brianmcdoogle
Member
MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR ALL GAMES MENTIONED. Don't read my thoughts as they will contain spoilers!
Please revisit this thread to see how this was accomplished and what games were chosen.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1013248
Also, just for reference, my experience with Sega and the Sega CD was at friends' houses as a kid, and specifically, I remember playing Lethal Enforcers, Jurassic Park, and Sewer Shark as a kid. One kid had Snatcher, but it was boring to me back then (not now! please don't kill me!). As a result, a few toes are planted in nostalgia, and the others and the right foot are in modern times. It's both a look at the time but mostly how they are today.
I'm currently playing Snatcher, and I'm trying to get to the "bathtub scene" (if anyone remembers what I'm talking about) because that is about where I left off after I got to borrow the system and that game almost two years ago for a very short weekend. After Snatcher, here is what I will be going through from now until maybe around the beginning of October (whatever I can finish. Tips and suggestions on how to prioritize these is appreciated):
The Adventures of Willy Beamish
Ecco the Dolphin
Hook
Popful Mail
Shining Force
Silpheed
Snatcher
Sonic CD
SoulStar
Thoughts on the game's I've played so far:
Corpse Killer:
Corpse Killer is a miserable game. The zombies are dressed in generic flannel shirts, they fly at the screen in a ludicrous jump animation, and it is full of racist and sexist caricatures. Staring a character actor from Amadeus named Dr Hellman who was once a military scientist but now has weaponized voodoo, the silent marine protagonist must save his fellow infected marines by shooting magic bullets and kill/capture Dr Hellman. Loose scenes are stitched together through boring shooting sections and repeated dialogue (No hitchhikers on this bus!) in a bland and generic forest. The game contains no puzzles and no interesting characters. In fact, outside of Dr Hellman, theres the Rastafarian driver (over the top in broken english) and a sexy female helper who exists to be in a bikini at the end of the game; seriously, the game ends on a jet ski, with the player ogling her body, as they ride into the sunset. Adding insult to injury, the final battle is just random voodoo-infected zombies jumping at the character in front of a frozen image still of Dr Hellmans face. And such small portions! The game is barley two hours and stretched thin.
Double Switch:
One of the first things one might notice in Double Switch, outside of the hilariously dated CGI, is the knock-off Beetlejuice music. Double Switch feels like an offshoot of Night Trap where a silent protagonist operates traps to save various people inside an Egyptian hotel. What makes Double Switch so much better than Night Trap is that it recognizes and relishes in its awfulness. Night Trap pretends to be serious while Double Switch knows it is trash. The basic story is that thieves are trying to steal a mystical statue between life and death, but mixed within this by-the-book tale is a hilariously awful rock song, Cory Haim, and various interactions between the dozen or so characters. Compounding things are the revelation that the father of Cory Haim, the kid in the basement who introduces the game, is in a cult, the Egyptian lady hotel manager is his mother, theres a lady who is too busy painting her toenails to care about murderers, and a rock critic is trying to hire a new musical act. Theres so much happening at all time. For the most part, the traps are better hidden into the environment, more practical, and more intuitive. The story concludes with many revelations (Cory Haim is the bad guy, the hotel manager is his mother, the janitor his father, the hotel is an ancient pyramid, and then Cory Haim dies). It is bonkers. One must play though a rote FMV clickfest to experience this nonsense, but at least it is worth the endeavor for the most part.
Time Gal:
Time Gal sucks. An amine knock-off of Dragons Lair, theres no story, no gameplay (except for pressing a button when the game tells you to), and it is all stretched out paper-thin by being incredibly time sensitive. Each section is barely 30 seconds long and jumps from scene to scene, timeframe to timeframe, with no proper through-line. Once in a while the game will have a time stop segment where the player must figure out a brief puzzle by pressing a certain button (with the result usually being defensive or counterintuitive to the situation), but the rest of the game is spelled out by flashing the direction on the screen which must be pressed; theres no guesswork. Making things worse is that the animation inconsistently alternates between a detailed caricature of Time Gal and some strange generic portrait; and it is never explained if this is supposed to be from a comic or anime or something else. It sucks.
