After 23 years, American McGee's Alice is beaten.

Story:
Alice is in an insane asylum having become wracked with guilt because of a fire, which killed her parents and she survived. Wonderland has become twisted and evil. What is at the 'heart' of it all?

Good, but not great as far as platformers go. One design I appreciate, is not putting enemies in cheap spots to knock you into an abyss when you least expect it. When you get knocked off a ledge, you'll know why and from where. You will run into enemies placed throughout the game hiding around corners, though. It's not excessive, but it's there. The game plays great with a keyboard & mouse. Moving is fluid but jumping and the associated lag as a result is sloppy. A landing marker/guide appears, but it's only useful when the action is at a minimum. Usually, there's some kind of enemy firing at you from a distance. It's a good thing they included a quick save function, because I would have given up pretty quickly having to start a level over from the beginning from either falling, or an enemy bomb or strike pushing me over the edge. Puzzles are intelligible and you won't ever find yourself wondering how to solve them. Even better, there's practically zero backtracking. I think the labyrinth garden near the end was the worst of it; but what do you expect; it's a maze...

Enemies can make short work of you even on medium difficulty; Alice is not a bullet sponge; in fact, her defense is pretty low, and there are no power-ups to increase your health and will-power bars. However, with the flawless and responsive mouse aiming (must be the Quake 3 roots), you can make short work of those same enemies, too. Health/Will-power items are well placed; you'll need them if you do not eliminate enemies quickly. There's also some special power-ups for increased strength or invisibility, but they are few and far between. All but in a few locations, they are useless because you'll probably have mopped up all the enemies by the time you reach one of them. As the game progresses, using the right weapon for the right situation helps keep the floors mopped. You'll get a feel for it as you progress. The "will power" you have is used to power those weapons, so you can't just run into the area 'guns a blazing' as it doesn't last long. If you don't take out the enemies effectively (which also provide the juice to refill your health and will), you'll run out of will very, very quickly; and the Vorpal Blade (stock weapon) is weak. You will find yourself becoming a sniper trying to pick off enemies from a distance and hiding behind environmental obstacles the more reckless you are expending your will power. The enemies have great aim, and their weapons and projectiles benefit from a very large hit radius (meaning, unless you're moving/strafing quickly, you are going to get hit). Enemies usually counterattack very quickly also, so if you're in close you need to constantly be moving. In fact, you need to constantly be moving for most of the game. Don't get the impression the AI for the game is amazing; they'll be plenty of situations for enemies to get stuck in the environment or too stupid to notice you if you're just out of reach of their programmed sight. You can take advantage of this, certainly.

Speaking of weapons, I've found all but the 'Demon Dice' useful. Most have a primary and alternate method of fire. Earlier weapons picked up in the game are more useful during the earlier parts of the game, and the later weapon pick-ups with the latter. The only useless weapon is the 'Demon dice.' It takes too long to do anything and there's a chance the demon will attack you, and it most definitely will attack you if there are no other enemies around! Be careful with the Jackbomb; it's great for setting an area ablaze, but it can hurt you significantly, too! Top 3 weapons: Icewand, Jacks, & Jackbomb. The Jabberwock Eye staff and Blunderbuss (secret... look for Humpty Dumpty!) are also great, but mostly reserved for boss fighting. The Jabberwock Eye staff alternate can practically clear a level of enemies, but it takes too long to charge, and it will likely hurt you (significantly), as well.

The artwork and graphics are a perfect reflection of the state-of-the-art graphics and design for 1999/2000 - lots of 'blocky-ness' with a feel that the edges are softening, and shapes are becoming more realistic (which I lament to some degree today - I love the technological limitations of the period), and they are brilliant, imaginative, bold, and colorful. The game should be played in 32-bit color. I had tried playing using 16-bit color on a Voodoo5, but flaws are evident with particle and smoke effects pixelating and banding at the top of the list of negatives. (As an aside, the game in 32-bit is too demanding even for a Voodoo5 overclocked on a 3.2GHz OC Pentium 4, which was very, very disappointing...I was even a bit surprised the experience was as bad as it was - framerates enter the teens and low twenties even with smoke effects and a couple NPCs.) In any case, when an area is clear of enemies, you should stop to take in an eyeful and appreciate all the work put into the artwork, graphics, and wacky structures. If you like exploding meat, there's plenty of that, also.

