It’s almost a tradition by this point, to take some preexisting game and give it the roguelike treatment. We’ve seen MetroidRL, CastlevaniaRL, MegamanRL, ZeldaRL and others. Those in this list were all made by Slashie, a prolific developer in this sphere.
Well, his most recent experiment in this mode is SpelunkyRL, taking concepts that Spelunkly itself borrowed from roguelikes and borrowing them right back. What the game gains is a strong emphasis on situations and using what’s at hand. You only have five health points, and they don’t heal naturally. Most enemies move only every other turn, but if you attack them they get a counter-attack. You have a gun with six bullets that does high damage, but it’s a good idea to save your shots for when they might be needed.
You can pick up pots, corpses and even stunned enemies, which don’t go into your inventory, but remain in hand and can be thrown at attackers. Instead of food, there’s a “DooM” counter to keep you moving. There are also altars for sacrificing enemies to Kali, which work in a NetHack/ADOM kind of style. And there’s even some atmospheric music and sound effects so you don’t have to smack bats and snakes in silence.
It is an interesting thing to play around with, and on subsequent games you can start with alternate character classes Rogue (extra health and bow) or Tourist (bad at fighting but has a camera and 2000-gold line of credit). It will be a reasonably entertaining use of your time, I’d say.
To give to some incentive to click through, some of the projects linked are:
A Spectrum emulator written in Rust, and another one in JavaScript
A port of Spectrum game The Great Escape to C and current platforms
Tools for working with archives of Spectrum cassette tape images, including to convert one to mp3 to facilitate transferring to a tape for play on a physical ZX Spectrum
A Visual Studio Code extension for working with Z80 code
And small program to convert image files to the peculiar limitations of the Spectrum’s graphics hardware, to give your portraits some of that loading screen flair.
That last one I tested out a bit, here’s some results. I discovered it’s best if you resize the images to around the Speccy’s 256×192 resolution before processing.
Shadow Warrior has come a long way since its original release in the 90’s, and then a reboot in the 2010’s. Violent, over-the-top, and crude, are some of the words you could describe the series. When studio Flying Wild Hog took over development, we saw games that attempted to mirror the FPS at the time. Shadow Warrior 2 felt like an extension of the looter shooter aspect of Borderlands and for me was an underrated hit. Now with Shadow Warrior 3 we have a great, albeit not that memorable third game in the trilogy.
Wang Chung
Our story finds the infamous loudmouth Lo Wang depressed after freeing a dragon at the end of the second game that has led to the apocalypse. Without any other option, he must team up with his nemesis Zilla to make one last play at saving the earth, and making as many references, “wang” jokes, and cursing as possible.
Right off the bat, there is good and bad news about Shadow Warrior 3. With this iteration, the developers clearly have been playing Doom Eternal and studied the idea of “push forward” combat. Wang is as agile as ever with the ability to dash, wall-run, and double jump around arenas. There is only one ammo type and whatever gun you are currently holding will get pickups. Shooting enemies will make them drop health, using your katana to kill them will make them drop ammo. You can also use your chi blast to send enemies into obstacles.
The idea of turning combat encounters into playgrounds of death has been made fully realized in Shadow Warrior 3. There are always explosive barrels ready to be shot at to cause area damage. Many areas feature environmental hazards like buzzsaws that can be turned on to deliver quick kills to even the strongest of enemies.
Like Doom, you can perform glory kills on enemies to instantly kill them, but there are two differences. Your ability to finish off enemies must be charged up by collecting orbs off other enemies, and there are three tiers of charge that correspond to the different enemy types. When you finish off a larger enemy, you get the same cutscene each time and get a limited-time exclusive weapon that you can use to turn the tide of combat. The gunplay in Shadow Warrior 3 is on point, with every weapon sounding meaty, delivering all manner of death, and can be upgraded using upgrade orbs found or unlocked by completing challenges.
This all sounds great and would put Shadow Warrior 3 on equal footing with some of the better FPS released in the last few years, however, there are a few things missing that could be a dealbreaker.
Sliced Away Systems
One of the major aspects that made Shadow Warrior 2 so different was the integration of looter-shooter aspects from games like Borderlands, and it turned the game into an almost FPS Action RPG. I found it compelling, not without some missteps in terms of itemization, but something I wanted to see the developers iterate on. Unfortunately, all those systems have been removed from Shadow Warrior 3 and the game feels more in line with the first game.
Gone are the variety of weapons, larger and more open areas, multiple upgrade routes, and quests. Instead, you’re going to get a linear 5–8-hour long game. Don’t get me wrong, the gunplay here is fantastic with a lot of entertaining arenas, but it comes at the removal of so many systems. If you didn’t like Shadow Warrior 2 for being filled with too many elements, then you’re going to enjoy this one.
One thing that is clearly different is the writing and may leave old and new fans a bit polarized.
#writing
One of the common criticisms of Shadow Warrior as a brand has been its depiction of Asian stereotypes and the low-brow humor, with of course the main character being named “Lo Wang.” For the third game, the developers are trying to square that circle by trying to keep the humor and remove the stereotypes. To wit, they have replaced the voice actor of the previous games with Mike Moh and the writing has been cleaned up of some of the lower hanging jokes from previous games.
