Self Similar – self similar's personal gaming nonsense blog

Metal Gear Mania 2025 – Metal Gear: Ghost Babel

2000’s Metal Gear: Ghost Babel (simply titled “Metal Gear Solid” in the USA) is a spin-off developed by Konami for the Game Boy Color to capitalize on the success of Metal Gear Solid (the actual one) in Nintendo’s massive handheld market. That said, the game is not an attempt to recreate MGS on the GBC, but is much more in line with the original MSX games. While it seems that Hideo Kojima was at least loosely involved in its production and is much more accepting of it than some of the other Metal Gear games he was less involved in, it clearly deviates from the chronology of first three games in the series and these days is decidedly non-canon. Personally, I was pretty ignorant about this game until researching to kick off this Metal Gear Mania series, yet it is often brought up as a severely underrated entry in the Metal Gear franchise and is often a recommended play by hardcore Metal Gear fans. Let’s see!

Metal Gear Solid - Tactical Espionage Action!

“Metal Gear: Ghost Babel – A blast from the past!”

First, I know I said I’d skip Ghost Babel for now and move on to Metal Gear Solid 2, but I dragged my feet for long enough that the next thing I knew, Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 was here. The joke’s on me though, as disappointingly, that version doesn’t include the achievements/trophies that I was originally holding out for. Lame! In any case, for this playthrough, that is mostly the version I played (on my Xbox Series X.) Not unlike some of the games from the first Master Collection, this version of Ghost Babel is running in some kind of a GBC emulator rather than being a true port. Despite the lack of achievements, it’s not without any additional features though; most notably, it includes the ability to “rewind” your game. Konami did a pretty good job of supporting Master Collection Vol. 1, so it’s possible we’ll see some more enhancements added to this version in the next year or two, though my guess is that much more of their attention will be focused on the two main games in the collection. You know, the ones that actually got achievements. 🙄

Loading up the game you’re immediately tossed into a lengthy introduction sequence which, not unlike Metal Gear Solid proper, sets up the mission you’re about to embark on. There’s some decent pixel art here and a surprising amount of text. In fact, I think it’s the most detailed intro we’ve seen so far outside of MGS’s optional briefing videos. Once you’re dropped into the game itself, the colorful 2D pixel artwork is even nicer, and they make up for it being much lower resolution than Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake by extremely skilled use of those limited pixels, including adding a lot of extra frames of animation wherever they could. Between that and the finely tuned control of Snake, Ghost Babel feels so much “smoother” than those older 2D games. Hell, the screen even scrolls as you move rather than being a single fixed screen! As the game progresses, you’ll see even more excellent artwork by way of the frequent cutscenes. The art here is quite stylized, part gritty and realistic, part anime and manga inspired, and, owing to its bold use of colors (probably to account for the GBC’s lack of a backlit screen), a little cartoony. It’s definitely a unique look, but one I think works well.

“Another swing and a miss. Poor Snake.”

Ghost Babel’s music and sound effects are also interesting, with throwbacks to all three of the previous games, especially the original MSX Metal Gear. Throwing back to the first Metal Gear is actually a pretty big theme here as, gameplay-wise, it really feels like Ghost Babel’s main two influences were it and, of course, Metal Gear Solid. Even the story pretends Metal Gear 2 doesn’t exist, instead being something of an alternate sequel. I’m not sure why MG2 was done so dirty, but perhaps it was an attempt to make this game appeal more to the Western audiences that, beyond MGS, might have only played the first game thanks to its widely distributed NES port. Regardless, having played these games in order, this really stood out to me.

In fact, jumping right into gameplay, stealth feels much more like the original Metal Gear. Guards have simple patrol patterns and no cones of vision, so it’s similarly quite easy to avoid and maneuver around them, including sneaking up on them to knock them out or laying in wait to pop them with your silenced Five-seveN. As such, your Soliton Radar has been downgraded to only show enemy positions and movements and not facing, though a bigger downgrade is probably just how damn tiny it is. If anything, sneaking around is even easier given some MGS inspired enhancements like the ability to squeeze against walls, which is actually used quite a bit more here, hide in and behind things, even in bushes, and knock on walls to lure guards to you. Actually, the game uses an almost exact duplicate of MGS’s evolution of alert phases, though it might be my imagination, I swear the phases progress even more quickly, making getting caught far less annoying. Certainly much less annoying than in MG2 at any rate. Snake’s weapons and equipment are also pretty close to those on offer in MGS, though I wouldn’t really call this an improvement over your already extensive caches in MG and MG2. I suppose the familiarity does help if coming from MGS though; the Nikita, for instance, works practically identically.

