You Found a Secret Area!

Author: beverly jane

  • Here’s Some Stuff I Bought: Portland Retro Gaming Expo 2025 edition.

    Here’s Some Stuff I Bought: Portland Retro Gaming Expo 2025 edition.

    Another year, another Portland Retro Gaming Expo is in the books. I’ve been going to these things since at least 2011, and the vibes this year felt a bit lower than usual. A friend of mine said the overall feel of the show is “exhaustion,” and I honestly agree. Definitely felt a bit underwhelming compared to last year.

    Mostly because I didn’t see as many folks as I wanted to see there, as costs made things unattainable for some of my friends to attend. Even the $90 price for a weekend pass was a sticker shock for me, after usually seeing that be about $60 or so in previous years.

    There was also a bit of issues I had with the con as a whole, but I’ll save that for after the roundup of stuff I bought. I did walk away with a few interesting things, but mostly cruft and stuff that I could afford without spending oodles of cash I don’t really have.

    With that out of the way, let’s get started.

    So Saturday only netted me two purchases, at the same booth for $5. It was in the same booth as Pat Contri’s, so I assume they shared it. I didn’t catch the name of the person who was running it, but they seemed really nice and friendly. Those were the only purchases I made that day, as seeing common games go for more than they’re worth caused me to lose interest in looking after a bit. My partner, however, was more accepting of what was on offer, as she netted a good chunk of gaming stuff.

    Def Jam Rapstar (Xbox 360)

    Ah yes, another rhythm game that requires singing. I keep running into those.

    I remember an old, old Giant Bomb video where Brad Shoemaker and Jeff Gerstmann rapped to Nelly’s “Hot in Herre,” which was pretty god damn hilarious. While I probably won’t hit the highs of that performance, I’m definitely curious to see what songs are on the base setlist. This game also had a feature where if you had an Xbox Live Vision Camera or a PlayStation Eye, you could post your performance online to be graded by the community. Sadly, those online services shut down a few years after release, so you won’t get to see hilarious videos of people rapping to Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice.”

    Over the past few years, I’ve gotten Karaoke Revolution Vol. 2, Get on da Mic, and now this game. All games that require me to sing. I still have an old Rock Band USB microphone around, but I get extremely self-conscious whenever I sing in these games. Maybe one day I’ll play these and not feel immense guilt for singing into a microphone like a dingus.

    Medal of Honor: Warfighter Limited Edition (Xbox 360)

    The second attempt to revive the Medal of Honor franchise. I’ve already said my words about the 2010 reboot, so my expectations are really low. Funny enough, since this is a late-era Xbox 360 game, the multiplayer and single player are on separate discs, though this time the entire game uses Frostbite 2 and not the weird two-engine hybrid system the previous Medal of Honor did.

    All I know about the campaign for Warfighter was a door-breaching mechanic where, similar to Modern Warfare 2 (classic), you’d breach a door and unlock unique breaching methods for getting headshots. I know this thanks to Miracle of Sound’s music video for the game, affectionately called “Medal of Honor Doorfighter.” Can’t wait to kick down doors and take out generic middle-eastern soldiers.

    Oh, this also has digital unlockables and a beta key for Battlefield 4 that no longer works. Our Digital Future™, baby!

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  • Cold Fear: French-ident Evil.

    Cold Fear: French-ident Evil.

    I don’t write much about survival horror games. It’s not a genre I love with any sort of passion, but it is definitely one I find intriguing, especially when it comes to developers finding new ways to make things creepy and unsettling to players.

    My experiences with survival horror begin with the most famous survival horror franchise of them all, Resident Evil. But not the original titles on PS1 – though I remember being at a friend’s house when I was younger where he played Resident Evil 2 trying to unlock The Tofu Survivor. No, I’m talking about the early 2000s doldrums period of the franchise, when the series was struggling where exactly the series should go from those PS1 games. Games like the 2002 Resident Evil remake, Resident Evil 0, Code Veronica X, that kind of stuff. Before Resident Evil 4 came out and suddenly changed everything.

    With Resident Evil taking the fairly niche survival horror genre into the mainstream, various developers from around the world would release their own spins on the genre. Some, like Konami’s Silent Hill franchise, leaned a lot more into the psychological Japanese horror. Others would opt to take a few pages from Capcom’s playbook and make their own spin on it. Today, we’re talking about a bunch of folks based in France taking that playbook and running with it. That game was Cold Fear.

