It’s a first person shooter from a venerable studio in the genre, Raven Software.
Put out during their “golden age”, before Wolfenstein and Singularity flopped and uncle Bobby sent them to work in the Call of Duty mines.
Really cool selection of sci-fi guns, some of them pretty unique.
Campaign is essentially a prototype for Quake 4. It was built by the same internal team at Raven.
It has a more interesting story than Quake 4.
It’s an early example of a game that lets you choose your sex. NPC dialog changes to reflect this.
The whole cast of Star Trek: Voyager lends their voice talent to the game, including Jeri Ryan.
It also has a sequel, made by another studio. Elite Force II isn’t quite as good, but it is still worth playing if you like the original. It loses the female protagonist option, likely because it was 2003 and the story had a love triangle. It’s a visual powerhouse though, really pushing the limits of the Quake III engine far beyond what many people likely thought possible.
Ooh I forgot about this. Elite force is one of the few games that I’ve actually finished. I thought the graphics were gorgeous for the time with lots of believable alien worlds. The characters are engaging and the missions never felt repetitive.
Honestly, by now I’ve come to hate games where you can’t figure out how to play them from the game itself. It seems like nowadays you can’t play without a whole community figuring out what’s currently the meta way to play.
I played Valhiem early in its launch for like two weeks on my own server. Once I finally got my friends to join they were dismayed as to why I had dozens of broken copper pick axes in storage boxes.
I had no idea you could repair things and kept mining barely more copper than was needed to make a copper pickaxe.
I changed my control scheme in rocket league like 1k hours in. Really needed the ability to boost while jumping among other things. It was a totally brutal transition, but I’m glad I did it.
There’s a few classic Star Wars games that don’t get talked about as much that are great. Galactic battlegrounds is an age of empire 2 clone with Star Wars skins and stories. I played the crap out of this one over the years. Fun campaigns and tons of fan made missions out 5err too. But a ton of the old Star Wars games are fun if you are a fan. Freelancer is a PC game that I don’t think you can even buy any more which was a fun space sim from back in the day and holds up somewhat. Star Trek also had a bunch of interesting games in the early aughts worth checking out if you’re so inclined.
I recently watched a Twitch streamer play through all of the Fatal Frame games. It was a wild adventure. I heard that there’s a new Fatal Frame game coming out sometime soon and I’m stoked to check it out.
Oh wow, kudos for sitting down and writing this piece out. Damn, that’s a long post.
But seriously though, all I could think of when I “skimmed” through the text was that you got too obsessed with the building blocks of a story and realised that you are critical towards that they’re all the same shape and/or made by the same material. So you stand very close to the wall and squint instead of backing up a few paces to get a good view of the actual construct in it’s entirety.
Relax and just be happy that we have the luxury in this day and age to appreciate gaming as a medium. Or don’t, whatever makes you happy :)
I really like this point. If you look closely most churches are built with bricks and wood, but still create beautiful structures. As I was reading through the list I was thinking a lot about games that did points good and badly. Tropes are tropes for a reason (check out OSP trope talks if you want break down on how specific tropes can be used well or poorly)
I’mma do it, I’mma be the one to bring up Undertale this time (estimated 2 hours, worth a few replays), there’s also little nightmares (2-4 hours depending on platforming skills) which is a spooky little game, but not too spooky if you ever play in front of the kids.
Happy to see my boy Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura in there.
If you are not averse to 90’s isometric PC RPGs, it is a breathtaking journey through fantasy industrial revolution. Think mages, flintlocks, steram engines, and wonderfully elaborate facial hair. But also, think side-quests so good, they’d be the main attraction in some lesser games. Think evocative world-building scored by entirely by melancholic cellos, violins and violas. Think quests without any other markers than the clues indicated in your journal.
It’s not balanced by any means, you’ll need community patches for it to not die on you the second it launches, combat is good neither in the turn by turn or real time mode, and in the last stretch, the game looses quite a bit of its momentum. It takes quite a game to make all this unimportant in the face of everything else it does perfectly.
I don’t need complete agency and freedom to enjoy a game. I don’t play games like Red Dead Redemption and The Last of Us expecting to create my own story; I play them to be immersed in a beautifully written and preformed narrative.
My answer to that question is always “King of Dragon Pass”, a narrative/management game that is unlike anything else out there. It got a spiritual successor with “Six Ages”.
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