1914 Shells of Fury

I'm going to play another Strategy First game today. This time a more recent title called 1914 Shells of Fury. As far as I can figure it's a WWI game where you're piloting a German sub and blowing up British boats...

Starting off

I figure the best place to start with most games is the tutorial, so I fire it up. The first tutorial mission, I'm surfaced and staring out at the sea. According to the mission objectives, I need to go to two check points then return to point.

This is simple to do. Open up the map screen and draw the path then put the sub on autopilot. And I'm off...veeerrrrry sloooooowly.

Okay, I realize the point of the game is to simulate a submarine from the beginning to the century but does the simulation have to be so accurate as to emulate the exact speed early subs moved? I keep opening the map screen every few minutes just to see if I've gone anywhere at all. Even with the engine set at full speed ahead, it still takes forever to get to the first target destination.

I finally arrive, and what's there? NOTHING!! I dunno why, but I was expecting there to be something to blow up once I arrived. Nope, just go to these points on the map and return to port. Yuck.

Campaign mission

So, thirsting to make something explode, I start a new campaign mission. My orders, written on a parchment are to patrol for incoming British ships.

Once again, I start over staring at water and nothing else. Pull up the map, make a patrol route and follow it...to....nothing. I end up diving and firing torpedoes in random directions just for something to do. End up back at the port and the mission is complete. That's it?

Start the second mission. Objective again is to patrol for the British...and I think there was something about the French in there as well. Begin the mission by...staring at the empty seas. Patrol around, firing off random torpedoes at nothing since I still haven't found anything to blow up.

Conclusion

So, I've been playing this for more than half an hour haven't blown ANYTHING up!!

Am I gonna keep playing? Um, NO!

I realize the point of this game was to simulate the way a vintage submarine ran (though I'm pretty sure you didn't set your depth by clicking a mouse cursor on a valve...) but come on! The game is called SHELLS of FURY! With a title like that, I expect to be able to FIRE SOME FURIOUS SHELLS!! If this was called "Submarine Simulator" my opinion might be different but as it stands, this just feels cheap.

Uplink Hacker Elite

I was trying to figure out what to play this morning, so hit up GameTap's massive library in search of something I'd never tried before. A 2003 game by Strategy First caught my eye: Uplink Hacker.

The beginning

The game opens with an old-school terminal looking screen where you're asked to create an account with Uplink, a company that seems to employ freelance computer hackers. I go through the sign-up process (with something like a quarter of the web sites I visit these days requiring a sign-up, what's one more? Even if it's not a real web site..) and I'm ready to start hacking.

The first one to be done is a tutorial mission...

Hacking tutorial

For some reason I get the feeling that if any real computer hacker played this, they'd probably laugh harder than they did at Swordfish but it's time to hack Uplink's test computer.

The first thing I'm told to do is download some software - a password cracker and and a trace tracker to see how close I am to getting caught. The tutorial mission is simple: get into the test computer, break the password and download a file before they complete a trace.

And so I'm off. Using a map screen, I route my connection through three other computers around the world I can access to slow down the trace and then load the password cracker.

The cracker uses the brute force method of just trying combinations of letters and numbers to get at the admin password. Never mind the fact that this wouldn't have even worked in the 80's since most online machines kick you out after three wrong passwords, but whatever, it's just a game.

Of course, the second I start cracking, they start a trace on my connection which sets off my trace tracker. It beeps to warn me that I'm being traced and the closer they get, the faster and louder it beeps adding a nice element of intensity to game with otherwise dull game play.

Get in and go for the file...of course, I got a little bit ahead of the tutorial that was giving me step-by-step instructions and could no longer go back but whatever, this was easy enough.

Hack the planet

Now it's time to start taking some assignments. The first ones are relatively straightforward corporate espionage. I've got to break into a competing company's computer and either steal or erase files. Made some quick in-game money like this and my rank increased. Now it's time for something a little juicier.

Ooh. An identity fraud assignment. Hack into social security records and change someone's status from "deceased" to "employed." This should be interesting.

...and kinda difficult.

Even with my connection routed through multiple proxy sites, I only get 45 seconds before the government has traced me. Will have to work fast on this one. Crack the admin password and search records for the name of the person I'm after. Find it, but I've got 10 seconds before the trace it done - crap! Disconnect before it's completed.

Now I have to log back in and crack the admin password again and...almost get caught before completing the assignment AGAIN!

After a few tries, I finally figure out that I can crack a non-administrator account and won't have to re-do when I go back in, yay!

Finally get the record changed and e-mail the person who hired me. Yay monies!

