You Found a Secret Area!

Category: From the Bargain Bin

It came from the Bargain Bin… the mysteries of sub-$20 video games, where you weren’t sure if you were paying for a gem or an absolute clunker. These are the budget games that make you question whether it was worth the money spent…

  • 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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  • Save Room – Organization Puzzle: Got a collection of good things on sale, stranger.

    Save Room – Organization Puzzle: Got a collection of good things on sale, stranger.

    I like Resident Evil. Whether it’s the horror aspects of the first few games, or even the goofy action-driven pivot the series took after Resident Evil 5, it’s one of those franchises I have a soft spot for. Except for Resident Evil 6, that game is… not good.

    One of the core mechanics Resident Evil relies heavily on is the inventory system. Your character can only hold a fixed amount of items, thus there’s a bit of strategy beyond exploring a place and killing all the zombies. Knowing what items and weapons to bring, making sure you’re equipped for whatever the game throws your way, whether or not it’s worth getting the big ticket item now or coming back later once your inventory’s empty. While it can be frustrating that you can’t just hold everything, it’s a deliberate design choice that I can appreciate.

    The RE4 inventory system in action. (courtesy of r/oddlysatisfying on Reddit, likely taken from elsewhere.)

    By the time we get to Resident Evil 4 it starts being more complex, where they use a grid system, with each item taking a specific number of slots in the game’s inventory system, now depicted as a large briefcase. It feels a bit more realistic, but also a game within a game, as one has to occasionally do a bit of adjusting to fit the new weapon or the dozens of fish they caught. It’s that one thing people always mention when they talk about RE4 that isn’t complaining about Ashley Graham being annoying. In 2022, 17 years after the original game’s release, a bunch of Brazilians were inspired by this interesting inventory system and liked the concept so much that they made a game out of it.

    I assure you, in spite of the simple title screen, this is not an asset flip.

    Save Room: Organization Puzzle is a game made by Fractal Projects, an indie studio based out of Brazil. Unfortunately I couldn’t find much information on the studio itself, but it’s made a few indie games like Npc Problems: Vertex Coloring and How to Bathe Your Cat, which are mostly pixel-driven indie games that are likely enjoyable games for the sub-$5 price all of their games go for. They don’t really have a website or a broad social media presence, so I can’t really pinpoint if these folks have prior game experience outside of their own work. Funny enough, while there aren’t clear credits for who made this, they do credit the assets they used in from the Unity store, so they’re at least considerate even if they’re semi anonymous.

    If you want to progress stranger, solve my puzzle!

    There isn’t much of a story. A Merchant – likely a reference to the merchant from RE4 – asks you to solve his puzzles, which involve having a bunch of items and fitting them within a specific grid of tiles. You click and drag them into specific spaces, right click rotates the item 90 degrees, and clicking on an item without moving it gives an option to inspect, combine or use, like in Resident Evil 4. Once you’ve filled all the slots, you can move on to the next puzzle.

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  • Legendary: Maybe we shouldn’t open Pandora’s Box.

    Legendary: Maybe we shouldn’t open Pandora’s Box.

    I kind of miss the seventh generation of shooters. Sometimes you’d find a game that while not amazing, was at least trying something interesting. Other times you could end up stuck in the sluice gate of Activision’s budget hell, with games like Soldier of Fortune: Payback, Jurassic: The Hunted or The History Channel: Battle for the Pacific. (By the way, those are all by the same developer: Cauldron, a Slovakian game studio that’s since been absorbed into Bohemia Interactive.) But regardless, I miss that B to C-tier type of game, something to waste a few hours of your time with that might’ve had promise but couldn’t deliver for whatever reason. And the game I’m talking about this time around definitely fits that criteria perfectly. Time to open up Pandora’s Box with this one.

    Not endorsed by Barney Stinson.

    Legendary – which is such a very generic title that it definitely will be hard to find info on in Google searches – is a first-person shooter that definitely fits this seventh gen C-tier mold. Developed by Spark Unlimited, a developer best known releasing Turning Point: Fall of Liberty and this game in the same calendar year, as well as working on the third game in the Lost Planet series and a Ninja Gaiden spinoff before closing up shop just as the seventh generation was coming to a close. They definitely were a C-tier developer.

