5 – Dark Messiah of Might & Magic

Fairly early on in the game, a ghoul steals an important artifact, and to catch him you’ve got to do a poor man’s parkour across rooftops, through windows, and across rickety scaffolding to catch it. While the ghoul is climbing walls and leaping twenty feet through the air, you need to resort to climbing ladders and leaping two foot gaps between wooden planks. Being forced to take a far more circuitous route and leap before you look makes the chase frantic, and I personally plunged to my death at least a half dozen times. But once you learn the route you need to take and are racing along, the chase is indeed exhilirating.

Watch the Ghoul Chase from Dark Messiah of Might & Magic

4 – Enter the Matrix

I don’t remember very much detail about the gameplay in Enter the Matrix. The game was most notable for its FMV sequences with footage that was filmed at the same time and with the same actors that were in Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions. But once part that I remember quite well is being chased by an agent early in the game. If you remember the opening scene in the first Matrix movie, Trinity was in a frenzied flight from an agent. The sequence from the game captured that feeling perfectly – you’ve got to run as fast as you can, and you have absolutely no chance to look back. If you look behind you, you die. It’s the most frantic chase scene in any game I’ve ever played.

3 – Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

Overall, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was a frustrating game. A bug prevented me from even completing it. But the first real action in the game, before you have any weapons, is a scene where you’re running from townsfolk who want to kill you. You’re staying in an inn, and you’ve locked your door, but you’ve only got a few seconds before the townies break it down. You move to the adjacent room and push a bookcase in front of the door to block it, then start working on opening the window to get out. This is the beginning of an insane chase that constitutes the only really well crafted part of this game. Very memorable.

Watch the Call of Cthulhu chase

2 – Gravity Bone

It’s very possible that you’ve never heard of Gravity Bone. It’s not an actual commercially available full game. It’s a short, free, downloadable game that I’ve featured on Free Game Friday. But it’s one of the best Free Game Friday games I’ve ever covered. If it were a full game, I’d buy it in a minute. The first level is a 2-minute romp. The second is fun but not phenomenal… until the end. The twist is brilliant and unexpected, and leads to an amazing chase with an equally unexpected ending. I loved it. You can link to the video below, or better yet – download and play the game.

Watch the Gravity Bone chase (skip to 3:30)

1 – Beyond Good and Evil

I’m sure that the people of Lungfishopolis wish by now that I’d shut up about Beyond Good and Evil. I try to keep my raving to a minimum, but when I thought of chases in games, this is simply the best. The cinematic chase near the end of Beyond Good and Evil breaks the rules of the game by changing the camera angle multiple times and intercutting slow-motion mini-cut-scenes in a way that results in a beautiful foot chase. At one point, you’re actually running directly towards the camera, which seems odd until you realize that in that point of the chase, dodging projectiles thrown by your pursuers is more important than dodging upcoming obstacles.

Watch the chase from Beyond Good and Evil

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

When game developers design games based on movies, they’re nearly always train wrecks. The only movie-based games I can think of that were better games than E.T. for the Atari 2600 are The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and the recently released Ghostbusters game. Aside from that, there’s Enter The Matrix.

When I was writing a list a few months back of five poorly rated games that I enjoyed, Enter the Matrix was one of the first games that came to mind. Aside from the apparent existance of magic, the second Matrix movie wasn’t as terrible as a lot of people make it out to be. It certainly had some amazing action sequences. Playing a video game that tied in so neatly with that movie was a lot of fun, and the movie footage that you could view only by playing the game added quite a lot of value.

I’ve still got my copy of Enter the Matrix, and I like to think that maybe some day I’ll go back and replay it. I’ll leave you with my favorite video clip from the game. Enjoy.

Video game reviews are big business now. And while I really didn’t want to get into the games review business when I started Lungfishopolis, I feel a need to bring peoples’ attention to a few games which got a lot of terrible reviews, but which I found to be very good games. I’ve played all but one of them more than once, and I’ll likely go back and play most of them again. I’m silly like that.

Firstly, Enter the Matrix. It got an abysmal Metascore of 58, but I remember liking it. I haven’t replayed it for perspective, and I remember hating many of the driving sequences, but the combat was fun. Running up walls and diving through the air in bullet-time while shooting at enemies, then beating the snot out of them in over-the-top hand to hand is a lot of fun. The hovercraft-piloting segment was just plain stupid and broken, but that was at the very end of the game such that you could completely skip it and miss nothing.

You got to play the role of either Niobe or Ghost, and in a design choice similar to Resident Evil 2, this gave you two separate angles on the same story, adding to replay value. In the car segments, Niobe always drives and Ghost always shoots, so you’re either only shooting or only driving.