Conclusion

It's a fun little game if you're willing to go for the suspension of disbelief when it comes to the method of hacking. There's a good chance I will keep playing this one since I'm interesting in seeing where the assignments go and if perhaps any kind of plot works it's win (a story element seems to get hinted at on the hacker's message board.)

The Typing of the Dead

So I make the discovery that there's a typing tutor that includes zombies, um how could that combination possibly go wrong? I need to try it.

As soon as I loaded it, I realized what could go wrong: It's the horrific House of the Dead 2 (complete with quite possibly the worst voice acting in any video game ever made) but modified so that you kill the zombies by typing words instead of shooting them.

Alright, why not? This could still be interesting...

Start it off, same bad intro with the squeaky voiced flying critter I wouldn't be able to understand if it weren't for the subtitles...then the zombies start coming at me. There are words floating over them and the idea is to type the words before the zombies get to you.

Basically, type fast or die. Shouldn't be a problem for me, I mean I've been clocked at 120 words per minute...

But sadly, there are issues. The biggest pain being sequences that involve zombies that throw projectiles. See, there will be a full sentence over the undead monster to type, but as soon it hurls a knife, you have to hit a different letter to shoot it down. The problem there is that if you're halfway through a sentence when the knife gets thrown, you can't hit the letter on the knife to knock it down.

Getting through the first level is pretty easy - though I do feel bad about the woman that died because I typed "U3" instead of "U2." There's no room for error when there are hostages involved.

Oh yeah...and the government agent type characters who are the good guys are rather amusing to look at since instead of having guns, they have keyboards mounted in front of them that feed into what looks a PlayStation with a battery pack attached to their backs. Um...well, it is a zombie game, so I guess they were going for total cheese.

Anyway, first boss fight is pretty simple, just keep typing sentences as they pop up.

Later levels mix up on the boss battles, though. In the second, you can only type at certain times. For the third level, questions appear at the bottom of the screen and you have to type the answer as fast as possible.

After screwing up too many words in the fourth level and getting the dreaded "GAME OVER" screen, I decide to try the game's typing drills.

These are actually interesting. It starts off as a normal "survive the zombie horde" scenario...but with typing.

At the end of each round, however, it shows you your problem keys and asks if you'd like to work on them. I say yes and now have to hold back a new zombie horde who all want me to type in words with the letter U to stop them (that was my problem key.)

Conclusion

Much as I'm loath to suffer through House of the Dead 2 yet again, the concept of typing fast to kill zombies is far too cool for me to not keep playing this one.

ToeJam and Earl

As I mentioned in my review of Phantasy Star 2, there were very few games for the Sega Genesis I was interested in. Along with PS2, there was ToeJam and Earl. It's probably the weirdness factor that drew me to this one.

See, through the long intro you learn that ToeJam and Earl are extremely funky aliens from the planet Funkotron who crash land on earth. The idea of the game is the wander around until you find the pieces of the space ship in order to return. Funky.

Starting Out

First, this game already has one impressive feature: the game levels are randomly generated every time you start a new game, in a sense offering plenty of replay value. I really wish more games would do this, as the Genesis pulled it off in 1991 with 1/100th of the power today's consoles have.

Anyway, I chose to play as ToeJam, the weird skinny red alien with three legs. I start off on a small island area surrounded by water with presents scattered around. Once the presents are collected, they're accessible from a menu, but there's a catch. There's no indication whatsoever as to the contents. And as I so quickly learned by dying from ripping open a present, the contents aren't always good.

After that unfortunate lesson learned, I find an elevator that takes me up another level. Upon leaving the elevator, I'm informed that there's a piece of the spaceship on this level. Cool.

Finding it's not entirely easy though, since there are fat little devil characters wandering around who seem to like the jam pitchforks into me.

Fortunately, I do find a present with tomatoes in it to throw at them. Apparently this is the only real weapon in the game.

Some brief exploration later and I've found the top fin for the ship. Time to get in an elevator and head up again.

Elevator Going Up

After heading up a few levels, things start to get complicated. See, every level is an island and it's entirely possible to fall off and land on the previous one which can get a little annoying. On the plus side, some presents allow you to bounce back up to the previous level. But then there's the issue of not being sure which present it will be in.

I had yet another unfortunate incident where I opened a present that contains rocket skates which SHOULD have been cool except they rocketed me off the edge...leaving me to fall right back down to the first level.

Witness the Weirdness

Going up higher and higher I begin to encounter more hostile characters and they're probably stranger than the three-legged creature I'm controlling. I get attacked by some kind of mad doctor, shot by a cherub and have invisible boogie men chasing me (they scream BOOGIE BOOGIE as they attack.)

Tomatoes seem pretty scared in the random world I got, too.

Conclusion

Overall, this game is really about exploration, finding your way around the randomly generated islands in the sky. What little combat exists is pretty dull and it's far easier to just avoid bad guys than to fight them.

