In the several years I’ve been writing about retro FPSes on this blog, I’ve covered some of the biggest. Doom WADs. Quake mods. Half-Life mods. But there’s one particular game franchise that I haven’t really tackled in written form. One that was an absolute technical marvel when it was released in May 1998. One that would spawn a franchise, an engine, and cement the legacy of two game companies. I’m gonna talk about Unreal.
Developed by Digital Extremes and Epic Games – then known as the superior-sounding Epic MegaGames – Unreal would end up being a critical darling, commercially successful, and a good incentive to get a 3D graphics accelerator card for your computer, just when those were starting to take off.
You can’t deny, this opening sequence can get one hyped.
The two companies had worked together on the popular Epic Pinball, and wanted to make a shooter that could shun the term “Doom clone” to utter irrelevance. It went through several years of development, at one point intending to be released in late 1997 to compete against id Software’s Quake II, but eventually released in May 1998: After the Q2 zeitgeist, but before the freight train that was Half-Life would change things in the FPS space forever. Even then, Unreal ended up leaving a massive impact on the gaming world.
For this article, I played the OldUnreal patched version of Unreal Gold, a re-release of the game in 2000 which comes with the original game as well as the Return to Na Pali expansion pack. There might be slight differences between original Unreal and Unreal Gold, but I imagine they’re merely cosmetic.
Honestly amazed I’m still standing after all this.
You play as a nameless soldier, Prisoner 849, captured on a Skaarj alien ship called the Vortex Rikers. Suddenly the ship crashes, and you’re all alone as you escape the wreckage of the Vortex Rikers, which then opens to the world of Na Pali, a tranquil place invaded by the Skaarj. Through logs strewn about the area, the player must figure out how to stop the Skaarj’s control from Na Pali and be the savior of the imprisoned Nali race.
The first-person shooter in the 90s was still a new thing for gaming. Called “Doom clones” for several years before the current nomenclature took hold, these kind of games were often seen as violent and filled with gore, primarily made for adults, with very few kid-friendly versions of the genre readily available. Then again, it was mostly cartoon violence, but you try telling old decrepit senators like Joseph Lieberman that.
But then in 1997, Sunstorm Interactive, a developer of expansions for games like Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior, and publisher WizardWorks released Deer Hunter, a first-person hunting game. Still violent, but it’s hunting! People in the US of A love hunting, and that’s an untapped market!
Cue several different hunting and shooting games by a myriad of companies, including the scores of Cabela’s video games by Activision Value. But it wasn’t just hunting games. Hunting is basically shooting on an open range, and target ranges are popular, so why not games based on that?
A screenshot of NRA: Gun Club. Look at this riveting gameplay!
There’s a handful of those too, including the infamous NRA Gun Club, a game I wrote about many years ago. In a sense, the game I’m talking about today is basically the spiritual successor to NRA Gun Club in more ways than one, and likely was made to cater to that same niche market that Deer Hunter did all those years ago. Except now it’s a bit more of a crowded market…
That’s one chunky smartphone.
Reload, also called Reload: Outdoor Action in some regions, is a lightgun rail shooter. Yet another game that’s hard to find info on the web, much like when I wrote about Legendary. Reload was published by Mastiff, a brand mostly known for making shovelware fare during the late 2000s to early 2010s, like the Heavy Fire series among many other games. The developer on the other hand, Top3Line, is not a developer I’m familiar with, but I figure they’re yet another a dime-a-dozen bargain bin game developer. Reload came out for the Nintendo Wii, and later, bizarrely, on PC. For this article, I’m playing the PC version through Steam. I can’t imagine the Wii version being any different except looking a bit worse and a bit more Wii remote waggle.
“Welcome to Reload, here’s what you’re in for.” Pretty basic.
There isn’t much of a story to Reload. Your player character goes to various target ranges with many different types of firearms, with a goal at each mission: Get a certain amount of points, avoid harming too many civilians, that kind of stuff. Fulfill the mission requirements and we’ll move on to the next stage with different requirements than the last. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Well, it’s doing what it says on the tin, that’s for sure.(more…)
Anybody who has been on the internet long enough will have some goofy image or meme that resonates with them and a group of friends. Something so absurd and silly that it just becomes a part of you, and a small meme along a group of friends. For me, it was Glunch.
There’s something so absurd about this image.