    I can’t see this logo without thinking of Dan VideoGames from Gigaboots, who started the stream of this game by seeing this logo and yelling “GAMECOCK!”

    This game was also published by the rather infamous Gamecock Media Group, a publisher that was known for having fairly aggressive marketing tactics. In essence, they were basically the proof of concept of what would become Devolver Digital. (Fitting, since Mike Wilson was one of the head honchos at Gamecock, as well as Devolver.) I tend to remember them for storming the stage during the Spike Video Game Awards while Irrational Games’ Ken Levine was about to give a speech to promote Hail to the Chimp. Besides that, I couldn’t tell you any other game they published that was memorable besides these two games.

    Anyway, the story goes a little something like this: You play as Charles Deckard, a generic white dude protagonist who’s a graduate of the Gordon Freeman school of FPS character development. Deckard is given an offer from Osmond LeFey, leader of the sinister-sounding Black Order, to procure Pandora’s Box, which is conveniently hidden in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. After sneaking in and inserting a fancy key and a blood sacrifice, all hell breaks loose, as Pandora’s Box opens a portal to evil gods and beings flooding the city. With the help of Vivian Kane and his new Signet powers, Deckard must close up Pandora’s Box, while making sure LeFey doesn’t get it for evil nefarious deeds that evil nefarious villains do.

    Sewers…. why does it always have to be sewers…

    Legendary is a bog-standard FPS for the time. WASD moves, Left click to fire, right click to aim down sights, Shift sprints, E uses objects. Deckard can only hold two weapons, following the Halo/Call of Duty formula, alongside his trusty axe and two explosives that you switch between. Despite taking several pages from the 6th-7th generation FPS ethos, there are a few things it tries to do differently, such as no regenerating health, and fancy powers thanks to the Signet on his arm. Though, Deckard also has the cool ability to turn valves and “hack” keypads to open doors.

    Deckard’s abilities really boil to down to two things: A kinetic blast that helps destroy objects and stuns Pandora’s foes, and healing yourself. I ended up using the blast a lot to make certain foes easier to fight, and a few times for destroying physics objects when the game asked me to, but the heal feature was the most helpful. That is, if I could find places to heal and have enough animus energy to even heal in the first place.

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  • Daikatana: John Romero’s “expert FPS.”

    Daikatana: John Romero’s “expert FPS.”

    Sometimes I think a lot about what defines “the worst video games of all time.” There’s a lot of games in that category that I question if they deserve that distinction. After all, sometimes people get swept up into the zeitgeist of it all and hate a product without really thinking if it deserves it. While I’m thinking about this topic, there’s one game that comes up in that category.

    So I’m on a Discord server where a random bad game is picked every month and people play it. This time around, the game chosen was John Romero’s Daikatana, a first-person shooter developed by Ion Storm and released in 2000 for PC and oddly, Nintendo 64.

    Yep, this is how the game starts: Right in the Single Player menu. No splash screen, at least on this fan patch.

    I’m not gonna go too deeply about the game’s history here. There’s lots of places that have documented the history of this infamous game and Ion Storm as a studio overall, and I kinda wanna make this something shorter than my usual fare. If anything, I just want to get past talking about that one ad where they proclaim that “John Romero is about to make you his bitch.” (You can thank Mike Wilson of later Devolver Digital fame for that one.)

    Everybody loves a sewer.

    I’m no stranger to Daikatana. I remember watching the Something Awful Lets Play by Proteus4994 and Suspicious, which was my first experience of seeing the game beyond cultural osmosis. Stuff like “Thanks, John” is permanently burned into my lexicon thanks to this LP. (I don’t think if it’s worth watching nowadays, there’s probably a lot of offensive language that makes it age like expired cottage cheese.)

    I actually got to play it myself in 2016, and I don’t remember the experience all that well. The only thing that stuck in my memory was somehow getting Superfly Johnson stuck under a stairwell. Besides that, it was just shooting enemies in various time periods.

    To this day I don’t know how this happened.

    For this replay, I decided to send my NPC allies to the shadow realm, and Hiro Miyamoto would fight everything singlehandedly. From advice from a supporter of Daikatana – elbryan42 on Youtube – I turned on auto-aim, which made hitting a lot of the smaller enemies a lot less painful. I also decided to kick it up to Shogun difficulty, just for the extra challenge.

