Starship Titanic (1998)

I seem to remember this being wildly difficult and being incredibly impressed that Dan completed it himself, so I doubt I'll make it very far through, but I want to check out the opening and the atmosphere at least. I remember the text parser being really accomplished some of the time and classically limited at other times. Like, talking to the bomb and realising you could make it lose count and start again was such a fun moment. Doubt I'll get that far, though!

It's a great opening, very Adams. Quite meta as well, the first thing you get told to do when you get onto the Titanic is go to the plinth and push the button, and when you get to it the plinth says "push button for opening credits". Very Stanley Parable! I haven't actually done anything else yet, I'm popping out for a bit then I'll come back and brave the stupidly difficult puzzles!

Ah yes, I remember, this is really hard to navigate through and also full of Myst type puzzles. Also, I set the bomb countdown off, so I've got to go back there every 15 minutes to reset it! Which is funny but also kind of a pain. Met the Terry Jones parrot and it followed me around for a bit commenting on stuff which again was funny but in a slightly obnoxious way. I finally found my way to the rooms, but I don't know how I'm supposed to work out which one is mine from the weird barcode thing I was given. I think I'll have to read the manual.
So far, very nice atmosphere and fun characters, but it's all a bit irritating as well. I think it could really benefit from a remake - keep the comedy and the visuals, but do it all in lovely hi-res full 3D and soften off all the rough gameplay edges (it's mainly the navigation issue so far, which would be improved by changing to 3D space, I think, plus maybe a few signs or something - although maybe feeling lost is intentional).

Ah. The manual is actually just a fictional in-flight magazine with no actual helpful information in it! I think the pattern here is 'good comedy and atmosphere, bad game'. Time for a walkthrough! 

I've looked at a couple of walkthroughs (needed two because this game is so impenetrable only one isn't enough) and fucking hell I can't believe anyone ever completed this. It must have taken a saintly amount of patience. Take the bomb thing, for instance: there's a bomb with a button saying 'press to disarm'. This is a trick and actually arms the bomb. Okay, so you might guess that in a ship full of malfunctioning robots, and it's quite funny. But then you do have to keep using the crappy navigation to go back through dozens of rooms to reset the countdown every fifteen minutes at least otherwise it's game over. And the puzzle is: if you try to blindly enter passwords for no reason (it's a thirty character password, so there's no reason to think you could guess at it) the bomb will sometimes pick a random dialogue bark. One of these has the password in it, though it isn't highlighted and doesn't stand out in any way. I remember being there when Dan guessed this and I'm still flabbergasted, frankly.

I can't be bothered to follow these walkthroughs the whole way while struggling with the navigation UI, so I'm done with this!

(Also, I take it back that this would be great for a remake!)

Rating: Red

Blade Runner (1997)

Much like Last Express, I suspect this will be one I admire rather than enjoy, and get frustrated with very early on, but we'll see. I think it's got like dead ends and RPG elements and what have you in there...

If nothing else, the CDs are really slick. Plain black background, white wireframe version of the title, and close-ups on great-looking hi-res character models (disc 4 has two - Tyrell and Rachael!).

I've gone with the 'restored content' version on SCUMMVM as it doesn't seem too major - some optional meetings, extra NPCs etc - and it's all content found on the original discs, it's not fan-recreated or anything.

Just watched the intro, this is awesome. Reminds me of Alien Isolation, the way it perfectly captures the film's atmosphere and puts you in a very similar situation on a very similar point in the timeline. They've got all the retro UI stuff, the noir stuff, even bits that are more from the novel about electric animals. Shame they didn't get M Emmett Walsh, though, and just said his character's off sick. I probably would have preferred a soundalike tbh.

Seems the gameplay is heavy on detective work - the UI has different tabs for crime scenes, suspects, clues etc. I'm definitely going to have to read the manual for this!

Ohhh boy, okay, I remember now, This has shooting mechanics, it's in real-time and characters' agendas change per playthrough (most pertinently who's a replicant, I guess). Also, NPCs might pick up evidence themselves if you miss it, there are a bunch of little mechanics you have to learn like how to do the V-K test, the photo enhancement stuff etc (and which the manual warns you require patience!). Sooo, seems like it has lots of cool ideas that might all just end up being inpenetrable and annoying. OR it might all be really cool and I'll end up doing multiple playthroughs!