As good as the graphics are, the cinematics are lousy. There are only a few (developers, opening, and closing), but they look like terrible even for 2000. They are compressed to dust, low resolution, and it seems to me it would have been much better to just use the in-game graphics.

Audio - Fantastic. The music, eerie sound effects, and voice acting are all superb. I played with EAX2 (Creative ALchemy) and surround. If you're a headphones gamer, you'll really appreciate the sound positioning. The game supports A3D2, also.

Next time you're in a Halloween-type of mood, consider American McGee's Alice.

System used to play the game:
AMD 7800X3D
32GB RAM
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX

Settings used to play the game:
1600x1200, 91Hz (engine cap)
32-bit color w/all in-game settings at maximum
44KHz sound (8-bits disabled), EAX 2.0, Surround
Vsync enabled (externally forced)
AA adaptive multi-sampling 4x (externally forced)
AF 16x (externally forced)
Texture filtering high (externally forced)

I've been playing Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order on and off, and.. I stopped. I don't hate it, but it just does not grow on me like I thought it would.. The Souls/Uncharted hybrid gameplay is doing nothing for me; keyboard mouse controls are a mess and the gamepad feels only marginally better.

I went in expecting a Jedi Knight kind of game, and this it is not. Such a shame.. Should I soldier on? I am in the third hub world, after finding the temple. Does it get better?

appiah4 wrote on 2023-07-02, 09:00:

I've been playing Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order on and off, and.. I stopped. I don't hate it, but it just does not grow on me like O thought it would.. The Souls/Uncharted hybrid gameplay is doing nothing for me; keyboard mouse controls are a mess and the gamepad feels only marginally better.

I went in expecting a Jedi Knight kind of game, and this it is not. Such a shame.. Should O soldier on? I am in the third hub world, after finding the temple. Does it get better?

I enjoyed it well enough, but it's not on my list of great games. One thing for me is its the only souls-like that I've ever finished, I hate those games. So I think it was just a very light souls-like. I can't think of a reason you have to get through it though if its not working for you.

Five years later, I have now beaten Quake (first played in 2018). I ignored it during its heyday (if it ever ended?) because I wasn't playing first-person shooters. Perhaps I don't get it, but Quake wasn't holding my interest (and I never play online or in multiplayer), so I switched it to 'easy' and plowed through until the end.

I had to look up how to beat Shub-Niggurath. I knew it had something to do with that spikey ball floating around the level, but since I died so quickly in the lava, I didn't notice the teleporter followed the spikey ball's path.

I don't know if I'll ever play it again with the backlog of FPS games I have remaining (and yet to ever play/finish).

Last game I played was Half-Life: Blue Shift on my P2 build, so why not try the remake? 😄

I'm playing the Black Mesa: Blue Shift mod and I'm really enjoying it so far: even if it's a mod, it looks like an official Black Mesa expansion. It's great 🙂

It pushes the Source Engine to the limit even more than the base game, the maps are really well done, faithful to the original but much bigger and detailed of course, and the NPC characters are really good, making the game a lot more immersive.

Unfortunately, the last chapter is still in work but most game is available.

Only problem I'm having are these strange artifacts at the start (I also have them in Black Mesa base game):

Still don't know how to get rid of them.
They don't appear in the in-game menu, only at the start 🫤

Last night I installed Age of empires 2 original - not remake, remastered, definitive, you name it edition - and started playing! It felt so good! It was exactly as I remembered it, it did not miss any fancy graphics or sounds, it was exactly as it was supposed to be! Played an 8 game with max population cap (200) until 1 am! I went to sleep feeling great!

