Gothic Remake Playable Teaser - Feedback and Review

In a surprise news release that seemingly no one saw coming, THQ Nordic announced that they're looking to remake the original Gothic, and released a lengthy demo (or as they call it, a "playable teaser") as proof of concept, available for free on Steam to anyone who owns any of Piranha Bytes' games on Steam. This news follows seven months after THQ Nordic acquired Piranha Bytes, the small German studio responsible for the original Gothic trilogy, making them and all of their IPs official subsidiaries of THQ Nordic. The remake, however, is not being designed by Piranha Bytes, as they're presumably busy working on Elex 2 -- rather, it's being handled by THQ's Barcelona studio. The demo opens with a few slides of text from the designers stating that they're huge fans of Gothic and wanted to revamp some of its clunkier, more out-dated designs while "maintaining and strengthening" the "amazing atmosphere" of the original game, but rather than simply doing a straight one-to-one remaster, they wanted to treat the project like more of a re-imagining, adding a bunch of new content and expanding on existing ideas while putting their own unique twist on what they consider to be a "legendary game." The purpose of the demo is to showcase early ideas they're working with and to gain feedback from fans about the direction they're going with the remake -- upon completing the demo, it actually links to a survey where you can fill out responses and grade them on their efforts.

In essence, this development process feels like a more open form of Early Access and will hopefully provide the Barcelona studio the opportunity to shape the remake into something that will live up to the great legacy of Gothic, and which will satisfy fans of the original game while also introducing it to a new audience. While the demo showcases some promising new ideas, and I'm absolutely ecstatic for the opportunity to play a brand new Gothic game heavily-inspired by the original, the current version of the demo isn't really what I would want out of a Gothic remake, or even a re-imagining. Supposedly they're still very early in the alpha stages of development and nothing is set in stone -- a full release isn't even a guarantee at this point -- but early impressions suggest to me that, although they may have a lot of love and respect for Gothic, it seems like they don't fully understand what it was that made Gothic so unique and special in the first place, because there are a lot of design elements that seem to go directly against the core design philosophies of Gothic and which make it hard for this demo to truly feel like Gothic.

Metroid: Samus Returns - Classic 2D Gameplay with a Modern Finish

Metroid is one of Nintendo's most iconic and long-running series, though its releases have been somewhat sporadic over the decades, with frequent gaps between major installments and with development largely being handed over to studios outside of Nintendo, starting in 2002 with Retro Studios taking the reigns for the Prime trilogy, Team Ninja handling Other M in 2012, and now MercurySteam (known for their Castlevania: Lords of Shadow games) developing Metroid: Samus Returns, a 2017 remake of 1991's Metroid 2: Return of Samus. Starring the usual series protagonist Samus Aran, Galactic Federation bounty hunter, Metroid 2 takes place after the events of the first game, and sends you to the metroid homeworld, planet SR388 to wipe out the rest of the metroids. With that simple premise, Samus Returns plays like any typical Metroid game, where you explore a series of complexly-interconnected levels while gaining assorted power-ups that grant access to new upgrades and new areas, in addition to opening up new gameplay possibilities, all in the form of a two-dimensional puzzle-platform-shooter.

Risen - Review | A 10-Year Retrospective

Risen is a fantasy-themed open-world action-RPG by Piranha Bytes, a small German studio who were previously responsible for the first three Gothic games -- the first two of which are some of the best RPGs of all time. Following the colossal mess that was Gothic 3, Piranha Bytes split from their publisher, JoWood, who retained the rights to the Gothic name, thus forcing Piranha Bytes to create a new series which would serve as a spiritual successor to their beloved Gothic series. As such, Risen sticks pretty closely to the formula set up by Gothic 1 and 2, so if you're at all familiar with those games then you should know pretty much exactly what to expect with Risen.