Around 2019, I had shared a post on a my friend mavica’s discord from a tumblr called “VHS Dreams,” which featured a computer graphic with the word “GLUNCH” and some guy making a silly face. I was oddly fascinated by the image, as one of many pieces of ephemera folks discover off a random VHS tape.
With anything that I find and share to folks, I like to know the origins of where it came from. Even if it’s a nugget of trash knowledge. I figured it came from a game show due to the set, and the computer graphic pinpointed it to somewhere in the mid-to-late 1980s. Since I tend to watch a bunch of mostly forgotten game shows, it didn’t take me long to find the show in question: WordPlay, a short-lived game show that aired on NBC daytime from December 1986 to September 1987.
Produced by Fiedler-Berlin Productions, Rick Ambrose Television, and Scotti Brothers-Syd Vinnedge Productions, WordPlay was a game show based off the classic Fictionaryparlor bluffing game. If you’re familiar with the board game Balderdash, it’s similar to that.
Allan Kaiser, Tracey Gold and Marc Price give their definitions for “Inscrutable.”
The rules of WordPlay went a little something like this: Two contestants, one often a returning champion, compete. A grid of obscure English language words are shown. A contestant picks a word, of which three celebrities will each give a definition of what the word might be described as, with one of them always having the correct dictionary definition. If the contestant picks the celebrity with the right definition, they get cash, otherwise their opponent gets to pick from the remaining two celebrities to steal.
At the February 2026 PlayStation State of Play, a trailer for a currently untitled John Wick video game was featured. It was all CG renders and no gameplay, but it could be promising considering the last attempts to put John Wick in a video game was a passable crossover in Payday 2, the strategy game John Wick Hex that I heard was pretty good, and likely other crossovers.
Then it was announced that Saber Interactive was making it, and among my friends the hype immediately deflated. Saber’s games vary wildly from being “perfectly fine and inoffensive” to “absolute trash.” They’re kinda like Rebellion Developments in a way, where their best games are mostly above-average schlock, but their bad games are truly terrible games.
This got me looking into one of their previous attempts at a licensed game. I opted to go for the one based on a mostly forgotten 2013 movie based on an equally obscure comic book series. Bonus: we get digital Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds in this one.
Dude, clean off your desk, man.
Based on the 2013 movie of the same name, R.I.P.D.: The Game is a product of Old School Games, a short-lived subsidiary of Saber Interactive based out of Russia. They only released two games, both in 2013: This game, and God Mode, a medieval horror shooter hybrid. This was published by Atlus USA in the final year before Sega acquired the Atlus brand, which might seem weird to folks finding out the same company that published Persona and Catherine published this. Then again, Sega published indie games like Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit (which I wrote about here), so I guess it was kinda On Brand for companies to publish offbeat games like these in the early 2010s.
This was available on Patreon a few days early. If you wanna support my independent queer games writing, consider contributing to my Patreon. You don’t have to kill deados, just $1 will get you early access to my work
If only the game looked as stylized as this does.
R.I.P.D.: The Game’s story is a loose adaptation of the film: Nick, played by Ryan Reynolds, dies and is assigned to the Rest In Piece Department, a supernatural police force meant to take out “Deados” – their version of zombies, basically – and either eliminate or arrest them. With the help of Roy, played by Jeff Bridges, the two must fight all kinds of Deados through various locales like a Meth Lab, a Library, a Construction Yard, and eventually gain enough to tackle the leader of the pack named Hayes, played by Kevin Bacon.
I love Quake. It’s undeniably one of my favorite games of all time. I love it because it’s the textbook definition of a surreal FPS to me: You’re fighting marines, ogres, knights and Lovecraftian horrors with shotguns, nailguns, and a lightning gun through marine bases and castles. If you think about it for more than five seconds, you realize how dumb it all is, that it shouldn’t work.
Yet somehow, in spite of all the turmoil going on internally at id Software – this would be John Romero’s last game with the studio before jumping ship to form Ion Storm and making the abysmal Daikatana, something I previously wrote about – everything fell into place perfectly and Quake became an absolute classic. There are very few games that I think nail this formula, and Quake nails it in spades. (I wonder if there’s any other surreal/absurdist first-person shooters that fit this example. Rise of the Triad is another example I can think of, but I’d love to hear your suggestions!)
I’ve written about countless Quake mods and expansions over the years, I still play it every now and then, I check out the mods made for it, and so on. This time around, there’s a new big Quake mod that was getting a lot of attention at the start of 2026, and naturally I had to check it out. Turns out it’s worth the hype.