    This was available three days early for Patreon subscribers. Wanna be one of those? No Daikatana needed, just head to my Patreon and chip in at least a buck and you’re already there!

    Don’t try fighting these folks without auto-aim. It’s complete suffering.

    The first episode that takes place in the 2200s is an absolutely terrible first start for a game. Lots of small enemies that are hard to hit and hard to see. Lots of green, showing off all that pretty colored lighting that Quake II popularized.

    What was with FPSes of this time and using fruit as healing items?

    And of course, fruit you can interact with to heal yourself. The later levels of Episode 1 throws so many enemies and very little health that there were a lot of moments where I’d finish a combat section, then make the long backtrack to the nearest health “Hosportal” to refill. It didn’t help the game gives weapons that will do damage to you if you’re not careful: Stuff like the C4 Vitzatergo and the Shockwave Cannon will do lots of damage to foes, but it’s easy to kill yourself with them than the enemies. Even stuff like the Shotcycler seem like an interesting idea in concept but realizing you’re gonna be wasting ammo by killing an enemy with a single shotgun blast.

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  • Slingo Mystery: Who’s Gold? – A casual classic meets the modern casual game.

    Slingo Mystery: Who’s Gold? – A casual classic meets the modern casual game.

    In the many years I’ve been writing about oddball video gaming stuff, I thought I covered it all. The unofficial expansion packs, the weird cross-promotions, the mostly forgotten cheap games that came out during the 2000s. But it wasn’t until recently did I realize there was one genre I never talked much about: The hidden object game.

    A genre I haven’t really covered on here, the hidden object game involves usually finding a bunch of items inside a room to make progress. For a good long while, the hidden object genre was the go-to game for super casual gamers everywhere. I assume it’s still modestly popular, but I figure most people have since moved on to Candy Crush Saga and similar easy-to-understand mobile game offerings.

    Normally, I wouldn’t cover these, but then I found an interesting hidden object game. One mashed up with a classic online game I remember from my teen years. When I spotted this game at a thrift store, I had wondered how they decided to bring back a mostly dormant franchise and combine it with one of the most popular casual gamer genres out there. Turns out it’s quite a journey.

    James Bond this ain’t.

    Slingo Mystery: Who’s Gold? is a game developed and published by Funkitron Games – no relation to Toejam & Earl – that combines the popular hidden object game with Slingo, a game show-like game that mixes slot machines with bingo. Released around 2007 for PC platforms, this game seemed to slip through the cracks, as I didn’t realize this existed until I picked it up last year at a thrift store.

    A screenshot of Slingo Deluxe, one of the earlier offline versions of the game. Sadly, there isn’t much footage of the original online game available, so this will have to do.

    But before we get into the game itself, a small primer on what Slingo is. You have a bingo card and every spin of the reels gives you five numbers to fill the card with. Alongside the numbers are jokers – a wild card that can be used to mark any number on the column its on, gold coins – gives you extra score, and the devil, which cuts your score in half. You have up to 20 spins to fill the card, and the first to do so wins the game.

    Slingo is a game I fondly remember from my days of playing it on America Online. For people of my generation, Slingo was one of those classic games people played in the early 2000s, web 1.0-era internet. That, Yahoo Games, You Don’t Know Jack: The NetShow and Acrophobia are many of these online games I fondly remember. Sadly, most of these are gone now, or live on through fanmade clones.

    Totally forgot how jovial the Zynga Slingo joker was.

    I’ve talked about Slingo once before: Way back in 2012, covering the time Zynga licensed the game for a Facebook mobile game that was fairly short-lived. It was perfectly fine, but filled with microtransactions and nagging your Facebook friends for help, which was pretty common at the time. Thank god we kinda moved past that.

    But I’ve waxed enough nostalgia. Let’s get into the hybrid Slingo meets hidden object game that is Slingo Mystery: Who’s Gold?

    Freddy doesn’t really seem happy to be there…

    You play as Maggie Gold, a divorced, destitute woman who finds out from her friend Kyle Sparks that her ex-husband Freddy has passed, and decided to give his massive Las Vegas casino, “The Gold Casino,” to his current wife Gloria. Throughout the various areas of the casino, Maggie tries to find out the secrets of the casino, which involves a bunch of unusual item hunting and puzzle-solving.