    I just realized the A and R are fused together in this logo and it’s mildly unsettling. Good job, guys.

    Released in late 2005 for the PC, PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Xbox, Cold Fear was basically a more “western” take on the survival horror genre popularized by Resident Evil. This was developed by Darkworks, a French game development studio best known for Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, the fourth installment of the progenitor to the survival horror genre.

    Before playing Cold Fear on the recommendation of a few friends, all I knew about this game was Mega64 doing a few promotional videos for the game, featuring Rocco Botte portraying a games journalist asking developer Gunther Galipot – fake dubbed in a bad French accent by Botte – about the message of the game, while the rest of the Mega64 crew film themselves doing jumpscares at random folks in a Costco. In hindsight, It’s kinda surreal how much Mega64 made videos that made fun of the games they were hired to promote. Wonder if they ever got in trouble over that.

    Spoilers for Cold Fear within.

    So the story goes like this: You play as Tom Hansen, a member of the United States Coast Guard. You and a squad of soldiers are sent onto a Russian fishing boat going wildly off-course during a massive storm to investigate what’s going on. Suddenly, the rest of your squad gets killed off by weird parasitic monsters. Armed with only a 1911 pistol, Hansen must figure out what’s going on and stop this whole mess.

    Don’t need to be aiming your gun at him, Hansen, he’s not really a threat.
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  • Desert Crisis: A Half-Life mod with a soundtrack straight out of 2004.

    Desert Crisis: A Half-Life mod with a soundtrack straight out of 2004.

    Every once in a while I get a bit nostalgic for that early-to-mid 2000s era of computer gaming. Though less for major games like Unreal Tournament, and instead for those who have existing games but want to expand beyond what the vanilla multiplayer for Half-Life was.

    For me, that was absolutely the norm around this time, playing the notable multiplayer mods like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress Classic alongside classics like The Specialists, Sven Co-op and Natural Selection. Of course, I was reminded of another multiplayer mod I was into, but has mostly fallen into obscurity in recent years.

    An action-packed romp. (Source: ModDB.)

    This is Desert Crisis, a modification for Half-Life released around 2003-04. Done by a handful of amateur modders/mappers from the Half-Life mod scene, it’s a multiplayer mod that is very much “everything including the kitchen sink” in terms of design.

    Two factions, the USA and the “United Peace-Keeping Organization,” an enemy faction built from various other countries after a decades-long global conflict, go and fight against each other with realistic firearms, melee weapons and space lasers. Think something like Action Half-Life or The Specialists with a bit of Unreal Tournament’s Assault mode mixed in.

    It was pretty damn ambitious for what it was trying to do in 2003-04, especially with games like Half-Life 2 around the corner. There aren’t very many gameplay videos of it, since it was around before YouTube was really a thing, so have this action-packed low quality trailer uploaded from 2006 to get kind of a feel of what the mod was aiming for:

    YouTube player

    But I’m not really here to talk about the mod itself, though it could be an interesting topic on its own. No, I want to talk about the music of the mod.

    In something you don’t really see often for a game mod, this mod does have an official “theme song” that plays in the menus when picking your team and loadout. Theme 1 is for the “USA” faction: A fairly simple chugging rock tune with fairly basic riffs and your go-to guitar solos. Theme 2 is for that rival “UP-KO” faction that’s a bit more Rammstein-esque in terms of style, with those chugging guitars.

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  • Heretic + Hexen: Raven Software’s classics get the Nightdive makeover.

    Heretic + Hexen: Raven Software’s classics get the Nightdive makeover.

    Updated 8/21/2025 with clarification and some new information.

    Last year, Bethesda surprised us with Yet Another Remaster of Doom. Titled DOOM + DOOM II, this one replaced the 2019 remaster done by Nerve Software with a from-the-ground-up approach by Nightdive Studios, which have become the go-to developers for FPS remasters these days. It even came with a brand new Doom episode made by members of id, Nightdive, and MachineGames called Legacy of Rust, which I wrote about last year. I jokingly asked when they’re gonna tackle Raven Software’s Heretic and Hexen next. Well, I got my wish.

    Back to back badassery.