Link's Awakening: A 25+ Year Retrospective

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was originally released in 1993, and I vividly remember playing Link's Awakening on that bulky, unlit, green-screened Game Boy while sitting in church and on long car rides as a young boy. It's probably safe to say that it was one of my favorite games in my early childhood, and I was overjoyed when it was re-released on the Game Boy Color a few years later with extra content. With the 2019 remake for the Nintendo Switch coming out, I figured it was time to go back and re-examine a classic that I used to love so much as a kid, and see how well it holds up 25+ years later.

As it turns out, Link's Awakening is still really good. Surprisingly good, actually, considering it's one of the oldest games in the series on one of the most primitive Nintendo devices. The only thing really holding it back is the sheer limitations of the Game Boy, only being able to render a very small resolution and only having two buttons to work with; otherwise, the actual game designs feel timelessly classic, which makes sense seeing as later games in the series seem to have taken a strong influence from Link's Awakening. Its impact on the series is especially noteworthy considering it originated a lot of elements that have now become Zelda staples, like playing songs on the ocarina for various effects, trading sequences, collectibles that lead to extra rewards, fishing, owl and companion characters, and more. It is, as far as I'm concerned, a quintessential Zelda game and ranks among the series' best, easily making my top five, and maybe even having a case for top three.

Gothic 3 Sucks -- A Critique From a Longtime Gothic Fan (Updated Ver 1.1)

Note: This article was originally published in January 2018, but has since been updated with extra content, including a full video review.

Gothic and Gothic 2 are two of my favorite games of all time, being two of the games that had the most influence on my young and developing mind when I first played them in the early 2000s. And yet I harbor virtually no love for Gothic 3. I've barely mentioned it in any of my Gothic articles because I don't even like to consider it part of the series; it doesn't connect to Gothic 2 very well, and the whole gameplay formula is a radical departure from what made Gothic and Gothic 2 so great. Even though it was made by the same developer, Piranha Bytes, Gothic 3 feels like a different game by a different group of people who had only a vague understanding of what the Gothic games were, and who were told to make everything "bigger and more epic" in order to compete with the likes of Morrowind and Oblivion. Spoiler alert: they failed miserably.

Gothic 3 is a classic case of a game being ruined by ambition, of a developer trying to reach beyond their own means and biting off more than they could chew. The game, besides being unfinished and under-developed, was a buggy mess upon its release, and it took years of fan-made patches to supposedly "fix" the game and make it functional. The community patch is now almost one-third the file size of the base game, and contains numerous bug fixes and stability tweaks, and also attempts to completely redesign and rebalance the combat system. I played the game at launch (late 2006) before the community patch even existed, and again a few years later with it, and while the patch truly does a lot to improve the game's overall playability, it doesn't (and simply cannot) fix the core gameplay design and story problems, which are the real reasons Gothic 3 sucks -- not just the bugs and broken combat that the patch supposedly fixes.

Normally I'd be content to dismiss the issue and move on with life (the game's over a decade old, after all, and I haven't even played it in about eight or nine years), but I find it surprising that, even today, people still speak highly of Gothic 3. With the recent release of Elex, newcomers to Piranha Bytes games frequently ask about their previous games and which ones are worth playing, and people readily leap to defend (or even recommend) Gothic 3, usually with the caveat that you need to play with the community patch. That's sound advice, of course, but I just can't justify recommending Gothic 3 to anyone because of how bad of a Gothic game it is, and how mediocre it is, just as a game in general. So in this article I'll be explaining my opinion on Gothic 3 and why I think it sucks.

My Personal Ranking of the Soulsborne Games

Dark Souls has been one of the most culturally significant video game series over the last decade, spawning a new sub-genre of games like it and basically setting a new standard of comparison for melee combat, level design, and difficulty. The series has been so popular that it really needs no introduction -- if you haven't heard of Dark Souls by now then you've been living under a rock, and even if you've never played any of them you surely know what kind of games they are. I began playing the series with the original Demon's Souls and have kept up with every release since, though it took me a while to get around to Bloodborne and I still haven't played Sekiro, although from what I understand Sekiro is more an evolution of Tenchu than Dark Souls, so it maybe doesn't fully belong in the "Soulsborne" category of games. With each release of a new Soulsborne game I usually find myself having mixed opinions -- while usually enjoying each one, there's usually some aspect that leaves me a little unsatisfied or subtly disappointed. So I thought it would be fun to review all five games against one another, comparing their relative strengths and weaknesses while attempting to rank them in terms of my personal favorites.