Done with Diablo II. It ran really well on my AthlonXP + Voodoo3 system. No slowdowns even when the screen was chock full of enemies. I was also pleased with how nicely that rig held up during the summer heat wave, while producing a minimal amount of noise.

The core gameplay of Diablo II is still very addictive, but playing a melee character necessitates too much clicking and holding down the mouse button for my tastes. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I didn't enjoy this playthrough as much as I used to back in the day.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-07-15, 15:49:

Done with Diablo II. It ran really well on my AthlonXP + Voodoo3 system. No slowdowns even when the screen was chock full of enemies. I was also pleased with how nicely that rig held up during the summer heat wave, while producing a minimal amount of noise.

The core gameplay of Diablo II is still very addictive, but playing a melee character necessitates too much clicking and holding down the mouse button for my tastes. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I didn't enjoy this playthrough as much as I used to back in the day.

Something tells me you might not be too happy with the first Diablo with its 1 click = one attack system. How the heck some people like to play their ARPG's like that even when they have the usual hold button to keep distributing punishment is beyond me. I once saw a guy who played like that streaming Grim Dawn, clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick 😀

Diablo II on the other hand ate an entire summer break from me back then, I was hopelessly hooked. Though every time I tried to go back to it later ended with me petering out at some point after the first act. It's still on my rather long list of games I'd like to revisit and it's been like a decade so maybe I too can finally go for a full playthrough, funny how I've must have clocked countless of hours on it and still only once finished the normal difficulty with the expansion installed.

Sombrero wrote on 2023-07-15, 18:29:

Diablo II on the other hand ate an entire summer break from me back then, I was hopelessly hooked. Though every time I tried to go back to it later ended with me petering out at some point after the first act. It's still on my rather long list of games I'd like to revisit and it's been like a decade so maybe I too can finally go for a full playthrough, funny how I've must have clocked countless of hours on it and still only once finished the normal difficulty with the expansion installed.

Exactly the same for me.

Sombrero wrote on 2023-07-15, 18:29:

Something tells me you might not be too happy with the first Diablo with its 1 click = one attack system.

Heh, I enjoyed it a lot back in the day. Not sure how I would like the clickety-click experience now though.

I did replay it a couple of years ago using the (first) PlayStation and a CRT TV. That version has some graphical improvements over the PC release, such as lighting from projectiles (e.g. fireball) and reflections in the water. It's also somehow easier for me to push a button on the controller instead of clicking the mouse repeatedly.

I want to say I beat the first Diablo within the past 3 years, and the 1 click = 1 action limitation didn't bother me at all. But I found Diablo 1 to have a much tighter economy (single player) than Diablo 2, and this includes it's action economy. There were fewer enemies, they were less HP spongy, I was stingier all around with hp, mana and potions. It was a far cry from basically every ARPG that followed Diablo II where it's just more and more and more all the time always. The first Diablo was a comparatively constrained experience with tighter resource management.

I got a copy of Rise of Nations yesterday and installed it on my Athlon 64 rig with the Geforce 7800 GS. Mother fucker actually hard reboots my whole ass computer. Turns out it's some Nvidia driver error? Maybe? I only found one single other trace of someone with the same problem, and the debug info on the crash pointed out an nvidia display dll same as mine. No solution was ever posted. Just recommendations to do a "clean" driver reinstall and then crickets.

I simply don't have the fucks to give, the machine works perfectly with everything else I throw at it, so I instead installed it on a machine with a surplus Athlon X2 I had lying around, and a random Radeon card someone gave me. No reboots there, so I suppose there is where I'll be playing it.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-07-15, 19:36:

Sombrero wrote on 2023-07-15, 18:29:

Something tells me you might not be too happy with the first Diablo with its 1 click = one attack system.

Heh, I enjoyed it a lot back in the day. Not sure how I would like the clickety-click experience now though.

Heh, back in the heyday of Diablo 1 I was frequently visiting a friend who was a big fan. Many times I witnessed him play the game and I really could not fathom what someone can see in it. All I saw (and heard) was click-click-click-click-click-click.

