Next to play: Heart of Darkness

Game: Heart of Darkness
Release Date: 1998
Platform: Playstation

Conditions: Finish the game on a medium difficulty









What do I expect?
I already know what to expect since I played the game for some 40 minutes after I bought it. And even before that I knew I should expect gruesome death animations and high difficulty. What I didn't expect is to lose my gun (shown on the cover) after the opening 5 minutes of the game. I thought I was done for when my only weapon was eaten by a giant monster after barely surviving an attack by a mob of shadowy creatures. Fortunately there wasn't any combat after that point and I had to evade the enemies through platforming. What really puzzles me is decision by the developer to make the first 2 minutes of the game way more difficult than anything that comes after. I could  almost see angry kids throwing controllers in rage and never progressing beyond that point. The only logical explanation I can think of is they wanted to have a shooting section in the beginning to draw the players in. I don't think it worked out well but let's start from the beginning.

Heart of Darkness is a cinematic platformer by Amazing Studios, supervised by Éric Chahi who is known for Another World. And just like Another World, Heart of Darkness has exceptionally good character animations and beautiful backgrounds. The game has that Oddworld visual style that doesn't age and looks just as good today as it did when it came out. It also reminds me a lot of Mighty Max cartoon. The game doesn't just look cinematic, it also sounds like it. It features a score by film and television composer Bruce Broughton. I'm really looking forward to hearing more of his music in this game since he did the theme for the movie Homeward Bound, which was one of my favorite childhood themes and I still love it. The high difficulty is balanced by unlimited tries. Sometimes it's worth to die just to experience the crazy death animations and the game won't punish you for it. It will just set you a single screen behind. For some reason Heart of Darkness didn't get the greatest critical reception when it came out (it received fairly good scores around 70%) nor it was very successful commercially. Time to delve into this cult classic to find out why.

Game facts

• The development began in 1992. The game was planned for PC, 3DO and later for Sega Saturn. It was finally released in 1998 but only for PC and Playstation
• Final FMV sequence of the game was done in 3D and the game came with a pair of blue/red 3D glasses
• PC version only supported 256 colour VGA graphics while Playstation had 16 million
• Game Boy Advance port was announced 2001 but never came out
• Over 30 minutes of FMVs
• Main character has a dog named Whiskey
• The game was rated E for everyone despite having gruesome death animations. Someone wasn't paying attention.

Update / removing one game at a time rule

Haven't updated this blog in a while. Still haven't bean able to beat MKII with a single character. Honestly it felt impossible at times and I was thinking about lowering the difficulty to very easy. But once I played on easy, I was breezing through the enemies without any problem whatsoever and it didn't feel fulfilling at all, it felt like cheating. so I decided to stick with normal mode and in the meantime I learned some juggling combos with my current character Liu Kang and the game suddenly doesn't feel unbeatable.

  Removing rule 2 - one game at a time

When I started this blog I set some basic rules for beating the games. The second rule was one game at a time- I have to finish the game before moving on to the next one. I set this rule because it would allow me to completely focus on one game since besides playing it I also like to research it's development, put it into perspective and see what made the game special at a time it came out etc. Now I decided to remove this rule because of various reasons. In 2014 I have only finished a single game - Mortal Kombat. It took me 7 months to beat it and then I got stuck on it's even more difficult sequel. I get tired of playing MK after 2 games in a row so now I could play something else in the meantime. I also want to play new games along with the old ones and there are times when I feel like playing a specific game or a genre. I'd like to play horror games during the Halloween for example. So removing this restricting rule allows me to do all of these things.

Recent Game Pickups

Even tho I'm kinda stuck on Mortal Kombat II, I couldn't resist buying some more games. These are the titles that were added to my collection in a last couple of months.

Total cost: $13.5

All of these were new, still sealed in plastic. They were on sale in a local game store so I got them really cheap. The Getaway was $4.45 while the other ones were just $2.2 a piece. I remember Aquanox was one of the best looking games when it came out and it was used as a graphic benchmark. The best find among these is Alpha Polaris, a point and click adventure game set on icy Greenland. This game is best experienced if you don't know anything about it.

The Getaway is known for it's accurate recreation of London so they included the map. The other side is a poster. Pretty cool

Used copy for $35. Good condition, complete with the manual. 

An atmospheric psychological horror exclussive for GameCube. I heard it's really good and a must play for any horror fan.

Devil May Cry was $12.5. I would rather get non-platinum version but at least it's new (sealed). Brand new Haunting Ground for $19 was an awesome find. It is a survival horror game, a spiritual successor to Clock Tower series. I've heard it's pretty rare in the US. So rare the price goes up to $100 but here in Europe it's much cheaper. Metal Gear Solid (used but in great condition) was $22.5. It contains a Silent Hill demo disc. Really looking forward to that one since I haven't played any MGS game before.

$45 for the used game and a memory card (shipping price included). Not the best deal but I'm glad I finally got it, especially since I'll play it right after I'm done with MK4 (which might take a while with my snail progress). I guess Mythologies was intended to be a series that could explore every MK character, starting with the most popular one - Sub-Zero. Too bad it was commercial and critical failure so they never made another one. But that won't stop me from playing...

Quake was only $8.5, Heart of Darkness $13 and Koudelka $20.  Quake has always been my favorite game series so I'm really happy I finally got a copy of Quake 1. Heart of Darkness is absolutely gorgeous game. The character animation is so smooth it feels more like watching a well animated cartoon than playing a video game. It's hard to believe the average review score for this game was around 70-75% at a time. I honestly think this game would be a big indie hit if it came out today. Koudelka is pretty unusual JRPG horror. I played the first two hours of it just to see what it's like. So far I liked it even tho combat can be very slow. The voice acting is pretty good (especially for that time) but the dialogue can be cringeworthy at times.

Complete Quake

Funny FAQ

One of the things I decided to do when I started this blog is to build a game collection. Now I feel like the collecting has gotten a bit out of hand, especilly since I'm still stuck at MK II and I have one game at at time rule so I have to finish it before moving on to the next one. It's clear that some time will pass until I get to play the new games. Sometimes I buy a game just because there's a big sale or I see an older title and I'm afraid if I don't get it now, I won't be able to find it new or in such a good condition later. The result is having a lot of games just sitting on the shelf, waiting to be played. I don't really regret getting these but will stop buying new games until I actually beat the ones I already own.

Next to play: Mortal Kombat II

Game: Mortal Kombat II
Release Date: 1994 (1993 original arcade)
Platform: PC (MS-DOS)

Konditions:  Finish the game with every character on medium difficulty with 4 credits available




What do I expect?

I've heard that Mortal Kombat II is widely regarded as the best installment in the series. I expect improvements in every field. Give me higher resolution, better animations, faster gameplay, better UI, more characters, more fatalities (and more stage fatalities) and deeper story. Unfortunately I've also heard the game is incredibly hard and AI is very unfair with it's inhumanly fast throws. I managed to get through Mortal Kombat 1, hopefully I can beat this one too...

It has begun!

Mortal Kombat Finished

Finally beat the game, HALLELUJAH!

Game: Mortal Kombat
Release Date: 1994 (1992 original arcade)
Platform: PC (MS-DOS)
Date Started: April 23, 2014
Date Finished: October 18, 2014

Konditions: Beat the game with every single character on medium difficulty with 4 credits available, no character switching during the game ✓ 
Beat Reptile at the bottom of the pit ✓

When I started this blog I thought things are gonna move fast and my initial plan was to beat one game per week. In the end it took me 6 months (!) to finish Mortal Kombat and that makes it one of the hardest games I ever played. There were times when I thought about quiting and moving on to something else but I didn't give up and managed to beat the game with every single character. In the first post I wrote that I was sure the difficulty options are just placebo. The truth is I was so bad at it that I couldn't tell the difference. The game kicked my ass on both easy and hard.  Now after getting a bit better, I can beat the game on medium but can't get past the pit stage on very hard,

As I first started playing Mortal Kombat, I thought I've seen everything the game has to offer within the first 2 hours (little did I know that I'll be playing it for the next 6 months). Only after some time of learning the game I discovered that there is a surprising amount of depth to it. The amount of moves and combos is larger than it seems at first sight. Graphically the game has aged better than the early 3D fighters but worse than some older 2D fighters with cartoony graphics, say Street Fighter 2. The gameplay still holds up very well. Uppercutting someone into the air or shadow kicking them across the screen feels very satisfying. Fatalities are the icing on the cake. The music and sounds are alright but nothing special. The announcer voice on the other hand is freaking epic. He's definitely up there with Quake 3 and UT announcers. All the characters in the first game are iconic, distinctive and have an unique fighting style (only Scorpion and Sub-Zero share the basic fighting style while having different specials) but they are not perfectly balanced for competitive play. The story is very basic (there is a single text screen) but every character has an introduction and an ending screen that tells his story. The best part of the game has to be the multiplayer which I unfortunately couldn't really experience. Tried to play against a friend but it wasn't fun since he barely remembered the moves while I was playing it actively so he was no match for me. Single player is frustratingly hard at times and most often you will have to fight through stages by abusing game's AI.

+ Interesting characters + Fatalities + Combos

- very hard - bad AI - Reptile isn't playable

5.5/10

Scorpion Wins

Come to me baby

Despite being one of the fan favorites, Scorpion is ranked by mksecrets.net as the worst Mortal Kombat 1 character because of his long recovery time. I didn't have any problems beating the game with him tho, I think I did it on the second or third try. And with Scorpion's victory, I finally finished Mortal Kombat 1!

We meet at last...

A wild Reptile appears!

What happens when you mix yellow with blue? You get green. You get Reptile. The green ninja is a secret character who can use special moves of both Scorpion and Sub-Zero. He has also faster walk speed, which makes him really annoying. I was disappointed to find out he is not a playable character. I sort of expected him to appear in the character selection screen instead of the dragon logo after you beat him but that's not the case. The green ninja will sometimes randomly appear during the game before the match starts and leave some cryptic messages. These are hints on how to find him.

• You must Find me to beat me
• Alone is how to find me 
• TIP EHT FO MOTTOB (bottom of the pit backwards)
• Look to la Luna 
• Blocking will get you Nowhere
• Perfection is the key
• Fatality is the key
• You Cannot Match my Speed
• 10,000,000 Points if you destroy me

Sometimes during the fight on the pit stage you can see siluethes flying in the sky 

("Look to La Luna"). If the siluethes are present, you could get a chance to fight Reptile. The siluethes appear every 6 games or so on a PC but on the actual arcade it's much more rare. To fight Reptile, you have to win both rounds with flawless victory, without using the block button and then perform a fatality.

Note that the health bar says Scorpion for some reason

The secret character Reptile is just a meshup of Sub-Zero and Scorpion in the first game but he will become a playable character in the sequel with his own original set of moves.