Games developed by Symtus
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CyberGenic Ranger: Secret of the Seventh Planet
Trixter reviews this marginally underrated game so well on MobyGames that I'd like to quote him verbatim (and yes, I agree with him 100%): 'Cybergenic Ranger carries my dubious title of 'game that should never have made it into production'.
I'll get straight to the point: The controls suck. And how much does it suck, you ask? Well, instead of controlling the keyboard scan codes, like every game made for PC since 1982, this game takes keystrokes from the BIOS, like a normal word processor. (Yes, that means that to run it, you hold down the key and, after a second, the keyboard replay kicks in and you start running). Of course, the end result is that you can't run and jump, run and shoot, jump and shoot, or practically press two keys at once without the second key overriding the first. I've witnessed (and come to expect) this in 9 year olds' throwaway BASIC games, but in a commercial game? That was actually on store shelves? Has anyone on God's green earth tried this game?
Control issues aside, the first level is enough to make you tear your hair out in big yanks because it's impossible to navigate without hitting floating corpses all the time. Every time you hit one, the game pauses to play a sound effect and then takes some energy from you. But every 3 or 4 corpses, you get a power capsule that restores your energy almost to the level it was before you started. This is what is ultimately frustrating: not the fact that you keep getting hit by floating corpses, but the fact that, because of the power capsules that keep helping you, the whole sequence is completely unnecessary and lacks any purpose'.
The Dark Half
Despite its 'cult' status as one of the most coveted games of all time, The Dark Half is one of the worst adventure games ever made, despite its successful license.
The game is full of Buick-sized plot holes, illogical puzzles, and really bad writing that doesn't do justice to the brilliant novel on which it's based. One thing the game doesn't lack - and this is true of most Capstone games - is a great premise. Of course, that's because it's based on one of thriller master Stephen King's best-known novels. Here's a brief synopsis: As a young man, Thad Beaumont developed a brain tumor. When they opened his skull in the operating room, the tumor turned out to be the undeveloped remains of a twin that Thad had incorporated into himself while still in his mother's womb. More than twenty years later, Thad is a successful writer with a wife named Liz and two young children. The books he writes under his own name are 'literary', but to maintain his income, he writes violent and formulaic fiction under the pseudonym George Stark. When a blackmailer threatens to reveal his dual identity and jeopardize the lucrative secret, Beaumont goes public himself, 'burying' Stark. That's when the murders begin. As the body count rises, Beaumont becomes the prime suspect - his fingerprints have been found in the victims' blood - but Thad has no idea what's going on. Has Thad's evil twin revived, or is there some kind of evil entity loose in the world?
The game opens with a brief introduction, and you, as Thad, standing in the graveyard - looking at the symbolic grave of Stark 'buried'. Unfortunately, plot holes and inane puzzles rear their ugly heads as soon as you get deeper into the game. Thad's goal throughout the game is to keep the police from suspecting him of being a murderer, mainly by hiding the evidence that points to him, and to gather evidence that Stark is the real killer. All well and good, except that you'll wonder why the police in this town are so dumb. For example, the police will arrest you at the end of the first day if you fail to hide all the evidence and wipe off all the fingerprints . . . but there's the murder weapon - the victim's fake leg - lying in the back of the truck that you can't interact with. The question, of course, is why the police didn't just dust that leg for fingerprints, or, if your prints match Stark's anyway, why should you bother to wipe off your other fingerprints at all.
The game continues in this vein, throwing illogical puzzles at you from time to time. One of them, is the fact that Thad has to smoke before he can write, and he MUST write every day to advance the plot. This is, of course, something that is never mentioned anywhere in the game, and the appearance of new sheets of paper at each new crime scene that Thad can use to write is as mysterious as most things that happen in this game.
Despite some nice touches, such as some sufficiently creepy cutscenes and good ambient music, The Dark Half is simply too inane, illogical, and poorly written. King fans beware: this is NOT every 1/100th as good as the novel is. Capstone definitely lives up to his worst performances in this installment.
