What game are you playing?

[Roguey]

Dark Forces is doable enough with its lives system. The worst part of it is the platforming, I took advantage of quicksaving there because losing lives to first person jumping is intolerable.

[rusty_shackleford]

and it makes the game incredibly easy

How so?

[Oyster Sauce]

and it makes the game incredibly easy

How so?

Functional controls

[logincrash]

Have you played Outcast lately? I had to drop the difficulty down to easy and was still getting my *** kicked in a lot of areas. I'm playing Academy on hard now without issue.

Yes and it was easier than Academy by far.

I played Jedi Academy first and then Jedi Outcast when I first got into Star Wars vidya in 2004 or 2005. I finished Academy on all the difficulties, but Outcast was a hardcore meatgrinder in comparison. Even when you get a lightsaber, the game doesn't let up. And, yeah, the platforming is brutal.

[Vergil]

Have you played Outcast lately? I had to drop the difficulty down to easy and was still getting my *** kicked in a lot of areas. I'm playing Academy on hard now without issue.

Yes and it was easier than Academy by far.

I played Jedi Academy first and then Jedi Outcast when I first got into Star Wars vidya in 2004 or 2005. I finished Academy on all the difficulties, but Outcast was a hardcore meatgrinder in comparison. Even when you get a lightsaber, the game doesn't let up. And, yeah, the platforming is brutal.

Feel like I must have played an entirely different game to you guys.

[rusty_shackleford]

Yes and it was easier than Academy by far.

I played Jedi Academy first and then Jedi Outcast when I first got into Star Wars vidya in 2004 or 2005. I finished Academy on all the difficulties, but Outcast was a hardcore meatgrinder in comparison. Even when you get a lightsaber, the game doesn't let up. And, yeah, the platforming is brutal.

Feel like I must have played an entirely different game to you guys.

Did you play the console version?

[Vergil]

I played Jedi Academy first and then Jedi Outcast when I first got into Star Wars vidya in 2004 or 2005. I finished Academy on all the difficulties, but Outcast was a hardcore meatgrinder in comparison. Even when you get a lightsaber, the game doesn't let up. And, yeah, the platforming is brutal.

Feel like I must have played an entirely different game to you guys.

Did you play the console version?

As a kid. I played PC last time though.

[WhiteShark]

The RPGHQ Steam curator received a key for this a couple weeks ago, which @rusty_shackleford passed along to me:



I fired it up today to see if it would defy my low expectations, thinking I might even write a review if it hooked me. Well... it certainly defied my expectations!

► Mini-review

On the plus side, the cast is almost entirely white, and the portraits look nice:

That's the majority of the plus side. The negatives began simultaneously with the opening text:

Meanwhile, the voice actress said, "Leylines. These mystical and omnipresent energies connect everything in the universe."

I was immediately met with a jarring sentence fragment and a narration that didn't match. I assumed the voice actress was equally confused and was just trying to make the best of a bad script, so I forgave her that. What I couldn't forgive was her uptalking. Following the opening text, there was a brief scene with a man in the desert―the purple-haired man from the image above―being confronted by some sort of feminine monster or demon:

The woman's sprite is also clearly a modification of a stock RPG Maker sprite and not custom like the man's, which would be fine, for it looks better than the custom ones, but it is inconsistent.

Do you see any questions in that dialogue? I don't. That didn't stop the voice actress―the same voice actress, for I'm pretty sure she voiced every female character I encountered―from ending the first line with a rising intonation. I was also forced to reconsider my magnanimity toward her earlier going off script, for she did it again, this time saying, "Oh well," instead of, "Very well."

Ok, ok. It was off to a very bad start, but maybe the mechanics would save it. Tutorial fight!

I'll explain why this is a video in a minute.

Oh man, where to begin. First, the game hitched noticeably when entering combat mode, which confirmed my worst fear: the game is made in RPG Maker MV, which has inexplicably terrible performance. In fact, the game hitched badly on every screen transition, combat animation, and sometimes even when just walking around. Turning on "Performance Mode" didn't help, nor did turning off glow and blur, though the latter did make the sprites a bit crisper. Perhaps the blur was intended to hide how bad some of them look.

Next, I got my first look at a PC sprite in profile, and I wished I hadn't. That sprite could pass for a woman; it didn't retain any of the sharp features of the nice looking portrait. His wasn't the worst, though. Soon I would have to endure this abomination:

Can we just go back to Wizardry-style first-person view?

Now for the reason I uploaded a video up above instead of a still image: the UI. Note how the resource bars have a continuous "flowing" animation. That doesn't signify anything special; they always do that. I found it so visually distracting that it was hard to gauge my resources at a glance. On the other hand, the turn orders bars at the top are appallingly plain. They look like placeholders the dev forgot to replace. Unfortunately, even some of the elements that were clearly finished looked terrible:

Is that an eyeball? Balloons? Bubbles?

Can anybody guess what sort of damage that is? I could only infer from the attack name that it was supposed to be earth, but, even with that knowledge, I can't really make sense of it.

Ok, enough artfaggotry. Gameplay is what counts, right? This game's combat gimmick is "combination inputs":

Normally, you would also have abilities corresponding to → and ↓.