Okay, so far this is really cool. I'm going around picking up clues, talking to witnesses, and finding stuff round corners in photographs with my magic tech, then I'm going home to pet my (electric?) dog and stand on my tiny balcony while floodlights sweep past and Vangelis fades in. The UI is really tidy and intuitive and it's keeping all my leads comfortingly well-filed. The animation/character movement is a little janky, but that's fine, overall it looks great. But unfortunately the ESPER photo analysis tech mechanics can be janky as well (one thing that I really should be able to check out is apparently of no interest, whereas it took a long time to cajol it into looking at a car properly - I knew what I wanted to look at, I just couldn't figure out the exact grid squares to select). Also, there's a guy with like five incriminating (if circumstantial) bits of evidence but it seems I can't talk to him or arrest him or Voight-Kampff him or anything. So I'm stuck now, and I don't know if it's because I've missed a clue or a mechanic or what. I'm going to check a walkthrough but I'm guessing they'll only be so much help if everything's randomised per playthrough...

Anyway, this is getting less engaging! Turned out I hadn't zoomed in on one photo enough to notice a girl mostly concealed behind a pillar. Once I'd done that, I could go to my suspect and show him my hard copy of that zoom in, then he ran. That still didn't give me anything to work with, so I went home, and turns out that was the right thing to do because he showed up on my rooftop and tried to kill me, so I retired him. Now I'm onto the next case. So, okay, progress, but I had to use a walkthrough and it was all a little fiddly, and now I'm stuck again, just bouncing back and forth between the same few locations hoping something will shake loose. I'm getting flashbacks to all those immersive sims where I felt like an idiot bumbling around not knowing what I didn't know, but there's also some of the irritations of point and clicks.

I went to a fair amount of effort copying all the files over from the 4 CDs to get this going, so I'd like to try to get more out of it before I give up, but the game isn't really helping me out!

Okay, so one issue was that a new location had opened up on my map and I hadn't noticed the tiny blue square. The other is that I didn't click on the same thing enough times to get my gathered clue to have an effect, which is really fucking annoying. Oh, and apparently it's random as to whether my lieutenant is in his office to get me an interview with Tyrell or not, which seems like a pretty big deal to just maybe miss out on!

This game is such a mixed bag. On the one hand, it's very atmospheric and full of really cool stuff, and when things are flowing it's great. But, having initially been impressed by them, I now feel like the UI and mechanics are intentionally getting in the way sometimes; I could really do with some more hand-holding here. Like, Chew tells me that some other guy didn't meet him for takeout today. This takes me like three listens to parse, and even then I don't know who that guy is or why it's important, but my dialogue runs out, so I go to the location across the street and there's a guy chained to a bomb so I run straight out again and narrowly avoid getting blown up. Apparently that was the guy, so now it makes sense why he didn't meet with Chew, but I only know this because my character somehow knows this. So it's a pretty cool series of events but I feel like it's happening to me by accident.  It's that immersive sim disconnect.

Also, it's really cool to be in the same timeframe as the movie, hearing about Holden getting blasted, getting to talk to Chew (the eye manufacturer played by a returning James Hong) and stuff like that, but on the other hand it has this Ghostbusters The Game feel where you're meeting everyone and going everywhere that Deckard did, presumably at a very similar time. Like, I went to JF Sebastian's place at the Bradbury, smashed up his shelves and used them to climb up onto the roof just in time to get overpowered by a philosophising replicant, exactly like Deckard is presumably going to do in about a day from now!

I'm going to take a break now, I think. I'm at the start of a new bit, so I've got fresh stuff to come back to. I got captured by the Nexus 6s, who are acting like a family unit, and I'm having weird dreams (again, very Blade Runner but also too Blade Runner!).

I took a very long break due to life changes, and I can't bring myself to start on Blade Runner again. Too many fiddly UI things to remember and then struggle with for the sake of probably giving up twenty minutes in anyway. So, loads of great atmosphere but also I felt like I was struggling against the game a lot plus the fan service often got a bit much.

Rating: Orange