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I finished Realms of the Haunting (PC, 1996) yesterday. Enjoyed it & had a few thoughts:

As a first-person-shooter it's rough. It predates what are now the standard controls (mouselook, WASD) and so takes some effort to play. There's a version of the game available (the US release) that allows you to rebind some controls and that helps a lot. Aside from that the basics are here: an array of weapons, monsters with strengths and weaknesses, healing items, etc. . Nothing groundbreaking but fun enough.

I don't really have the experience to evaluate it as an adventure game. The puzzles I was able to solve were fun; the ones that I couldn't solve (or found overly tedious) I looked up solutions for. There were sufficient hints for most things, I think.

As a narrative, a story, it was fantastic and very well-told. And there was a surprising amount of it! Spoken dialog, readable text journals and notes, and a large amount of FMV sequences. The FMV scenes really impressed me, they were atmospheric, slow-paced, well-directed and edited.

The narrative itself was a kind of biblical-fantasy-horror thing, a mashup of a bunch of different themes and influences. Angels, demons, cults, magic, other dimensions, an old spooky mansion, etc. . Felt to me like something Clive Barker might have come up with in order to hit a G rating.

Was a really cool game. I'm a little surprised it isn't more well-known or discussed.

back to Realms of the Haunting (PC, MS-DOS, 1996) today at https://twitch.tv/andreaen.

I'm about halfway through the game so I should finish it this session.

I'm starting a game of Realms of the Haunting (PC, MS-DOS, 1996) this morning at https://twitch.tv/andreaen.

This is a a strange game - a first-person-shooter adventure game with many full-motion video cutscenes. I'm really interested to see how it plays.

#streaming some more modded Morrowind (PC, 2002) this morning at https://twitch.tv/andreaen. Will finish up a few quests in Narsis then walk north.

Watched "Hard Revenge, Milly: Bloody Battle" tonight. First time watch, it was a blast. Another relatively short movie at ~75 minutes. Noticeably higher budget than the first. (Still very low budget tho).

Ridiculous splatter-y violence. If you're interested in seeing an '80s / '90s cyberpunk anime OAV but live action and filmed in the late 2000s that's sort of what this is. I've also seen these Milly films compared to the works of Albert Pyun, although I'd guess this is bloodier.

Liked this one more than the first; there's more strange worldbuilding, more impressive fight choreography, more dilapidated warehouses. A lot of introspective downtime and melodrama between action scenes, too, which I love.

I really wish there were more of these in this same style.

I'm #streaming Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines (PC, 2004) tonight at https://twitch.tv/andreaen. This session: the Clan Quest Mod East L.A. hub & hopefully the end of the game.

Watched Cemetery Man tonight. Somehow I'd never seen it before. I feel like I should have rented this 20 years ago.

So absurd and dreamlike and funny and sad. Absolutely incredible looking too. Amazing cemetery location (and set dressing, and cinematography, and...).

I'll have to watch this a couple of times before I know how I feel about it. I think it'd be foolish to try and parse what's "real" and what isn't, to look for a consistent narrative in the film. I'm more interested in Dellamorte as a character - do I sympathize with him or am I repulsed by him? I don't have an answer. I'm flummoxed.

What a great movie. So much fun to watch & think about.

I've been thinking about this one a lot lately. "Not building a wall but making a brick".

(Image from the #ObliqueStrategies bot at @oblique_strategies).

More Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines (PC, 2004) tonight at https://twitch.tv/andreaen. Doing the Chinatown hub & onward this session.

I'm #streaming more Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines (PC, 2004) tonight at https://twitch.tv/andreaen . Doing sidequests in the Hollywood hub & then the sewers (possibly the nastiest part of the game).

Watched "Hard Revenge Milly" (2008, dir. Takanori Tsujimoto) tonight. First time I've seen it.

Short (45 minute) very low budget revenge feature. Somehow gory, funny, and melancholy/sad all at the same time.

Nice fight choreography, esp. the final fight. Cool worldbuilding. Appreciated the surprises, the few curveballs it threw. It's pretty brutal, pretty nasty, particularly the incident that prompts the revenge, although the budget and tone somewhat undercuts that. (It could've been a lot more repulsive).

This, "The Machine Girl", and "Tokyo Gore Police" were all somehow released in the same year. From what I've seen I think this (Milly) might be more my speed.

Will have to watch the sequel soon.

Going into the downtown hub area of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines (PC, 2004) tonight at https://twitch.tv/andreaen.

I haven't posted any video of my Quake mod in a while so here's one.

Shown is a few different ways to get to this upper platform on a #quake1 version of ospdm5. To be clear the modification is to the game's movement; you can't do these sort of moves in vanilla Quake 1.

I'm starting my yearly playthrough of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines (PC, 2004) tonight over at https://twitch.tv/andreaen. Will be playing with the Clan Quest Mod this time.

I'm #streaming some more modded Morrowind (PC, 2002) today at https://twitch.tv/andreaen. Will wander around Narsis a bit, maybe free the last remaining sleepers.

I hadn't watched any horror movies yet this October so I put on Noroi: The Curse (2005). Still really good, still scares me, even having seen it a half dozen times now.

One thing that stood out to me this viewing is that there's a notable bit of soundtrack in Noroi that sounds very much like Ennio Morricone's theme for The Thing (1982).

I finished Symphony of the Night a few hours ago and (surprising no one) it was excellent. Really fun game.

I'm impressed with how many solutions there are to a lot of the fights. Pattern learning and perfect dodging, smart use of weapons and equipment, and simple over-levelling by grinding for XP on easier enemies are all viable strategies. I was worried the game would be too difficult for me (I'm bad at sidescrolling action-platforming games) but thankfully that wasn't the case.

Of course the artwork - backgrounds, sprites, character design, sound, music - were all awesome. I was surprised how much of the music I had heard outside of the game in different contexts. And it controlled very well too, it felt more forgiving than some earlier Castlevania games I've played.

Anyway. Everybody knows SotN is good, now I know it too.

#streaming Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PSX, 1997) this evening over at https://twitch.tv/andreaen. I'm in the upside-down castle and it's very difficult; might be near the end of the game.

It's really difficult to keep VtM Bloodlines running on Linux. I swear I have to reinstall it every year because some change in my system breaks it. This time it seems to be because I upgraded Debian (which brought with it an upgrade to Wine).

I'm picking up my Morrowind (PC, 2002) save again this afternoon at https://twitch.tv/andreaen. Not sure what I'll do; more quests in Firewatch, maybe a visit to Narsis.

#streaming more Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PSX, 1997) this afternoon at https://twitch.tv/andreaen. Going into the "colosseum" area next, I think.

I'm starting a game of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PSX, 1997) today at https://twitch.tv/andreaen. I have somehow never played this game before.