Resonance (2012/PC)

Adventure games are a difficult entity. Not only to publishers and gamers due to their lack of selling power and replayability, but even when they’re really good, you can only gush so much about them without ruining things. Giving examples is hard, and plot revelation is a bit of a minefield. The better the story, the more you want to write about it, so the more you have to fight it. That's been the case more than once with a Wadjet Eye point-and-clicker, and Resonance is no exception.

There’s no getting away from the fact that a lot of games that are published under the Wadjet Eye banner recall the heyday of the adventure genre in the 1990s. Of course, this era is the yardstick by which all adventure games are measured, and on the evidence of what’s been put out in the years since, will continue to be so for some time. Many of this publisher’s titles go beyond that comparison, though, and are often directly comparable to specific titles. Resonance, as well as Gemini Rue before and Primordia since, all appear to be disciples of Beneath A Steel Sky, as if the year was 1995 and 320x240 window resolution was still considered to be acceptable. All three titles share the Amiga classic’s themes of dystopia and advanced technology, as well as moral quandaries. That’s not to say that each game tries to emulate Beneath A Steel Sky in too literal a sense, as each title has its own distinctive style and visual palette within similar graphic confines. The ancestor’s classic images of skyscrapers and futuristic industry are most readily seen in Gemini Rue, but the similarity is partially dispelled by the latter’s intertwining dual story thread, which often steps away from the generic sci-fi facility. Indeed, the beginning of the game almost evokes film noir, with the lead character in a coat, seeking shelter from the rain on a dark night outside some gates. The level of futurism is in fact evocative of Dreamweb at such times, answering the unasked question of what that title would have looked like if it wasn’t presented in plan view. While Primordia is presented mostly in shades closely resembling black, Resonance is a little more tangible. Its palette ironically paints a pleasant enough modern city, set perhaps an envisaged decade ahead of the 2012 release date. The steel-and-glass of modern architecture is spliced with the crumbling brick foundations of less affluent boroughs and stereotypically-cast public transport. Dystopia is merely a looming concept that grows in stature as the game progresses, rather than a way of life for the inhabitants.

Your line-up is the cop, the scientist,
the nurse and the reporter

A noirish introduction for the
old-fashioned detective

There’s more to the controls than informing you that pointing and clicking is involved. To get the most important feature out of the way, the answer to the question dripping off of the tip of the tongue of every gamer discussing this aspect of the genre is “Yes, there is dragging, not just pointing and clicking”. To buck the trend and cover all of the trivial points first, one of the weaknesses is not being able to change your destination once you’ve clicked, and another is the freeze when clicking to move on in a long walk. This, in a game with such a short visible travel zone and high level of panning for an adventure title, means frequent, metronomic clicking to a greater extreme than most adventure games. You could let Guybrush Threepwood cover a decent distance over five seconds with one click in The Secret Of Monkey Island, but you’re clicking about ten times as often here.

The inventory is still the mainstay
of the genre

Memories and objects outside of
inventory are used in the same way

The real meat and bones of the controls recalls another classic title, and pushes forth a concept that’s new to me. The four characters, initially playing through standalone paths, quickly converge as the plot thickens, and your roving band of non-misfits is pressed into Maniac Mansion-style teamwork, although the need to swap around inventory items and make use of “special abilities” of certain characters (such as the policeman being a bit stronger and a bit dumber than the particle physicist) is kept fairly low-key. What I found novel was the concept of long-term and short-term memory banks. This was a real double-edged sword in what it gave to the gameplay. Particularly with short-term memory, you can’t just learn something by examining a scenery-bound object and then go and chat to someone and have it appear as an extra dialogue option, so filling up your short-term memory with stuff is a slightly annoying habit that you need to get into. You then drag what you want to discuss with someone from your bank either onto that person, or into a box above the dialogue options at a convenient time, and it’s usually at this point where the character decides upon discretion. On the other hand, particularly with long-term memories, the process takes figuring out tasks out of the character’s hands and places more of it with the player, which serves to deepen the level of puzzling you have to do. The lack of narrative leaps made without direct input from the player makes the game more immersive in a non-atmospheric way, and makes you feel a lot more satisfied when finding solutions. The memories also provide good ways of providing helpful titbits and preserving key points without making you feel like you’re having a hint system rammed down your throat or like you’re playing a game that’s too easy.