“Jimmy admonishing me for blowing up the wrong wall. Oops!”

A major departure from the earlier entries in the series is with the controls and the user interface. Of course, having to squeeze all of the controls on what, including start and select, is only four buttons, was obviously a bit of a challenge. They did a fine job, all in all, though the controls are certainly less intuitive than the revised MG and MG2 controls in the modern ports and it took me a while to get used to them enough to stop fumbling with them. Once I got used to them though, they worked great. The UI is similarly stripped back yet entirely adequate. It’s honestly kind of a miracle they managed to squeeze a working radar onto the screen without massively encroaching on the play area. As mentioned, it’s tiny as hell, but it is functional. Still, that was on a large TV so I can only imagine the eyestrain one might have gotten from trying to keep a careful watch on it when playing on the GBC’s minuscule screen.

The biggest departure though is with the structure of the game. Not counting Snake’s Revenge, Ghost Babel is the first game in the series to do away with the more open, interconnected world and replace it with a linear progression of discrete stages. This really doesn’t bother me though, as the series has relied less and less on Metroidvania-like progression gating and backtracking and many of these stages were large and open enough to still require a lot of exploration and backtracking anyway. The one thing I really didn’t like about it was the rating screen, similar to those shown at the end of other Metal Gear games, here shown to you after each stage has been completed. The ratings are quite strictly calculated, and it’s absolutely normal to get a bad rating if you did anything out of line, including simply taking a bit too long during an otherwise flawless run. It’s discouraging to be told you’re “terrible” between every level simply because you were thorough. I mean, this is a stealth game, right?!

“Mei Ling on the back foot regarding her endless pearls of wisdom. LAWLZ!”

The codec though? That’s ripped straight from Metal Gear Solid. The conversations are a bit more terse owing, again, to the GBC’s tiny screen, but there is still a surprising amount of text here; probably being on par with MG2 or at least being a good approximation of what we got in MGS. They manage to fit in a whole lot of dialogue about political conspiracies and the like and Ghost Babel is probably even more egregious about telling you where to go next and how to solve puzzles. Of course, there’s no voice acting, but it still feels impressive given the platform. As with MGS, your main way to interact with the narrative is via those codec calls and with cutscenes. While of course the cutscenes are nowhere near as cinematic as what we got there, this mix still feels like a similar evolution of MG2’s presentation as MGS. As an aside, I find it kind of amusing that Ghost Babel is the game they decided to borrow the codec character portraits from when updating MG2, given how disconnected the two games otherwise feel from each other.

Let’s go ahead and address that elephant in the room and re-cap the story. Expand the box below for a high-level but still spoiler-filled synopsis of the game’s plot.

Story Synopsis - Spoilers!

2002. Prototype Metal Gear GANDER is stolen by the Gindra Liberation Front, led by General Augustine Eguabon. Former FOXHOUND commander Colonel Roy Campbell brings Solid Snake out of retirement, revealing that Galuade, the GLF’s stronghold in the African country of Gindra, is actually the former site of Outer Heaven. His mission: infiltrate Galuade and link up with Delta Force operators already on the ground to rescue any captured researchers and destroy GANDER before it can be used against the United States. Once inside the base, Snake is contacted by the only surviving member of the Delta Force squad, Sergeant Chris Jenner, who reveals the presence of a dangerous mercenary unit called Black Chamber. During his first contact with Black Chamber, Snake learns that they have a vendetta against FOXHOUND due to their part in a betrayal that wiped most of their unit out. They’re also seeking the identity of the person who ordered the attack, known only as “Anonymous”. Snake finds and frees Metal Gear GANDER’s young chief engineer, Dr. Jimmy “The Wizard”’ Harks. With little warning, GANDER fires at the United States. On a broadcast video message, General Eguabon reveals that this was a dummy warhead meant only as a demonstration, and gives the U.S. government three hours to recognize the GLF’s demands. Snake next attempts to infiltrate and sabotage Galuade’s power plant to crippled GANDER’s rail guns. While successful, Jimmy is recaptured by the GLF, though manages to escape. Upon reuniting with Snake, Jimmy begins to explain that GANDER has one more weapon at its disposal but his handcuffs explode, killing him. With no options left, Snake proceeds to GANDER’s underground hanger. Once there, Snake encounters the General himself, who activates GANDER and attempts to stop Snake. After a tense fight that leaves GANDER disabled and the General mortally wounded, the General reveals that Outer Heaven was originally established by the U.S. to create a base of power on the African continent, though Big Boss unexpectedly went rogue, leading to Operation Intrude N313 and Outer Heaven’s ultimate destruction. Still, those efforts continued, eventually leading to the current situation and Project Babel led by Army Chief of Staff John Parker. As the General lay dying, Snake is confronted by Black Chamber’s leader, Black Arts Viper, who reveals that he now believes the identity of “Anonymous” is Steve Gardner, Deputy Director of the CIA, who was behind the original Outer Heaven and Metal Gear projects. Viper then reveals GANDER’s last weapon, its ability to launch nuclear attacks from orbiting satellites, and begins preparations to use it. Snake attacks Viper, killing him and stopping GANDER in the process. Campell confirms that Gardner planned the whole operation to disgrace Parker and get control of Project Babel returned to him. Snake and Chris reunite, escaping Galuade together, with Snake vowing to stop Gardner.

