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Star Trek? Everybody loves Star Trek, right?
This is Kurn, son of Mogh and captain of the Hegh'ta. It's his doody to change me into a warrior worthy to be a member of the Honor Guard, the rootinest, tootinest fighting force on all of Qo'noS.
He's prepared a training simulation where I have to destroy an entire city single handedly by destroying a cooling system. He saw a movie once where some other guy managed to do it so it should be a simple enough task for a complete rookie like me.
This is a dark cave. It's full of little crawling monsters that look like the facehuggers from Alien, but I can't see the buggers. It's all I can do run around the outside edge of the room blasting randomly with the disruptor pistol. Luckily it recharges, but not very fast.
Which way am I supposed to go anyway?
This way? I guess so.
The disruptor fires very big, very slow-moving balls of glowy green pain. Slows the game down like hell, but their glow helps me find my way out the cave.
Klingons! ATTAAAAACK!
I run toward them with my dagger, because I'm nuts. Then the screen starts shaking.
The bridge connecting the central column to the outer edge of the cave falls into a firey pit of lava. As do the poor Klingons who were standing on it at the time. Oh well.
Heading out of the cave, I'm waylaid by two warriors emerging from the shadows.
The disruptor's alternate fire vaporises them both... slowly.
"ONE LESS CORPSE TO TRIP OVER."
Everybody kept dropping these knives, so I decided to see how useful the alt-fire throwing mode was. The answer: not very. Takes a couple of knives to kill anyone and by then they've either ran at you with a knife or shot you with a gun.
"IS THAT MY D'K TAHG IN YOUR THROAT."
Which way to go? I wish I had a map. Why don't I have a map?
I head toward the passage at the far end.
Which caves in with a soft 'flop', revealing INFINITE SPIDERS. Arrrgh!
Snipers!
There's three guys on the same platform as me and two guys on the top level. I decide to hide behind a box to avoid the snipers and knife anybody who decides to check out what's behind the boxes.
"NEKO WAS DISEMBOWLED BY DHGRUNT"
:(
Let's try that again.
Don't try to touch the lava to see if it's sufficiently hot.
One more go.
What?
Oh right, it's not real. I guess killing everybody in the cave is a win for this part of the mission.
I wonder where I'll end up next?
Of course, the city. A kinda dull looking city if you ask me.
Mission objective: Kill everybody in the city. Check.
Are Klingons are made of bubblegum? Sure looks like it.
Is there anything else I should be doing? I activated a switch for the sewers, but I have no idea where that is.
Ah. It was shrouded in a shroud of darkness. The comforting glow of my death rod lights the way.
I'm lost again. Well, that's not exactly true. My sense of location is absolutely perfect, but I don't know which of the possible ways I haven't yet tried lead to this cooling system I'm supposed to be destroying.
Let's see what's beneath the surface of this green sludge.
I got sucked into a fan and died. THE END.
Let's try staying above the level of the sludge. Onwards!
I got sucked into a fan on the left hand wall and died. THE END.
Holding down the backpedal key with all my might...!
Either these save games are stacking up or somebody beat me to this fan.
HUH. What do you know, you can just shoot the fans and destroy them. I trying to shoot the EVIL SPIDERS.
I have just snuck up behind a Klingon warrior taking a whizz. I feel accomplished.
These guys sure do like the colour red.
This building I've infiltrated is a tiny place that's very difficult to navigate without tripping up on crates. There's a nasty Klingon hiding in every corner and behind every doorway and it takes a couple of hits to kill them with anything, so it's not easy to come away from combat without taking any damage. I'm really running low on health. Fortunately, this is the last guy so I've completed the mission. Hooray!
"I LOVE THAT SMELL."
Pretty glad my guy didn't say that when I was sneaking around before.
This looks like an ice place to stop playing!
A bomb's gone off somewhere and the Klingon High Council is something something. The leader of the Honor Guard has chosen me to kill those responsible. I've been chosen because as an inductee of the Honor Guard, MY LOYALTIES ARE WITHOUT QUESTION. They could have at least given me a new gun or perhaps healed me, I'm still at 2% health from the last mission! And that mission didn't really happen! Blah. No more game.
It's functional enough, but it's really boring. Even if you were interested, there's no computer on the planet that's gonna run this game right. I enlisted the help of many of the world's most talented scientists and several entirely different computers to get it to run for the purposes of this adventure and even then it went screwy whenever I fired a weapon.
Don't try running this game, it will take the rest of your life to get it working and it's not worth it.
You've obviously enlisted the help of all the wrong people. I got the game running very nicely and smoothly on Windows 7 on a monder computer (though I admit it did take some tweaking to iron out all the problems). It's got some very, very nice level design, though I think you stopped just before this becomes obvious. It's not the best of games (I prefer the original Unreal) but I'd still give it a "not crap" award. Though even back in the days, on a Pentium II and a Voodoo 2 card, it was pretty hard to get it running well.
ReplyDeleteThe game not getting good before the reviewer gives up doesn't cut it on SAiG, I'm afraid. The ice level might (MIGHT) have been nice to look at, but I was sick of the sight of all that red and brown and those terrible guns that made the game freeze for a second whenever I fired them that I couldn't bring myself to play any longer.
ReplyDeleteI did get the game working on my modern-ish computer in time more or less, but the cutscenes didn't work so I didn't feel like I was getting the proper experience. (The advice given to me by the scientists to fix the videos was to install some specific codecs. They warned me that said codecs were 'dangerous', so I decided to pass.)
The "not crap" award is something only Ray can give out. I suppose I -could- give out a "not crap" award if I really thought the game wasn't crap, but in this case KHG is crap, so I can't.