I've put this page up to house some of my old Steam reviews, and some jabber about other stuff I've enjoyed enough to have an opinion on! I'm gonna begin with a review of the truly excellent "Star Traders" - actually it's more of a stupid little song, but people seemed to find it funny! It's not that helpful as a review, but if you've played the game, and have watched old Southpark episodes, then you might find it amusing!
Star Traders: Frontiers
Star Traders: Frontiers is a space RPG from a development duo called the Trese Brothers (they are actual brothers!). You've got a massive open universe, plenty of written narrative, adventure, and lore. You command one upgradable (or replaceable) spaceship with a trainable crew of officers and crew in an evolving galaxy torn by strife, political intrigue, and alien threats! It was the crew combat that amused me though - the way the two sides square off against each-other, and the jilted way that they move: it reminded me of the Southpark episode mocking Russell Crowe!
So here it is, my non-review!
🎶"The good-ship Tugger, and Captain Russell Crowe... fighting 'round the 'verse🎶 we go!"
What's that Tugger?? A Princess from one of the noble houses has been framed for a horrific act of separatist violence?? Grab me' breath fresheners!! We're foighting our way into the detention centre!!!
🎶"Making contacts, righting wrongs, and foighting 'round the 'verse!"🎶
What's that Tugger?? You've sustained catastrophic hull damage, 17 of the crew are badly injured and are close to mutiny!! Hold me back First-Mate Mr T,
I feel a foight comin' on!!
🎶"Making contacts, fixin' fings, and foighting 'round the 'verse!"🎶
What's that Tuugggger??? I've forgotten to purchase (or acquire by nefarious means) the 18 electronic components I need to proceed with the mission!! ...STREWTH...!! Oi think oi've suffered a BRAAAAIN aneurysm!!
🎶"Making contacts, forgettin' fings, and foighting 'round the 'verse!"🎶
What's that Electronics Officer Freddy Mercury?? The doctor's failed her save versus Auto Immune Deficiency SYNDROME??!! Hold me back Mr T, oi fink me' shirts gonna come orf!!
🎶"Making contacts, failing saves, and foighting 'round the 'verse!"🎶
What's that Quartermaster Harkonnen, morale is low??!! You best look away NOW "Beast Rabban", or oi'm gonna stick my foot RIIIGHT up your Kwisatz Haderach!
🎶"Making contacts, the spice must flow... aaand...🎶
foightin' 'round the 'verse we GOoo...!!"
Utter gibberish!
Creativerse!
This is one of the good Minecraft clones, I enjoyed playing it immensely. There are many good reviews to choose from, so instead let me tell you of a tale of narrowly avoided tragedy! It all began just as i was finishing my first proper building project - a nice, two-story stone-and-timber farm-house (with a loft for all my teleporters and machines) it had taken me 6-8 hours.
I was adding the last few touches, when I mistook a mineral water block for a stone block, and that's when catastrophe struck! The block of water began expanding in my loft space, creeping across the floor like a menacing blue blob - I start bailing as quickly as I can with my magic-glove-thing, nada, it just keeps getting worse!
My bald avatar, Picard, is starting to drown!
I swim down towards the wooden floor (which is obviously ruined, glad I didn't fit a carpet) and start digging through it, this proceeds to flood the first floor, then the ground floor as I frantically remove blocks of wood and stone in my attempt to dig through to the foundations (to create a sump for all this water to drain into) - it just keeps flooding - it's like that scene from Fantasia with all the animated mops!
Picard is nearly dead by this stage, only the curative properties of the mineral water is keeping him alive... I swim back up through the lounge, then the drawing room, and back up into the loft - the water has become a perfect column of blue malevolence! But then I see it... the original water-block I placed, perched atop the column!... At this point I also come to the realisation that I care more about this figment-house than my actual real house... Quickly I create a ladder, and start climbing up to reach this bastard of a block, I pluck it out of the air, and watch in joy as the water begins to drain away through the gaping hole in the floor, oh Happy Days!
Moral to the story folks: get flood insurance!
