Let's Play System Shock 2, Part 2

Fun with exploding robots and our new friend Mr. Shotgun.

Let's Play Dust: An Elysian Tail, Part 4

We navigate some very treacherous caves and fight a water goddess to save the village of Mudpot. All in a day's work.

 

Let's Play System Shock 2, Part 1

A tragically overlooked game, and, in my opinion, the greatest survivor horror game of all time.

Don't forget to watch in HD!


A brief overview of starting character customization and in-game skills in general

As the game begins, you're given a choice between three military branches: The Marines, the Navy, and the OSA, aka psychic black-ops.  The last of the three sounds the most awesome, certainly, but each one is worth considering in its own right as they all have very distinct play styles.

The Marines are primarily focused on weapons training.  They start with one tier in Standard weapons, learn how to repair and maintain weapons, and, depending on your choices, you can even start the game with a grenade launcher or a laser pistol.  If you want to make the game play as closely to a standard FPS as possible, this is the path for you.

The Navy, on the other hand, focuses more on the technical side of things.  While they also start with one tier in Standard weapons, their starting skill choices include hacking various computers and security devices (very handy), repairing and modifying weapons, and even researching enemies to discover their weaknesses.  If you like a more technical approach to things, apply to be a sailor.

The OSA's main focus is on developing and using psionic abilities.  These more or less function as this game's "magic", enabling you to do all sorts of fun stuff you wouldn't be able to normally.  Launching ice and fire from your hands, becoming invisible, removing your mental safeguards to make yourself inhumanly strong temporarily, and so forth.  OSA characters start out with the first two psychic power tiers unlocked by default, as well as a few first-tier powers available for immediate use.  The downside is that they aren't nearly as well trained in any other aspect - they don't even have Standard weapons start out with, and no real technical skills to speak either (unless you pick the option in the second choice that gives you a point of Research).  Still, having the second tier unlocked right away does give you a significant head-start over the other two branches, as it costs a whopping 26 Cyber Modules just to enable it for use on the other two paths. So if you like the idea of using crazy superpowers and don't mind being poorly equipped and barely trained in the early stages, the OSA can be very fun and rewarding.

Mods used:

SS2Tool - Patches the game to run much more smoothly on Windows XP and above (and enable mods).

Anomalies, Discrepancies, and Outright Bugs (Beta 0.3.0) - Fixes a few design flaws in the game, as well as making a handful of minor tweaks to weapons and armor to better balance the gameplay.

SHTUP Beta 6 - Cosmetic, replaces many textures with higher-res versions to give the graphics a cleaner look.

Arcaniac Graphics Pack Reduxed - Cosmetic, replaces most of the character models with nicer looking versions.

Rebirth 02 - Cosmetic, replaces several enemy models with nicer looking versions.

SHMUP - Cosmetic, replaces the stock music tracks with higher quality versions.

Let's Play Dust: An Elysian Tail, Part 3

We venture into the caves beneath Aurora Village and find a second village in peril.  Also, more side quests.

Let's Play One-Shots: Manos: The Hands of Fate

Your "average Joe" has never seen a game like today's experiment. Your "average" person on the street has not even begun to conceptualize the horror which is your Let's Play today, Mr. "Joel Average". I give to you: Manos: the Hands of Fate!

 Brought to us by Freakzone Games and based on the infamous zero-budget 60s horror film, Manos is a simplistic, but enjoyable budget-priced platformer with a lot of references to old, cheesy B-movies. See if you can count them all!

Let's Play Dust: An Elysian Tail, Part 2

We face our first boss and get a bit of the story going.  Mostly though, we're interested in side quests.

Let's Play One-Shot - Noitu Love 2: Devolution

A game I've been meaning to get recorded for ages but only recently had success with thanks to the excellent screen capture program Bandicam.  Fraps isn't usable due to the fact that the game doesn't use DirectDraw, and every other screen recorder I tried was various flavors of completely terrible.

Anyhow, this is a really fun action title from Konjak, and more than a little reminiscent of classic Treasure titles like Gunstar Heroes and Alien Soldier.  It's fast paced, over the top, and it has multiple playable characters which gives it some pretty decent replay value.  Well worth the $5 asking price on Steam.

Let's Play Dust: An Elysian Tail, Part 1

It's a brilliant Metroidvania adventure with amazing visuals and a great story, and it was my favorite game of 2012 to boot, so why not start off 2013 by doing a Let's Play of it.





Be sure to watch in 1080p!

Let's Play One-Shots: Jack in the Dark

You've probably at least heard of Alone in the Dark, arguably the grandfather of survival horror games.  So what is Jack in the Dark?

In a nutshell, Jack in the Dark was a demo for Alone in the Dark 2, available as a standalone floppy disk release and as a bonus with the CD version of the first game.  Its main purpose was to showcase the improvements in the engine, from the simplified interface to the fact that the run command actually works better now (no more tricky timing on where and when you have to double-tap the arrow key).

While Jack in the Dark is very short and unrelated to the rest of the series plotwise, it does have a few in-jokes pertaining to the second game.  Grace Saunders is the secondary protagonist in Alone in the Dark 2, and the villainous jack-in-the-box in this game strongly resembles that game's villain, One-Eyed Jack. They both confusingly also try to fit in a Christmas theme for no particular reason.