it eliminates the need to hunting for secrets. Having to push every wall randomly was never really a great design choice anyways.
I think this is considered by many to be one of the best point and click adventure games of the early nineties. I can see why people remember it fondly. The cyberpunk setting is unique (if you don’t count Neuromancer or just about every CD-ROM title from the same era), the production is impressive, and the game is massive for a point and click. At the time of this writing it is still offered as a free game on GOG.com. Unfortunately, I felt it to be a bit too oblique and meandering. I found the puzzles frustrating and I eventually gave up, finishing the game with a walk-through. Even with explicit instructions, I had no idea why I had to complete tasks. All I know is that I had to get to the ground floor of the tower. Somewhere in there was a story about discovering my past but that kinda gets lost when you are scrounging for dog treats so you can lure an heiresses’s dog onto a plank in order to catapult it into a pond thereby distracting a guard so you can enter a church so you can… you get the picture.
The original Serious Sam became an unexpected hit when it received the approval of Old Man Murray. While other games were trying to be dark and mature, Serious Sam reveled in pure, goofy run-and-gun action. It was like Duke Nukem if it was made by a backwoods folk artist. This sequel is somewhat of a technological upgrade, but the art design still looks like the work of someone just learning how to use 3-D Studio Max, and that is the game’s charm. The enemies range from run-of-the-mill space marines to exploding clowns to giant cigar smoking mechanical T-rexes.
It takes a while for the game-play to rise to the bonkers level of the first one, but by the final world you will be shooting and running backwards from hundreds and hundreds of (literally) screaming mobs. The shooting mechanics are lacking the visceral feel of the Shadow Warrior reboot, but what it lacks in feel, it makes up for in the sheer numbers of enemies.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Serious Sam 2 is that its cut scenes can be genuinely funny. The story is dumb and the writers know it. So, rather than bore the player with exposition, you can watch Sam rise a surfboard in the sky or get drunk and party with the local primitives.
Well, this is a Zelda game. The formula has remained unchanged ever since The Ocarina of Time. The princess has been abducted and you must work your way through the various dungeons one-by-one, collecting a new power in every dungeon. Each game in the series introduces a new game-play element. In the case of Skyward Sword that is its (supposedly) precise motion controls.
Skyward Sword requires the use of the Wii MotionPlus controller. While it’s definitely an improvement over other games that have tried to use the standard WiiMote as a sword, you still end up just flailing your arms like an idiot. The key here is to realize that the game is forgiving enough to allow you actually to take your time and be precise for many of the bigger battles.
The motion controls are also a large part of the flying sections of the game. They work well enough, but there really isn’t much fun to be had while flying. It just needlessly lengthens play time as you slowly navigate to the next zone. I found myself abusing the “dive” function as a hacky way to increase my altitude rather than concentrate on manipulating the bird in slow arcs.
Wii frills aside, this is really just a standard Zelda game. Like with the DS Zelda games, I found myself getting bored by the simplistic narrative. On more than one occasion I had to set the game aside and move on to something else for a while. I would eventually return and get a little farther on but there’s only so much un-skippable, insipid dialogue a guy can take.
Now, there are moments of inspired challenge, but for each one of those, there are mini-quests that have you back tracking over finished areas over and over. This was not a bad gaming experience, but Nintendo needs to kick it up a notch. I’m hopeful that Breath of the Wild might break from tradition enough to bring back this once great series.
The story is implausible and Nick Cage is as ridiculous as ever, but the stylish direction makes this an entertaining thriller. It opens with a ten minute long shot and keeps bouncing back to that same moment in the plot to show different perspectives. Once the baddies are established things quickly fall apart but by then I was invested in whatever little plot there was.
My copy was bought used and man-o-man does it smell musty. The odor is, at best, like a stack of old newspapers in the dampest bayou floodplain basement, or, at worst, the bouquet of the finest Trader Joe’s wine. I’m not sure if the author’s intent was make his readers recoil in disgust, but, if it was, mission accomplished. Okay, it’s unfair for me to judge a book by the way it smells, and, as we all know, a book’s scent is not set by the author. It’s set by the publisher. Damn you Crown Publishers, Inc.!
Fortunately, this week I have a cold and my nasal breathing passages are all clogged up. I guess I should quickly review this book before the DayQuil wears-off. All-in-all this is a fantastic overview of Eichenburg’s work and a good starting point if you are interested in collecting his illustrations. The reproductions are all high quality. I especially like the side-by-side comparisons between initial sketches and the finished engravings. Many of the prints are reproduced at a bigger scale than the actual blocks. This understates the incredible detail and skill the Eichenburg brings to his art.
For the most part, text is kept to a minimum with only a paragraph or two written about each of the print series. That’s fine by me as artists writing about their own art can get pretty cringey. As an example, listen to the Sean Astin and Elijah Wood’s commentary on the Lord of the Rings DVD. You’ll want to take a swig of arsenic every time they mention “the craft” of acting. I digress. There are no hobbits in this book.
This is a strange old book. It’s a Nancy Drew style mystery but the main character is a teen-aged Shirley Temple. Characters in the book recognize her as the famous entertainer and then it’s never mentioned again. There’s one instance in the book where, in order to escape a desperate situation, she needs to utilize skills she had learned sitting in the make-up chair. This is just weird concept. The mystery itself is not that deep and Shirley isn’t even the one who solves it. The whole plot about a haunted lake might have been the impetus of her investigation, but it’s soon forgotten. What the book does have is some wonderful line illustrations by E. Joseph Dreany.
The title of this one is a bit deceptive. The book is actually a history of British wood engraving. It starts out at the very beginnings of art history by making the tenuous claim that European cave art was actually a form of engraving. There are some nods to Chinese works, then quite a bit about the woodcuts of the Albrecht Dürer and other formschneider print makers (again, not wood engraving!). The author then breezes past the many decades of the golden era of commercial wood engraving only to spend chapter after chapter gushing over Eric Gill and works of the early 20th Century. Eric Gill is fine and all, and Gill Sans is a lovely typeface, but can Lynd Ward or Fritz Eichenburg get a little love here? Still, even if the writing is rather dull and the scope somewhat limited, the book is filled with plenty of examples of fantastic engravings in all different styles.
As a bit of a side note, the layout of the illustrations in this book sucks. Not once was the picture on the same page as the passages that covered it. Most of the time I would have to flip back 30–40 pages to find the relevant engraving, then flip back losing my place in the text. Were all my old college art history books this poorly organized and I’m just forgetting?