The story itself is a captivating one, with threads starting off loose, quickly intertwining and winding up very taut, and suddenly splintering off again. There is no perfect satisfactory ending, which will infuriate some players. But, more so than in films or books, the important parts of the story in adventure games are sometimes the points that you control rather than cutscenes provided as a reward for solving puzzles. This is Resonance to a tee, as most of the story unfolds in the middle of the gameplay. This is about enjoying the ride more than reaching the end.

Bennet can keep his cool inches away
from his stake-out target

The job flusters him a bit more
when murder and science are about

Your four characters, set in the supposedly grim but very generic-looking Aventine City, are Tolstoy “Ed” Eddings, a bespectacled dweeb of a mathematician, Detective Winston Bennet, a hardboiled cop with emotional and physical baggage, Anna Castellanos, an inwardly disturbed nurse, and a well-connected freelance journalist Raymond “Ray” Abbot, who is continuously derided as a blogger, which as we all know is the worst kind of person, let alone writer. We start with Ed going to visit his superior, Dr Javier “Javi” Morales at his laboratory to discuss some potentially dangerous new technology. A blackout occurs, and a very peculiar explosion at the laboratory stands as the key driving event for most of the game. The four characters are drawn in one by one by the death of Dr Morales, each by an apparent sense of vocational duty, although we are aware by this point that Anna is a relative of Morales. The game goes forth with the four characters seeking answers about the technology that caused the explosion, with each character using their social status to get access to different areas (such as Bennet being allowed access to the Police Administration headquarters on account of being a police detective). Some one-frame puzzles that you get in the cheap-and-nasty puzzle titles of the day do appear, but they’re nothing more than the occasional break from the dialogue-driven puzzles that move most of the game forward. A gamut of plot twists is pretty much a requirement, but Resonance doesn’t disappoint, and all but the very sharp and the very lucky will be caught surprised a couple of times. The characters are not fully developed, but this serves the purpose of keeping us guessing and focused on the story itself. There are a few silly sides like a score count and Steam achievements, but they’re not in your face and you don’t have to care about them other than worrying that you’re near the end.

Bennet can take one other character
up to interrogation in police HQ

The hospital is more open, but only
Anna can gain access to certain floors

The overall tone is pretty serious, far more so than Beneath A Steel Sky. The slight humour involved usually revolves around the reporter’s output being a blog, the occasional sexist lapse of the aging detective, and a receptionist’s dating exploits. It’s actually quite refreshing in a way, as almost all point-and-click games (and indeed many outside the genre) are compelled to refer to rubber chickens, the “death” of the genre, or some other not-so-subtle nod to veterans of the LucasArts 1990s titles that still seemingly form a large part of the target audience of today’s independent point-and-click publishers.

The narrative compels you with
a magnetic force

The game asks us to make a simple scientific leap of fiction that’s easily digestible to the point where we can openly accept it as a driving force for the entire plot. In a game that isn’t set deep into the future or the fantastic, that’s quite an achievement. Resonance breaks very little new ground despite the memory mechanics, but in spite of the obvious heritage (as shown by the sheer number of older game titles referred to in this review), it still feels fresh. What we lack in gameplay or graphical creativity, we get back in pure narrative, and this prioritisation shows in other Wadjet Eye titles like Gemini Rue and even the very different-looking Emerald City Confidential. Like a good book, you can put Resonance down when you’re done with it and feel satisfied. It’s a gripping story that’s well told, not just a game with a plot that boasts being playable and challenging, and that’s what defines most of the best adventure games.

Beneath A Steel Sky (1994/Amiga/PC)

One of the more exotic gaming journeys back into the 90s was to indulge in a point-and-click adventure that wasn’t a LucasArts project, but one that could stand tall against just about any of them. One well-recognised game that matches these criteria is found in the trip back to early 1994, with the destination being an uncomfortable chair in front of a DOS machine with Beneath A Steel Sky ready to play. I first experienced this game as a youngster on the Amiga, but revisiting and playing through the PC “talkie” version brought extra life to the set. The CD-ROM is also slightly harder to use as a murder weapon than the Amiga’s colossal fifteen floppy disks, which resemble a hefty brickbat when taped together and wrapped in something brickbat-coloured, or fifteen highly customised shurikens.