    Heretic + Hexen – keeping the naming convention from DOOM + DOOM II – is a complete overhaul of Raven’s two medieval action games from 1995-96, pushing the Doom engine to its limits at the time. New levels, new art, a vault of concept art from the previous games, and of course, a newly arranged soundtrack by Andrew Hulshult. (there’s the option to revert to Kevin Schilder’s original soundtracks if you wish, but I like Hulshult’s work when he’s not doing generic metal covers of game music, this remaster included.) This also marks the first time in over 25 years that you can play Heretic and Hexen on modern platforms with all the niceties that come with it.

    This also means Nightdive has officially remastered every major commercial Doom engine game from the 90s: Doom, Doom II, Heretic, Hexen, and Strife. Congratulations, y’all. Now if you wanna count stuff like Chex Quest and HacX, you’re more than welcome to, but I’m excluding those here, as Chex Quest was a free* product and HacX has been made freeware by the developers for a while now. I can’t see a remaster of either of these, though I wouldn’t mind one for Chex Quest, just for laughs.

    When DOOM + DOOM II came out,I said that they “didn’t need to do this,” that the Nerve Software remaster was perfectly fine for what it set out to do: Make it so you could play Doom on modern devices, without the need for DOSbox wizardry. Anyone who’s diehard into Doom know they can just drag DOOM2.WAD into a source port of choice – GZDoom, dsda-doom, Doomsday, you name it – and play.

    A screenshot I took earlier this year while playing Hexen through dsda-doom, which was the ideal Hexen experience until now.

    Heretic and Hexen, however, are different. Heretic never left its DOS origins, and the last time Hexen got home ports was the mid 90s, on the PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and Nintendo 64. (From what I’ve heard, the PS1 port is the worst, while the N64 port was the best.) While Doom had been ported to every platform under the sun, these two games haven’t. So this is the chance for a new audience of folks dealing with annoying Iron Liches spitting tornadoes, or get annoyed at trying to find the hidden switches in Winnowing Hall.

    Enhanced, but these guys are still as obnoxious as ever.

    If you’re familiar with Nightdive’s remaster work – They’ve remastered System Shock 2, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Blood, Quake and Quake II, Powerslave, Killing Time, Rise of the Triad, among countless others – you know what to expect here. Polishing up the original game assets, updating levels for clarity and fun factor, and, especially in more recent remasters, a new set of levels often made by Nightdive themselves. Heretic + Hexen have all of those in spades, with a bunch of enhanced features.

    Speaking of enhanced features, let’s talk about the updates the port brings. Nightdive updated all the maps from both games to be a bit nicer looking, moving them a bit more closer to “modern” custom Doom map sensibilities. This surprised me to find out during Heretic, as I was trying to find the secret levels in episode 2 (Hell’s Maw) and episode 5 (The Stagnant Demesne), only to realize that the regular way you’d discover them in the original game wouldn’t work here. That’s when I discovered they updated the maps as well.

    I liked whoever at Raven thought that Episode 3’s theme should be “backdrop of a seafood restaurant.”

    The last time I played Heretic in its entirety – the three episodes plus the two bonus episodes from the Shadow of the Serpent Riders expansion – was 2016, so I just figured the levels just looked like that. I should’ve expected this, as that seems to be their MO with every remaster. Well, barring DOOM + DOOM II, they treat all 68 levels of those two games as sacred and don’t touch a thing on them besides maybe fixing a bug or two.

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  • The Last of Us: Cinematic blockbuster, terrible game.

    The Last of Us: Cinematic blockbuster, terrible game.

    I never keep up with the zeitgeist when it comes to anything in media. TV shows, movies, video games, you name it. I’ve come to accept that I will always be behind, looking at stuff years past the point of their popularity. Anyone who’s been reading my stuff for so long have probably noticed me covering things long past their prime.

    And that’s okay! There’s no need to keep up with what’s current and popular unless you’re on the entertainment beat, or your friends won’t stop talking about it. Hell, the last time I tried keeping up with current gaming was with the recent Call of Duty games, and even I gave up by the time Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023) came out.

    But this time around, I am part of the zeitgeist, albeit indirectly. A currently popular TV show that in itself is an adaptation of a popular video game franchise. But rather than watching the TV show on a service I don’t have, I’ll just play the game it’s based on. After all, if people say “the book was better” whenever a novel gets a film adaptation, I assume the same rule applies for video games that eventually became TV shows, right?