When brainstorming this list and trying to figure out how I'd actually order them, I went back and replayed large chunks of each game, just to refresh my memory, and so I decided to base these rankings on a combination of how much I remember enjoying each game the first time I played it, how much I enjoyed replaying it, and finally how well it compares to the other games in the series mechanically. So in other words, this is not a purely objective ranking of how good the games are technically, since I'm putting a lot of weight in my own subjective feelings in addition to their more technical design elements. If it were purely objective, then believe me they would be in a very different order. All of which is to say that this is my personal opinion, so don't get offended if I don't have the exact same feelings as you do.

Bloodborne Review: Interesting, but Ultimately Disappointing

Dark Souls has been one of the most influential video games over the last decade, with its unique gameplay formula and pantiresentation becoming a standard of comparison whenever people talk about melee combat, level design, and difficulty in other video games. The Souls series has been such a cultural phenomenon that it's essentially become its own sub-genre of games, with the "Souls-like" term catching on as a way to describe other, similar types of games who've taken clear inspiration from Dark Souls. In 2015, between the release of Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3, developer From Software released Bloodborne, a main-entry "Souls-like" (or Soulsborne) game, which is basically just a spin-off from Dark Souls, taking the core gameplay concepts and mechanics from Dark Souls and giving them a complete make-over with a whole new setting and a bunch of mechanical tweaks on the familiar formula.

Speaking as someone who's played all four of the Souls games in order, starting with the original Demon's Souls, Bloodborne breathes a lot of new life into a gameplay formula that's become a little too tired and repetitive over the years, but ultimately doesn't set itself apart from the Souls series as much as I would have liked it to. In practice, my experience playing Bloodborne started with excited optimism as I relished the positive effect many of its changes had on the core gameplay formula, until about halfway through when I started to feel like I was just playing Yet Another Version of the exact same game I've already played four times previously over the last decade -- this now being the fifth. And the more I played, the more I started to feel subtly disappointed and underwhelmed by some of the game's other design elements, and by the missed opportunities to do something more with the potential that a spin-off game could have.

Gothic 1+2: Masterpieces in Immersive Design

Gothic 1 and 2 are some of the best open-world action-adventure-RPGs of all time, and part of the reason why is their uniquely immersive gameplay designs. Developed by the small German studio Piranha Bytes and released in 2000 and 2002 in their native Germany, Gothic 1 and 2 were truly ahead of their time; while not the first to implement scripted NPC scheduling and reactions, they were already doing so years before Bethesda supposedly pioneered that concept with Oblivion, while some of their other design elements like in-world skill trainers and the process of forging weapons aren't really seen in other games, even to this day with almost two decades of industry advancements since the original Gothic. Some of their design elements may be a little quaint or antiquated at this point, but for the most part the immersive design of Gothic 1 and 2 is timelessly brilliant and contributes to a feeling of atmospheric immersion that often isn't found in other games.

Gothic 1 vs Gothic 2 - Which is Better?

Gothic 1 and 2 are some of my favorite games of all time, being some of the most deeply satisfying and immersive action-adventure-RPGs that I've ever played. While most people in the early 2000s were raving about how great Morrowind was, I was busy playing Gothic, and my experience with those games fundamentally altered my ability to appreciate other, similar types of games because the early Gothic games were truly ahead of their time and did some really impressive things that other developers weren't doing at the time, and still aren't doing to this day. I sometimes struggle, however, to decide which of the two Gothic games I like better. With Gothic 2 being a direct sequel to the first game, directly continuing the story with many of the exact same characters in the exact same world, and being built on the exact same game engine, they're about as similar as two games in a series can be, and so I often like to think of them as essentially one game broken into two parts. At the end of the day, however, they are separate games with some key differences, so I thought I'd take some time to review the two games against one another and discuss the relative pro's and con's of each game.