    This is the usual fare for hidden object games: Mostly licensed properties like Gameloft’s The Blacklist: Conspiracy.

    Now, normally I wouldn’t talk too much about hidden object games. They always seemed to be the kind of genre that would flood the bargain bins of office supplies and department stores, sitting alongside a rack of cheap PC releases of games past like Braid or Far Cry 2. To me, these kind of games peaked when books like I Spy and Where’s Waldo came out. I couldn’t imagine these kind of games were anywhere near my wheelhouse.

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  • Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit: Cutesy, yet gory.

    Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit: Cutesy, yet gory.

    (content warning: cartoony violence and blood within. there’s also an aside about a game designer’s transphobia, but not in the game itself.)

    Ever had a moment where you’re scrolling through your library on Steam or some other digital storefront and spotted a game in your library that you have no memory of acquiring? Something that made you wonder “when the hell did I buy this?,” causing you to frantically search Humble Bundle and the 3-4 other discount key storefronts you have accounts on just to have the record of when you purchased that game? Well, the game I’m writing about this time was like that for me, a game that somehow was in my Steam library for literally years. I was confused on how it got there. Maybe I bought it from hell or something.

    Or, as the game calls it, “Ugh yeah!!!”

    Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit is a… rather bizarre action-adventure/metroidvania (ugh) game that was in my Steam library for a long time. Released in 2012 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Steam, it’s an unusual choice of game in my library mostly because of the game’s publisher: Sega.

    “SEG-” *frantically mashes start to get to the main menu*

    You know Sega, right? The company that puts out okay-to-great Sonic the Hedgehog games, the amazing Yakuza/Like a Dragon games, and occasionally dabbles in their back catalog once in a blue moon, right? In addition to its main headquarters in Tokyo, Japan and the oft memed USA branch, there’s another important division, an unsung hero of the company: Sega Europe, publishers of iconic PC gaming franchises like Total War, Company of Heroes, Endless Space and Football Manager. They dabble in other games as well, but Sega Europe’s is the reason Hell Yeah! was published by them and not like, 505 Games or something.

    Pretty sure this is also the name of a my bloody valentine tribute album.

    Hell Yeah! was offered as one of the free gift packages in “Make War Not Love,” a promotion Sega Europe was doing with its iconic strategy game franchises where playing either of those games – Company of Heroes 2, Total War: Attila and Warhammer: Dawn of War II – would result in unlocking content for those respective games. Hell Yeah! was packed in alongside other Sega games like Viking: Battle for Asgard, Renegade Ops and some of the games in the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive Classics Collection. All of these were offerings for the third “Make War Not Love” event, which happened in February 2016, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

    But let’s talk about Hell Yeah! itself. Developed by Arkedo Studio, a games studio based in Paris, France, was mostly known for relatively forgotten platformers in their “Arkedo Series” of games. Said games had fairly unremarkable titles like Jump!, SWAP!, and Pixel!. Hell Yeah! would be their last major game released while the studio was still active. Eventually one more game would be released not long after the studio shut down: Poöf vs the Cursed Kitty, released one year later and published by Neko Entertainment. Surprisingly this game doesn’t end with an exclamation point in its title.

    Don’t try to go to that web address, it doesn’t exist. Though, watch as Google suddenly makes .kom a top level domain…

    In Hell Yeah!, you play as Ash, a bunny rabbit who reigns supreme over the realms of hell. Through negligence on his part, pictures of him are taken by paparazzi and spread around the shores of hell, causing it to damage his reputation. With help from his servant Nestor, Ash opts to seek revenge by finding the culprit who leaked those photos in the first place, which requires defeating 100 monsters around the world.

    Why does it feel like I’ve waltzed onto a bullet hell shooter?

    Ash has a fairly modest arsenal to start. Not long after the beginning, Ash acquires a super-sawing jetpack that allows Ash to drill through certain materials and fly to certain areas. In addition, Ash can acquire a slew of weapons: Slow-firing missiles that can blast through rock and destroy enemies with ease. Eventually after the tutorial area, Nestor gifts Ash with a second weapon: A machine gun, one that looks similar to the famous M41A Pulse Rifle from the Aliens films.

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  • I Am Alive: Ubisoft’s dollar store version of a survival action game.