    I remember reading about how they were initially hesitant to put Ellie on the cover for… dumb marketing reasons. Glad they didn’t back down on that, at least.

    The Last of Us is the game I’m referring to. Released in 2013 for the PlayStation 3 to critical acclaim, it spawned a new franchise for Sony to capitalize on, with books, comics, and of course, that TV show that’s airing on HBO Max and recently finished its second season as this writing, which covers part of the game’s sequel, The Last of Us Part II.

    I had briefly played The Last of Us before back around 2016, futzing around with it through PlayStation Now, a cloud streaming service where you could play PlayStation 3 games on a PC through cloud streaming. I didn’t get very far in it due to the visible lag I was having with inputs, so I stopped playing it on there.

    Several years later, I grabbed a copy and mentioned it on a Some Stuff I Bought post back at the end of 2022 because I had heard many positive things about this game, being a critical darling, and a favorite for many. One of many games given the coveted “Game of the Year” award by numerous publications. Obviously, if something is given that much praise, it has to be just that good, right?

    Folks, what you’re about to read is the journey of a woman wanting to enjoy a popular video game from 12 years ago and being absolutely frustrated with it. With gameplay being so aggravating to the point of controller-throwing anger. A miserable story that left me feeling cold and disappointed at the end. A game that left me wondering if Roger Ebert was right about games not being art.

    Light spoilers for The Last of Us within.

    Mild-mannered dad Joel (Troy Baker) returns home to his daughter Sarah after a long day. Cut to a few hours later where Sarah suddenly gets a call from Joel’s brother Tommy (Jeffrey Pierce) about the news that there’s a massive pandemic, the two make their hasty escape to safety. After the absolute chaos of escaping the city with Tommy, Joel and Sarah are confronted by military soldiers who shoot at the pair, wounding Joel and killing Sarah.

    Hell of a first day, huh?

    Cut to several years later. Joel, now an older man suffering from PTSD, eventually meets Ellie (Ashley Johnson), a young girl who is meant to be dropped off by Joel’s friend Tess (Annie Wersching), before complications occur and Joel has to take care of Ellie through the continental United States full of psychopaths, enemy factions, and the mutated cordyceps virus to take her to the Fireflies, a military faction with specialized equipment to help her.

    I will say off the bat that Joel seemed like a very nice guy at the start, and I could relate to losing a family member, which can be a traumatizing experience and change any person. Troy Baker gives a wonderful performance in that regard. But as I went through the campaign, Joel always seemed to be cynical and distant to everybody at all times. Many other characters, including Ellie, and later, Tommy, try to ground him a bit more to reality, or at least to get him to lighten up, which he does a bit towards the end of the game. There’s a lot of moments where the story boils down to “Joel does not want to deal with caring for Ellie, so he wants to dump her off to somebody else so he can go back to handling things by himself, but Something Happens that forces the pair to stick together for a little longer.”

    For a good chunk of the game, I genuinely did not like Joel as a character. Until the latter third of the game where he starts putting himself in extreme danger, just to save Ellie from unfortunate circumstances the pair got into, Joel just felt like a boring white dude protagonist in a sea of games that already had that market covered. Joel’s overall pessimism just sucks the air out of the room, in contrast with others like Tess, who I really took a liking to. Made me wish I was playing as her, because she was at least caring and optimistic in spite of the hellscape they were forced into.

    After playing this, I know who I would’ve preferred to play as, and it’s certainly not the guy on the left.

    Nothing against Troy Baker’s performance, this is the game that got him noticed by the mainstream gaming audience, but much like Ellie, I really wish Joel did lighten up more.

    “But it’s a video game,” you may ask. “How does it play?” Well, The Last of Us has probably the most clunkiest gameplay I’ve played out of the 360/PS3 era. And I’ve played some janky games on that platform in my time, believe me.

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  • Here’s Some Stuff I Bought: All of 2024 (and half of 2025) edition.

    Here’s Some Stuff I Bought: All of 2024 (and half of 2025) edition.

    So back in October 2024, after covering the stuff I got at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, I had teased I was gonna write a “Some Stuff I Bought” at the end of the year to cover the stuff I got outside of that con. But then I forgot to. With good reason, though.

    Since it is the middle of 2025, and I have bought more things since. So let’s do a bit of catch-up, shall we?