It’s not without its flaws, the most notable being the ill-fitting American accents of Foster and a minority of the cast, and indeed the entire cast bar Eduardo the gardener if you consider that the game is played in Australia, with the rest of the cast displaying a broad array of British accents, among others. Still, the cockneys are close enough. The voice acting has the right amount of ham to blend in with the dialogue to bring humorous overtones to a conceptually sinister game, similar in theory but not in practice to the cream of LucasArts’ contributions to the genre. The background music is typically supplementary, and the moods usually complement the intended atmospheres, but it is a little bit too cheery at times. The Virtual Theatre engine propels non-playable characters around the world, but the need to avoid them at times and to be moved to a particular place on the screen to have a conversation can be grating.

You play Robert Foster. He's stylish...

...an effortless womaniser...

...has a refined taste in music...

...and is quite the athlete, to boot!

The characters are typically very identifiable despite not having discernable faces. This is largely due to the scope of accents deployed, and while it’s something you wince at upon the realisation that you’re getting a vocal tour of the British Isles (London, Birmingham, Cardiff, Belfast, Liverpool, Manchester and Edinburgh are all covered, although 1994 was long before non-footballers from Newcastle were allowed to become celebrities on a regular basis, and the treaty that controversially decreed that Geordie was technically a dialect of English only came into force a decade later), you do start to appreciate the necessity of this as you get further into the game. The primary layer of characters is quite distinctive, with the free outsider Foster, the zealous Reich, the archaic Lamb, the rebellious Anita, and the caustic mechanoid Joey. There are a lot of characters, however, that fit into the oblivious, selfish stereotype, but you still manage to maintain a mental image of them through their often unique voice, which is never subtle but not always a caricature. The French doorman’s accent is a little forced, but it’s more David Suchet’s Hercule Poirot than Peter Sellers’ Jacques Clouseau, so we’re not treated to the sheer mockery of the tongue seen in Jackie Chan Stuntmaster and other games. On the other hand, the Welsh security guard is practically drowning in saliva as he stumbles through lines like “We’re here to serve the community, and shoot people” (which, despite being epitomic of Beneath A Steel Sky, is far too easily missed), and Sam and Norville in the security centre are so brummie that they make Jasper Carrott sound like a foreign national.

Joey is always complaining...

...and Hobbins can see why...

...but that's what upgrades are for

The nagging issue that the characters don’t always stick to the written script is largely the cause of dialect, and this is in evidence as the American Foster meanders loosely around a very colloquial British script, with “jumper”, “it’s well smart”, and “they’re shagged beyond repair” changed to “sweater”, “it’s totally cool”, and “they’re frazzed beyond repair”. You can feel the defiance in the voice actor in the last of those lines. “‘Shagged’? Don’t be ridiculous, frazzed makes much more sense,” he says to himself. He’s wrong, though.

The most intensive the interface
gets, and it's telling you why
Hobbins is in such poor shape

Being point-and-click, it’s hard to complain about the controls. You click either mouse button to walk somewhere, talk to someone, or follow an exit cursor, and you left-click to examine a highlighted object, right-click to pick up or interact with it, and right-click anywhere to skip a line of text. Just one keyboard button is required, to bring up the menu. The interface is dead simple. The unobtrusive inventory only drops down if you move the cursor to the very top, and the only thing that changes when looking at objects is the cursor, which changes from a smaller arrow to a larger one labelled “Exit” for a route out of the room, or to a crosshairs with the name of the object or person, which even changes as the player learns the character’s name. It’s all minimal and effective, and allows you to enjoy the graphics.

Stunning graphics are featured...

...from the barren to the exotic

And what graphics they are. The background art supplied by illustrious comic book artist Dave Gibbons is painted to a half-realism rather than his comic style, although he does provide a comic strip too for the introduction in the packaging, which was featured at the beginning of the game itself on CD-ROM. From the bleak industrial towers to the plush modern veneers, the artwork is something to be savoured, and you can easily appreciate the effort that the Revolution team put into giving it centre stage. You even have the option to remove speech text from view if you’re feeling cocky about hearing everything first time, but do bear in mind that you don’t get to repeat conversations.

Lifts make transportation easy

Despite the sprawling city and plot, the navigable world is pretty small. Multiply that with the ability to change your game speeds, and you’ve got a much more easily accessible world than say, The Secret Of Monkey Island, a comparably epic world that takes about four decades to explore.