    I Am Alive: Ubisoft’s dollar store version of a survival action game.

    I never really cared for post-apocalyptic stuff. That stereotypical dystopia of derelict cities fighting off some zombie horde or devastating dust storm while people living in squalor… It all felt a bit too played out to me. Considering what’s happened in the past few years with us living through a global pandemic, I can’t say I’m really interested in playing too many things that hit a bit too close to reality like that.

    That doesn’t mean I never play those kind of games. I’ve played stuff like Fallout 3 and Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead which take place in dystopian worlds and yet still enjoyed them. But it’s definitely not something I actively seek out.

    Yet, I decided to start 2023 by playing a game that took place in a post-apocalyptic world. One that was recommended to me as something interesting, but fairly clunky. And as you’re gonna learn, feels like the dollar store brand of something more notable.

    I mean, it’s better than being dead, I suppose.

    I Am Alive – a title that while grammatically correct, still sounds weird to my ears – is a survival action game published by Ubisoft and developed by Ubisoft’s Shanghai studio. Released in March 2012 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and later the PC through Steam and Uplay Ubisoft Connect; the game was one of those aforementioned post-apocalyptic games, coming out just as the survival action genre was starting to take off.

    Originally announced as just Alive in 2008, I Am Alive was being developed at Darkworks, a French studio who had done other similar games, such as the interesting survival horror game Cold Fear and the mostly-forgotten Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare. 

    After an initial trailer showing a player surviving a catastrophic event in Chicago, Illinois, the game went dark, with only occasional news reports of the game still being alive (no pun intended). After countless delays, the game was rumored to be canceled until Ubisoft moved the development in-house around 2010, while also shifting the game’s focus from a major retail title to a smaller digital-only title. Darkworks shuttered its doors not long after.

    Unless some Darkworks developer held on to some unfinished development code, this particular version of I Am Alive is presumably lost, with only some proof of concept trailers still available online.

    Even after moving development to Ubisoft Shanghai, they opted to take Darkworks’ concept and start completely fresh, basically making a new game under the same name. Let’s see if they revived this concept, or if it should’ve stayed dead.

    It’s like I’m watching a found footage movie!

    In I Am Alive, we’re introduced to the playable character, a boring, run-of-the-mill dude protagonist whose name is never mentioned at all during the game. For some reason, I thought his name was “Ethan,” but all the sources I checked have him unnamed, so he’ll be named Our Hero going forward. 

    After The Event – the nebulous term the game uses for the apocalyptic event that ravaged the country – Our Hero returns to Haverton, a fictitious New York-like locale. He goes to find his wife and daughter – who do have names unlike Mr. Unknown here – but after finding that they’re not home, Our Hero then gets wrapped up in a journey that involves reuniting other families, getting supplies, and taking advice from various strangers around Haverton to eventually escape out of this hellhole.

    Ezio Auditore he ain’t.
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  • FOX n FORESTS: A retro-style platformer with a surprising twist.

    FOX n FORESTS: A retro-style platformer with a surprising twist.

    About 10 years ago on another WordPress blog I had, I made a rather dumb wordy rant about how retro pixel-style games sucked and how I was getting sick of them appearing everywhere. This was before games like Undertale and Celeste came out, games that showed how you could make that style work perfectly. In essence, I was being a graphics snob, which is somewhat uncharacteristic of me these days.

    I only mention this because this post is gonna be about a game that uses pixel art, and how surprisingly good it looks. Basically letting my past self have some crow. Though in this case we’re talking about a fox, not a bird.

    Oh no the fox is kinda cool-looking

    FOX n FORESTS is a retro-style 2D platformer developed by Bonus Level Entertainment and Independent Arts Software, two studios based out of Germany. Bonus Level is a modest indie studio founded by Rupert Ochsner, a former developer who worked on projects at Deep Silver including Saints Row The Third, though mostly in a business role. Independent Arts on the other hand, are known for a myriad of games, mostly ports of games like Tropico 6 to console platforms and the Moorhuhn series of games (known as Crazy Chicken outside Germany). So two developers with at least some amount of game history, just on the more “shovelware” side of things.

    Originally pitched on Kickstarter in 2016, FOX n FORESTS was released in May 2018 on all the major platforms: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and of course, PC via Steam. Outside of getting mentioned by James Stephanie Sterling in their “Greenlight Good Stuff” series, this game very much came and went when it came out. Yet I’m always curious about lesser-known games that aren’t talked about much, so I was willing to give it a try.