Devil Whiskey
It's been a while since I last played this, but I had taken good notes and had saved my game right in front of the next dungeon so I could get right back in. I continued on with the main quest (I haven't found any side content except for a single dungeon I already cleared), and it was ridiculously easy... quite a contrast from the game's somwhat brutal first hour or so.

I have no clue how far I am into the game, since there's so little information about this one out there. I found one partial walkthrough, but of course that's no help in determining how close I am to the end. I still have several towers throughout the town that are locked, and I suspect that those are all dungeons I'll visit when the time comes. There's also a wilderness area around the town, but I haven't explored it at all.

It's a cool game, but I dunno. My first attempt was using the latest beta patch, and it was completely broken and frustrating (enemy ranged attacks ignore AC and are therefore extremely lethal). My current attempt is with the latest official release, and after a pleasantly tough first hour the game has become unbelievably easy with enemies barely able to even hit my frontline characters. We'll see how it goes.

GTA IV is 15 years old

Early games featuring this kind of "realistic" higher definition graphics that have been the norm for so long are 15+ years old now

i played it years ago and recently started again

great setting, interesting people and protagonist. never quite as engaging as GTA san andreas but still offering lots of fun. Given the power of early 2010's PC the early concerns about optimisation and requirements are less than when the game was released such that even a ~10 year old pc and modest graphics card are fine now

but the driving..... all but one view options gives a "cinematic" view of the car that spends nearly as much time looking towards the side of the car as from behind. Turn a sharp corner and the camera actually points to the side for several seconds, ensuring you crash into everything. tapping look behind helps but ends up in a constant disorienting resetting of the camera.

Every car has the turning circle and stopping distance of an oil tanker, and each has soap for tyres. The one aspect perhaps most important to the GTA games is the weakest part of GTA 4

the only possibility is either to risk some 'mod' or to adopt the behind the dashboard view when driving needs to be accurate and just put up with the juddering screen as every undulation on the road telegraphs into a rapid yo-yoing of the view out of the windscreen. when racing (as in the Brucie mission) just play as often as needed until the AIs crash themselves

i have played a little GTA 5, car driving is so much better - an obvious tacit admission that they got it wrong in gta 4

I have been replaying a lot of Rayman Legends, in preparation for hosting the next quiz round on RaymanPC forums, and to finally get those 1,000,000 lums and the final costume! 😁

I began a second playthrough of Half-Life Opposing Force (the Steam version this time) and I noticed something that I either didn't notice before, or it wasn't present in the version I was playing; among the miscellaneous items in some of the supply crates are copies of The Onion! I used to really love The Onion, and I had a subscription to the print edition from probably 1999 to maybe 2004?

Finished Prey (2017).

Didn't impress me: I liked the graphics, apart from the human models, the level design and the atmosphere, but gameplay-wise I didn't enjoy it too much.

I played on Hard, so it makes sense that it's difficult, but the enemies are too OP: they are bullet sponges, and that's a problem because weapons aren't that great (a wrench is the most effective weapon in the game 😁) and ammunitions are scarse, have strange attack patterns and they kill you in two hits. Some of them, like the telekinetics ones, are so annoying that run past them seems to be the best solution. Also, turrets are your best friend 😁.
Moreover, I feel player movement is a little clunky, mostly on outside explorations, which I believe, by the way, are a nice concept.

Story-wise, I didn't get invested on it too much.
It follows the same formula as Half-Life: aliens invade a lab and, as you progress, through terminals and audio logs, you learn more about it; be it the characters, or the general story, but I just couldn't immerse myself. But then, I have a small attention span so it could be my fault 😅.

In my opinion, the game is ok but, without the things mentioned above, it could be a lot better.
By the way, I got it for free through Amazon Prime Gaming so it's a plus 🙂

Demetrio wrote on 2023-08-01, 04:53:

Finished Prey (2017). […]
Show full quote

Finished Prey (2017).