Ghost Babel’s story certainly feels appropriate to the series, and while it lacks some of the more existential themes discussed in MGS in particular, we have the familiar components of deep state conspiracies, proxy wars, the exploitation of soldiers to satisfy both of those ends, and walking robotic weapons of mass destruction. The return of Roy Campbell and Mei Ling helps solidify this too, even if Snake clearly didn’t meet Mei Ling until the events of MGS. *shrug* Tonally, it feels more like MG2 to me, being a bit more focused and serious across the board. There is a little humor though, particularly when it comes to the bratty, arrogant Jimmy the Wizard, who I generally found to be pretty hilarious. The villains of Black Chamber are as over the top as ever too. I mean, Pyro Bison and Slasher Hawk give Vulcan Raven a run for his money and Marionette Owl feels straight out of a manga. The whole Outer Heaven being Galuade twist seemed a little silly to me, and the subplot about Steve Gardner and John Parker, Weasel and McBride, etc. felt quite shoehorned-in. Even still, it seems like they could have easily made a few minor tweaks here and there to make Ghost Babel fit cleanly into the established timeline. My guess is that Kojima simply wanted to maintain creative control of the series and wanted anything he didn’t write to remain non-canon, even if he liked it (and he seems to have, as there are some references to it in later Metal Gear games.)

“Again?! Its an Mi-28 Havoc instead of a Mi-24D Hind-D, but close enough!”

Difficulty wise, I don’t think Ghost Babel was too challenging. There were some odd moments where Snake could get stunlocked (fucking dogs!) and the boss battle against (the awesome looking) Metal Gear GANDER was tricky; even after beating it, I’m not sure exactly what I was supposed to do as it seemed to take me ages to drain its health bar, having to restock on ammo multiple times. Still, the biggest challenges presented by Ghost Babel were its larger levels which were huge and often maze-like. The conveyor belt puzzle in particular was absolutely as diabolical as it was ingenious and satisfying to master. I used a collection of lightly annotated maps for this playthrough, but some of these sections must have been incredibly time-consuming and quite frustrating without a map and/or a full walkthrough at your disposal. Beyond that, my other biggest frustration was a bug seemingly related to the emulator used by the Master Collection Vol. 2 version which rendered gauss grenades completely useless. Those damn things were my lifeblood in the latter half of MGS, and there were several sections here in which I just had to face-tank gun turrets without them. Hopefully that gets fixed in a patch sooner or later. On the plus side, the aforementioned rewind feature of this version is actually incredibly powerful – invaluable for Nikita sections, but also extremely useful for experimenting with stealth in general. Make a mistake? Rewind and try again!

To round this out, there’s a few other things about Ghost Babel worth mentioning. First, it has its own massive selection of VR training challenges, most of which appear to be straight translations of those found in MGS to Ghost Babel’s 2D engine. Pretty neat. There’s also a Special Missions mode that unlocks after beating the game that brings you through what are essentially tweaked challenge versions of the campaign’s missions, but more interestingly, these are bookended with a lot more narration to help fill in some of the details of the story. Most interestingly of all, it’s revealed that these are actually VR simulations being experienced by a character named Jack rather than Solid Snake. Yep, that Jack! Ghost Babel was also the first Metal Gear game to include multiplayer, with its pretty cool sounding “Battle Mode” meant to be played via the GBC’s link cable. Unfortunately this feature was removed from the Collection Vol. 2 port.