That said, the characters and power-ups are amusing and having the maps generate randomly at the beginning of each game is brilliant.

So will I keep playing? Well, it's probably not a game I'd gravitate to immediately but if I could see firing it up to kill time.

Now if only I had some of that...time, that is.

Hitman: Codename 47

Ah, going back to the beginning of a series. The Hitman franchise has been around for some time for some time though my introduction came only a few months ago with Blood Money. Which was awesome.

Given that awesomeness, I figured I should investigate the rest of the series. And what better place to start than the beginning? Hitman: Codename 47, released in 2000 by Eidos Interactive.

This one opens in some sort of creepy basement with a voice yelling out directions over a loudspeaker (and I begin to suspect Rockstar's Manhunt borrowed heavily from this game...)

Basically, it's a tutorial, you learn how to move and open doors. Then in one room you find your first weapons and learn how to stab dummies or strangle them with piano wire. Then on to another room for standard gun training followed by an outdoor area where you learn to move around in an environment. Pretty boring, but useful to me since I played Blood Money on the PS2 and have no idea how the controls are going to work on a PC.

Finally, you get to some guards and have to make your first real kill. Feeling old school, I dispatch the first one with the piano wire. Then take his outfit. Then realize something is missing. There's a locker right beside him, but the game won't let me stuff his body inside...blah. This was so easy to do in Blood Money. Fortunately, no one seems to find the body and I escape undetected.

First mission - Hong Kong

The game fast-forwards to a year later in Hong Kong. The assignment is to kill a Triad leader...but can't get at him right away. Instead, the International Contract Agency informs me that they have a plan to weaken his power. First move is to take out a negotiator.

I select my equipment and start the mission. It begins on the streets of Hong Kong. Wandering around, I find an elevator that'll take me to the roof of a building...and I know full well there's usually a reason the Hitman games give you access to a rooftop. Get to the top, unpack the sniper rifle...and wait. After a few minutes, my target arrives by limo. He's easy enough to spot since he's a different colour from everyone else.

Look through the scope...take aim...steady the rifle and BOOM! HEADSHOT! My target is down...but there's a problem. A big one, in fact. An armed helicopter is heading right for me. I'm spotted immediately and gunned down. Shit.

Go through this a few times until I realize that skipping cut scenes in this game doesn't speed up time. What's happening in the cut scene still happens. So by skipping the little movie of the helicopter heading for the building, I manage to buy enough time to pack up the rifle and get off the roof. Woo!

Second Mission

Next mission is still Hong Kong. This time the target is another negotiator and a bunch of triads. But I get equipped with a car bomb at the very beginning, so this should simplify things.

Wait for the target's limo to come into view and chase it to a restaurant. First problem though. The second I get close to it, one of the nearby gang members tells me to stay away from the car. Clearly I'll need a disguise...and the limo driver seems to be walking away. I follow him through an alley and check my equipment...and am disappointed.

See, in Blood Money if someone needed to be neutralized for the purpose of borrowing their clothes, so there were ways to do it without killing them. You could stab then with a sedative-filled syringe. You could tase them in one mission. Or if all else failed, you could just head-butt them. But in Codename 47, it seems killing them is the only option.

So once the limo driver stops to uh, relieve himself against a wall, I pull a silenced pistol and double-tap him in the chest. And watch him fall into an open sewer. Shit.

I start over the mission and go through it again and strangle the driver with piano wire this time. Get his clothes, dump body in sewer (which is rather difficult in this one...I miss just being able to click "Dispose body" in Blood Money.) Then go plant the bomb. Wait for triads to get in and detonate. Of course, the first time, I detonated it too soon and didn't take out everyone who supposed to be blown up. Blah. Replay until I get it right....

Conclusion

I think this is one of those cases where I'd have loved this game if I'd played it when it came out but going back after having all the glorious features of Blood Money makes a good deal of the game play seem like a chore.

The Grand Theft Auto series is pretty bad for this, with each new game adding features that SHOULD have been in the previous ones. I mean, really, after San Andreas I can't bring myself to play the earlier installments since they don't have the nifty feature where I can manually tag a location on the radar to get to it.

In the case of Codename 47, I'm missing many of the interesting methods of eliminating targets, the means of hiding bodies (come on, there's an open dumpster RIGHT THERE, WHY CAN'T I PUT THIS GUY IN IT?!?) Oh, and weapon upgrades. Being able to customize my weapons was one of the coolest parts of Blood Money.

So, will I keep playing? I really don't know. So far I've had to re-do each mission close to five times each before I got it right, which makes it pretty frustrating. I'd have probably loved this game in 2000 (Not that I had a computer that could run it back then) but now it'll probably sit around until a day I've got nothing else to play.