Night Trap:
Night Trap is a hard game to pin down. Is it intentionally bad like Double Switch and Wirehead, or just plain bad? The biggest problem is that the game is just plain boring. Working as part of the Special Control Attack Team (SCAT), the player must set off traps to capture augers," vampire ninjas that feed of the blood of young women. It turns out, for some reason, that the family of the home hosting a slumber part of teenage girls collects their blood and has been doing so for a while (which is the reason for your mission). In order to follow the story, you need to follow the actors, but doing so results in missing the capture of augers (miss too many and you get a game over). As a result, the game deliberately requires you to ignore the reason for its existence to instead capture faceless enemies into ludicrous smoke traps (which are flimsy and sometimes cause the walls of the sets to shake). Two highlights exist for this game. The first is a late switch where one of the helping neighbors dresses up as an auger to assist the player. He must be kept track of and not disposed of as an auger even though he now somewhat blends in with them. The second and more famous is the musical Night Trap musical sequence where Meagan, the best of the characterless girls, plays air guitar on a tennis racket to a song with no guitar. The entire sequence is so unnecessary and stupid, filled with tight teenage tummies, that it becomes farcical and entertaining at last. Eventually the player, with the help of Dana Plato, uncover the familys dark sequence (but you dont save all the girls since they seem to die anyway). With so many other bizarre and campy games on the Sega CD, its odd and unfair that his is the poster child of badness for the system.
Panic:
Panic exists as a time-wasting demo. Not quite WarioWare or Incredible Crisis, Panic serves to exist as a random humor game where strange things happen at the press of a button. Theres no story and all the player does is randomly press buttons as silly things happen (moi heads falling or a hippopotamus on stilts). This might work if it was funny, but random things arent funny, and the jokes become tired. In a cynical way, it would be just seeing a clip show on television where the jokes arent that good and divorced from all context. I couldn't finish this because the game kept freezing on me.
Wirehead:
Wirehead surprisingly has a lot of heart. Opening with the MGM logo and starring a schlub resembling Rick Moranis and Tim Robbins, a lot of production values went into creating this schlock. Numerous car chase, boat chase, and real locations pepper a highly ludicrous and unexplained conceit of a man controlled by a remote control who is caught up in a spy thriller. The humor is intentional and works. For example, when meeting a hot woman, he has a testosterone surge, and the jumping from scene to scene are beyond explanation (he jumps from a plane and lands in an old western town after gliding in the air with a flotation raft). The main guy, the titular Wirehead, also randomly punches a woman in the face in an abandoned factory. Sadly, the story becomes more serious and grounded in reality as it progresses, but the beginning highs provide glorious amounts of entertainment. At the end, a female Wirehead is created, Wirehead gives a short and pointless press conference, and it just ends out of nowhere as if they ran out of ideas or budget. Like all other Sega CD FMV games, it is plagued with random choices that are often repeated due to their obtuseness, but the goofiness at least makes the repeated viewings tolerable.
Sewer Shark:
Unlike many Sega CD FMV games, Sewer Shark actually functions as a game. Guided by a Bill Paxton wannabe in a terminator-esque future, the player (from Dogmeat to Rat Breath to Exterminator, all displayed on the screen as a callsign) must navigate through sewers, shooting vermin, opening doors, and all to deliver a million pounds of tube steak in the hopes of finding Solar City, a paradise in the sun. Like Double Switch, the game is over the top with tongue firmly placed in cheek. The head of the organization is a character actor from many Arnold Schwarzenegger movies introduced as a fat incompetent who is constantly eating. As the game progresses, there are more things to shoot, more obstacles to avoid, and a bat you must follow to the surface. Initially, it is difficult to figuree out what to shoot and where to go, but once it is understood, the game breezes by well within an hour. At the end, Solar City is discovered, the corrupt fat mayor deposed, and all is well. The one glaring thing that is never explained is how Dogmeats successful navigation of the sewer leads to some sort of uprising. But I guess it is my fault for asking for narrative cohesion in this game.
Jurassic Park:
Like any adventure game, some of the puzzles are obtuse and inscrutable. Nevertheless, Jurassic Park provides some fun wandering around an island populated with several dinosaurs (and not much else). Part of the problem with the game is the inconsistent production values. The CGI is incredibly dated, but the environments look great. Also, the music alternates between atmospheric ambient pieces filled with nature sounds and hopped up tracks tonally terrible (notably the triceratops scenes). Scattered around the island in front of various animal pens are kiosks that give information on the half dozen dinosaurs still existing on the island. However, for some reason, some of the kiosks are gated behind CD keys. When viewed, they give brief but informative information presented by a hippie paleontologist, one of two people to speak. The other talker is a female scientist leaving video emails. The goal is to collect the eggs of the various dinosaurs on the island and escape. In the last few minutes of a game, a villainous rival group called Bio-Synth arrive to steal the eggs. After exploring the island rather uneventfully, the last two paddocks, the Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor sets, provides some excitement, but the Tyrannosaurus looks so awful as to ruin any tension. After all the eggs are gathered, the player must race to the enemy helicopter, where the game starts to resemble a Lethal Enforcers-esque shooter where generic enemies must be tranquilized. Ending rather anticlimactically, Jurassic Park allows a measured exploration of dinosaurs and the titular island.