“You know, it’s much less of a kid’s game than you might think…”

While I think I might still prefer Metal Gear 2 over Ghost Babel, I probably had more fun with Ghost Babel, and it definitely pushes Metal Gear down the ranking when it comes to the 2D games. It’s a surprisingly competent entry into the series, and it’s a game that makes me rethink what was technically possible on the Game Boy Color, full stop; it really is quite impressive. Plus, it’s short, with the time of a single playthrough usually clocking in at under 5 hours if you don’t get too lost in those conveyor belt mazes. Honestly, my biggest issue with the game is its odd lack of coherence with the canon timeline, and perhaps I just wasn’t mentally ready to return to the 2D style of Metal Gear after finally playing Metal Gear Solid for the first time not that long ago. In any case, I’ll remedy that next time, as I finally play Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty!

Computer Computer Games

This is hopefully the first of many articles in which I review hacking, programming, and other games that mostly involve in-game interaction with computers. There are a ton of these, from classics like Infocom’s Deadline and A Mind Forever Voyaging and Activision’s Hacker and Portal, all released in the early to mid 80s, SysOp and/or BBS hacking simulator door games I played on BBSes in the mid 90s, all the way to the crop of modern games meant to either leverage, or in many cases teach, coding and automation concepts in a “gamified” way. I hope to explore dozens of these games, but I’m starting off with a few that have been collecting dust in my backlog for ages.

Given my love for vintage computing, including the Commodore Amiga and the BBS scene, two topics both relevant to Digital: A Love Story, I’d been meaning to play this one since first hearing about it… which was like 15 years ago. 😒

So yeah, what I knew about DALS was that it was a narrative heavy game whose gameplay mostly involved calling various BBSes and reading and sending messages. What I didn’t know is that it is actually much more of a visual novel than any kind of simulation. In fact, it’s built on the well-known visual novel engine Ren’Py. Evidently a lot of cool trickery went into making this feel like more of an immersive, faux computing simulation though, as it’s reasonably effective at it. Of course, it’s far from perfect, but while a giant nerd like me could get all “ackchyually…” about dumb stuff like DTMF tone and modem handshake noise accuracy, there are bigger fish to fry.

“Reading a message on a board in DALS. Gotta find that warez!”

First, the entire BBS experience is extremely dumbed down. You dial a BBS and are treated to a welcome screen that looks more like a BBS advertisement (though this isn’t totally inaccurate – such welcome screens weren’t uncommon.) You then need to logon, which requires only a password and not actually a username, oddly. From there, all you can really do is read and reply to public messages and send private message the users on the BBS. The whole experience is very simple, reminding me a lot of the BBSes in Interplay’s Neuromancer adaption (which I reviewed years ago here.) It absolutely gets the job done in terms of gameplay though, and I think some abstraction is probably necessary, but regardless, these BBSes only barely resemble the real thing.

It’s all a little anachronistic too. The game’s intro/title screen is based on the Commodore 64, yet the rest of the game’s interface is based on Amiga Workbench 1.x. The fonts, music, graphics; none of it quite adds up. It’s even mouse driven, though this is somewhat forgivable as even though BBSes weren’t generally mouse based, basing the game’s interface on a mouse driven OS made this seem much more plausible. Despite these nitpicks, it’s effective enough in my mind. I mean, if someone like me could get immersed in it, it’ll surely work on someone less familiar with the tech.

“Calling the new board I was just recommended.”

Disappointingly, despite how absolutely crucial communication via messages is to the gameplay, you don’t actually get to see the messages your character writes. While I didn’t expect you to be able to free-form write messages yourself, you don’t even get to see what your character wrote. Instead, it’s only hinted at by the subject lines of the messages people are replying to. Kind of weird, but it’s also sort of cool that it leaves the contents of the messages open to interpretation. Given that your character is also kind of a tabula rasa, that’s probably for the best. That said, as mentioned, this is actually a visual novel, not some kind of slick hacking simulator, so the fact that it’s even this functional is remarkable.

Unfortunately the gameplay starts to feel repetitive quite quickly, as it mostly just involves dialing a BBS, reading and replying to messages, logging off, and moving on to the next board. Sometimes it’s not clear where you need to call next, or how to get into a system, but overall it’s all fairly simple. With a time to beat of around 2 hours, I appreciate that it doesn’t quite overstay its welcome either. Still, I would have personally liked to see more tension here. What I mean by that is that a big part of BBSing back in the day was having to wait hours, maybe even days to get a response to a greatly anticipated message, or for your daily allowance of time, game turns, or download credits on a particular board to reset, but none of that is really represented here.

“Sweet welcome screen, though that’s not quite ANSI.”