I played the shit out of this during the first covid lockdown, I ended up making a huge "Howl's Moving Castle" with all kinds of turrets, towers, rooms, nooks and crannies, it even had a banquet hall! It didn't move though...
Vagrus - The Riven Realms
Critical fail, critical fail... this is a tale... of critical fail! Unless you have 50+ hours to invest in this game then I wouldn't bother - Vagrus is slow-burn and awkward to get into. The various systems are irritating and difficult to engage with, but like most things worth doing, perseverence is rewarded...
The tutorial is annoying - it is hobbled in ways that will make you hate it. Use it to learn how the game works, then, when you are about to rage-quit (I know that's not a great endorsement!) start the main quest - by that point (if you can tolerate the absolutely awful companion combat system) you should have enough knowledge of the game to attempt a rudimentary life of a Vagrus...
So, you have overcome the 10+ hour "North Face of the Eiger" learning-curve, now you can actually begin to play the game, and believe me it is brilliant!
The artwork, writing, and world-building is stellar - Vagrus doesn't avoid the standard fantasy tropes, but it does do them in a way that somehow feels different to most "game" fantasy - the narrative is dark, and leans into unpleasant themes that due to the current social climate most publishers would not touch with a barge pole for risk of causing offence. There is a lot of exposition, so don't try to digest every word of narrative that is thrown at you, skim it, then move on - eveything you are told is stored in your journal, and these journal entries become more relevant as you expand out into the Riven Realms, and are, in fairness, done in an accessible way. The journal IS the game, you will return time and again to scour entries for information as it becomes prescient to your adventures.
The way it all ties together is astounding, no other game comes close, because no other game is as narrative based as Vagrus; but it doesn't faff - many games give false choices - where it is obvious that you would agree Vagrus doesn't insult you by giving a "choice", it just cracks on - I like that.
I will reiterate how wonky and annoying it can be to play, the various menu's and sub-menus will make your eyes bleed, but they do work once you are familiar with them, and offer such surprising granularity that you will still be discovering features many hours in. As I have already said, the companion combat is hideous - having played 100+ hours I now despise it, there aren't enough expletives in all the languages of the world to convey how grotesque I find its boring, blocky crapness - rock-paper-scissors would have been a better system for combat resolution... but still I suck it up, because the way Vagrus all fits together (as flawed as it is) is wonderfully compelling. You will not find a gaming experience as close to a tabletop RPG as this.
Critical success!
Shout out to all the people who critical failed and died whilst installing this game!
"Vids"
Vids (or Vidz - no-one seems sure!) was a wacky late-night video-review show on Channel 4 that ran as part of 4Later from 1998 to 2001 in the UK - part legitimate review, part sit-com, part sketch show. The premise worked around 2 deadbeat misanthropes (Nige and Stef) running a two-bit video rental store on a crumbling council estate in Glasgow. It was very "Bottom-esque" - crude, witty, stupid, insightful, grubby, subversive, and strangely unique! It was part of the edgy 90s counter-culture programming that was Channel 4's "bread and butter" before many of us Brits had internet access or some form of satellite TV. Vids existed during C4's creative heyday, just before the toxic-grandad of reality TV - Big Brother, came along and displaced almost all other media on the channel for the next decade!
Vids was definitely not for everyone, or probably anyone at all! It was meant to be viewed through steamed-up-nicotine-infused-beer-goggles at 1am after a heavy night on the piss! It doubled-down on the crass "lad culture" that dominated at the time, but took it to such extremes it became parody - a kind of "aggro-nerdiness" that riffed off pub-banter, hooliganism, and all the other common masculine tropes of the time!
Nige and Steff did not give a fuck, they were the degenerate working-class spawn of Thatcher's broken Britain - and that is why I loved them! Vids pre-dated stuff like
Bo Selecta and Trigger Happy TV by a few years, and if they didn't riff off it
then I'm a monkey's uncle!
