Hello there, internet! Welcome to The Ninth Underworld; a place that will provide you, my dear reader, with the quarry of video-game related hootenanny you so desperately need. Come on in, one and all. Do not be afraid, for all is pure and good down here, nestled under an overpass of the information super highway.
That last paragraph was written with the optimism of a small boy writing love letters to his teacher. In fact, I’m confident that these words will never pass the eyes of any other human, besides myself, but I’d be happy for somebody to prove me wrong!
Anyway, I thought the best way to initiate this video-game review blog, would be to illuminate the small portion of the interwebs I currently occupy with the knowledge of my favourite games. Okay, ready? Let’s dive right in with:
Half Life
Predictable. Well, I’ve got no qualms with that statement, because Half Life is well recognised as the granddaddy of all first-person-shooters filling our screens today. Half Life, if we are stretching the metaphor, would probably be sitting in his orthopaedic chair, right now, complaining about how times have changed, and proclaiming how things were much better in his day. And I’d have to agree with him, to an extent. When I first played Half Life (I must have been 12 or so), it was a time where games were strange, exciting, entities, and fighting off an alien invasion, hadn’t become a tired, over-used cliché.
From mauling head crabs with your trusty red crowbar, to scrambling around a giant tentacle monster, desperately trying to find the necessary knobs and dials to decimate it; Half Life had it all, and - at the time - it was downright scary. Ah, nostalgia, how it bestows memories with such a glowing aura , but yet - whenever I play it - the same emotions I had, as the small chap I once was, would surface and I would be returned the sanctity of the perspective of the silent scientist, Gordon Freeman. Surely a hallmark of a great game.
Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn
My first proper RPG. I still have the big old cardboard case, brimming with disks, sitting on my bedroom shelf. This reminds me firstly, that game packaging was way cooler back in the day, and secondly of the hundreds of hours I must have spent on this masterpiece. Emblazoned on the front of the box is a quote from PCZone: “A MUST FOR ALL RPG FANS”. If these words had been heeded throughout the years, I’m adamantly sure there gamers all over the world would be enriched from the experience.
It’s depressing, the number of times I’ve asked a fellow gamer if they have ever played Baldur’s Gate 2, and the answer is either a resounding “no”, or - even worse - a clueless, “what’s that?”. I think the last time I picked up and completed BG2 was just over a year ago, and the experience was just as enjoyable as the first time I tottered unwittingly into the engrossing, and inspiring world that Bioware had lovingly crafted. It is not just the sheer size and depth of the game-world that makes BG2 magical to me. Each character has a unique personality, and friendships seem meaningful and plausible; the story is epic, with you traversing through entire continents, a magical detention fortress for deviant mages, and even to Hell itself.
I could spend the rest of this article singing BG2’s praises, but I won’t, for all our sake’s. I will, however, demand that anybody reading this, who has not played it, buy it now, and play it immediately.
Grim Fandango
I’ve just finished replaying this game, and I think I can safely say that Grim Fandango has to be my most favouritist game ever. It is also where I got the name for this blog. If you haven’t played the game (you damned fool, you), GF is set in The Land of the Dead, which is where - in Mexican belief - the souls of the deceased make their treacherous three-year journey to the gates of the Ninth Underworld, where then it will be decided whether they are morally fit to enter.
You slip into the robes of Manny Calavera, a quick-tongued, skeletal, rascal who has to pay off a moral-debt, for bad deeds done in life, by working as a Reaper for the Department of Death. Reapers are effectively glorified travel agents, able to sell better packages to the Ninth Underworld to the more deserving souls they are assigned to reap. Unfortunately for Manny, the only clients he receives are amoral no-good-nicks, so it will be an eternity before he settles his debt, but why? There is corruption afoot, and Manny Calavera is about to get caught up in it.
This is about as revealing as a blurb, because I’m unwilling to divulge any more of the plot, as I think, for anybody who has not played the game, it is something that needs to be experienced first-hand. It seems such a shame that GF was LucasArts final adventure game; it seems they perfected their craft with this gem.
Visually, The Land of the Dead is intricate and interesting, heavily influenced by 1930s Art Deco. Combined with a film noir plot, a cast of fully-fledged characters equipped with hilarious lines of dialogue, and a groovy, orchestral soundtrack, the game world is stylish, and charming.
How the game sold so poorly is baffling. Grim Fandango is, in my eyes, the perfect game, and any adjective I’ve used does not exaggerate my love for it. Probably why I devoted so much time for it here.
EVE-Online
Ah, EVE-Online. I’ve played countless MMORPGs in my time (from EQ1 to WoW, and many more in between), but EVE is the only one I find myself unwilling to resist re-subscribing to. Set in space, you are a capsule pilot (pretty much a bloke, or lass, submerged in gelatinous fluids, within a pod), with no clear goal. The first time you float, warily, into space, you’ll be overloaded with information, scared stiff by the immeasurably larger ships floating past you, but at the same time in awe of the supreme scale of the game.
This article is far too small to even begin to explain the countless options, opportunities and excitement that EVE can inundate you with, and I’m wasting more of it now. Put it this way; this is a game where you can choose to roam low-security space, as a pirate (yes, a pirate, a space-pirate!) looking for expensive ships to blow up, purely for the thrill of the fight, and the sadistic joy of ruining someone’s day.
And believe me, day’s can be ruined. EVE is not a namby-pamby MMO; when you die you do not respawn in a graveyard, tasked with the small discomfort of running back to your corpse, you really feel it. Imagine having just spent all of your hard earned ISK (in-game currency), on a super-shiny battleship, equipped with the latest Tech II gear, and then passing, innocuously, through a low-security system, only to be instantly warp-jammed, and destroyed by a band of marauding pirates, losing everything you worked so hard for in seconds. In fact, I think that is exactly what happened before I quit EVE the last time.
Damnit, I tried to repress that memory. Back to therapy I go.
So, what are your all-time favourite games, which titles trigger your nostalgia gland into overload? I would love to hear of any obscure games that I haven't played, so hit me!
NSB95X2P2MXR
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