    For the uninitiated: I check thrift stores and other shops of interest for things I think that are neat: Music CDs, video games, DVDs/Blu-rays of movies, that kind of thing. Inspired by places like LGR Thrifts, Oddity Archive’s Archive Thrifting and other similar online content creators, I often do this type of article 2-3 times a year: One around June-July, One in December, and then any separate ones for any conventions I go to – which has been only the Portland Retro Gaming Expo so far, but I won’t rule out opportunities to check out other cons in the future if time and budget allows for it.

    I will be honest with you. My mental health wasn’t in the best of places last year. Current events notwithstanding, it was just really really tough for me to get the motivation to go places and do things that I find enjoyment in doing. I was able to get a bit of thrifting done, just with very, very wide gaps between each thrifting.

    Such as my first trip in March 2024. A small pilgrimage to one of the local Goodwill stores got me these small, yet still interesting grabs.

    Chicago XVII on audiocassette (99 cents)

    Ah yes, the 80s soft-rock gloop classic that brought us “You’re the Inspiration.” The last major album featuring Peter Cetera on lead vocals before he decided to branch off into a solo career that was even more cheesier than when he was with Chicago. I’m more partial to their hard rock stuff like “25 or 6 to 4,” but I don’t hate their more lighter work – “If You Leave Me Now” is cheesy but I have a soft spot for it. This was my first cassette purchase in a while, and at a store that was slowly phasing out stuff like cassettes and 8 tracks.

    You might also know “You’re the Inspiration” from being featured in Elite Beat Agents, with a really touching level attached to it and a damn touching cover to boot. (Hey Nintendo, put out the studio masters of the songs from the Ouendan series and Elite Beat Agents on your Nintendo Music service already!! I know they’re all licensed tracks, but I wanna hear these in their original quality and not through a tinny Nintendo DS speaker.)

    Karaoke Revolution Vol. 2 – PlayStation 2 ($3.99)

    For the longest time I didn’t know Harmonix did music games besides Frequency, Amplitude, Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Turns out Karaoke Revolution was also one of their big successes, and it’s probably why vocals in Rock Band games were so darn good.

    I basically got this to complete my Harmonix game collection, but also to hear how they handled the songs, which are all covers much like the early Guitar Hero and Rock Band games were, even produced by the same company as those games, Wavegroup Sound.

    Now I just need to get over my fear of singing in games like these…

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  • RTC-3057 for Doom: Doom with a tinge of survival horror.

    RTC-3057 for Doom: Doom with a tinge of survival horror.

    I. Love. Doom mods. Out of all the things I’ve written about over the years, it’s the one thing I consistently come back to writing about. What folks have done to push that 32-year-old game and its engine never ceases to amaze me. This one in particular was one I wanted to write about as early as last year, and I think it’s time.

    When id software released the Doom source code around 1997, little did they know what folks were gonna do with that “old” engine. From expanding the vanilla limits like Boom, to the more complex scripting that GZDoom brought years later. While there were still levels being made for Boom and vanilla Doom around the 2000s, source ports like Doomsday and ZDoom pushed the idea of expanding beyond what vanilla Doom could achieve, with a myriad of gameplay and levels projects released around that time. One of these in particular was a ZDoom-focused mod that would change Doom into something more like its contemporaries of that time: System Shock.

    The following was released to Patreon subscribers a few days earlier. If you wanna see this stuff early, please consider subscribing to my Patreon. Every dollar helps.

    Wow, so blue…

    The mod is RTC-3057, a creation ran by “Team Future,” a handful of Doom modders lead by one Jacob “Shaviro” Kruse. Initially, the mod was released as a single-level demo in 2002, and would end up being considered as part of the 10 Best WADs for 2003 to commemorate Doom’s tenth anniversary. (This would be a precursor to the later Cacowards, which started the following year.) The final version consisting of the first hub, codenamed Blue, was released on the /idgames archive that same year.

    The RTC-3057 in this case refers to you, a human-cyborg hybrid. Awakening from a bunch of unexplained nightmares, 3057 discovers something has gone incredibly wrong in the spaceship he’s occupying. Armed with the standard pistol and 50 bullets, 3057 must fight their way through all the foes that have invaded the ship.

    Things may look slightly different, but it’s still Doom: the goal is still killing demons.
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  • Quake II RTX: An old FPS gets an unnecessary coat of paint.

    Quake II RTX: An old FPS gets an unnecessary coat of paint.