An ominous start.
Quake Brutalist Jam III is a mod for Quake that’s inspired by Brutalist architecture introduced way back in the 1950s. Based on the existing Copper mod, this mod not only introduces a bunch of new textures for mappers to use, but a new rogue’s gallery of monsters and weapons to make it unique from vanilla Quake. Done as a map jam from October-November 2025 where members worked together to make maps for the mod using the aforementioned new weapons and enemies, the final collection was released in early January 2026.
The Jam is split between three sections: A section for new/inexperienced Quake mappers called “New Faces,” a set of remastered levels from the two previous Quake Brutalist Jams called “QBJ Resurfaced,” and the main set of levels made specifically for this collection.
Surely this is the only enemy here and more won’t spawn… right?
The maps are made by veterans and newbies from the Quake mapping community, alongside Twitch streamer/boomer shooter enthusiast DraQu, and Robert Yang, famous for Radiator 2 (NSFW), a series of small games with severe homoerotic overtones. And that’s just the ones I recognize. The rest seem to be a cavalcade of various mappers from the community, all with their own style.
A bunch of explosives and zombies to kill? It’s just like Christmas! …wait, that was last month.
Gameplay is similar in nature to classic Quake: kill monsters, hit switches, find keys to open doors, get to the exit. The big changes involve the arsenal and the monsters. A wrench replaces the axe, your starter shotgun is replaced with a Stechkin ApS pistol with infinite ammo (and a reload sequence!), the super shotgun is now the KS-23 Flak which allows the shots to bounce between walls (this became my favorite as I always loved the Flak Cannon in Unreal Tournament for that same ricochet properties), the nailguns are now akimbo, the super nailgun is now a rebar crossbow, the rocket launcher now fires a volley of eight rockets for four shots (wasn’t a big fan of this because it reminded me of Daikatana’s Shotcycler and how wasteful of a weapon that was), and the lightning gun is replaced by the powerful Invoker, which is the BFG-9000 equivalent in that it will kill any enemy in a single hit in a 3×3 grid pattern. Works great when you have to deal with several Shamblers at once.
Annoying little bastards.
The bestiary for QBJIII hasn’t been drastically changed. The main Quake rogues gallery is still here, just reskinned and renamed, using the Copper mod’s rebalancing as a base. There’s a few new grunt types like pistol grunts, a rocket launcher grunt who’s basically a glass cannon, often seen alongside the Grenadiers (reskinned Ogres) and Plasma Trenchknights (reskinned Enforcers).
There’s also more horror monsters, like the annoying Amalgams that drop caltrops that do damage to the player if stepped on, as well as the swarmers and blisters, small enemies that often appear in groups that can overwhelm you. I swear a good chunk of my deaths were because I got swarmed by a bunch of swarmers only to be blown up by a blister not long after.
Welcome to 2026 and the 14th year of You Found a Secret Area. It’s kind of weird to think about for me. Over the past decade or so, I’ve seen a shift more towards video and streaming content, with long-form writing being shoved away. While I had dabbled in such things in the past, there’s been one thing that’s been constant, and that’s me sitting down at least once a month to put down a bunch of words about… stuff.
I don’t really have any super strong goals for the blog this year, besides to keep writing. Even in the age of AI slop, where cheap fly-by-night blogs scrape the internet to make blogs full of SEO marketing drivel that’s not even correct half the time, I’m not giving up on writing. It’s arguably one of my strengths, I don’t wanna offload my work to the plagiarism machines, the human element is most important thing to me.
That being said, back in June I said I’d make a “rest of 2025,” and here’s me fulfilling that promise. I know I did a separate post for Portland Retro Gaming Expo 2025, but this is the stuff I bought outside the convention. Here’s Some Stuff I Bought through the rest of 2025:
This first one was a case of a happy accident. In October, I decided to roam around the area and spotted a small resale shop called Village Merchants. Funny enough, a taco truck is also parked right next door to it, and they used the signboard to use “Who Wants a Taco,” which I think is sage advice we can all agree with.
Village Merchants is a quaint little place, mostly full of clothes, but also knick-knacks and other assorted things like music CDs. And I spotted one that really caught my interest.
$2 – Bob Miller’s Polkarena
Okay, I’m gonna be talking about local Portland, Oregon stuff here, so skip on if you’re not interested in knowing about local personalities from my neck of the woods.
