Ah Shit, Here We Go Again!
The past is a puzzle, like a broken mirror. As you piece it together, you cut yourself, your image keeps shifting. And you change with it. It could destroy you, drive you mad. It could set you free. — Max Payne 2
Remember the first day of school whenever a new class-year began. All the teachers made students stand up, introduce themselves and tell everyone about their hobbies. To be honest I legit hated that part since the only possible answer, I had to the question was — “Video Gaming”. Since this was way back in time, before gaming giants like PUBG, CSGO, Apex Legends made gaming famous and mainstream…the teachers straight out used to ridicule me by saying that video gaming was not a hobby ( Lol…I’ll love to hear them say that again :P).
Still, being a nerd I loved PC video-games, they constituted the entirety of my leisure time as a kid (which also lead to me having shitty eyesight in the current day). I had a PC at my home from as long as I can remember, so I started playing games probably from as little as 1st grade ( Well..to be honest, that mostly used to constitute of me sitting next to my brother and watching him play…but ah well…that was fun).
I don’t play computer games now, mainly due to two reasons 1.) I use the Ubuntu operating system now which isn’t well suited for games 2.) I am more of a retro-styled gamer who loves single-player games, and as it seems, the current generation of players are hooked on to MMORPG games like WoW, DOTA, PUBG, CS GO which I honestly don’t like (though CS GO is pretty impressive, I played CS 1.6 a lot and Half-Life as a kid).
Despite all this, I thought it would be awesome to write about some of the retro games that I used to love to play as a kid, and which I would still prefer over PUBG/CS GO any day. All of the games I’ll talk about were released before 2002 ( Yeah I know…that’s pretty old and most of you would get cringed by their mediocre graphics…but hey…this is my blog..so fuck it :P). Now I am not a professional game reviewer, so this won’t be a very critical review, so take it with a grain of salt:
Oni (2001)
“What if a cyber brain could possibly generate its own ghost, and create a soul all by itself? And if it did, just what would be the importance of being human then?”
— Motoko Kusanagi ( From the mind-bending brainfuck of an anime Ghost in the Shell)
- Year: 2001
- Genre: Third-Person Shooter, beat ’em up, action, hand to hand combat
- Rating: 7.5/10 (IGN)
Overview:
Set in a dystopian world that is highly inspired by the cult classic cyberpunk anime like Ghost in the Shell and Akira, which is so polluted that little of it remains habitable. The government is totalitarian, telling the populace that what is actually dangerously toxic regions are wilderness preserves, and uses its police forces to suppress opposition. (Kind of reminds me of George Orwell’s 1984). The player character Konoko (who seems to be highly inspired from the Ghost in the Shell’s Motoko Kusanagi) learns her employers have been keeping secrets about her past. She turns against them as she embarks on a quest of self-discovery. The player learns more about her family and origins while battling both the TCTF and its greatest enemy; the equally monolithic criminal organization called the Syndicate.
Now the magic of the game is that it came out in 2001 (just one year after I was born Lol) but the cyberpunk science fiction theme of the games beats the shit out of most of the recent games. The game is an absolute treat to play, with futuristic elements way ahead of its times.
Gameplay:
While the game doesn’t boast of high-end graphics, the gameplay is just beautiful. Since the player can carry only one weapon at a time and ammunition is scarce, hand-to-hand combat is the most effective and conventional means of defeating enemies. The player can punch, kick, and throw enemies; progressing into later levels unlocks stronger moves and combos. The game makes you feel like a martial combat guru, having complex animations for each movement (which can sometimes be pretty brutal), the game also features many elements of parkour and typical avoiding of laser-beams (kind of like Prince of Persia)
There are ten different guns in Oni, including handguns, rifles, rocket launchers, and energy weapons. The concept behind some of the firearms was highly creative (like the one with the homing spikes or the one-shot one kill guns or the life-sucking biochemical weapon wisp kind of thing). Powerups such as “hyposprays”, which heal damage, and cloaking devices, which render the player invisible, can be found scattered throughout the levels or on corpses.
There are multiple classes of enemy, each with its style of unarmed combat. Each class is subdivided into tiers of increasing strength. Oni does not confine the player to fighting small groups of enemies in a small arena; each area is fully open to explore. The fourteen levels are of various sizes, some large enough to comprise an entire building (Bungie hired two architects to design the buildings)
Favourite Features:
- Highly complex plot
- The Dream Drive Level
- Flexible arm to arm combat and combining that with awesome guns
Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now (1998)
Everyone is a target!