The Importance of Gothic 1+2's Music: A Review of Kai Rosenkranz's Soundtracks

A lot of different components go into making Gothic 1 and 2 such great games, but one of its more subtle, understated triumphs is the excellent quality of its soundtrack, composed by Kai Rosenkranz. Music is something that I feel often gets overlooked when it comes to video game reviews, because most gamers aren't music critics, and aren't very knowledgeable about what goes into making great music -- we just know what sounds good, and what doesn't. The thing that makes Gothic's soundtrack so good, to me, is that it strikes a perfect balance between melody and ambiance -- it has enough melodic structure that you can pick out themes and quickly come to recognize its motifs, while also serving as an ideal backdrop to set the tone of your adventures, without crossing too boldly into the foreground and calling too much attention to itself.

Resident Evil 2: Great, But Imperfect

The Resident Evil 2 remake has been possibly the most-anticipated release in the Resident Evil series, considering how well the original game is beloved by fans. Ever since the first game got remade on the GameCube in 2002, fans have been clamoring for a similar treatment of the sequel, which many actually consider to be the better game. Two decades later, we finally have the Resident Evil 2 remake, but it's maybe not quite what people really wanted, at least not initially. Gone are the pre-rendered backgrounds, fixed camera angles, and awkward tank-controls that were so iconic and representative of the first three games; in their place we now have an over-the-shoulder Resident Evil 4 style third-person shooter perspective in a fully three-dimensional environment. While the shift in perspective may make it seem to have more in common with some of the more recent Resident Evil games, rather than the game it's supposed to be based on, the remake is definitely more of a classic survival-horror game in the vein of the original trilogy than a modern action shooter. In fact, it's probably the most old-school survival-horror game to be released by a major publisher since, well, Resident Evil 7, and the remake is even more of an old-school survival-horror than Resident Evil 7 was.

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Review - Interactive Storytelling in a Movie Done Right

Netflix's Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is an interactive movie about an aspiring video game developer in 1984 trying to finish his first major game release while feeling like his life is spinning out of control. The movie plays like a "choose your own adventure" book or game where, at certain points in a scene, an interface will appear on screen asking you to make a binary choice for the character, which is then played out in the following shots and can lead to a lot of different pathways to over five different endings. As the story continues, the main character, Stefan, begins to realize there are weird forces controlling his life; he begins to relive past traumas, starts having demonic visions and conspiratorial dreams, and slowly descends into a surreal madness as reality crumbles around him, all while struggling with the normal tribulations and speed bumps to meet the deadline to release his first game, Bandersnatch.

For anyone unfamiliar with the series, Black Mirror is a dark science-fiction anthology series on Netflix, a bit similar in tone and style to The Twilight Zone, where each episode explores a concept about the darker possibilities of technology. Iconic episodes deal with being able to "block" people in real life (like on social media), using reality television as a form of criminal punishment, using memory implants for police investigations, and having one's consciousness uploaded to a virtual reality mainframe after you die, among many others. Bandersnatch functions as a feature-length stand-alone episode that can last 90 minutes or more, depending on your choices and how much of it you choose to explore. I don't normally review movies on this blog (although I have on a few occasions, and I used to have my old Video Games in TV series), but this movie deals directly with video game themes and its interactive nature makes it feel almost like a game, so I figured I'd share my thoughts and observations on it for those who're interested.

Dead Space - A 10 Year Retrospective

Dead Space hails from 2008 as a bit of a cross between System Shock 2 and Resident Evil 4, if you were to take the slow-paced over-the-shoulder combat system from RE4 and put it in a space horror setting reminiscent of SS2. According to interviews with the development team, Visceral Games, Dead Space was originally being designed with the hope that it could become System Shock 3, but after playing Resident Evil 4, their eyes were opened to new possibilities, and thus the game shifted from more of an RPG focus to an action-horror focus.