Outside of certain magics, attacking an enemy is always done the same way: you open the combination screen, then input a series of moves. From that description, one might imagine that it's timed or otherwise action-y, but it's not. Certain sequences of moves, unique to each character, result in a "finisher", which has a greater effect than the sum of its parts. Each character's list of finishers can be checked at any time during combat, so they don't have to be discovered. I don't know if there's any reason but lack of resources to do a series of moves that doesn't result in a finisher. Finishers seemed quite strong, so it's hard to imagine why one would do something else if he could do a finisher. Maybe it's actually deep system with a lot of nuance! I doubt I'll ever find out.

Victory! Is... is he air guitaring?

The scene with the purple-haired man concluded, the game puts me in control of this red-haired woman, Jaskya. I am immediately reminded that the writer must be ESL:

I "have" fallen asleep? Is she still asleep?

You can "**** someone off", but it feels very unnatural to say that someone will "be ****** off" instead of just "be ******". Maybe that's overly picky, but once my ESLdar goes off, I become sensitive to anything that sounds even a little unusual. These are subtler examples, but I just wanted to make clear that the writer's poor grasp of English is painfully evident in the majority of the script, whether in smaller mistakes like the above, not knowing what a possessive apostrophe is, randomly forgetting to use contractions, or in grammatical mistakes and failing to write complete sentences.

The opening town has several chests lying around in plain sight. I guess that's what people who don't actually play JRPGs imagine they are like.

Well, the gameplay hadn't hooked me yet, but maybe the story would salvage it despite the technically terrible writing. Jaskya rushes back to town to try to make it to work on time, but she is accosted by a man in armor before she can enter the inn. He says that there is someone who "would really like to meet her"; when Jaskya says she's not interested, he threatens to hurt the "poor people of this town", to which she responds:

Does this town not have guards? Wait, is this even a town? I only remember there being four buildings...

I could hear my suspension of disbelief snap. One guy in armor makes some vague threat in the middle of town―no actual hostages or anything!―and she folds? Wait, this isn't one of those games, is it? Checking the Steam page again... nope, I guess the writing is just inexcusably bad. Alright, continuing. Jaskya acquiesces to his demand for no discernible reason. But wait, what was his demand? All he said was that "someone" wants to meet her. The guy starts following Jaskya, but no indication is given of where to go. Having checked all four buildings in town to no avail, the only thing left was to turn around and leave town, which turned out to be the correct answer.

Did he really lie? I mean, he is someone, and he does want to meet her. That's all he said in the first place.

More dialogue. It turns out Jaskya has suppressed magical powers, which she instinctively uses to defend herself when armor guy, Dolan, threatens to kill her. It turns out that the whole thing was a ruse to draw out Jaskya's magic.

Bring you in a crisis situation...

She's then recruited by Dolan and this woman, Soraya, to go do some errand, and the three set off.

Now here's something I genuinely like. That purple orb is an encounter. All encounters are visible on the map. Typical RPG Maker stuff. However, what sets this game apart is that movement is actually turn-based. Like monsters in a roguelike, encounter orbs only move on the map when the player does. Thus, the player has some control over which encounters to fight and which to avoid, but he can't just run past everything. Truly, every RPG is improved by being more like a roguelike.

Anyway, accidentally wandering into the orb, I got my first encounter with monsters since the tutorial and with Soraya's battle yells:

The audio is very desynced for some reason, but I don't feel like doing another take.

Her yell is jarring enough as it is, but almost as bad is the whiplash when she goes from repeating that strained battlecry to coolly tossing off a one-liner at the end of her combo.

Anyway, that's as far as I got. I can't submit this as a review because I didn't finish the game, but I had already started taking notes, so I wanted to put them somewhere. If anyone take the time to read this, I hope you get more enjoyment out of it than I did playing the game!

[Oyster Sauce]

Finished Dark Forces 2. Solid , perhaps higher if this is a genre you favor. Good level design(except for one level), tight controls, decent difficulty, OpenJKDF2 sourceport ran fine on lunix with only one bug.
Won't be playing the expansion, partly due to the sourceport not fully supporting it, partly because I want to move on.

Oh God, why is it so wobbly?

[rusty_shackleford]

Finished Dark Forces 2. Solid , perhaps higher if this is a genre you favor. Good level design(except for one level), tight controls, decent difficulty, OpenJKDF2 sourceport ran fine on lunix with only one bug.
Won't be playing the expansion, partly due to the sourceport not fully supporting it, partly because I want to move on.

Oh God, why is it so wobbly?

Didn't have this issue, but I think you can disable it somewhere in the options.

[rusty_shackleford]

dork forces was the first doom-like game I've ever beaten

[Oyster Sauce]

Finished Dark Forces 2. Solid , perhaps higher if this is a genre you favor. Good level design(except for one level), tight controls, decent difficulty, OpenJKDF2 sourceport ran fine on lunix with only one bug.
Won't be playing the expansion, partly due to the sourceport not fully supporting it, partly because I want to move on.

Oh God, why is it so wobbly?