    There seems to be a lot of hay going around about ray-tracing technology in video games. That stuff where lights reflect off of surfaces that makes it look more like real life. Probably the biggest technology arms race next to high dynamic range rendering and accurate water physics. For a modern video game, ray-tracing can be a valuable tool to make your game world feel more alive. But not so much if you’re trying to bolt on ray-tracing to an old shooter from 1997.

    YouTube player
    Official trailer. Source: NVIDIA Geforce’s YouTube.

    Quake II RTX is a remaster of the 1997 shooter classic, but with the engine upgraded to support NVIDIA’s RTX ray-tracing technology. Released on June 6, 2019 for PC by NVIDIA’s in-house Lightspeed Studios, this game was made as a way to show off their fancy new RTX technology. Quoting from NVIDIA’s blog:

    “We are giving Quake II back to gamers with a bold new look, as Quake II RTX,” said Matt Wuebbling, head of GeForce marketing at NVIDIA. “Ray tracing is the technology that is defining the next generation of PC games, and it’s fitting that Quake II is a part of that.”

    Now, I personally have my doubts that a remaster of a shooter that’s nearly 30 years old truly defines the next generation of video gaming, but I don’t work at NVIDIA. It’s not like this kind of marginal upgrade hasn’t existed beforehand: Doom95 as a shell to play Doom and Doom II in Windows 95 without needing to run DOS, GLQuake being an OpenGL render for Quake back when graphics accelerator cards were still new to the PC market, that sort of thing. Usually if you wanna tout this technology you’d use a fairly recent game. But let’s see how Lightspeed took Quake II and made it look shiny and pretty for a modern PC audience.

    Since there might be folks who are wondering: I had this article idea before Microsoft announced using their Copilot generative AI demo that trained off Quake II data as a base. This was merely a coincidence. In fact, what did inspire me to write about this was another RTX game that just came out: Half-Life 2 RTX, a version of Half-Life 2 that uses the RTX technology, just done by a group of modders rather than in-house at NVIDIA Lightspeed in the case of Quake II RTX and Portal with RTX.

    Once more, into the breach…

    Now, I’ve talked at length about Quake II several times over the years. Mostly the unofficial expansions like Juggernaut: The New Story for Quake II and maps made to advertise a mostly forgotten ‘90s TV show. But my opinion on the original Quake II hasn’t really changed much: It’s a solid shooter that feels kinda bland artistically. It’s the embodiment of the John Carmack era of id Software: Fancy technology over anything else. It’s a perfectly fine game, and the Nightdive remaster from 2023 rebalanced the game a bit to push it from being merely a solid game for its time, to standing with the id classics like Doom and Quake in a much better light.

    At the time I did not have a computer that could really handle running Quake II RTX smoothly. My previous PC, which housed a GeForce GTX 1060, was not enough to hit the specifications to turn on the RTX features. Once I got my current computer, which has a GTX 3070 in it, I was able to run Q2RTX pretty smoothly at around 60 frames per second with not much trouble. Much like other tech demos, sometimes it’s worth upgrading the PC just to try it out. Provided it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to upgrade, that is.

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  • Shadowgrounds: Survivor: Top down alien shooting, Now with Physics!

    Shadowgrounds: Survivor: Top down alien shooting, Now with Physics!

    Way back in 2016 I wrote about Shadowgrounds, a top-down horror shooter by Frozenbyte, the developers of the Trine franchise. I thought it was a neat little game for what it was, and while it wasn’t super unique, it was at least a bit of fun for a few hours. Towards the end of the article I wrote:

    One day I’ll get around to the sequel, Shadowgrounds: Survivor, which might be more of the same, but I don’t see that as a bad thing.

    Then I mostly forgot about it. The original Shadowgrounds was a fun little romp for what it was, and I guess I felt I needed some time before I jumped right in. It wasn’t until almost a decade later would I actually get around to playing it. It wasn’t quite worth the wait.

    Wouldn’t be a 2000s video game without a cute lady on the title screen.

    Developed again by Frozenbyte and published by Meridian4, Shadowgrounds: Survivor is basically a standalone expansion pack to the original game. This was released one year after the original Shadowgrounds, and since Frozenbyte wasn’t a super big developer at the time, this felt a bit more like a tech demo than anything resembling a sequel.