Right from the almost-animated cartoon strip intro, the scavengers that act as the guardians of Robert Foster paint an ill landscape erupting into the sky, and the protagonist’s life summary illustrates the relative wasteland. Another helicopter crash brings Foster, now regarded as a fugitive, to the start of the gameplay. Unlike a fair chunk of its peers, Beneath A Steel Sky presents several situations where our protagonist can die, and the ability to save is most welcome. Points of timing also come up, and the ability to slow the game speed down can prove to be quite nifty at times.

Foster gets backed up against a
wall straight away, and can die here...

...good thing he's so eloquent and
can blag his way out of trouble

You’re instantly put in a situation where Foster can be killed. Walking down the stairs results in instant termination courtesy of the purple clad guard. A simple puzzle leads to a very dead end, but Foster manages to outwit the goon without your help. As the guard leaves the building, your next step is to find a shell for Joey, who can then analyse your items, mend things, break things, fly, complain, and insult you. After convincing the hapless Howard Hobbins that he’s a safety inspector, which becomes his recurring disguise, he steals his stuff and slides down into the recycling plant’s furnace room. Upon attempting to escape the room, gun-toting security officer Stephen Reich (who was in charge of abducting Foster in the intro) bursts in, pointing his weapon at Foster, who as it turns out, is Robert Overmann, but he’s still Foster to us. Some spy camera linked to a system called LINC toasts Reich, and the pun-toting fugitive is becoming aware that someone or something is looking out his survival.

Foster's incisive humour is nothing
short of irresistable...

...he's smooth like ice, but Lamb is
cold to the touch and isn't very nice

Dystopian fashion is questionable,
and yet Foster's coat is ridiculed

The supporting caste bears the
brunt of swingeing cuts

Having looted Reich’s corpse, Foster can access most of the industrial area available to him after this point, waving his imaginary inspector credentials around like a feather duster to any guards and technicians that he chooses to talk to. There are computer terminals that he can use his newfound card on, through which he eventually discovers that this LINC thing had his mother killed. In the pipe factory, Foster meets the suffering rogue Anita Einbeck, who is sympathetic to Foster’s plight, and her oppressive, ostentatious supervisor Gilbert Lamb, who is implied to be some sort of inept hack. After trying to flirt with Anita, discovering that he’s in Union City (Sydney, apparently), learning that this city is a supposed corporation which is at economic war with Hobart (another city/corporation that isn’t renamed), and sabotaging the power plant, Foster fixes the lift and gains access to Belle Vue, home to a couple of characters, and several strange businesses.

Suddenly, you're in what feels
like a different world

Belle Vue isn't paradise, but it
sure beats London

The strange but admittedly not counterintuitive concept of being closer to the ground giving you higher status that Foster had picked up on is in full view here. The rusting housing of industry gives way to stone facades and plant life. Belle Vue isn’t brilliantly lush, but it’s such a stark contrast, particularly outside the conveniently adjacent living quarters of Reich and Lamb, where you can talk to a strange chap called Gallagher, who thinks he’s… William Shatner. Foster can visit the travel agency, insurance company, and the obligatory mad scientist Doctor Burke, replete with a curious German accent and a habit of inhaling anaesthetic whilst cutting up patients, who provides Foster with an electronic port in his head (not shown). Foster can then access LINC (“LINCspace”), which is like some bizarre virtual reality world with a set of puzzles.

LINCspace is like stepping
into another game

With enough trickery and help from Anita, Foster gets to Hyde Park at ground level, and manages to get some answers from Danielle Piermont, whose deceased husband’s work led the pair of them to be close to the Overmann family. The frightening Piermont is incredibly wealthy and well connected, and can get you access to an underground club, and her dog Spunky can be used to create a good distraction for one Officer Blunt, who is basically Parker from Thunderbirds, who ‘as no h’idea what h’exactly you’re h’up to. After entering a truly bizarre courthouse scene in which a dated judge presides over his court as if it were a game show, Hobbins hastily befriends Foster after standing accused of assaulting Blunt with some water spray, which was an unseen result of Foster’s work in the power plant.

