So, this guy, this thug got shot up and now he's laying at the bottom of an acid pool. Usually I wouldn't care for a person like this and just go after his buddy, the one who shot him up, kill him and take his money. But this time, it's different. The thug at the bottom of the acid pool, he has a key that I need.

I do, I do

When I stomp around USG Ishimura in my gravity boots, I'm reminded of the Von Braun. I remember citadel. When I cut an arm off a nechromorph with my plasma cutter, I remember Soldier of Fortune and all those helpless 'bad guys' with their arms blown off by my shotgun, screaming for help. I'm not sure why I had to kill them or in such a gruesome manner, but I know that I enjoyed it a lot more than hiding around shadowy crevasses in the castles of Thief, waiting, waiting, waiting to do what? To get some loot that I can't even equip? I dunno, if I'm going to avoid something it better be because some beheaded freak is running behind me and I need to get to the next room to apply that medkit and reload my gun. Fuck, one of those creepy wall mounted baby spouters just decapitated me with its chest tentacles.

I don't even know how I'm going to get that key. I guess the first action would be to empty the pool of the acid. Now, where is that switch? I knew it was going to be more complicated than that, I have to crawl through ventilation vents, climb pipes and ladders, get behind locked doors and all this for what? To get two items and then to activate the pump. All I have to do now is find that dead thug and rummage through his dead body to find thet key and I can finally catch that bastard who got me in this mess in the first place.

Needs more actions

When playing Too Human I couldn't help but feel that I'm playing something really old. Some dungeon crawler from the 80's. I couldn't help but feel that this game was made two decades ago but with better graphics, better inventory design, better music and sound effects, better gameplay. When you play Too Human and you enter a combat situation, the developers gave you quite a toolset for getting rid of your opponents. You can use your melee weapon, you can use your rifle, you can lob grenades, or you can unleash a fierce attack, you can do a finisher, do an air melee attack or air ranged attack, you can deploy your spider or call for a battle cry, if all else fails I unleash a ruiner. I have never played a third person action game with such an intricate and involved combat system, maybe that's why it reminds me of games from the golden age of PC RPGs, because I never played them.

I move past the locked door only to have the bugger slip away through my fingers. Seriously? And my bike is borked. I guess I'll catch a ride from that trucker, I think I need to go to the docks.

Earthbound?

Before playing EarthBound I couldn't imagine that anyone could make suburbia look so beautiful. Maybe it's because there were no suburbs in the game, just urbs? Maybe it's because the game gave me a chance to save music? Or because I got a chance to ride the Lochness monster through the winter wonderland with a monkey, a bubble gum chewing monkey. I don't know what it was exactly about that game, but EarthBound gave me hope. Hope that one day I will be playing games where instead of exploring empty halls of a space ship I will be walking around neighborhoods. It gave me hope that instead of killing hordes of zombies in a mausoleum metropolis I will be traveling from town to city to town, soaking in CULTURE.

The truck pulls up at the docks. The driver asks for ten bucks, my pockets are overflowing with money because the thug laying at the bottom of the acid pool also had a cool hundred on him. I pull out my shotgun and blast the driver in the face, his brains splatter all over the windshield and the sideview window. I begin exploring the docks.

It's Kingpin: Life of Crime