Hi there.

Once hyped as an exciting new chapter of the Star Wars canon, with input from the grand high beard himself, now officially relegated to ‘never happened, sorry’, today’s game is Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

(Not to dazzle you with thrilling ‘behind the curtain’ insight, but I had a more old school title, and something of a personal white whale, lined up for the next review, but, uh, it’s probably going to be a while. It *will* happen though. That’s the FFG guarantee.)

Soundtracks is where we take a look back at the use of licensed music in games. Go here if you want to know more.

Hello and welcome to Soundtracks, a series that is likely to be ending soon.

For a finale, let’s do some more racing games: why not? Specifically, all of the Need for Speed games that have some good tunes but not quite enough for me to be able to write an individual piece about them. Need for Speed: Underground and, especially, Need for Speed: Carbon might not be the best games in the series, but I’d argue that their soundtracks are the most memorable.

So what do we have left? A mopping-up exercise involving the best of the rest, in my completely subjective opinion? Or a bloody great compilation showstopper to send this series off with a bang? [The first one – Ed.]
 

Need for Speed: Underground 2

Need for Speed: Underground 2 has more *stuff* in it than the first game, and is probably a marginally better game overall. But it also has adverts for Burger King and Campbell’s Soup, as well as a less enjoyable selection of songs. I don’t want to hear an Australian rock band’s cover version of Black Betty, which also featured on the soundtrack to the 2004 film Without a Paddle (starring Matthew Lillard, Seth Green *and* Dax Shepard), ever again, thank you.
 
Soundtracks: Need for Speed Special continued »

Hi there.

We’ve got some 90s karting action for you today, plus a bonus feature on its slightly nightmarish music. The game is called Manic Karts.

[What did we talk about with these intros, Rik? – Ed.]

Ah, ok. Also – how are you? Did you have a good summer? September already, huh? What about all of those troubling domestic and world events? I’m fine, yeah. Can’t complain, can’t complain.

[Great stuff – Ed.]

Hi there.

We’re heading to the newer end of our normal reviewing territory today (so about 10-ish years ago), although there are plenty of echoes of older games here, in Wadjet Eye’s sci-fi adventure, Gemini Rue.

Hello and welcome to the latest Discussion: [indie game] (spoilers!), a series which, I’ve just decided, needs no further explanation in the introduction. I’m sure you can work it out, readers, even if you’re new around here.

Today’s game is Telling Lies, a spiritual sequel (of sorts) to the subject of our very first indie discussion, Her Story. Developed by Sam Barlow, in partnership with Furious Bee, and published by Annapurna Interactive in 2019, Telling Lies is, like Her Story, a game in which you conduct an investigation by searching through video clips.

Here’s a brief trailer:

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that we both liked the game, and would recommend it.

Otherwise, though, if you haven’t already played Telling Lies but are sufficiently intrigued by the trailer to want to do so, you should probably leave before the discussion starts and we talk about what happens at almost every stage of it. (Also, be warned: there’s a couple of spoilers for Her Story in there too).

Ok? Here’s the ***FINAL SPOILER KLAXON***!
 
Discussion: Telling Lies (spoilers!) continued »

Soundtracks is where we take a look back at the use of licensed music in games. Go here if you want to know more.

Welcome! If you thought the premise of this feature started off thin and has only got thinner since, get ready for the barrel to be scraped. By which I mean, in celebration of the likely near end of this series, we’re going out with a bang with a couple of specials.

This time, we’ve got a double-feature, covering the racing games Juiced and Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights, two of the sexiest/sexist-est racers of the mid-00s. (No, of course the two games being together in one piece isn’t just because I don’t know enough about the songs on either – weren’t you listening? This is a double-whammy, a super-extra-special feature!)
 

Juiced

To be fair, while the first game was the subject of a notoriously abhorrent TV ad, its content was comparatively inoffensive by 00s standards. And it was a fairly good racer, if you ignored the ludicrous and punishing auto-save feature that most sane gamers would use a workaround for.
 