Didn't have this issue, but I think you can disable it somewhere in the options.

This is the worst feeling first person shooter I've ever played

[Roguey]

This is the worst feeling first person shooter I've ever played

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Star_ ... e_head_bob

Oh wait wrong game, well try something in https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Star_ ... _Forces_II

But as I recall the Jedi Knight/Quake II era of 3D games had wobbly textures.

[Oyster Sauce]

This is the worst feeling first person shooter I've ever played

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Star_ ... e_head_bob

Thanks but that's the wrong game

[rusty_shackleford]

This is the worst feeling first person shooter I've ever played

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Star_ ... e_head_bob

Thanks but that's the wrong game

Are you playing the regular game?
if so, high FPS will make the waggle code go crazy, it's fixed in openjkdf2

[Yankee Zulu]

I played Enlisted for a few hours. Its not bad but I dont really get the squad thing which supposedly differentiates it from Battlefield. Squaddies act like typical AI dummies, get under fire and killed. The only real use is a few instant respawns. Otherwise its a f2p Battlefield which is not gay. No women at least. Not yet. P2w? I dunno, havent played it long enough to judge.

[Roguey]

Finished Pop'n TwinBee. Cute vertical shoot 'em up. It's annoying how characters are frequently moving in the background that distract from all that's happening in the foreground, but I'm sure that's the intent. The boss in the penultimate level was an aggravating bullet hell, but the reward for beating it is was a much easier victory lap level and final boss that I appreciated.

[rusty_shackleford]

Taspir level in Jedi Academy was really bad, it was just 20-30 minutes of the same exact fight over and over while going up. Probably the worst level in the game(so far, anyways.)

[madbringer]

I'm trying to beat this on Nightmare without dying and I'm slowly losing my mind.

[Tweed]

I'm trying to beat this on Nightmare without dying and I'm slowly losing my mind.

Psycho. Bad enough on UV.

[Roderick]

Might finish Red Dead next.

[Breathe]

Might finish Red Dead next.

I finished this one about 3 years ago. Loved it. Some annoying quests but overall a satisfying experience.

[rusty_shackleford]

Jedi Academy:

Secrets are meaningless and contain nothing useful. No reason to go looking for them at all.
Level design is far too linear.
Gets very repetitive.


The series peaked with Dark Forces 2 in terms of actual design for everything but (melee) combat.

[madbringer]

I'm trying to beat this on Nightmare without dying and I'm slowly losing my mind.

Psycho. Bad enough on UV.

I'm stuck on the platform where a fleet of Pain Elementals and Cacos spawn. It can be done, but Jesus f. Christ, it requires so much RNG luck.

[ERYFKRAD]

Bannerlord dudes
Everytime I rebelsquat a city and decide to start a kingdom another place rebels and I'm rushing over to take advantage of the free real estate.

[Roguey]

Finished Signalis.

I liked solving the puzzles and figuring out how to best use my resources to get through the levels. Didn't like the bosses at all, worse than Silent Hill bosses, especially the last one which is aggravating on multiple levels (ammo/inventory restrictions and having to dodge projectiles while waiting for an opportunity to actually hit the boss, losing health ******* up your vision). Didn't really care for the opaque story either. Yeah yeah, East Germany's bad, tragic lesbians, Lovecraft, gratuitous Ghost in the Shell reference. German game all right.

[WhiteShark]

Didn't like the bosses at all, worse than Silent Hill bosses, especially the last one which is aggravating on multiple levels (ammo/inventory restrictions and having to dodge projectiles while waiting for an opportunity to actually hit the boss, losing health ******* up your vision).

You know, every time you write something like this, it makes me more interested in a game than when you praise it.

[wndrbr]

Signalis is a fairly easy game, but the final boss does feel rather over the top. I believe it's the only fight in the game in which i had to 'cheat death'.

[rusty_shackleford]

Finished Signalis.

I liked solving the puzzles and figuring out how to best use my resources to get through the levels. Didn't like the bosses at all, worse than Silent Hill bosses, especially the last one which is aggravating on multiple levels (ammo/inventory restrictions and having to dodge projectiles while waiting for an opportunity to actually hit the boss, losing health ******* up your vision). Didn't really care for the opaque story either. Yeah yeah, East Germany's bad, tragic lesbians, Lovecraft, gratuitous Ghost in the Shell reference. German game all right.

Woke game

[Roguey]

Signalis is a fairly easy game, but the final boss does feel rather over the top. I believe it's the only fight in the game in which i had to 'cheat death'.

The confident wunderbar versus the anxious Roguey.

Finished Signalis.

I liked solving the puzzles and figuring out how to best use my resources to get through the levels. Didn't like the bosses at all, worse than Silent Hill bosses, especially the last one which is aggravating on multiple levels (ammo/inventory restrictions and having to dodge projectiles while waiting for an opportunity to actually hit the boss, losing health ******* up your vision). Didn't really care for the opaque story either. Yeah yeah, East Germany's bad, tragic lesbians, Lovecraft, gratuitous Ghost in the Shell reference. German game all right.

Woke game

It was made by two Germoids, a they/them man and a woman(?), yes.