Please revisit this thread to see how this was accomplished and what games were chosen.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1013248
Also, just for reference, my experience with Sega and the Sega CD was at friends' houses as a kid, and specifically, I remember playing Lethal Enforcers, Jurassic Park, and Sewer Shark as a kid. One kid had Snatcher, but it was boring to me back then (not now! please don't kill me!). As a result, a few toes are planted in nostalgia, and the others and the right foot are in modern times. It's both a look at the time but mostly how they are today.
I'm currently playing Snatcher, and I'm trying to get to the "bathtub scene" (if anyone remembers what I'm talking about) because that is about where I left off after I got to borrow the system and that game almost two years ago for a very short weekend. After Snatcher, here is what I will be going through from now until maybe around the beginning of October (whatever I can finish. Tips and suggestions on how to prioritize these is appreciated):
The Adventures of Willy Beamish
Ecco the Dolphin
Hook
Popful Mail
Shining Force
Silpheed
Snatcher
Sonic CD
SoulStar
Thoughts on the game's I've played so far:
Corpse Killer:
Corpse Killer is a miserable game. The zombies are dressed in generic flannel shirts, they fly at the screen in a ludicrous jump animation, and it is full of racist and sexist caricatures. Staring a character actor from Amadeus named Dr Hellman who was once a military scientist but now has weaponized voodoo, the silent marine protagonist must save his fellow infected marines by shooting magic bullets and kill/capture Dr Hellman. Loose scenes are stitched together through boring shooting sections and repeated dialogue (No hitchhikers on this bus!) in a bland and generic forest. The game contains no puzzles and no interesting characters. In fact, outside of Dr Hellman, theres the Rastafarian driver (over the top in broken english) and a sexy female helper who exists to be in a bikini at the end of the game; seriously, the game ends on a jet ski, with the player ogling her body, as they ride into the sunset. Adding insult to injury, the final battle is just random voodoo-infected zombies jumping at the character in front of a frozen image still of Dr Hellmans face. And such small portions! The game is barley two hours and stretched thin.
Double Switch:
One of the first things one might notice in Double Switch, outside of the hilariously dated CGI, is the knock-off Beetlejuice music. Double Switch feels like an offshoot of Night Trap where a silent protagonist operates traps to save various people inside an Egyptian hotel. What makes Double Switch so much better than Night Trap is that it recognizes and relishes in its awfulness. Night Trap pretends to be serious while Double Switch knows it is trash. The basic story is that thieves are trying to steal a mystical statue between life and death, but mixed within this by-the-book tale is a hilariously awful rock song, Cory Haim, and various interactions between the dozen or so characters. Compounding things are the revelation that the father of Cory Haim, the kid in the basement who introduces the game, is in a cult, the Egyptian lady hotel manager is his mother, theres a lady who is too busy painting her toenails to care about murderers, and a rock critic is trying to hire a new musical act. Theres so much happening at all time. For the most part, the traps are better hidden into the environment, more practical, and more intuitive. The story concludes with many revelations (Cory Haim is the bad guy, the hotel manager is his mother, the janitor his father, the hotel is an ancient pyramid, and then Cory Haim dies). It is bonkers. One must play though a rote FMV clickfest to experience this nonsense, but at least it is worth the endeavor for the most part.
Time Gal:
Time Gal sucks. An amine knock-off of Dragons Lair, theres no story, no gameplay (except for pressing a button when the game tells you to), and it is all stretched out paper-thin by being incredibly time sensitive. Each section is barely 30 seconds long and jumps from scene to scene, timeframe to timeframe, with no proper through-line. Once in a while the game will have a time stop segment where the player must figure out a brief puzzle by pressing a certain button (with the result usually being defensive or counterintuitive to the situation), but the rest of the game is spelled out by flashing the direction on the screen which must be pressed; theres no guesswork. Making things worse is that the animation inconsistently alternates between a detailed caricature of Time Gal and some strange generic portrait; and it is never explained if this is supposed to be from a comic or anime or something else. It sucks.