Didn't impress me: I liked the graphics, apart from the human models, the level design and the atmosphere, but gameplay-wise I didn't enjoy it too much.

I played on Hard, so it makes sense that it's difficult, but the enemies are too OP: they are bullet sponges, and that's a problem because weapons aren't that great (a wrench is the most effective weapon in the game 😁) and ammunitions are scarse, have strange attack patterns and they kill you in two hits. Some of them, like the telekinetics ones, are so annoying that run past them seems to be the best solution. Also, turrets are your best friend 😁.
Moreover, I feel player movement is a little clunky, mostly on outside explorations, which I believe, by the way, are a nice concept.

Yep, didn't much care for it either. I got the impression they expect the player to incapacitate the enemies when ever possible instead of just blasting them away, I think they were trying to make you feel like you're the underdog who needs to be smart to survive which sounds good on paper but I personally just didn't like it, I thought the combat was just clunky and boring.

And just like in their other game of the time Dishonored 2 for some reason they absolutely DROWN you under written notes, I like to read about the world and what the characters were up to but when you can't take a damn step without finding 1-3 of them constantly you may have gone just a tad overboard.

It's also the only game I can remember playing where I kinda started to hate the sound design, to me the sound of critical hit in Prey is one of the most annoying sounds I've personally ever heard in a game.

gerry wrote on 2023-07-19, 11:20:

GTA IV is 15 years old ... but the driving..... all but one view options gives a "cinematic" view of the car that spends n […]
Show full quote

GTA IV is 15 years old
...
but the driving..... all but one view options gives a "cinematic" view of the car that spends nearly as much time looking towards the side of the car as from behind. Turn a sharp corner and the camera actually points to the side for several seconds, ensuring you crash into everything. tapping look behind helps but ends up in a constant disorienting resetting of the camera.

Every car has the turning circle and stopping distance of an oil tanker, and each has soap for tyres. The one aspect perhaps most important to the GTA games is the weakest part of GTA 4

having played more (and more than i did the first time i tried) i am getting used to the driving - it's still wallowing oil tankers all the way but its the camera that makes it worse. sometimes the camera will simply remain 'looking' at the side after turning with no return to behind the car so its important to actively 'manage' the camera in this game. The environment is great though - many buildings can be entered giving interesting detours and vantage points, exploring is fun.

anyway, having thought about GTA and driving i list in reverse order the 'funnest' driving by GTA game IMO...

5. GTA 4. Camera weirdness spoils already boat like driving physics (plus the excitement of full 360 handbrake turns at .. near walking speed!) but ok when you get used to it
4. GTA VC. Lots of fun but almost too twitchy and sensitive at times
3. GTA 5. More arcade and sports like handling most of the time, easier to drive than gta4
2. GTA 3. maybe i just spent so long in game that i grew to love the driving but it seems well balanced overall (not the Rumpo van of course!)
1. GTA SA. Good cars to drive, great Bikes to ride and fun aircraft too, overall the best

I've been bouncing between all sorts of games, waiting to hit on one that really speaks to me. Dabbled in Rise of Nations, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Sid Meier's Pirates (2004). But ultimately I found myself circling back around to WarCraft II. I'm about halfway through the Orc campaign, and finding it infinitely easier than the first game.

It occurs to me I don't think I ever beat either of these games without cheats. With the first one that seems reasonable. It was way harder than I anticipated, antiquated controls aside. As soon as the computer gets catapults, I suddenly have 4 dead infantry instantly, from an attack out of LOS, before I even know what's happening. I try to scout ahead, since without a fog of war you could see everything coming, but somehow I still get walloped at some bridge where I'm not paying attention that particular microsecond. I assume the strategy is to see the catapults coming, and rush them with cavalry. But for whatever reason I never saw it coming adequately to pull that off.

By comparison, WarCraft II is far more forgiving. For starters catapults and ballistae don't one shot several infantry at once. And in the campaign at least, the AI seems far more docile, giving me ample time to scout and build my economy. So I'm finding this far more enjoyable than the first WarCraft. I may just stick with it.