This is a Christmas album made for 1190 KEX, an AM talk radio station that had a handful of local radio personalities, but nowadays is just a place if you wanna hear right-wing talk radio and Coast to Coast AM all day.
Bob Miller was a longtime personality for the station, starting in 1979 and continuing until 2003, moving on to KPAM until retiring in 2014. 35 years is a hell of a run for any radio personality, honestly. For a good chunk of the late 90s to the early 2000s, KEX would put out these charity CDs for the holidays. According to Discogs, this has a 1998 copyright, something I couldn’t easily find on the disc itself.
I bought this only because of the concept of a polka version of the famous “Macarena” one-hit wonder sounded appealing. It’s silly, mostly Bob talk-singing about German related things while trying to get Horst Mager, a famous Portland celebrity chef at the time, to sing. It’s not nearly as interesting as I was hoping, but it’s goofy even if they’re massively late to the party.
The rest of the album is various sketches and songs featured on Bob Miller’s radio show throughout 1998, including adding lyrics to the Olympic Games theme, A blues track about traffic on Interstate 5, and even some other Oregon themed tracks. There’s even a bit where Dennis Nordin, part of the KEX traffic chopper, talks about a tale of a woman stuck in a tree. Guess Portland has always been weird even in the late ‘90s.
While writing about this, I found out about Wes Cooley, a former Oregon Republican infamously for lying about his military record (not to be confused with the motorcyclist); and Jake O’Donnell, a former NBA referee who seemed to have a massive beef with Clyde Drexler, a basketball player who was a longtime player for the Portland Trailblazers. I’ve been living in Portland, Oregon all my life and I suddenly learned more about my city and state with this album. Thanks, Bob Miller.
For being a typical radio station charity CD made for the holidays, it’s Perfectly Fine. Nothing to write home about. It’s no Z100 Evil Barney Christmas, that’s for sure.
Fun fact: The track listing on the back of the CD doesn’t match the actual CD track listing. A performance of Heywood Banks’ “Diddly Squat” had to be yanked at the last minute due to licensing issues, so instead we have a silly little Christmas-themed song by Bob Miller instead.
If you’ve ever played a five-fret guitar rhythm game, you probably have a favorite one of those. Most of us have our most favorite fake plastic guitar rhythm games. But what about the least favorite guitar rhythm games? There’s probably a few well known examples that immediately come to mind: Rock Revolution,PowerGig: Rise of the SixString,PopStar Guitar, a game I previously covered here. Maybe Guitar Hero Live or Rock Band 4 or Fortnite Festival if you’re feeling really spicy. But I propose a new candidate for the worst five-fret rhythm game I played. Which, considering I played and wrote about PopStar Guitar, is an impressive feat.
The title is a bit confusing. Is it Santa Rockstar HD, Metal Xmas Santa Rockstar HD or just Santa Rockstar? Make up your minds, y’all!
Santa Rockstar HD is a five-fret rhythm game for PC made by Bekho Team, a studio based out of Santiago, Chile. Outside of a few games of theirs that are knockoffs of existing games, this is probably the most standout product the company has made. This is the sixth installment in the Santa Rockstar franchise, a series that initially started out as a series of Flash games released from 2008 to 2012, during the first boom and bust of the rhythm game genre. Santa Rockstar HD is the first one to not use Flash, instead opting to use Unity to make the game.
I was made aware of this game back in 2023 when Twitch streamer and overall guitar game god Acai covered it on a stream during the holiday season. He was absolutely floored at how bad it all was. Since I am a trash connoisseur and rhythm game nut, I bought this on a whim not long after. Since it’s the holiday season, it seems like a perfect time to talk about Santa Rockstar HD.
There really isn’t much of a story to Santa Rockstar HD. A rock and roll dude, who goes unnamed here, notices Santa Claus has been hurt. Being reminded of the memories of getting a guitar from Santa for Christmas, decides to wield Santa’s axe, of which he suddenly becomes a buff Santa himself. So now our buff Santa Claus must save Christmas with the power of rock. It’s like if The Santa Clause had a baby with Brutal Legend. I wasn’t expecting an outstanding story out of a rhythm game here, but it’s a good enough premise to keep things going.
We’re off to a bad start if I’m seeing typos here….
