Deep Cuts

Few things underscore the differences between Rob and Patrick more than their approach to playing new video games, which is to say that Patrick is often spending his time with The Next Thing, while Rob continues to mine the past.

That split is part of what makes Remap what it is, though!

Plus, who doesn't want an excuse to talk about BioForge? Who isn't excited to potentially have Rob and Cado playing Myth II: Soulblighter co-op on stream? It's our Remember Some Games era and it's great.

Rob: So we talked about this on the podcast, but I’ve spent a decent chunk of this week playing Myth: The Fallen Lords and Myth 2: Soulblighter. They just had some amazing updates drop from the Project Magma team, who have basically been working to keep the Myth series playable for the last fifteen years. The new update is called the Twice Born Edition and it’s as close to a remaster as the game is likely to get.

Myth is one of my all-time favorite games. There are countless games that channel or outright copy from Tolkien, but Myth is one of the few that I think fully understands how the Lord of the Rings experience should be translated into a game. Mission briefings are given via bleak, well-written journal entries that evoke the idea that the game itself is a found text, like the history the Fellowship finds in the depths of Moria. Unit descriptions are pieces of larger, unseen texts (a technique that would resurface with Destiny’s Grimoire), and that narrative device suggests a world of cultures, languages, and histories both known and lost to time.

The narrative points to epic battles happening off-screen but the game is not aiming to be a fantasy Total War. Rather it plays out like a miniatures game, one where each warrior must be painstakingly positioned and maneuvered to get the most out of them in battle. You’re usually with a special forces team or a beleaguered rearguard or a clever diversionary raiding party, in situations where you still feel like you’re part of a military fantasy epic, but the scale is a little more personal, and little more ground-level.

Which means you have ample opportunities to witness the chaos caused by the game’s physics model. Stray arrows knock out friendly troops, grenades take miraculous or cursed bounces or turn out to be duds. Flying bits of debris (usually bone and meat, being honest) will smack into other units and cause damage, or perhaps knock a spear off-course. It’s a game that feels gleefully at odds with a lot of notions of game balance: the same encounter in Myth might go horrifically wrong despite your best efforts or you might make a horrible mistake that somehow breaks in your favor and hands you a wholly unearned victory. But because this is all depicted on screen and driven by some simple physics and overpowered explosives, Myth usually feels funny and surprising rather than a game where you can get screwed by a bad dice roll.

This game also served as my introduction to Bungie, and I was kind of surprised when the next I heard of them was when they were in the early stages of promoting Halo before it was picked up by Microsoft. I didn’t know about their history as a shoot developer for Macs, and so I was kind of disappointed when the studio that made this fantasy tactics masterpiece became Halo Incorporated. At the time I thought Halo was the outlier, now I understand that if anything, the two Myth games are a wildly successful experiment from a shooter studio.

Playing it this week got me wondering, are there studios you’ve been a fan of that have a game or a series that fascinates you because it doesn’t seem to fit what they are known for?

Patrick: “Did that say mecha raptor?”

Yeah, this one is easy. It’s Origin Systems making BioForge. I first fell for Origin Systems because of the Wing Commander series. More specifically, Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger. The more CDs a game shipped with, the better, imo. Remember that killer box art? Absolutely irresistible. But this was an era where it wasn’t easy to look up the history of a studio, unless you came across it in, say, a PC Gamer.

In my mind, Origin made Wing Commander games, or at the very least, flight simulator games. It was 1994 and I was nine years old. I didn’t know what Ultima was. I didn’t know about System Shock, either.