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This is Malachi. He's an angel! He smites things for a living.
In case the intro didn't make the situation clear, there's a few more screens of text when you start a new game. The Fallen have taken control of mankind's first colony ship and are stuffing it full of innocents. You have to stop them because that's bad.
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Maybe it's so dank because this is the cosmic toilet connecting Heaven to Chaos. To get to Earth from Heaven, you've gotta go through here. Malachi throws himself down with gusto.
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The walls are pulsing in and out. There's moans and screams coming from all directions. It's really, really annoying.
"What in God's name?"
Not even Malachi knows what's going on here.
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In all this combat, I keep getting turned around. Chaos is comprised of many of these identical looking chambers connected together by squishy corridors. You can kind of tell the rooms apart by the different kinds of moaning you can hear, but by this point I'd turned the sound down. There's quite a few dead ends and other fascinating ways to get killed such as acid pools and ceiling spikes.
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On the other side of the chasm was an image of Lilith. I'd have taken a screenshot, but she's a dark red transparent ghost. You can imagine how that shot didn't come out.
"Cross the portal, descend to Creation, muck about like a human. YOU'RE VERY LATE! HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAH!"
Well I'm sorry if I'm late. You see, I GOT LOST.
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Argh. I made the mistake of looking away from the screen for a moment. Now the game is steady, but real life is pulsing. Take regular breaks while playing games, kids.
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Malachi spins up the Stargate with a wave of his magic hands and shoots off towards Earth.
Incidentally, Malachi's wings were available as a 'Flight' spell, but all it did was make me jump a little higher. Rubbish.
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With wild arcs of lightning and a whirlwind of sparks,
Now which direction is the pub?
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Excuse me gentlemen, can you direct me to the public house?
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I didn't know! Thanks for the info!
Hey, those are real-time shadows! Nifty stuff you've got there! Doesn't really make sense if you're standing next to a building like that, but it works regardless.
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Oh dear. Bodies.
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When I started the level, I was greeted with the caption: "Attacking is not always the best solution." Well nuts to that! This is an emergency! Unleash the lightning fingers!
"Wait, I'd better restrain myself."
Malachi's refusing to attack! Damn it, Malachi! Lightning fingers NOW!
"I've got better things to do with my time."
Like bloody what? Some angel you are! Didn't you see the bodies before?
"I'd better restrain myself."
Okay, I'm just going to hold the button down until you stop complaining and make with the unleashing!
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That's not lightning fingers! That's... I've disintegrated the lot of them!
That's... not... good. Okay, reload. I don't think I was penalised in any way by killing the innocent (WHAT?), but this still isn't good enough. Let's try this again.
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According to Wikipedia, 'Pentecost is a prominent feast in the Christian liturgical year commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples of Christ after the Resurrection of Jesus.'. In other words, I force-fed them Jesus until they exploded.
Uncharged, it's a slow moving BFG-like blue ball that knocks people over and causes blood to spill everywhere.
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Not exactly the precision tool I need in this desperate situation. I'm going to reload once more and see if I can rescue the poor man.
Every time I load, I have to sit through Malachi's complaining about restraining himself. Even if I've sat through it, fired off some Pentecosts and quicksaved, he starts all over again. A lesser man would give up and leave the bugger to his fate. Not me.
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He doesn't respond. He's still alive, but he's got nothing to say. I guess I didn't have to save him after all. Oh well.
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This isn't the pub. Am I even going in the right direction?
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As soon as I pop out the door, these guys get messily executed in the middle of the street. Pentecost takes time to charge up and travel to the target, so there's nothing I can do. Malachi doesn't have anything to say.
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Malachi's very astute, but he still wants to restrain himself. The guards don't mind if I watch for a bit. I thought they might get a bit upset, but they're too professional for that.
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This might be a problem. I don't have a gun, I don't know any exorcists and I don't see any vent covers or windows around here. Have I somehow broken the main game sequence and skipped forward a couple of levels? If that's the case, I should have bumped into some tough enemies by now.
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More vents and crazy corridors and I'm back in the city proper. This can't be how folks get around normally. This part of the city looks very familiar. I really hope I haven't gone round in a big circle.
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These guys look pretty cool. The look like they're out of Shin Megami Tensei.
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My next mission is to meet with a resistance contact at another place. Another far away place. Can't stop playing until I've started actually doing something useful. Let's go!
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"What's in these things??"
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I have got another offensive spell, but it's incredibly weak, as is the pistol. I'll come back and resolve this later if I can.
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Defend yourself, Malachi! This is no time for restraint!
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Malachi isn't invincible by any means, so indiscriminate offense is the safest option. And the most fun!
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Assault rifle defeats regular goons almost as handily as Pentecost does, but without the inadvertent disintegration of unfortunate innocents. Run, Chell! You're free!
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I'm loving this assault rifle. The rate of fire is every alternate frame. That's 1800 rounds per minute! These pre-millennial FPS weapons don't need reloading, allowing me to fire all 400 rounds in one continuous burst if I want to. By all rights, this assault rifle is in fact a Vulcan cannon. It's accurate at long range and headshots can kill instantly. Excellent.
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Is that an ID card on the desk? Swiped!
This is my second trip through these offices. The exit at the far end of the corridor leads back outside to the place near where Chell was, so I completely missed the ID card the first time and had to do another lap.
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It's harder than you'd think to fall down. Malachi's standard-issue 90's FPS protagonist rocket boots make gaps like this easily dealt with. If I were to fall, I could find my way back here in seconds.
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Nah, I changed my mind. Figuring out how to deal with the enemies in the most zany manner possible without becoming dead is great fun. New places mean new ways to dive behind corners, jump up ledges and blast things with my ever-expanding arsenal of ways of dealing instant and gratuitous death. Still, I'm going to have to stop playing because it looks like I'm never going to meet the next person any time soon.
Requiem. You play a super-fast guy running around exploding soliders with your magic powwaz. Or avoiding the soldiers altogether. You can save the innocents, if you choose, or run right past them. You can do what you like! Requiem's levels are both maze-like yet completely linear. From the levels I've played, the dead ends were all very short and clearly marked, leaving only the long and often interesting route as the correct one. It's like Kingpin or Strife done right. It didn't really matter that I didn't really understand what was going on (they tried to explain it twice and it still was a bit weird and then Malachi turned up in medias res and generally was a clueless goon).
I bounced, scooted, exploded people, and generally made my own fun. Or I felt like I made my own fun.
Some might say that Requiem looks dated. I think it looks rather good for when it came out and its crapness is charming. It doesn't distract and it doesn't make me feel like they wasted time setting up set-pieces instead of just letting me get on with whatever I felt was imporant.
The worst thing about Requiem is that it didn't want to work very well in Windows XP. If you've got a contemporaneous computer pickled somewhere, you wouldn't go wrong to thaw it out and play Requiem right now.
I didn't like those scary worms in the Chaos level though. Brr.
No gold star? You seemed to like it, you didn't really have anything bad to play. I think ill download this and try it out. Hilarious screenshots too by the way, I have a big problem with 90s fps and their crate-warehouse-vent fetish. Seems they can never come up with anything else, but at least this has hell too.
ReplyDeleteThere's no gold star because Ray wasn't the one who played it.
DeleteYeah, I decided at the start that I'd keep the gold star for myself, and let other writers give out their own ratings if they felt like it. Which they didn't. My reasoning was that we all have different tastes in games, so a rating would have a different meaning for each writer. Seemed like a sensible idea at at the time anyway.
DeleteHuh. I could have sworn i've seen mecha-neko give out a gold star or a wins the prize at some point, but I guess that must have been an Xbox 360 "Dishonored" induced hallucination. That happens sometimes when I come back to the real world. Well, real-ish world anyway.
ReplyDeleteA quick search indicates that there are three guest posts with a Gold Star tag:
DeleteMecha-Neko: http://superadventuresingaming.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/chrome-pc.html
Ocean: http://superadventuresingaming.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/nox-pc.html
Nintondo Man: http://superadventuresingaming.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/ketsui-arcade.html
I'm guessing that Ray simply tagged them as Gold Star material because he wanted to play them himself later..?
Damn, I thought I'd caught all of them.
DeleteEarly on I thought I'd tag the games other people had played that I personally liked. But soon it dawned on me that this was a STUPID THING TO DO, and made things unnecessarily confusing, so I removed them. Or at least I thought I had.
For the record I've finished Chrome, and thought it was incredibly repetitive, but surprisingly playable. I played Nox for a few hours, and I remember it seemed like a interesting take on the Diablo formula. And Ketsui... well I'm sure I must have played it at some point, but all those flashy mid-90s shoot 'em ups start blurring together after a while.
I don't think I got far enough into Requiem to say whether it was crap or not. I must've found a dozen enemies in total at the most. Something about my so-called 'computer' didn't like Chapel F. It's a shame that there isn't a GOG version of this that's designed and tested for new computers. They've got Robinson's-bloody-Requiem, but not Requiem: AA.
DeleteI didn't put a Gold Star on Chrome, Ray must've done that.
This game is one of my favorite FPS. Ambience of loneliness and helplessness. Excellent gunfights. Angelic powers very original for its time that can lead to different strategies: bullet-time, possession, resurrection, etc. Great variety of enemies makes The Fallen is one of my favorite fictitious armies: soldiers with different armor, robots, demons and fallen angels. Small jokes and critics to occidental society as you see an poster about Lilith cosmetics, when Lilith is one of the bosses, or a poster about a The Riders film, clearly The Four Horsemen, as if the demons were infiltrating society through frivolity and the worship of appearance. Sadly this game also is very underrated.
ReplyDelete