Phantasy Star 2

The beginning

I've never owned a Sega Genesis. Probably because I could count on one hand the numbers of games available for it that I actually wanted to play.

One of those was Phantasy Star 2. I've always been a big RPG fan and seeing a few articles about it in the video game magazines I read, I thought it looked bloody cool. Alas, there was still no way I was getting a Genesis just for one game.

Fast forward to today. With the miracle of modern technology like virtual consoles, I've had the chance to go travel back in time and play some of the vintage console games I couldn't play when they were around the first time.

So my inaugural caffeine-fueled review, I'll go over my first impressions of Phantasy Star 2.

The game opens in a futuristic world where all is supposedly well thanks to a system called Mother Brain regulating agriculture and whatnot (though, I seen enough sci-fi movies to have a pretty good idea as to where the plot is going to go...)

Anyway, you control some sort of government agent who gets assigned to investigate biohazards (violent creatures who've been terrorizing everyone) by retrieving a data recorder from a lab.

Sounds easy enough. As you're about to leave your roommate of sorts Nei stops you and insists on tagging along. She's half human and half-biohazard. (someone had sex with a biohazard?!?)

In the town you start off in, you've got the usual amenities - hospital for healing, weapon shop, armor shop and item shop. In the case of the item shop, I actually had to load up an FAQ because none of the items had names that indicate what they do. I mean, what the hell is Monomate? At least give me an item description!

Also located in town are teleport stations for going to towns you've already visited, a clone lab to bring back dead companions (run by some really creepy looking dude) and a building for saving your game.

So, after stocking up on supplies, I'm off to find this lab. You have to travel the usual old-school RPG overworld where of course, you get into random battles. Just as well, since I'm controlling weak characters and need to build up experience.

I soon find out heading to the lab won't be so easy. Some guy is blocking a tunnel I need to get through and is robbing and killing people, great. So I head off in the opposite direction to find a town that's been destroyed by people known as scoundrels. Apparently this is where the jerk from the tunnel is from and he's turned to a life of crime to pay the ransom the scoundrels have on his daughter. So, in order to get through the tunnel, I'll have to go rescue the daughter from the scoundrels. Yay for RPGs and their unrelated, but requires, quests.

Now, so far I haven't had an issue with the game...until I enter the scoundrel's hideout and I'm confronted with quite possibly the worst dungeon design I've EVER encountered!

Worst dungeon design EVER!

First off, it's a bloody MAZE! Normally mazes are only mildly irritating, but add in the random encounter system where every step I take, some algorithm in the game is calculating whether or not a bunch of monsters are coming to rape me, it's infuriating to hit a dead end.

But it gets worse, oh, it gets worse. The maze actually spans several FLOORS! I pretty much needed to have a walkthrough and a map open on my computer to get through. The directions consist of things like: Go north from the entrance then follow the wall east until you hit a dead end and go north again. Go up to the second floor. Go south until you hit a barrier, then west and then north once you find a wall until you find a chute back down to the first floor.

That's right! I have to go up to the second floor, to find a way back down to a difference area of the first floor so I can take a another chute back to the second floor, finally get to the third floor only to have to look for a chute back down to yet ANOTHER area of the second floor....you get the idea.

Anyway, after finally getting to the top, there's no big boss dude to fight. Instead a note that essentially says, "Sorry, the princess is in another castle."

So it's off to go find some tower, where I hope the dungeon design has gotten better....

No, NO IT HASN'T! In fact, it's WORSE! I did get to the top floor on my own, spotted the girl I'm there to save but can't get to her. At least I know her general location, so I know where to look for a chute on the floor below her....this would be logical. However, I can't FIND a chute one the floor below that'll take me to her general area. So I break down and look at a map again...only to find the area I need to get to is about as far away from the girl as as the Maritime provinces are to Zanzibar!

Ugh.

Okay, I have played significantly longer than I think I'm supposed to for this kind of review and I have to say, I'm disappointed. Not only have I had to suffer two infuriating dungeons, there hasn't even been an ounce of plot development. I thought this was supposed to be the strong point for RPGs, after all, it's definitely not the combat.

Conclusion

So, will I keep playing? Probably...it has to get better than this. But if these stupid dungeon mazes continue, this one may end up with several other games I've abandoned over the years just because they were too frustrating.

Welcome

Alright, welcome to Coffee and Video Games where I hope to provide video game reviews (of games old and new) played and written over morning coffee.

Yes, it's heavily inspired by Kyle Orland's Games For Lunch (if not blatantly ripped-off) but hey, I'm going to be doing my gaming in the morning!

Stay tuned...