Albedo: Eyes From Outer Space Review

I'm a fan of Sci-fi, and a lover of Pulp, so when a game claims it's got both, I'm willing to give it a shot.

I downloaded Albedo: Eyes From Outer Space (which henceforth will be Albedo: E.F.O.S.) because I got it for free ages ago, then promptly left it on my hard-drive gathering dust. In fact, I had forgotten I had it until last week when I was looking for something new to play. Something light, nothing too taxing, no 100-hour long RPGs this time.

Albedo: E.F.O.S. seemed to fit the bill.

I took a quick look at the screenshots to remind myself what the game was and was mildly intrigued. "Looks like an old-school style adventure game" I thought to myself. "This'll do nicely." I believed.

I was wrong.

I couldn't tell if the game was trying to be humorous and failing, or serious and failing. A secret research facility with strange creatures running amok could make for an interesting horror scenario, but on the other hand, it could easily be the set-up for a satirical jaunt, poking fun at all the sci-fi of the '60s and onwards.

The creatures are monocular, tentacled monsters like the aliens from The Simpsons. So, I initially thought it was supposed to be a satire. Later, I ran in to a floating fish that served no purpose as far as I can tell, which further suggested this. But there was no joking, no comments poking fun, barring hidden nods to Star Trek and Ghostbusters, which seemed more for nods to these particular series than for any satirical purposes. So, I assumed it was a semi-serious sci-fi horror. I say assume, because the game barely tells any story. The character speaks, but mainly to lightly direct the player.

The story, what little there was, was so uninteresting, I couldn't force myself to finish the game. Normally, I can't leave a game unfinished (or book for that matter), but in this case, I couldn't force myself to care.

Moving on from the story, the graphics are probably ok, with a very '60s aesthetic to the monsters (and the flying saucers), but the game looked like someone had smeared a thin layer of Vaseline over the camera lens, making it impossible to determine for certain whether the graphics were barely passable or bad. Perhaps that was the reason they did that, who can say these days.

The controls were simply bad. Interacting being finicky, an inventory that took forever to cycle through as you accumulated more items, making fighting a creature and cycling through the inventory deadly, and interaction points on items being tiny or oddly placed in some instances.

The audio was poor, with the voice of the main character sounding like he was talking into a tin can. The music was forgettable, so much so, that I can't even recall if there even was any music.

All in all, this was a game that had the ingredients for what could have been a great little horror adventure, or a satire taking a humorous poke at sci-fi from the '60s, which were all sadly squandered.

I'm glad I got it for free, otherwise I would have felt shortchanged, no matter the price.

Onimusha: Warlords Remaster Review

As someone who was a big fan of the Onimusha when it initially released, and was sad to see it fall by the wayside, as many games of yesteryear did, it was a nice surprise to hear that Onimusha was getting a remaster.

Of course, every man and his dog are releasing remasters. Hell, even games that no-one really asked for remasters of got the shiny treatment. I'm looking at you CoD4. Well, at least I know I didn't ask for it. Which is what matters, obviously.

C'est la vie.

Back to Onimusha.

At first, I was sceptical. It had been so long, would it still hold up to the nostalgia shades that are sometimes welded to my head? The price was decent, at about 16 quid, so I thought "why the hell not?"

First things first; yes it does still hold up. In fact, it only reinforced my belief that modern gaming has lost something. The magic, if you will. But that's a blog for another time.

Now, I did no extra research, beyond a cursory glance, so I know hardly anything about the technical side of things. It certainly must have been cleaned up a touch, upscaling, that sort of thing as the game looks smooth, and crisp. The game controls the same, with the fixed camera angles, and tank-like controls of other greats such as Resident Evil, and the like. The music was redone, and I have no idea if it is improved, but as the original composer was a conman (he pretended to be deaf, if I recall correctly), it was to be expected. It sounds good, regardless.

In my opinion, the game seems fine. I definitely had a blast replaying through the game. In fact, I hope this spurs Capcom to do the same for the rest of the series, and maybe even revive the series proper.

Now, a friend of mine mentioned that this is based on the version that released on the PS2 versus the Xbox version, which had extra content, and that is unfortunate, to be sure. I'm not sure of the reasoning for this, and I assume it was an oversight on Capcom's part, or intentional if they release the extra content as DLC which would sour my opinion.

All in all, the game was a refreshing blast from the past, and I definitely felt it was worth the price of admission. Your mileage may vary, of course, depending on various factors, but if you liked the series, and would like to take a stroll down memory lane, then you can do worse than Onimusha: Warlords.

The Beginning of Things

I have decided to start a blog, as you can clearly see. It will contain thoughts and musings, reviews and rants, and links to other, more clever, bloggers.

I will generally blog after I have finished writing for the day, so as to remember any thoughts I have while writing that I may want to jot down. I will hopefully have completed the book by the end of June, with editing to take place after that. Perhaps I'll finally have published something by the year's end, which would be nice. A man can dream. This is more of a note to myself so I can see later on how close to the mark I was. As I said, it'd be nice to have completed something for a change.

This is a short post, but as it is an introductory post, I wanted to keep it to a minimum.

You can find me on Twitter, where I will post a link whenever I post a blog.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Xayveir