Surprisingly, I think where the game really stumbles is the story itself. Before playing it I imagined a really involved, lengthy narrative as the main character starts to befriend various people on these BBSes, perhaps build a reputation of sorts, and the romantic relationship referenced by the title blossoms. Instead, it all feels fairly surface level, especially the relationship, which progresses incredibly quickly to the point that I barely felt much towards the character you have this relationship with. It all feels a little rushed and shallow as a result. Beyond that, it cribs from Gibson pretty hard, but then, what good cyberpunk story doesn’t?

Digital: A Love Story is available for free from the author’s website, so if any of this sounds interesting to you, I’d recommend giving it a shot. There are much worse ways to spend two hours.

Speaking of slick hacking simulators, Introversion’s Uplink is just that, and really, one of the progenitors of the entire modern genre. After playing Introversion’s WarGames inspired global thermonuclear war focused light strategy game Defcon, I briefly became quite intrigued by Introversion Software and their innovative, stylish, often somewhat toy-like games that remind me of highly evolved products of the same underground computer scene I came up in. This is when I bought Uplink and a few other games of theirs, though somehow, despite thinking it looked awesome, I never actually got around to trying it.

“Killing my boy Dan in the original Uplink. Sorry, bud!”

Uplink takes place in some presumably cyberpunky version of (then future) 2010 in which you sign up with the Uplink Corporation as a freelance hacker. Through them you take on jobs/missions, monitor relevant news articles, update your software tools, and upgrade your gateway computer – something of a “jumpbox” that you do all of your nefarious deeds through. Once you have one or more missions, you’re emailed a more detailed description of your objective including the name and IP address of the server you need to carry them out with. You’ll need to connect to the server, but oh no, not directly, as you’d be traced and caught in no time. Instead, you’ll need to bounce your connection through multiple intermediary servers to increase the time it takes to trace you. It also helps if at least one of them is a server you can easily gain admin access to so you can clear the logs of your connection being routed through it to break that chain, as it were.

From there, things only get more complex. Some missions have you deleting files, some have you downloading and emailing files, sometimes needing to decrypt them first. Sometimes you’ll need to hack an institution to view or change some records, or move some money around, and sometimes you’ll need to trace someone else’s bank transfers, or even track down a rival hacker. The more difficult missions require a complex series of subtasks, and some may even have time limits. The mechanisms you need to work around are more difficult too. At first, just using a cracker to brute force an admin password is good enough. Later on, you’ll need to break encryption keys, provide voice imprints, and maybe even route your connections through other company servers. Sometimes you’ll need to disable monitoring servers, proxy servers, and firewalls too.

“Providing a voice sample to work my way into this Logic Systems server.”

The variety and complexity of these tasks ties smartly into the game’s progression system. Each level of mission gives you more and more cash, which lets you buy new software tools, update old ones, and upgrade your gateway’s hardware, allowing you to handle higher tier missions, which grant you even more money. Repeat! At least, that’s how the game is meant to be played. A cheeky strategy I found a lot of references to online is to hack a bank early on to give yourself a massive injection of funds and shortcut a lot of this progression. Of course, you’ll still need to gain experience to have higher level missions available to you, though having all of the best tools and the fastest hardware would certainly make that easier.

Regardless of how you get there, this all culminates as you reach the hardest missions, which often require gaining access to a corporate LAN and mapping out and hacking every server in the network to reach your target. Each hack may require bypassing multiple of the above mentioned roadblocks, and you’ll have an admin aggressively chasing you at every step too. Fun!

“Providing a voice sample, but this time in the Uplink OS mod.”

One of the best things about Uplink, and honestly, all the best entries in this genre, is that it is quite immersive. You’re interacting with a virtual computer system of some sort, and given that you’re actually interacting with a real computer system of some sort to play the game, it’s not a massive leap to feel like you’re actually really doing something. Couple this with the realistic sense of isolation you experience playing a single character in first person (narratively speaking) staring at a somewhat open-ended GUI and/or a blinking cursor at a CLI prompt, with your only contacts being an occasional email or chat message. If you’ve ever been there yourself, and I’d wager most of us have in one way or another, it’s extremely effective.