This was around the time that horror games started shifting from more traditional survival-horror games where players controlled a feeble survivor with limited resources, to controlling badass killing machines with a full arsenal of weapons, when the focus shifted more from making the player feel so scared and vulnerable that you might prefer to avoid combat whenever possible, to glorifying the combat and making the thrill of killing these terrifying enemies the main reward. Resident Evil 4 ushered in this new era of action-centric horror games, and Dead Space was one of many subsequent games to pick up that torch and carry the trend onward.

I played Dead Space for the first time in 2010, but that was so long ago that I don't remember much about it. I know that I liked the game, generally speaking, but wished that it could've focused a little more on its horror side of the equation, instead of leaning so heavily on action and jumpscares. With my newsfeed recently filling up with articles celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the original Dead Space, I figured it was time to refresh my memory and see how much my opinion on it has changed, if at all, and to see how well the game holds up a decade later.

Impressions of the Resident Evil 2 Remake: One Shot Demo

The Resident Evil 2 remake is right around the corner, and so Capcom have launched a 30-minute demo featuring a slice of gameplay from the full game, in which you control Leon Kennedy exploring the Raccoon City Police Department fighting zombies and solving puzzles to find a way to advance. As the "One Shot" title implies, you have one shot to play this 30-minute scenario; a timer starts counting down once you launch into the game, and once your 30 minutes are up you get booted out to the menu with a "Thanks for playing" message. You cannot start over for a new 30 minutes, unless you launch the demo on a new account.

I'm not a big fan of the 30-minute time limit, because I usually like to play these games pretty slowly, making sure I'm taking in all the details, exploring everywhere possible, and trying all of the outcomes. The side-effect of the timer is that I played the game a little differently than I would have a normal demo, since I was essentially rushing to get through as much of it as I could, and so my mind was less focused on the game itself and more on my playing of the demo. There's potential with a time limit in a survival-horror game to enhance the stress and tension, and to force more interesting decisions when it comes to risk-versus-reward, but I never really felt that in this demo, so it feels more like a marketing gimmick to stir up hype and get people more interested in the game.

The remake seems to have been done in the engine used for Resident Evil 7, so it has the sleek and smooth feel of RE7, but in a third-person over-the-shoulder perspective (a bit like Resident Evil 4) with Resident Evil 2-style puzzles and exploration. Resident Evil 7 already felt like a return to form for the series, with the Baker estate feeling reminiscent of the mansion from RE1, but RE2 seems to be taking it one step further in going back to the roots, which would make sense since it is a remake of RE2, after all, arguably the best game in the original series. So on first impressions, it seems like the remake will blend a bunch of different elements from three of the best games in the series.

Introducing Live Streaming on Twitch, YouTube

I'm pleased to announce that as of yesterday, The Nocturnal Rambler is now also on Twitch and YouTube, where I'm currently live streaming a playthrough of Gothic, one of my all-time favorite games. Video content had never really interested me in the past, but I've decided to give it a shot as a way to hopefully grow and expand, while also just having some extra fun. Right now I'm basically just doing a live "let's play" format where I talk to myself and give commentary about the game as I play, and I'll be doing that for a full playthrough of Gothic, and for most or all the PC games that I play in the future.

Last night I played Gothic for about four hours while live streaming on Twitch, and am also in the process of uploading those videos to YouTube, so if you're interested in watching me play and hearing me talk, you can follow me on Twitch to be notified when I go live or subscribe on YouTube if you'd rather watch at your own leisure. I'll be playing most nights and some random afternoons (I'm on the east coast of the US, GMT-5), so be on the lookout because there'll be new videos on a pretty regular basis. And who knows, maybe with this new recorded footage I can start doing video reviews to supplement my written ones.