The main story quest involves you playing notes to the tune of various Christmas songs of note, with a more metal flare. Silent Night, Come All Ye Faithful, Jingle Bells, all the iconic Christmas songs, plus a few original songs and arrangements of symphony classics like Rondo alla turca. Charlie Parra, the game’s composer, did a pretty darn good soundtrack here. I’m usually not big on metal covers of songs – I think they’re a bit cliched and overdone sometimes – but I totally would throw these in a Christmas songs playlist. (There is a soundtrack of this available on Steam, but it seems to come from playing the songs in-game rather than the raw audio files, so save your money.)
These gems almost look like candy. I wonder if you can eat the gems…
If you’ve played a Guitar Hero or Rock Band game, you’re gonna be easily familiar with the game’s mechanics: Tap a note, get points, hit a string of white notes to get Rockpower – this game’s equivalent to Guitar Hero’s Star Power – and try not to miss too many notes or you’ll fail. One of the more interesting changes through the quest mode is that your multiplier, rockpower and note streak carry over from song to song in the setlist. It’s a bit unconventional than standard rhythm game setlists, which usually reset everything upon playing a new song, but I guess it can be useful if you’re trying to get the high score.
Longtime readers of this site know that I am a trash connoisseur. I will watch terrible shows and bad movies, and of course I’ll play bad video games. I chalk it up to just absorbing a lot of critically panned media in my youth, but I also look at it as a learning experience: Just why did they make it like this? Engaging with media known for its negative reception is important to critiquing media, in my opinion. Gives you a better understanding of what’s actually good or bad.
I’ve written about several bargain bin games over the years. Often made by small teams on shoestring budgets and quick development time frames, these are fascinating to play for me. Many times they’re not very good, and I can finish them in just a couple hours. Though, sometimes you can see what they wanted to do, but couldn’t for whatever reason. In some rare cases, a budget label will decide to release a new installment in a long-dormant franchise in an attempt to get a few extra sales from longtime fans. Much like today’s entry.
Confirmed: That’s a gun firing, alright!
Soldier of Fortune: Payback is the oft-maligned third and final installment of the Soldier of Fortune franchise, loosely based on the magazine of the same name. Released in 2007, a mere two weeks after the massively popular Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, this game came and went to negative reviews, and is mostly forgotten outside of ragebait Youtubers or trash connoisseurs like me.
Payback was not developed by Raven Software, makers of the previous Soldier of Fortune games. Instead, it was developed by Slovakian development studio Cauldron, who was one of a few studios Activision Value relied on for developing their bargain bin games. According to The Cutting Room Floor, the game was tentatively titled “Mercenaries Wanted,” and likely got the Soldier of Fortune branding due to similarities between it and the previous games.
While it may seem weird for Activision to publish this game right after the biggest video game to probably come out in 2007, it actually isn’t. You see, for a while, there were two Activisions.
From 2000 to 2016, Activision Value was a publishing arm of Activision based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. This was created from a merger of several budget publishers, including Expert Software – known for publishing a good chunk of Sega’s PC output, like Sonic & Knuckles Collection, which I’ve written about – and Head Games, makers of such infamous games like Extreme Boards & Blades and Juggernaut: The New Story for Quake II, which I’ve also written about. If you’re familiar with the oodles of video games based on the Cabela’s brand of sporting good stores, that’s almost entirely Activision Value.
Unless you looked closely, there wasn’t much of a noticeable difference between the Activision based out of California that was putting out Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Guitar Hero and Call of Duty; and the Activision based out of Minnesota that was putting out stuff like Secret Service or the oodles of History Channel video games. They both had the Activision logo on the box, after all. I find this late 2000s era of Activision fascinating for that reason. They not only wanted be the big AAA publisher, but they also wanted to put out average schlock for $40 a pop. Guess they wanted to eat their cake and have it too.
Just another day at the office.
In Soldier of Fortune: Payback, you don’t play as the bushy mustachioed protagonist John Mullins from the previous games, but instead a generic faceless soldier by the name of Thomas Mason. (No relation to Alex Mason, I assume.) Mason gets double-crossed by another Shop mercenary named Miller, and with the help from Casandra “Casey” Decker back at The Shop, Mason goes through middle eastern towns, South American jungles and Ukranian hotels to figure out who is bribing mercenaries to defect. It’s a fairly basic story pretty much meant to move the player along various locales while shooting bad guys in generic environments.
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!
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.(more…)