Uplink suffers some here in that it was developed and released in the early 2000s. It still has a lot of now anachronistic references to “dialing into” servers and its GUI, while looking like a slick Window Manager you might have used with X back in the day, is a little clunky by today’s standards. Text boxes need to have their default text manually cleared, and have other weird input limitations, for example. The game also doesn’t handle modern screen resolutions very well, either. Thankfully, there are mods for all of that, some of which I almost hesitate to call mods as they replace the entire executable becoming what is more or less a whole new client for the game. The most popular of these is probably Uplink OS. I would highly recommend anyone looking to play Uplink these days just go ahead and start with something like Uplink OS, though with the caveat that you know that some of these UI and seemingly minor gameplay enhancements actually heavily affect the gameplay itself. That, and in Uplink OS’s case, even the aesthetics are quite different. While I prefer some elements of the original Uplink, Uplink OS was clearly a labor of love and its benefits outweigh its negatives in my opinion.

“Uplink OS replaces the world map with a boring hexagon, but I love the Randomize button!”

I started off with the original Uplink and didn’t find it too annoying to work around the UI and technical imitations of it, but at some point, maybe 10 hours in, I found myself almost hard locked from proceeding any further: I needed money to purchase some tools to do the new mission types at my current level, but had exhausted all of the lower tier missions I could actually handle. This is, admittedly, totally my own fault for not managing my funds better, but hey, this seemed like a good time to check out Uplink OS. Making a new character and being much more methodical this time (thanks to understanding the game a lot better) paired with a much more responsive UI, meant progression was waaaaay faster. Unfortunately I made another silly mistake. I was learning the ins and outs of hacking LANs when I finally completed my mission and increased the game speed to wait for the news to report on my deeds. Instead, I received my first game over screen – busted! This wasn’t really game over, but I essentially would need to work my way up from zero. As much as that sucked, I was much more annoyed by not knowing how I could have been caught. Regardless, having put probably 25-30 hours into Uplink, I’d have probably thrown in the towel if I hadn’t sneakily backed up my local save file at some point before this.

With that, I decided to change focus. When you make it far enough into the game, you start being offered missions out-of-band, which lead to a more linear set of special missions. With my second playthrough going so fast, I never got to the calendar date in which the first of these missions would be offered to me, so determined to beat the game legitimately at least once, I restored my game, did a few more missions to get a little more cash, then put the game’s clock on fast forward. At a high level, the story consists of two corporations vying against each other: one that wants to destroy the Internet because they feel like it has become corrupted by government and corporate control from its once great position as a bastion of free speech, while the other would rather, you know, NOT destroy the entire Internet. Of course, you’re able to choose either side, or ignore the entire thing (although that may eventually turn out badly for you if things have already been set into motion.) Personally, I chose Arunmor because at first ARC’s motives seemed more anti-social, plus being a professional hacker, my character would be out of work if the Internet were to cease to exist. I’m nothing if not practical!

“Deleting a system’s logs via CLI to cover my tracks.”

That said, the story feels a little rushed and could have perhaps used a bit more drama, even if just in the form of more emails, news articles, and other text, but I do appreciate how there are a lot of little clues about this whole plotline sprinkled throughout the game. More of this would have made the story that much better, though. As for the story missions themselves, beyond the new mechanics introduced by the Faith vs Revelation viruses, they utilize a little bit of everything you’ve learned up to this point. It’s a simple but smart design, and my final mission for Arunmor, which involved racing against the spread of the Revelation virus, was surprisingly tense.

Perhaps one day I’ll return to follow the ARC storyline, but for now I’m ready to move on to something else. In any case, Uplink is a bona fide classic. I’m looking forward to seeing how other games have attempted to evolve the formula, however.

I remember hearing a lot about Her Story when it was released back in 2015. It seemed like everyone was playing it, but I didn’t know much about it apart from it supposedly being one of the more impressive entries in a wave of FMV revival games. I knew it involved watching a lot of video clips, and that was about it. So what does it have to do with this theme?

“Making my screen a little cluttered to show off the UI in Her Story.”

Her Story puts you in the role of some kind of an investigator who is placed in front of an old PC with access to a curated archive of police interview footage. The interviews focus on a single person, Hannah Smith, the wife of a man found dead in their home, seemingly murdered. You’re not given much in the way of background on who you are, why you’re reviewing this data, or what your goal really is. One would assume you’re a detective, and you’re trying to determine the details of the murder, including whether or not Hannah is guilty or at least a legitimate suspect. Almost all of the interaction in Her Story involves typing simple search queries into this video database application and reviewing the results. Mostly this is in the form of keywords and phrases, but you can also add your own tags to individual clips, which is pretty neat. One interesting aspect of this is that each search will only let you see the first 5 results, which means narrowing down and refining your searches is practically a requirement, especially if you want to try turning over every last stone.