    “Fifth season” sounds like a boy band from the ’90s. I guess it fits, considering what the game is referencing.

    You play as Rick, a “foxtastic” – their words, not mine – hero who is persuaded from murdering a poor partridge to help the Season Tree, who’s lost their magic bark to various villains around the seasonal world. It’s up to Rick to recover the pieces of magic bark and give them back to the season tree to save the day, and get handsomely rewarded in the process.

    Is the story a bit silly? Yeah, definitely. But I’m not expecting high-quality writing here, especially for a game trying to hearken back to the days of retro platformers from the SNES era.

    Rick’s journey begins! …and already it’s a bit tougher than he was expecting.

    Rick starts with a fairly simple arsenal of a sword and a bow. The sword is used to attack enemies while moving, crouching or jumping. The bow is used to attack enemies at a distance, but requires Rick to be completely stationary and on the ground. As Rick progresses, he gets arrows that can alternate between special fire modes that come in handy later on for damage, or to activate platforms he couldn’t get to previously.

    Damn, I wish he could do that for real!

    The sword has a very special ability: pressing on either left or right trigger changes the season, which varies from level to level. The first level lets Rick switch between the warm summery colors to a wintery cold, which freezes all the water and makes some platforms easier to see.

    Another level switches between a spring dusk to a fall breeze, complete with growing fruit and falling leaves that double as platforms to make progress. This is a pretty neat mechanic. However, visiting the other seasonal area slowly drains your mana bar, so this requires a balance of switching between seasons at the most opportune times to make progress.

    Damn, this badger ain’t even phased by those bees

    At various points, another character named Retro the gaming badger appears to save the player’s progress mid-level, at the cost of some gold. Naturally he spouts off a bunch of retro video game references, as a wink and a nod to the games inspired by FOX n FORESTS.

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  • Juggernaut: The New Story for Quake II – A janky expansion.

    Juggernaut: The New Story for Quake II – A janky expansion.

    After writing about Doom Eternal last month, I felt like I was kinda losing my touch when it came to offbeat, weird stuff. Struggling to think of something to write about, I thought of something. And it’s time to head back to the unofficial expansion mines once again.

    I’ve been down this road countless times at this point, but this is one I had to come back to, since I mentioned it briefly before late last year. Since I covered one of the unofficial expansions — Zaero for Quake II — back in November 2021, I had to go back and look at another expansion for Quake II. And y’all, it’s a doozy.

    “Headgames is in no way affiliated with id Software.” Gee, I never would’ve guessed. (Cover courtesy of Mobygames.)

    Juggernaut: The New Story for Quake II – quite a mouthful – is an unofficial add-on for id Software’s space marine Strogg-killing shooter Quake II. The second of two unofficial add-ons, this came out around 1998 as a way to add more to your Quake II experience.

    I became familiar of this thanks to Something Awful, back when they used to “review” video games of dubious quality. Much like a lot of internet writing of that era, it’s really hard to go back to reading, especially since its creator Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka was an absolute piece of shit. But I had been curious about this add-on, so I started looking for a copy. Turns out it was a bit tougher finding a complete copy than I thought it would be, thus I put it aside and wrote about Zaero instead. It wasn’t until after I published that did a friend come and help me find a copy.

    Much like previous add-ons – official and unofficial – the game offers you to shoot and gib monsters, grab keys and have a fun time, right? I wish this was true, as this is not the case with Juggernaut. Problem number one is who published it.

    Sadly not sponsored by Foreigner.

    Head Games was a fairly infamous budget publisher through the late ‘90s, alongside some of the more infamous ones like Valu-Soft. While they dabbled in publishing unofficial expansions like the previously talked about Aftershock for Quake, their bread and butter was the “Extreme” line they published from 1999-2000, like Extreme Rock Climbing, Extreme Boards & Blades, and yes, the infamous Extreme Paintbrawl games. They’re not known for a high pedigree of quality, so buying a Head Games product meant you had to put your expectations real low. And this was before Activision acquired them.

    That looks more like a dome than a canopy.