I've had a bit of a think back, and there really weren't that many options for non-mainstream (especially non-western) movie reviews on British TV at the time. The Little Picture Show with Mariella Frostrup, and "Film" with Barry Norman spring to mind, but outside of a handful of dedicated shows, most reviews were usually done as segments on talk-shows, daytime TV, or other night-time shows like James Whale, or the South Bank Show. Rarely would they touch video-nasties, manga, martial arts films, extreme sports, porn, or any of the other bonkers stuff Vids would cover. It was meant to be the low-brow antithesis of shows like the Late Review on BBC2 - but some of the wordcraft was wonderful, often mixing scatology with philosophy, delivered either laconically by Stef, or fast-paced from Nige's snarling mouth, spittle flying,
like some kind of rabid beat-poet!
Vids was strangely avant-garde in its own weird way - while many of their reviews were just an excuse to take the piss and make jokes about bodily functions, it was interspersed with genuine critical observations, bizarre philosophical musings, name-drops of art-house directors, and political satire - add to that vulgarity so raw that it just ramped up the absurdity to glorious levels! It would spill out onto the street - parts of the review would cut to Nige walking down Glasgow high street, haranguing shoppers with his monologues, or preaching them like a street sermon, inviting cyclists to park their bikes between the cheeks of his arse, and generally being a fucking menace. Trigger Happy TV populised that kind of cringe street-theatre,
but Vids was funnier if you ask me!
I found out about loads of cool stuff that was niche, nerdy or taboo at the time thanks to Vids - not just eastern-anime like Ghost in the Shell, or the numerous martial arts movies they reviewed, but things like parkour, body modification, and obscure foreign films from well outside the western sphere. I mean, we weren't starved for leftfield media in the UK - we'd had access to some of the fringe, non-Hollywood stuff on terrestrial for years! I remember watching Das Boot, Mahabharat, and Monkey on TV in the early 90s - and Britain made some of the finest TV you could hope for, but finding out about anything cool from further east than France was usually the remit of archaeologists, historians, and media-studies students!
Vids kinda pre-empted a niche taken-over years later by amateur critics, creators, and subversives on a fledgling Youtube - raw, irreverent, low budget, and functioning well outside the established media norms of the time. It seems bonkers that many of us went from 4 highly-curated channels, and shitty dial-up internet, to high-speed broadband and 100s of channels over the 3 year run of this show. The tech just steam-rolled out, and late night shows like Vids were supplanted by channel-flicking wank-craft brought about by the sheer amount of choice offered by satellite TV -
well I say choice! Relentless rolling news-reels of 9/11, "HISTORY" - AKA The-WW2-Hitler-Channel, endless MTV music loops, shopping channels, reality TV, JFK and
Area 51 conspiracy shit over-and-over for years! Almost identical to the way youtube has gone nowadays, just with different conspiracies, and different dictators!
It's weird, Vids still seems more recent to me than loads of that channel-hopping bollocks, I think it's because you can usually find some kind of retro video-store in most towns and cities in the UK - so those "VHS" memories still get activated - while all the Satellite TV "culture" has gone the way of the dodo! Also, its amateurish, retro, and offbeat style resonates with what is considered "cool" nowadays, meaning Vids somehow still seems current to me - in a liminal kind of a way...
The show may seem a bit shit to the modern eye, but when you watch one of its reviews, you are watching possibly (and in some cases definitely) the first review of it ever recorded, perhaps anywhere in the world! It's a media time-capsule that's full of retro "easter eggs" for the modern viewer - I have a few movies lined up now that I've rewatched the show - things I'd never heard of, or had faded from memory over the past 25 years. I mean a lot of the stuff reviewed is crap, but that's part of the fun!
I can see most people bouncing off Vids hard - my nostalgia-goggles and working-class Britishness immunises me to its extreme vulgarity and oft-adolescent humour!
I like to watch it drunk at midnight, pretend it's 1999, and that the past two and a half decades have been some kind of rancid fever dream!
Here they are in all their low-definition glory, just as I remember them! Courtesy of Spamjavelin (no relation to Porksword!), and youtube - which unfortunately is one of the corporate-wankosphere's necessary evils! I dislike who owns it, and much of the shit on there, but it also performs as a near-vital archive of media past and present...
Alternatively, here's the 1st series on the Good Old Internet Archive!
It predates all of this, and is still non-profit - maybe there's hope after all!