Very good, m'lady:
h'Officer Blunt h'is 'opeless

Here's your starter for ten:
Judge Chutney hosts a sham court

Doctor Burke is definitely
on something

After discovering Anita’s radiation-cooked body in the cathedral, an increasingly vengeful Foster vows to finish what Anita was planning, and destroy LINC. He sneaks into the underground to find some of the strangest things imaginable in the circumstances. LINC is a pulsating organism hooked up to Foster’s dad, and some guy with a surfer dude voice is totally growing rubbery androids. Joey, whose job is to annoy you and keep breaking shells, has his last one broken after an altercation with the mysterious Gallagher, who turns out to be... another android, and Foster downloads him into an android and dubs him Ken. A few more puzzles and sharp thinking leads to Foster meeting his father, and then on to victory. Fast forward a little spring cleaning, and everything's fantastic, so Foster declares his return to the gap, despite all of his tribe having been exterminated in the explosion courtesy of Reich’s entourage in the introduction, leaving Ken and Hobbins behind. The fate of the rest of the surviving citizens of the implied nicer, uncorrupted Union City is left open, apart from Lamb, who is suggested to get a return to work in a less prestigious position. End game, roll credits, “be vigilant”, whoopee.

Things get weirder by the minute

Some of the puzzles are easier than others. Along with the threat of death that isn’t always obvious, some puzzles are abstractly different to others, which keeps you on your toes at all times. While many hallmarks of adventure games are there, such as the initial level acting as a silent tutorial that equates to “use that metal thing to open that metal door or get shot”, and the increasing complexity, moving around LINCspace makes you feel like you’re playing a different game.

The plot is heartwrenchingly good

Beneath A Steel Sky is a killer game

Dizzying heights were achieved
in the creation of this game

The game is completely gripping, and while a huge part of it is because of the amazing art, challenging gameplay and intriguing plot, a fair chunk is down to uncomfortable juxtapositions. From the way LINCspace feels compared to the tangible walkways, and how oddly cheery Belle Vue and Hyde Park are compared to the rest of the world, to the strange hodgepodge of current and dated technology that the dystopia setting allows for, and the strands of humour woven into such a serious tapestry, you're always wanting to play more just to achieve a greater sense of clarity. While The Secret Of Monkey Island and LeChuck’s Revenge were conceived from a grim idea that was crafted to be brimming with charm, the use of humour in Beneath A Steel Sky added a dimension to the game rather than just changing it to a different type. By straddling the borders of multiple concepts rather than firmly establishing the game as something distinct, the folks at Revolution risked a game that would fall flat and not achieve in any category. However, they put the work in, and served up something that, while not quite perfect, overachieved in many ways. Beneath A Steel Sky is one of the pinnacles of the genre, and its release to the freeware world in 2003 and inexpensive remastered release as a sort of iApp thingy in 2009 by the company, which was a demonstration that they understood the emulator scene and disaffected consumers better than the bigger players, have helped to keep the flame of adventure games alive. It is inspiring gamers to dig back into the past and indulge in the classic games, and encouraging developers to dedicate their time to creating games for the so-called unfashionable genre. Its place as both a quality game and a historically significant package are in no doubt.

Liero (1998/PC)

Liero is something of a recursive spin-off by proxy. It takes its name, basic concept and characters from Worms, released a few years prior, but is actually a rewrite of MoleZ, also made in Finland, which was the original Worms-in-real time game. My experience with MoleZ is limited, but from what I can gather, there are reasons that Liero became the international cult hit, other than it instantly being released as freeware (MoleZ wasn’t relinquished as freeware until late 1999).

Between a rock and a hard place:
Strategy and discretion play a
bigger role with more terrain

The sheer technical control you have over this game is awesome. While you don’t have things like setting off grenades after X seconds, you do get a ton of goodies. Loading times adjustable as a percentage from the standard, any integer from 0 (instant madness) to 9999 (excruciating), a limit to the number of bonus health and weapon drops, whether the weapon drops tell you what they carry or not, the amount of blood, whether the miniature overview map is present, if you want a fresh map or the previous wrecked one, whether you can load weapons you aren’t carrying, and a whole host of weapon constrictions.