Night Trap:
Night Trap is a hard game to pin down. Is it intentionally bad like Double Switch and Wirehead, or just plain bad? The biggest problem is that the game is just plain boring. Working as part of the Special Control Attack Team (SCAT), the player must set off traps to capture augers," vampire ninjas that feed of the blood of young women. It turns out, for some reason, that the family of the home hosting a slumber part of teenage girls collects their blood and has been doing so for a while (which is the reason for your mission). In order to follow the story, you need to follow the actors, but doing so results in missing the capture of augers (miss too many and you get a game over). As a result, the game deliberately requires you to ignore the reason for its existence to instead capture faceless enemies into ludicrous smoke traps (which are flimsy and sometimes cause the walls of the sets to shake). Two highlights exist for this game. The first is a late switch where one of the helping neighbors dresses up as an auger to assist the player. He must be kept track of and not disposed of as an auger even though he now somewhat blends in with them. The second and more famous is the musical Night Trap musical sequence where Meagan, the best of the characterless girls, plays air guitar on a tennis racket to a song with no guitar. The entire sequence is so unnecessary and stupid, filled with tight teenage tummies, that it becomes farcical and entertaining at last. Eventually the player, with the help of Dana Plato, uncover the familys dark sequence (but you dont save all the girls since they seem to die anyway). With so many other bizarre and campy games on the Sega CD, its odd and unfair that his is the poster child of badness for the system.
Panic:
Panic exists as a time-wasting demo. Not quite WarioWare or Incredible Crisis, Panic serves to exist as a random humor game where strange things happen at the press of a button. Theres no story and all the player does is randomly press buttons as silly things happen (moi heads falling or a hippopotamus on stilts). This might work if it was funny, but random things arent funny, and the jokes become tired. In a cynical way, it would be just seeing a clip show on television where the jokes arent that good and divorced from all context. I couldn't finish this because the game kept freezing on me.
Wirehead:
Wirehead surprisingly has a lot of heart. Opening with the MGM logo and starring a schlub resembling Rick Moranis and Tim Robbins, a lot of production values went into creating this schlock. Numerous car chase, boat chase, and real locations pepper a highly ludicrous and unexplained conceit of a man controlled by a remote control who is caught up in a spy thriller. The humor is intentional and works. For example, when meeting a hot woman, he has a testosterone surge, and the jumping from scene to scene are beyond explanation (he jumps from a plane and lands in an old western town after gliding in the air with a flotation raft). The main guy, the titular Wirehead, also randomly punches a woman in the face in an abandoned factory. Sadly, the story becomes more serious and grounded in reality as it progresses, but the beginning highs provide glorious amounts of entertainment. At the end, a female Wirehead is created, Wirehead gives a short and pointless press conference, and it just ends out of nowhere as if they ran out of ideas or budget. Like all other Sega CD FMV games, it is plagued with random choices that are often repeated due to their obtuseness, but the goofiness at least makes the repeated viewings tolerable.
Sewer Shark:
Unlike many Sega CD FMV games, Sewer Shark actually functions as a game. Guided by a Bill Paxton wannabe in a terminator-esque future, the player (from Dogmeat to Rat Breath to Exterminator, all displayed on the screen as a callsign) must navigate through sewers, shooting vermin, opening doors, and all to deliver a million pounds of tube steak in the hopes of finding Solar City, a paradise in the sun. Like Double Switch, the game is over the top with tongue firmly placed in cheek. The head of the organization is a character actor from many Arnold Schwarzenegger movies introduced as a fat incompetent who is constantly eating. As the game progresses, there are more things to shoot, more obstacles to avoid, and a bat you must follow to the surface. Initially, it is difficult to figuree out what to shoot and where to go, but once it is understood, the game breezes by well within an hour. At the end, Solar City is discovered, the corrupt fat mayor deposed, and all is well. The one glaring thing that is never explained is how Dogmeats successful navigation of the sewer leads to some sort of uprising. But I guess it is my fault for asking for narrative cohesion in this game.
Jurassic Park:
Like any adventure game, some of the puzzles are obtuse and inscrutable. Nevertheless, Jurassic Park provides some fun wandering around an island populated with several dinosaurs (and not much else). Part of the problem with the game is the inconsistent production values. The CGI is incredibly dated, but the environments look great. Also, the music alternates between atmospheric ambient pieces filled with nature sounds and hopped up tracks tonally terrible (notably the triceratops scenes). Scattered around the island in front of various animal pens are kiosks that give information on the half dozen dinosaurs still existing on the island. However, for some reason, some of the kiosks are gated behind CD keys. When viewed, they give brief but informative information presented by a hippie paleontologist, one of two people to speak. The other talker is a female scientist leaving video emails. The goal is to collect the eggs of the various dinosaurs on the island and escape. In the last few minutes of a game, a villainous rival group called Bio-Synth arrive to steal the eggs. After exploring the island rather uneventfully, the last two paddocks, the Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor sets, provides some excitement, but the Tyrannosaurus looks so awful as to ruin any tension. After all the eggs are gathered, the player must race to the enemy helicopter, where the game starts to resemble a Lethal Enforcers-esque shooter where generic enemies must be tranquilized. Ending rather anticlimactically, Jurassic Park allows a measured exploration of dinosaurs and the titular island.