— good old CARNAGE from the spiderman comics
- Year: 1998
- Genre: Racing, Vehicular Combat, Gore
- Rating: 7/10 (IGN)
Overview:
Now I am no psychopathic schizophreniac (well maybe, yet to be clinically tested for it) but sometimes anarchy and pure Carnage just feels right. Escaping from the “traditional” norms of sanity gives a sense of freedom that’s just wonderful, and that’s just what this game represents. It takes the standard racing format games like Need for Speed and just beats the hell out of it. Being a racing game, it has no storyline per se, but oh well that’s the point, it’s just Madness (btw Madness reminds me of Midtown Madness…check that out, it was excellent as well). So tune in to the personification of Madness viz Mad Damage and the badass of a car that is the Desert Eagle and wreak havoc!
Gameplay
Now the primary way to win in a typical race game is to complete a race, but what’s the fun in that? So in this game, there are three ways to finish most levels:
- Complete the track, passing through every checkpoint before time runs out — The standard approach in racing games, well arguably no-one plays the game by this standard, at least I never did.
- Waste all the opponents — So yeah, you have to use your car to pulverize opponents, ramming them into traffic poles, walls and whatnot, I can’t describe how fun it is beating the crap out of other vehicles, aiming at them at super-high speed with all types of superpowers infused in your vehicle
- Kill every pedestrian in the level — Well as good old Carnage said, in this game, “EVERYONE IS A TARGET”, so that includes these tiny little human pedestrians inside the game whose purpose of life is just to be either crushed by your car, electrocuted by your vehicle, burnt into minced meat like your car or a combination of these and guess what its fun :P
The time limits are pretty generous, and the player can kill pedestrians, crash into opponents or perform specific actions to gain extra time. It also featured deformable model removable parts on its cars, making for more realistic dents and crashes. The vehicles can be bent in half, leaving them with fewer wheels on the ground, and can even be sheared in half, causing retirement from the race if the damage is not repaired before the vehicle touches the ground.
Favourite Features:
- Instant Car Repair 😅
- Cool Powerups like Kangaroo Jump, to make your car jump, afterburner for turbo boost and the all favourite Opponent Repulisificator (which shoots springs from your car to the opponents bouncing them away :P)
- Theme Circus Levels
- HELIUM FILLED PEDESTRIANS!
Age of Mythology (2002)
Sugar and caffeine. My willpower crumbled
— Life Lessons from Percy Jackson
- Year: 2002
- Genre: Real-Time Strategy, Mythology
- Rating: 9.3/10 (IGN)
Overview:
Gaming isn’t the only thing I love. I love reading for fun, one of my favourite series is the Percy Jackson series, which deals with the adventures of a Greek Demigod son of the Sea God Poseidon called Percy named after the famous Greek hero Perseus, who was well…the Son of Zeus, not Poseidon (weird slip-off by the author Rick Riordan…anyway).
But that wasn’t the thing that got initially interested me in Greek Mythology. It was this gem of a game, a hugely underrated spinoff of the oh so popular Age of Empires Series (btw AOE3 and another similar game Rise of Nations and its spinoff Rise Of Legends are great as well) based on the exploits of an Atlantean (a member of the mythical greek city of Atlantis) war hero Arkantos as he hunts down the bad guy (Cyclops?) Gargarensis in his attempt to resurrect the biggest badass out there, the motherfucking Titan of Time big Daddy Kronos, which if succeeded would result in (or as the Norse like to call it Ragnarok).
Oh and it’s not only the Greek stuff in there, as it so happens, by some dumb coincidence, it also features the same mythologies as the Rick Riordan books namely:-
- Greek Gods (Percy Jackson & the Olympians)
- Titans (The Heroes of Olympus)
- Egyptian Mythology (The Kane Chronicles)
- Norse Mythology (Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard)
So fasten your seatbelts as you control a massive army of diverse mythological characters like half-bull half-human minotaurs, multi-headed hydras, fire breathing giants, the world-dragon Nidhogg, one-eyed Cyclops, Egyptian mummies and various famous Greek heroes like Odysseus, Achilles, Ajax, Chiron in this fantasy world.
Gameplay:
Typical of RTS games, it has a stage-wise evolution of the civilization. Consisting of 4 stages
- Archaic
- Classical
- Heroic
- Mythical
For advancing into each stage, you needed to build some specific buildings and collect some resources. At each stage you choose between two minor gods to worship, each having its advantage, including their myth units and god powers ( A god power is a one-shot superpower that you can use)
There are four resources food, wood, gold, favour. Food can be extracted from farms or by herding/hunting; wood is collected by cutting trees (yeah that sounds like captain obvious), gold is obtained from mines and also from trading between markets. Favour is received by worshipping at temples, creating monuments, killing people and stuff and is used to create mythical units.