By far the best part of the game is the movie footage. They filmed footage for Enter The Matrix at the same time they were filming the second and third Matrix movies, so there’s a ton of movie footage that never appeared in the films. Some of it is pretty damn good. My favorite: the scene where Ballard fights Seraph. It’s great mostly because of the fantastic quote at the end. There was a funny scene where Ghost talks about onanism too.

Another game I really enjoy is Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. PC Gamer panned it for being buggy and repetitive, and 1UP made fun of the kick mechanic and character development. But although I’ll agree that the plotline isn’t exactly inspired and the slutty demon chick is annoying, I liked Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. It has the best FPS swordplay mechanics I’ve seen – definitely better than Oblivion – and some fairly fun stealth gameplay. I actually really enjoyed the oft-maligned kick mechanic, and thought that the exhaustion meter and the fact that more powerful enemies can block a kick limited the kick enough that it was not overly powerful. The kick simply introduces a way to use the environment to your advantage. If there’s not a ledge to kick an enemy off, there may be a spiked wall or a support beam to kick him into.

I enjoyed Dark Messiah’s environments and level design, and really had a lot of fun sniping enemies from a distance with my bow. And somehow, sneaking up behind an orc and stabbing him in the neck or kicking him off a thousand-foot cliff just never gets old. There were some fairly intense chase sequences early in the game which at first annoyed the crap out of me. Somehow, going back through the game a second time, I’m not finding them nearly as bad.

I started replaying the game not long ago, and although I stopped when I started playing Crysis and Mass Effect, I’ll likely go back to it soon. Warning: I’ve heard that the console version of this game is far worse.

Next up, Fallout Tactics. First off, I’ve got to let it be known that I was huge a fan of the original two Fallout titles. The storyline and the open world were fantastic. The turn-based combat was excellent, and the only thing that (to me) could have made it better is to allow the player to control a party of characters, a la Baldur’s Gate. One of the reasons I loved Baldur’s Gate so much was because of the strategic combat. Fallout Tactics allows me that strategic combat that I crave so much.

Yeah – I’ll totally agree that the storyline isn’t nearly up to the standards of the first two games. But this game was largely about gameplay rather than story. I absolutely loved sneaking four of my men into position, having my shotgun guy lie prone and crawl around a corner into the raiders’ hut and blast him point blank, or positioning the guy with the rocket launcher up on a fire escape. Surrounding the enemy before they know you’re there is a lot of fun. And then kneeling behind a barrel or having a firefight through a window or standing in a trench for cover, trying to take out that Deathclaw before it gets close enough to rip your head off – it’s what makes the whole game fun.

I like being able to control an entire squad, and specialize the different members in different skills. Having one member who can drive the vehicles well and make tight turns, and another who can sneak up right under an enemy’s nose, a lockpicker/safecracker, and maybe a sniper. And having someone who’s good with landmines is always useful.

Temple of Elemental Evil, despite its many flaws, was a really fun game. My biggest complaints about it was that the a huge optional ending segment of the game was so buggy that I could never complete it, and that like Throne of Bhaal, the final boss is nearly unbeatable.The critics’ biggest complaints were the bugs and the complexity. There have since been many patches to fix the bugs and to correct the incorrect implementations of rules detected by a horde of D&D fanatics, but I still don’t think 100% of the bugs are gone.

Like Fallout Tactics, the biggest single thing that I liked about this game was the excellent strategic combat. It used 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons rules, implementing rules that many D&D players may not even have been aware of, thus the complaints about complexity. but I loved it. You could wait to delay your initiative, ready your bow so that as soon as any enemy spellcaster started casting a spell you could shoot them to interrupt it, double move, run, charge, cast a counterspell, and perform many other strategic actions. You can even craft magic items using the 3rd Edition D&D ruleset.

I’ll admit that the coolest-looking fight in the game was one of the first, against the giant frogs. Watching them jump out of the swamp and hop up to your party, then snag your wizard with its tongue and swallow him simultaneously sucked and was awesome. You lose a wizard, but hey – at this point you’re first level and you can go roll up another one. Besides, didn’t that look freaking cool when he got… digested?

Once you’re in the temple, the game lets you pit temple factions against each other and play up the intrigue and politics, but I generally just run through killing everything. And yes, I’ve replayed this game, and added all the Circle of Eight patches. There’s actually a lot of really good user-generated content too. Now that I’ve got a 3.0ghz dual core machine, I’ll probably go back at some point and see if the game plays any better.

The final game on my list is Thief: Deadly Shadows. Although it generally seems to be considered the least of the three Thief titles, it’s the only one I’ve truly loved. I’m playing it now, and loving it.

Amongst stealth games, it’s in my top five, alongside titles like Beyond Good and Evil and Tenchu: Stealth Assassins. Worth a play if you’ve never tried it.