The simulation here is surprisingly competent for a game that, well, isn’t really about that. The machine you’re in front of is modeled after Windows 95 and you’re able to interact with it with a reasonable amount of fidelity – there are multiple programs you can open, including a little game that someone had apparently tried to delete, you can move windows around, etc. Probably the most interesting aspect of this is the “glare” effect which adds a not-at-all subtle CRT effect to the screen – scan lines, a slight curve to the picture, dust on the screen itself, and reflections in the form of the fluorescent lights behind you, occasional lights from passing police cars, and even your own character’s reflection at times. This is the type of feature that a lot of people might immediately turn off, but I’m personally really fond of Her Story’s implementation of it, and I feel that it does just as much to set the mood as the ambient soundtrack in the background.

“Hannah tells us about her favorite video games.”

What really intrigued me about Her Story was the mysterious nature of many of the details of the story, both those expected (the obvious “whodunit?” of it all) and perhaps surprising. I obviously need to tip-toe around potential spoilers here, but the biggest mystery is in regards to Hannah’s identity. Is she who she says she is? It’s blatantly clear that there is some kind of manipulation going on, but it seems as if the game goes to lengths to specifically throw you off the scent, tossing out hints to support and oppose both of the two main conclusions you’re likely to draw. Personally, I went with the… err, let’s say “same person” conclusion myself due to some phrasing that is used here and there and some of the overall manipulative behavior observed, though I later watched a video on YouTube that convinced me that the other option was probably correct. Regardless, the game purposely leaves a lot of this, a lot of everything, open to interpretation. In fact, before I was even 50% through the archive I thought I had a fairly good idea of what happened, but with no idea how I was supposed to “beat” the game. While that becomes more clear eventually, the game ends without answering many of these questions, and a detail given at the very end still managed to surprise me while re-framing a few things at the same time.

It’s short, despite clocking in at a few hours tops, and it’s minimally interactive for a “game” to boot, Her Story’s execution really worked for me, and its story is one that I won’t forget any time soon. Part of this is thanks to the performance of Viva Seifert, but I also want to seek out more of Sam Barlow’s games, including Telling Lies, which is something of a spiritual successor to Her Story and includes a similar style of gameplay, which means it might end up in a future installment of this series.

Tales from the Darkside

I’ve been curious about Darksiders since the first game was released in 2010. The oh-so edgy take on a war between heaven and hell and the highly stylized, seemingly Blizzard inspired graphics simultaneously intrigued me and repulsed me. As reviews came out, the often repeated claims that its gameplay was practically a 1:1 clone of the Legend of Zelda series’ action-adventure formula had me even more interested. Then, I watched as sequels were gradually released, each one with a different protagonist and significant shifts in its core gameplay, if not practically switching genre. This is often a bit of a sour point for fans, with preference for one game or another being highly divisive, but personally, I kind of like the idea of the series being so fluid in its gameplay – prioritizing core elements and themes over discrete mechanics. At some point, this all added up to me being sold on the franchise. Now, with news of a new game in the works, I’m finally tackling the first game in the series: Darksiders.

“I’ll horseman during the apocalypse, thank you very much…”

The aforementioned ultra stylized Blizzard-esque graphics, which look like something between World of Warcraft and Diablo III, mean this game has actually aged quite well. Throw in a remastered port to the 8th generation of consoles in 2016, given the face-palmingly punny title of “Warmastered Edition” and yeah, not too shabby! The game also got a free upgrade to the current gen on Xbox Series XS and PS5 back in May, which means my game was suddenly replaced right in the middle of my playthrough. Doh! Thankfully, there weren’t any real issues with that, though as its main benefit was 4k support and a more stable FPS, I can’t really say I noticed any major differences on my relatively ancient 1080p TV either.

Anyway, unless you’re the type of person who could never bring themselves to try World of Warcraft because of its graphics, the art style itself is cool: painted looking, colorful textures, chunky models, and a loose interpretation of scale. I guess to be fair I should give Joe Madureira more credit than Blizzard here, as he had a big role in this as Vigil’s Creative Director, and he was drawing comics for Marvel well before Blizzard went all in on that style with Warcraft III. Even still, I can’t help but make the comparison, especially when the angels and demons look like they’d be right at home in a Diablo game.

“Reaping hordes of angels. Trust me, they had it coming!”

While I’m at it, I don’t mention sound nearly enough in these impressions, but I liked the soundtrack too. It’s the kind of dark, epic, often atmospheric, orchestral stuff you might imagine, but it’s really well executed. The voice work is quite good as well, with a stacked cast including Mark Hamill, and some standout performances.