Mike does a good job, but the updated writing I feel fails him. Instead of finding new jokes, the game really leans into toilet humor and dated references a lot more than I remember from Shadow Warrior 2. The quips Lo makes during combat get recycled fast. The game does have its heartwarming moments, but if you are offended/annoyed by toilet humor, you’re not going to like this game. Part of the problem is that there are fewer characters for Lo to interact with this time around, so the idea of having a “Dante-like” protagonist is lost when most of Lo’s conversations are with himself.
Shadow Dancing
Shadow Warrior 3 is an FPS that works with great gunplay, but I feel that this is a game that doesn’t do enough to stand out from the crowd and may be largely forgotten by the end of the year. You’re not going to be playing this one for a sprawling multi-hour epic, but a bite-sized thrill ride of guns, gore, profanity, and slashing. While not as ambitious as 2, Shadow Warrior 3 is a great weekend game for those looking to get their Doom Eternal fix with a more vocal hero.
This was played with a press key provided by the developer.
U Can Beat Video Games (their YouTube channel) has only been around for a bit over a year, but they’ve already covered a lot of challenging games. It serves as a complete video playthrough, often revealing all the game’s secrets, and has remarkably restrained and helpful audio commentary by YouTube standards.
UCBVG videos cover the entire game, and can be long. The most recent, the covering A Link to the Past with a second part, is nearly two hours but it uses YouTube’s timeline annotations to mark any potential trouble spots you may have. Even if you’ve mastered the games he covers, I find it relaxing to watch anyway to refresh my memory on these decades-old amusements.
For this podcast interview, I spoke with Andrea, Matteo, and Luca who are the team behind the recently released adventure game Terrorbane. We spoke about creating an unconventional adventure game, what gamedev is like in Italy and much more.
It’s Sunday again, so it’s time to let down our various hair and relax! So now, a little tidbit from the PS1 era.
Back in the days of the Nintendo 64, two competing versions of Tetris were being developed, one for the N64, the other for the Sony PlayStation*. Even through (or, perhaps, because) they were published by different companies, they were given confusingly similar names. PlayStation got “The Next Tetris,” while the N64 got “The New Tetris.” I still have to check to make sure I haven’t confused them.
The internet was a much younger place then, and a lot of Nintendo fandom at the time was centered on IGN’s N64 site. So, the things their writers and editors liked tended to get outside representation, resulting in some weird early memes like “Eye Tat boy.” (“A GoldenEye is an eye tat is golden.”) Wow, I’m really dating myself with that one.
Well, one of the things that IGN liked was the musical work of Neil Voss, who composed the excellent soundtrack to early N64 puzzler Tetrisphere, from H2O Entertainment. The success of Tetrisphere got H2O the license to make The New Tetris, and Neil Voss the job of composing its excellent music. IGN did a two-part interview with Voss way back then: Part 1 – Part 2.
The above title is a particularly memorable tune from The New Tetris. Me and my roommates back in college would play TNT for hours (generally it’s a good rendition), and every time the Africa theme came up, we couldn’t resist, when the music reached the refrain, singing along with our best English approximation: “Move to Canada!” No actual moving to Canada was intended or implied, it’s just what it sounded like, to us.
* To this day, I rebel every time I’m asked to capitalize the S in PlayStation. I also twitch every time I’m asked to write Xbox instead of X-box. I have an English degree, dammit.
With all the indie games I get to play, sometimes the easiest ways to talk about them are in video form. And that’s what I did for these reviews of The Last Cube and Refactor.
The third and last of the chronological platform cataloguing efforts is the longest-lived and most complete, Dr. Sparkle’s wonderful Chrontendo, going through the entire library of the Famicom and NES, along with sister projects Chronsega (Mark III/Master System and Mega Drive/Genesis) and Chronturbo (PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16).
Each of the projects I’ve presented have had a different style. Atari Archive does one game at a time, devoting from 8 to 20 minutes to it. Video Works tends to cover two or three times per video. Well, the various Chrons go for the omnibus approach: each entry shows from a dozen to 20 or more games. It also emphasizes gameplay footage, and also sometimes some side bits amidst the many games.
Chrontendo has been going since a while before 2010, and so there is a whole lot of material to catch up on. It also has the slowest rate of updating, with sometimes whole years between episodes. But each episode is its own little wonder, containing a solid mass of retro gaming information, including many games you probably won’t ever hear about anywhere else.
I do a lot when it comes to covering and supporting the indie dev scene, and one feature that I’m bringing back are my store page review shows or “indie inquiries.” For each episode, I, and my friend Rob, review a steam store page on its thumbnail, images, trailer, about this game, and tags, to give it a grade on how well it markets the game. If you would like me to cover your game in the future, please reach out to me. For this one, I reviewed the page for a friend of mine who is working on the game Buluk: Mayan Warfare
What I appreciate most about Jeremy’s many series is how they’re informative without being dry (he knows his stuff!), interesting without being pedantic, and lively and entertaining without being obnoxious, obnoxiousness being a sin that I charge against many many gaming YouTube channels. If your videos whisk cut-out elements around the screen, their passage marked by swooping sound effects, then you are not going to get a link from me if I can in any way help it, so states the doom of rodneylives, and of Set Side B too if I have something to say.
And Marc Normandin for Paste Magazine has an article suggesting 10 retro games that should be revived, and you know what, it’s actually a pretty great list! It’s got For The Frog The Bell Tolls, Dragon Slayer, and Terranigma on it, so it’s definitely got JRPG cred!