    Taking place concurrently with events from the original game, you play as three characters: Luke “Marine” Giffords, a generic soldier; Bruno “Napalm” Lastmann, a Russian drunken soldier stereotype; and Isabel “Sniper” Larose, a cute goth assassin lady. During the story you switch between these characters as they all get a message from McTiernan, a scientist who is trying to help fix a base in New Atlantis to cull the impending alien threat.

    Why is there always sewers……

    Like its predecessor, Shadowgrounds: Survivor is a top down action game. Each character has a unique set of weapons they use and procure throughout their journey to kill the alien threat, which is the general gamut of pistols, assault rifles, rocket launchers, flamethrowers, and railguns.

    All the major arsenal from Shadowgrounds reappears here, but this time locked to specific characters. Marine only gets a pistol to start, but eventually picks up the legally-distinct-from-Alien Pulse Rifle. Napalm starts with a flamethrower, natch, but can get a shotgun. Sniper naturally has a special handgun but later picks up a railgun. Each character also has grenades they can throw at any time, as well as a tactical dodge to avoid gunfire.

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  • Mad Max (2015): Maybe we do need another hero.

    Mad Max (2015): Maybe we do need another hero.

    I gotta say, 2025 has been off to a terrible start. What with everything happening in the USA, I decided to try to take my mind off things by well, doing anything that didn’t involve doomscrolling 24/7. Watching movies, playing games, that sort of thing. I ended up picking up a game that was a post-apocalyptic free roaming action game from 10 years ago that felt… a bit too on the nose at times considering current events.

    This is the most “box art by committee” I’ve seen in a while.

    Mad Max is a game based on the famous film series created by George Miller. Our hero, Max Rockatansky, trudges along the wasteland of a blown out world, where chaos and disorder reign supreme. During his travels he’ll help out stragglers, get into epic car chases on desert lands, and even fight his way in the Thunderdome. Developed by Avalanche Studios and published by Warner Bros. Games, this came out in 2015 to fairly above average reviews. I had heard how alright this game was for being a small little timewaster, and since it was constantly going on sale, I decided to get on Mad Max’s wild ride.

    And yet, he lives.

    Our story begins with ol’ Max Rockatansky driving his godlike car until he meets a powerful villain by the name of Scrotus. Scrotus and his gang of thieves steal Max’s car and supplies, intending to leave him for dead. It’s not until Max meets a gremlin-like character by the name of Chumbucket, who is a wizard with cars. Max must get his ride back and build enough trust with the various folks around the wasteland to get to his ultimate goal: Get to Gastown and continue his travels.

    While the game is based on the film franchise, it’s a standalone entry that does not require watching the movies to understand. There’s winks and nods to the previous films, but sadly no other characters besides Max himself appear. No Furiosa or Tina Turner-likes here.

    My apologies for the blurry image. Taking screenshots while in combat is not something I do often.

    Max has a combat system similar to Rocksteady’s Batman Arkham games: Tap X to punch, hold for a stronger hit that can stop enemies from blocking, enemies will choreograph an attack that can be countered with Y, there’s finishers that can be activated with A, that sort of thing. Build up enough of a combo to activate a rage mode where Max can do more damage more quickly. Since Mad Max relies on weaponry alongside the usual fisticuffs, pressing B will shoot Max’s shotgun, locking on to any nearby target, instantly killing any non-boss foe.

    During some combat sections, there will be a War Crier that, if not dispatched, will buff enemies. This is a real pain if there’s several enemies to fight at once. There’s two ways to take him out: destroying the chain that’s holding him up, or with gunfire/explosions. Eventually I got into a groove where taking out the War Crier was priority one, which he was easily killed by shotgun or stray explosive. Since he explodes once killed, it also helped do damage to his buddies and make fights a bit less monotonous.

    On the road again….

    While most of the game is Max on foot fighting foes Batman Arkham style, there is a good chunk of the game centered towards the vehicles. Max gets a car from Chumbucket called the “Magnum Opus,” which can be upgraded with scrap – a material all around the wasteland – to have power nitro boosters, spikes on the car to avoid enemies jumping on it, sidefire jets to damage foes from the side, the grappling hook to yank doors open or eliminate snipers. Speaking of snipers, Max has a portable sniper of his own that he can use while in the Magnum Opus, which can be useful for some annoying targets at range, but keeps you completely stationary. It’s a nice deviation but I tended to use some of the other weapons in my arsenal instead.

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