Together Retro: FMV Frenzy

[Key-Glyph]

Reporting in on Silent Steel.

The first thing I want to mention is that I found the line of edgy dialog that made my heart race as a child. It was: "Damn! Where the hell are my Rolaids?" Somehow this scandalized me so much in 1996 that I remembered it as "cursing." Haha! 10/10 would love to be eleven years old again.

The second thing to mention is that this game is good. I'm actually really riveted by the story. There's a lot going on: you're the captain of an American submarine in a believably 1990s world wherein leftover feelings from the Cold War are keeping international tensions high. Within the first few minutes of gameplay you receive an Eyes-Only communique about a Libyan submarine that has somehow recently exited the Mediterranean and disappeared in the open sea. The probable area of the Libyan submarine's location overlaps with your patrol route quite significantly, so it's up to you how you choose to approach this news. Do you tell your crew, or keep it confidential? Do you continue your patrol as usual, or do you amend it to head toward (or away from) your potentially hostile company? How fast and/or covertly will you trawl the waters? Do you focus on battle readiness, or evasion? Do you take that extra cup of coffee, or politely decline? (Yes, that is a real decision at one point.)

Then, depending on your decisions, you may or may not discover there are other players in the ocean with unknown intentions...

The acting is good. The sets are great. Even minor changes in dialog choices will lead to slightly different scripts in otherwise identical scenes; I find that level of production care to be incredibly endearing. There is relatively little cheese (the only things that come to mind are a certain musical cue and a very serious character using the phrase "the whole enchilada," which made me snortlaugh). It feels like watching a cross between M*A*S*H and Apollo 13. These are both things I like.

And there's a lot of hidden plot. I'm a sucker for stories that show you multiple perspectives or runthroughs before you understand everything; Silent Steel delivers on this. On my first pass I got a torpedo dropped on me out of nowhere and had no idea what caused it. On subsequent playthroughs I've uncovered more details and have gotten better bearings, but I'm still missing some huge pieces.

I've also learned a crapton about submarines and submarine slang. In fact, when I first started playing the game, I had a hard time understanding what was even going on because I couldn't parse the language fast enough. (I discovered later that you can replay any clip indefinitely before moving on.) I think it's super awesome that I now know about different classes of submarines, that torpedoes are called "fish," and that I clearly missed my calling as a Sonar Technician.

And to top it all off, you can view any save file in "movie" mode. In other words, you can rewatch all the clips you saw along with your dialog choices strung together as one continuous viewing experience. When I finally win I'll be sure to upload that somewhere where you folks can see.

This brings me to the only thing I don't like about the game: it seems almost impossible to win. It's not clear which choices are major contributors to your failure or success, and there's no way to know exactly where you went wrong in the narrative path when your team winds up nuked -- so you never feel like you can go back and put your finger on one specific moment and say, "Ahah, let me try doing THAT differently this time." There are so many variables at play that it's hard to parse what leads to what. I'm not even confident that the game's winning route or routes can be arrived at logically, or if it's more of a "the writers just decided this will result in a win." So I'm taking notes and trying things out, but it's mostly shooting in the dark.

So basically, in essence, you're playing a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. You don't know where your path is going to take you. You just have to keep reading and rereading until you discover your way to the end.

It's awesome. Awesome but frustrating. I'm still not tired of watching these clips, though, which is really saying something.

And if anyone's interested, you can get an interactive DVD of Silent Steel for $5 on Amazon and eBay. I have no idea how it'll play as a DVD, but for $5 I'm probably going to find out for myself one day.

And now, onward with my attempts!

EDIT: Either my migraine moved the decimal point or my playing of this game has jacked up its going price. It's roughly $40 in DVD form, not $5. Drat!

[Gunstar Green]

Mission 2 of Crusader is finished. Got some top-grade hammy acting from a mad scientist who escaped my grasp after killing all but one of the prisoners I was sent to rescue. That's certainly not going to help me gain the trust of the resistance I betrayed my evil overlords to work for. My favorite line was one lady asking if I botched the mission or if it went exactly as I had planned. Yeah, sure, I broke in and killed dozens of their guards so that I could also kill some prisoners who would have died anyway. Totally my master plan.

I'm getting the hang of the controls and while it's not second nature I'm not taking as much unnecessary damage at least.

[Ack]

Damn, Key, you are making Silent Steel sound awesome. Please keep us posted on how your game is going; I'm really excited about it from what you're telling us.

[noiseredux]

EDIT: Either my migraine moved the decimal point or my playing of this game has jacked up its going price. It's roughly $40 in DVD form, not $5. Drat!

When I was looking for things I could play I considered the DVD releases of Silent Steel, Dracula: Unleashed or Space Pirates, however they're all rather pricey.