Soundtracks: Juiced/Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights continued »

Happy Friday everyone.

For some reason, I decided it was time to play MegaRace 2. As is customary, here follows a summary of my thoughts.

Hi all.

There’s a new Jurassic Park film out at the moment (or are these new ones technically Jurassic World films?)

After re-watching the old movies I was in the mood to give Telltale’s 2011 game a go too.

So, that’s today’s review. [We really must have a meeting about these review intros – Ed.]

Soundtracks is where we take a look back at the use of licensed music in games. Go here if you want to know more.

Hello and welcome to Soundtracks. Today’s game is Burnout Paradise, a 2008 racer from Criterion that lots of people seem to like but which we found to be competent, but slightly clinical and unengaging, as these things go.

As an EA game, it does of course come with a lavish budget for a licensed soundtrack, including a theme tune of sorts, with Paradise City by Guns N’ Roses pumped into your ears at every available opportunity, accompanied at the outset by the inane utterances of in-game DJ, Atomika.

We’ll get to that, but in general the soundtrack here doesn’t quite have the same impact as in some of the previous racing games we’ve covered. It’s all much less ‘in your face’ than mid-00s Need for Speed, although perhaps that’s appropriate for a game that has no street racing angle and takes a more straightforward ‘race around in sunshine-land’ approach.

Soundtracks: Burnout Paradise continued »

I was all ready to click ‘Buy’ on the new ‘Enhanced’ edition of Blade Runner… until the reports of those who were keener and quicker to do so put me off.

To be honest I’d sort of forgotten about it – the last time we wrote about Blade Runner here it was to note that after many years of work by fans the game was finally playable in ScummVM, followed by a confident prediction by FFG’s top news-hound that an actual commercial re-release remained unlikely.

Which was wrong, as it turned out, and since December 2019 gamers have been happily able to purchase the ScummVM, fan-restored, Blade Runner from GOG. Talk of a remastered/enhanced edition soon followed in 2020, but after a muted reaction to sample video footage, the release date was pushed and things went rather quiet.

It’s not just fans who are disappointed with the enhanced edition – those in the games press with fond memories of the original have been quick to highlight their disappointment. The headlines sort of speak for themselves: RPS have gone with ‘The Blade Runner game’s new remaster looks worse’, while PC Gamer have plumped for ‘Blade Runner Enhanced Edition is a disaster, not a remaster’.

The new release has been handled by Nightdive Studios, who have a decent reputation for being specialists when it comes to this sort of thing, having produced, among other things, an enhanced edition of System Shock that seemed to meet with my friend and colleague’s approval.

NB: This capture is of the original, from my dusty archives…

Reading between the lines it sounds as if they found that there wasn’t a lot they could actually do to ‘enhance’ Blade Runner beyond what the ScummVM version team had already achieved, except that they couldn’t actually use or build on any of that work because they wanted to release the new edition on console as well, and that comes with a lot of additional rules.

It’s possible I might still take a look at the Enhanced Edition, especially as GOG will give you 50% off if you already bought the ScummVM release from them, although the consensus seems to be pretty clear that it’s not worth it. And, unfortunately, the only way you can now legally own the ScummVM edition is to buy the new version, with the two now bundled together on both GOG and Steam.

That’s the kind of thing that sticks in the craw, especially for those who put in their own time in order to get the game up and running in ScummVM only to now see it sidelined by an inferior commercial product.

It’s probably just a sign of old age, but beyond giving publishers a license to delete and then re-release old games on different generations of console, I’m not entirely sure of the point of remastered titles.

And when it comes to genuine oldies like this one, it seems like a few technical or visual tweaks are hardly going to win over people that would never be interested in the game in the first place, while the rest… maybe just want the old game to be available and functional on a modern OS?

UPDATE [01/07]: GOG have now restored the original ScummVM version to their store, although the previous arrangement of getting both versions for the same price also remains.