The army consists of infantry, cavalry, archers, heroes and mythical units. Each having an advantage over one of the others and having a disadvantage from others. So you had to keep a balanced army to defeat your opponents.
The campaign storyline is incredible and full of twists, although the difficulty level is not that high, it still requires some patience to complete them.
Favourite Features:
- Titans :P
- God Powers ( one-shot powers you get from choosing a god, like Zeus’s thunderbolt for one-shotting any unit, earthquake to create well…an earthquake)
- PROSTAGMA!!
- Colossus, Hydra, Giants and Tons of other cool myth units
- All the detailed mythological history in the description of each unit
Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002)
The beginning of wisdom is the statement ‘I do not know.’ The person who cannot make that statement is one who will never learn anything. And I have prided myself on my ability to learn.”
— Thrall (the savage looking orc in the left, who is actually quite nice)
- Year: 2002
- Genre: Real-Time Strategy
- Rating: 9.3/10 (IGN)
Overview:
Well the Warcraft platform requires little introduction and honestly, I wasn’t going to cover such a popular game and wanted to focus on less known games, but this one holds a special place in my heart, and I couldn’t control myself to write about it. (As a matter of fact, I am watching someone play the game while writing this :P)
So, meet the game that gave rise to massive successes like DOTA, WoW, this game is a revolutionary masterpiece that made the genre of Real-Time Strategy popular and also is single-handedly responsible for popularizing the concept of Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG).
It tells the story of the Burning Legion’s (basically a huge, huge evil army) attempt to conquer the fictional world of Azeroth with the help of an army of the Undead, led by fallen paladin Arthas Menethil. It chronicles the combined efforts of the Human Alliance, Orcish Horde, and Night Elves to stop them before they can corrupt the World Tree.
The game features four campaigns, each focusing on a different faction (Human, Orc, Undead, Night Elf) namely:
- Human Campaign — The Scourge of Lordaeron
- Undead Campaign — Path of the Damned
- Orc Campaign — The Invasion of Kalimdor
- Night Elf Sentinel Campaign — Eternity’s End
Gameplay
Warcraft III, like other RTS games, has a resource-based system. Having three primary resources food, lumber and gold. It features four playable factions: The Human Alliance — a coalition of humans, dwarves, and high elves — and the Orcish Horde — composed of orcs, trolls, and minotaur-inspired Tauren — return from the previous games while the Undead Scourge and the Night Elves were added as two new factions. Each race has a unique set of units, structures, technologies, and base-building methodology.
Also, Warcraft III adds powerful new units called heroes. For each enemy unit killed, a hero will gain experience points, which allow the hero to level-up to a maximum level of 10. Progressing up a level increases the hero’s attributes and also allows the hero to gain new spell options (bringing role-playing video game elements to the series). Individual hero abilities can boost allied units. All heroes can equip items to increase skills, defence, and other skills. At level six, the hero can obtain an “ultimate” skill that is more powerful than the three other spells that the hero possesses. Heroes can also utilize the various natural resources found throughout the map, such as controllable non-player characters, and markets in which the hero can purchase usable items. Often, hero units become the deciding factor in determining a winner.
The game’s multiplayer mode introduced anonymous matchmaking, automatically pairing players for matches based on their skill level and game type preferences, preventing cheating and inflating their records artificially. The sole objective in multiplayer games is to destroy all the buildings of the opposition. In default melee matches, players can pick their heroes, and losing one will not end the game. To make the game proceed more quickly, by default the map is fully revealed but covered in the fog of war.
Players can also host custom games, using maps either created in the Warcraft III World Editor, or the default multiplayer scenarios. The map editor allows a variety of custom maps to be created, such as several tower defence and multiplayer online battle arena maps, the most notable of which was Defense of the Ancients aka DOTA (And that peeps is how it DOTA happened).
Favourite Features
- In-game Cinematic Cutscenes (It almost feels like a high-budget movie)
- Illidan Stormrage (One word — Badass)
- Thrall’s FOR DOOMHAMMER!!
Though I only covered these four games in this blog, there are many other awesome games that I loved playing, like:
- Metal Fatigue, Netstorm
- Black & White 1,2; Zoo Tycoon
- Total Overdose ( a mixup of PoP, GTA and Max Payne)
- Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 1,2; Star Wars Battlefront 1,2
- Halo Combat Evolved, PoP series
And many many more, it would be a pretty long list if I write them all down. Unfortunately, people today don’t remember these classic games, it’s still a treat to play them (whenever there are no compatibility issues).
So that’s all for this post. Hope you liked it and it made you relive some awesome old memories. Since I am just starting writing blogs, please let me know how I can improve my writing skills in the comments. Until then, So Long!
Sources
- Wikipedia
- Countless hours of playing these games :p