In no-man's land:
In open territory, anything goes

Liero has a phenomenal arsenal for you to choose from, from the powerful, to the weak, to the ones more likely to damage you than your opponent. The chiquita bomb (a stark ripoff of the banana bomb) is among the most powerful cluster grenade explosive types, which also includes big and small nukes. There’s a slew of projectile weapons from rifles and shotguns to machine guns and guided missiles. Even more explosive weapons are available that don’t act as grenades, such as canisters of napalm, and the mysterious grasshopper that explodes and bounces around and explodes again a few times. A plethora of more tactical kit is available, from spikeballs, mines (earth-coloured ground ones, floating ones, and bouncing ones) and booby traps (disguised as health and weapon drops) to terraforming tools and even a fan that can blow weapons away or back where they came from. Not in the weapons section is the inbuilt ninja rope that comes from trying to change weapons and jump at the same time, crucial for navigating open spaces and clearing out of blast zones pronto.

Some weapons eject massive cartridges,
leaving you buried Rambo-style

Moreover, adjusting the fire rates shuffles the pecking order. With much lower times, the laser becomes a much more effective life-sapper in earth-heavy terrain, and the gun types become much more effective. At slower rates, a cluster grenade is the ideal weapon to pack a big punch and wipe out an opponent's health before they can scavenge for health restoration. At a loading rate of zero, most weapons are amusingly destructive and chaotic, and the frame speed will diminish rapidly, but this is a manically fun affair. You can adjust every weapon the game has to be banned from the game, available from the menu, or only available in weapons crates. So if you wanted to challenge someone to a game fighting only with the almighty “zimm”, you can. Why you would do such a thing is questionable, this ludicrous weapon is a projectile that bounces off a wall and comes back to where it came from, the midriff of your worm.

The AI doesn't really respond to any changes you make. If you set the loading times to 1000%, it will sit there happily waiting for its weapon of choice to recharge, in which time you can easily select a weapon you've allowed to remain loaded, mosey on up and take it out. Changing the game itself doesn't even have an effect. "Capture the Flag" and "Simple CtF" saw the opponent gunning for me just as much as the deathmatch "Kill'em All" mode. The implied advanced Capture the Flag does require a kill before being able to pick up a flag, but this changes nothing. In the simple version, where kill counts are meaningless, I lured it across my flag, and it jumped over it as if it were a landmine. Not only does it fail to tell the difference between a flagpole and an explosive, but it also fails to recognise its own weapons. After attempting to kill me with a dirtball salvo (I'm aware that there's a legitimate tactic of preempting a shot of mine with this ground-creating device), it switched to a small nuke, and fired it straight into the wall it just created, killing it. This is an annoying feature indeed, and slower players may find it more challenging to kill the AI before it finds a way to commit suicide than to win. "Game of Tag" is winnable purely by evasion, waiting for the computerised opponent to start its own clock. One thing the AI is occasionally pretty good at is using its grappling hook on you so you can’t get away, but overall, this is definitely best played by two humans sharing a keyboard (or two equally moronic AI worms, if you’re feeling particularly pacifistic).

Geroff!

Computer AI guide to success. Step 1: Enter catacomb. Step 2: Convert catacomb into valley using greenball tool. Step 3: Fire innumerable spikeballs, which are affected by gravity, vertically

Of course I’m being unfair on the AI. While commercial game output decrees that Liero’s AI isn’t up to scratch for 1998, the fact that this was done by a man in Finland makes the AI above acceptable. I’m not suggesting that Finnish nationality is inhibitory in any way, merely contrasting him against the hives of programmers in the major game creation powerhouses. The sound and graphics of course fall into the same department. No music is present, and sound effects are limited to muted beeps for menu movement, weapon firing and impact, a squelch of worm death, fart sounds on the structure-building dirtball and greenball weapons, and what sounds like Barry White vomiting when a worm is taking damage or low on health and spouting blood at a rate of its own volume every five seconds. The setting is just earth and a few rocks, but the hue blends are palatable, lumps and bones further break up the monotony, and you can decide if there should be showers or not. In the player options, you can even fine tune your worm to one of over 260000 colours for Rolls-Royce level individuality.

Victory is... mine

I'm a huge... fan

While Liero lacks the overt sense of humour of Worms (only the farting dirtball and the Barry White impressions come close to humour) and doesn’t have everything that MoleZ had, it’s an impressive little game that deserves its cult following. In a world of gaudy games where even online Flash games are more advanced and pretty, Liero retains the charm of a low-tech relic played through DOSBox (to my knowledge, you need DOSBox v0.7 or later to get sound out of Liero v1.33), whilst retaining a status as a great two-player-one-computer game that plays well to this day.