    Though we can’t just blame the publisher: Developer Canopy Games has their own tale of making clunky games as well. For the most part, they were known mostly for budget-label driving games based on Harley Davidson, Hot Rod Magazine and oddly Initial D of all franchises; as well as Midnight Outlaw: Illegal Street Drag, a racing game clearly made to cash in on the Fast and the Furious franchise that Something Awful also covered back in the day. (This will be the last time I mention that site in this article, promise.)

    They occasionally dabbled in other genres, including the then-lucrative market of hidden object games in the late-2000s, but from the research I did shooters were not really their thing. Juggernaut would end up being their only add-on for a commercially released game. So I don’t have high hopes for this.

    These cutscenes are… interesting, to say the least.

    According to what I gleamed through the cutscenes and the readme files, the story goes like this: In the far-flung future, a Juggernaut ship exported people from Earth to the two moons on Jupiter – Europa and Callisto, respectively. You’re a soldier named “The Defender” who lives on Europa, doing your usual mining business until you find out that settlers of Callisto are doing science experiments on people that turns them into mutated beings. The Defender must fly to Callisto and eliminate those mutated freaks before their demon stuff… spreads throughout the universe? It’s not really clear, the story is likely explained more in the manual or the intro cutscene than it is in-game.

    Fun fact: In this intro demo, the player has god mode on. Already a bad sign.
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  • Alien Rage: An old school shooter in more ways than one.

    Alien Rage: An old school shooter in more ways than one.

    Over the 10 plus years I’ve been writing about video game stuff, one thing that’s stayed constant is me writing about the most jankiest, clunky games out there, often in January. So much so that I almost considered making an event called “Jank-uary,” where people would play these particularly busted games as a celebration of the underdogs and trash of video game culture. Maybe I’ll still consider that in the future if there’s any interest.

    Since it’s the start of a new year, what better thing to write about then yet another janky FPS? After all, might as well keep up my tradition of writing about this jank to start the year. This time with a developer I’ve talked about a few times in the past!

    “Bet you can’t scream louder than me, human!” Cover courtesy of Mobygames.

    Alien Rage is a first person space shooter made by the present-day masters of budget label games: CI Games, the company formerly known as City Interactive. Released on Steam, the Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 in 2013, the game came out to mostly uneventful fare, often being forgotten except by people like me who are a glutton for punishment as well as quality Eurojank™.

    We’ve talked about CI Games/City Interactive twice before: Once in January 2019 when I wrote about the interesting-but-flawed Enemy Front, a World War II FPS that tried to be a bit more stealth-action like the old school Medal of Honor days; and again in April 2021 where I covered the infamous Terrorist Takedown, a rail shooter that was made during peak War on Terror, and for a long while was CI Games’ most iconic franchise before Sniper: Ghost Warrior came around.

    Since I’ve played a myriad of the company’s work at this point, I know to go into this with the lowest of expectations. And boy those expectations were met and then some. The result is a game that doesn’t quite understand what it wants to be.

    It’s always those rare materials that we’re looking for, isn’t it?

    Taking place in the distant future of 2242 AD, humans find a new material named Promethium on a space rock, which they use to make a space colony. Then the Vorus, an alien race, come in and invade, taking over the Promethium, and starting a war between the humans and the aliens. Eventually the aliens burrow underground to further stop the humans in their tracks, and it’s all hinging on the help of one supersoldier named Jack to go in and eliminate the Vorus threat once and for all. Yep, in typical classic shooter fashion, they send one guy to do the job of a whole platoon. Though Jack is not alone in his journey, Jack is supported by an AI assistant named Iris and a soldier buddy named Ray. Guess you gotta give Jack someone to talk to, eh?

    “Hmm. This certainly looks like Something Bad’s about to happen…”

    Alien Rage is a run-of-the-mill first-person shooter. Jack can hold three weapons: a sidearm and two human or Vorus weapons he procures throughout his journey. Standard WSAD controls for movement, left click fires, right click ironsights, F does a melee attack, and E is the catch-all use button, where Jack will activate keypads and climb over chest-high walls when prompted.

    Middle mouse button activates a special alternate fire which changes for each weapon: A burst fire for the pistol, a grenade launcher for the SMG, etc. The player can hold a maximum of five of these overall, and can be used for any of the game’s weapons, so one must be careful when using them on a pistol rather than a rocket launcher.

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