You play War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, summoned to present-day Earth to disrupt the Endwar between the angels and the demons that has seemingly just kicked off. It turns out that the 7th seal hadn’t actually been broken yet, however, so the horsemen shouldn’t have been summoned, not even one of them. The Charred Council, which is some sort of a powerful neutral party, and who the horsemen serve, bring War before them for punishment. He’s stripped of some of his powers, paired up with The Watcher, an annoying shitheel tasked with keeping him on a short leash, and reluctantly allowed to return to a now ravaged earth to figure out what happened and clear his name. Is it still a little edgy? Sure, though it (appropriately) feels more like something from a comic book than bad fan fiction, and I think it works just fine.

“I used War’s ability to turn into this massive fiery Balrog looking thing constantly.”

War is a dark, brooding tank of a man (err, Nephilim) who doesn’t say a whole lot, yet still devotes a significant percentage of the things he does say to badass quips. He manages to come across as fairly intelligent, despite constantly being manipulated by literally every faction in the game. Luckily he gets to prove his intelligence by solving a huge amount of ridiculous puzzles.

This is where the Zelda comparisons come from; beyond a steady progression of new abilities and item unlocks being used to gate access to certain areas, plus lots of fun chests to find, there’s also quite a lot of 3D platformer style puzzles not unlike those found in Ocarina of Time and later Zelda games. The world is mostly open, though it is also similarly chopped up into connected overworld zones, interior and connecting areas, and dungeons. At first I thought the comparison was a bit of an exaggeration, but as the game goes on the more prevalent these elements become. Personally, I find these kinds of puzzles a little tedious at times, but here they’re easy enough that I never had to resort to a walkthrough, yet I occasionally felt like kind of a genius when I figured one out, which I think is precisely the balance you want to hit with this type of thing.

“Some of the boss fights also have a God of War vibe.”

The other game I’d compare Darksiders to is the original God of War series. There’s plenty of combat in Darksiders, and it’s mostly of the slightly loose, button-mashy, hack and slashy ilk I attribute to that series. Also like that series, there are more complex combos and advanced moves too, but you don’t really need much technical proficiency to make it through the game, not even against the numerous bosses. Good thing for me, as it never fully clicked with me to the point that I felt like I was mastering it. Skill issue? Probably! It was still fun enough, though. Oh, and there’s also colored floaty orbs to grab after killing enemies too. That said, apart from the execution moves and a couple of other very simple button prompts here and there, there’s nothing really like the full-on QTE scenes found in the God of War games. Still, the more I think about it, the more apt I think that comparison is, even beyond mechanics. Tonally, War’s adventures and interactions with the larger than life world around him remind me a lot of Kratos’s.

Movement and control feels good, but not quite where I’d want it. I suffered a lot of darkflight mishaps early in the game, and I think falling into lava or other deadly out of bounds areas probably killed me more than anything else. Also, while your horse Ruin was no doubt really damn cool, it often felt a little clunky to control.

“Mirror me for an effective Abyssal Armor fit check.”

Traveling between areas could be better too. The main form of fast travel is via “Serpent Holes” which don’t bring you directly to a different area, but instead to weird little connecting zones. I don’t know if there’s some technical reason for this, like the game doing some asset loading in the background or something, but these areas feel kind of pointless. The fact that you can only fast travel from specific places also means you’ll need to backtrack a lot, especially when coming back out of a dungeon, which is particularly annoying if you intend to go back and track down some of the collection achievements. One re-visit to multiple old areas is mandatory for story progress reasons, but I also completed War’s Abyssal Armor. I actually only lacked a couple of artifacts and some weapon upgrades to complete everything else, but I decided that would be way too much of a chore. Perhaps if there was an easier way to browse the local map, if items were depicted more accurately on the local map, and if the connection points between areas on the local map were labeled, I might have been more open to the prospect.

“Welcome to Fishing with War!”

There were a few more frustrations here and there, like some bullshit insta-death moments (fucking sandworms!) but I mostly found myself enjoying my time with the game, especially as I got more and more comfortable with it, and by the end I was a little sad to be done with it. Also, something I don’t find myself saying a lot, is that the ending was actually quite cool and inspired me to immediately install Darksiders II once the credits were done rolling. Of course, realistically it’ll be quite a while before I get around to playing it, but the fact that I’m now confident that I will be playing it hopefully says a lot.

Fun facts: I practically never used “vessels” and I somehow almost immediately forgot that I could summon The Watcher on demand, so I missed out on all his extra snarky dialog and unhelpful hints.