[Exhuminator]

From what I saw, it seems the DVD version of Silent Steel has considerably better video quality versus the PC version. Since the DVD is decades out of print, I imagine that counts as abandonware or whatever. As I understand it, this forum is okay linking to abandonware or whatever. So:

http://www.theisozone.com/downloads/pc/ ... steel-dvd/

If I'm wrong about that, sorry mods. I'll take the cat o' nine tails via Ack preferably.

[Key-Glyph]

Damn, Key, you are making Silent Steel sound awesome. Please keep us posted on how your game is going; I'm really excited about it from what you're telling us.

Aw, thanks Ack. I'm trying to do it justice without giving major things away, because so much of the fun is discovering something suspenseful with your crew and thinking to yourself, "Oh SHIT. What does this mean for us?"

Speaking of, do we care about spoilers in here? I think I'll keep mine to a minimum so it'll be more fun to watch my save files when I make videos of them, but I did have a major breakthrough last night that completely changes everything:

There's a saboteur onboard.

I should back up and mention a few things about the game for a second. It came on four discs, and so far each of my playthroughs hasn't lasted more than an hour or so. I've gone through the game dozens of times by now (every failure ends in death, by the way) and have, to some extent, learned which choices lead to certain cutscenes and which choices skip them. For example, in the very beginning of the game you can either walk through the ship to retrieve the Eyes-Only message, ask that a crewman bring it to you instead, or thumb your nose at urgency and hit the bathroom for aspirin. If you go get the communique, you get a tour of the ship; if you ask for delivery, you miss the tour but get to have two conversations with crewmen you can't have otherwise; if you go to the john, you miss both of these scenes and also cut forward significantly in the progression of events due to your waste of time.

As I've played I've felt like a badass whenever I've gotten up to disc three. Getting that close to disc four was so tantalizing! A successful ending was within reach!

Or so I thought.

Over time I kind of got a feel for when scenes were "missing" -- big jumps in time, or having played enough to know first-hand when something got skipped -- and I decided my goal was to try to see as many of these scenes as possible at the beginning. Well lo and behold, in doing so I satisfied some unknown string of conditions, and was asked to put in disc four.

From disc one to disc four?! What?! And also yaaasss!

In a surprise twist, the events on disc four fall chronologically in the middle of events on disc one. I can't be sure, but I think they did this on purpose so that you'd have exactly the experience I had: days of going through the discs in order, just to be suddenly blindsided by such a significant and unexpected difference that you KNOW you've done something good. You know in your bones you must be on the right track now, because you finally did unlock disc four -- you just didn't expect it to happen like this, or so soon!

What I have done on disc four changes how everything will play out going forward as I finish with it and swap back to earlier discs. It's pretty exciting.

Not really sure if this ramble made sense, but I'm gonna win this thing.

[Exhuminator]

I was afraid my number 5 pick wouldn't make it in time, but it just arrived fresh from Japan! I'm legit excited to play this one, will attempt to do so tonight. This might just be the game that turns me around on this topic.

[ElkinFencer10]

I finished my replay of Corpse Killer on Sega Saturn while I was definitely NOT slacking during a boring professional development training. It's a shame because this game is ALMOST an improvement over the Sega CD 32X version...but there's one critical flaw here - the controls. Frame rate is better, visuals are better, and there are some quality of life tweaks and additions that were made that really improved the experience...but they took out light gun support. You can use actual light guns on the Sega CD version. And the Sega CD 32X version. And the 3DO version. But, despite having a light gun and some STRONG light gun game support, that was removed from the Saturn version. You HAVE to use the game pad's D-pad. It totally kills the gameplay. Because of that, this game's a tough sell even with the 90s cheese factor.

[Ack]

Speaking of, do we care about spoilers in here? I think I'll keep mine to a minimum so it'll be more fun to watch my save files when I make videos of them, but I did have a major breakthrough last night that completely changes everything:

There's a saboteur onboard.

Congratulations on making progress! I wouldn't worry about spoilers. It doesn't bother me any. I'm much more enthralled with your write-ups on the action and the experience of finding out things, and how you break down the gameplay for your experience. That's the real story for me.

[Ack]

I finished my replay of Corpse Killer on Sega Saturn while I was definitely NOT slacking during a boring professional development training. It's a shame because this game is ALMOST an improvement over the Sega CD 32X version...but there's one critical flaw here - the controls. Frame rate is better, visuals are better, and there are some quality of life tweaks and additions that were made that really improved the experience...but they took out light gun support. You can use actual light guns on the Sega CD version. And the Sega CD 32X version. And the 3DO version. But, despite having a light gun and some STRONG light gun game support, that was removed from the Saturn version. You HAVE to use the game pad's D-pad. It totally kills the gameplay. Because of that, this game's a tough sell even with the 90s cheese factor.

You know what this means now: