Incidental animals

 

Animals, the world is full of the buggers, we watch them, eat them, keep them as pets, we wear their wool and skins for warmth and grind their bones for soap.

As a species we have always depended on other lower animals on the food chain to survive and prosper.

 

In the hollow and artificial world of computer games though, these creatures are reduced to repeated patterns of behaviour and movement, yes sometimes there is effort put in to animal AI, Fable 2 for example has the best NPC creature I've seen in a game- this is in the form of you faithful dog. This dog follows you the entire game, it can do tricks, dig for treasure and feels like a genuine companion on you journey round the world of Albion. Its a testament to the creature design that when you get the choice to trade its life for a million in gold, the money is not even an option.

However,  it's all too often the case that creatures are added at best, to give a lifeless world a bit of spark,  or at worst, give the player something to kick off a cliff and laugh as it sails to its doom.

Submitted bellow in no particular order are the critters and beasties that serve no purpose other than ascetics or distraction for the player on their journey to find the mystical relic of who cares from the temple of meh.

 

Nali Bird - Unreal

Lots of games have birds, these winged creatures that soar and swoop across the purple skies of alien worlds or adorn the ramparts of gothic castles. However Unreal was the first game I played where you could take aim and blast their feathery bodies out of the sky and watch them tumble to their deaths on the rock bellow.

Chicken - Fable 1/2

 

Chickens, providers of eggs, KFC bucket meals and Mc Nuggets. These harmless feathered creatures do nothing to the player in the fable series other than potter around the city looking for worms or dropped crumbs to peck at, and yet the game goes out of its way to get us to kick the poor little blitters!

There's awards for how far you kick them, there is a special name you get for kicking ten of them. passers by even ask you "Chicken chaser? Do you chase chickens?" what the hell have they ever done to deserve this shabby treatment?

 

Rabbits - every RPG you can think of.

I hope that's just carrot juice!

 

 

Rabbits are everywhere, they breed like...well ..rabbits! and as such most RPGs put them in somewhere to add a bit of movement and verity to the vast open plains and grassy fields you quest through.

field rabbits, forest rabbits, Easter bunnies, World of Warcraft  has them by the hundred. Back in the day players could whole sale slaughter the buggers and skin then to get their leather work for 0 to 100 in a matter of an hour or so- Blizzard, the games creators got wise to this however and removed the skinning option and made then just another ambient critter for passers by to cleave in twain with their plus 400 broadsword of pointlessness.

However there is one WOW rabbit that you can win from the Darkmoon fair that turns the tables, anyone who has seen Monty pythons holy grail will know what in talking about, 

 

Fable 2 added an interesting dynamic to the player/rabbit relationship, evil. The player has a safety mode on their actions that mean that if they are strolling in the country and see a guard, towns person or even a bunny they have to turn this option off in order to blow the fluffy little cotton tail back to watership down- this is all well and good, however choosing to do this leaves a rabbit shaped stain on your karma and pushes you ever closer to the dark side- that will teach you to kick Mr hoppy wont it!

 

Hound eye - Half-life

You looking at me?

 

 

This ones a little different. When Valve the creators of half-life designed this multi eyed tripod legged beast they envisaged a friendly mutt who would run around the level barking and generally acting like the littlest hobo's alien cousin- however Beta players of the game made them change their minds about this harmless little freak.

It seems that the play testers just slaughtered them anyway- so valve gave them teeth in the form of a devastating sonic attack that turned their bark into the sound wave equivalent of a frag grenade! get too close and their howl blasts you to bits.

 

So with all this taken into account, are people just blood thirsty nut jobs who go around the real world stamping on kittens and kicking chickens? no, they are not, its an odd thing about games that you give people the option to do something in game and they will instinctively do it. It's like prostitutes in GTA- the option is there to use them, pay them and then beat them with bats and retrieve the money you paid for their services from their battered corpses, in no way would gamers do this in real life, but put the option in a game and people will do it for no reason other than they can. 

There are hundreds of videos online of players jumping their in game selves into walls or up mountains at the edge of virtual environments trying to find ways up them or through them due to a glitch in the coding.

 

If you give people the option to do something in a game they will try it as no matter how big your game is, or how complex your conversation trees are, there will never be as many options open to players as in real life, and that's why they kick chickens.    

 

       

 

          

 

 

Another game that harks back to the 90's with "home" in the title, oh joy.

(Spoilers, bloody hundreds of em!)

With the 90's being the next logical step for music and fashion (oh god I feel old!) earlier this year the fullbright company released a game with so many 90's music, fashion and pop culture references crammed in it's like being hit repeatedly in the face with a friends, x-files, Nirvana box set combo!

This is less a game and more a quick stroll through someone else's house with the lights out.

Your presented with the story of a young girl . She is struggling with being young, in high school and discovering gay in the mid 90's. This is drip-fed  in the form of diary entries, tapes and lots and lots scrape paper scattered around the place for you to find. Imagine if you will taking that file most people keep with invoices, receipts and  other important paperwork, shredding it, loading it into a leaf blower and walking around your home spraying the contents liberally as you go, because there are scraps everywhere,  there in the cupboards, the cellar and even inside the walls!
It all starts off well, the atmosphere is heavy with suspense and intrigue, why are your parents not here to meet you? where is your sister? with the amount of physical evidence scattered around the place how come no one cottoned on that sis has been having school issues?

The problem I have with this game is that it feels like a single level from a much larger title. It really reminds me of the "Ghost at midnight" level from vampire bloodlines- from a game released in 2004, this stand alone mission took all your weapons away and had you explore a haunted hotel, in the dark, picking up diary scrapes and news paper clippings hidden in the rooms and walls. Just take look at the screen shots bellow. 

Vampire bloodlines "ghost at midnight" level

Gone Home

 

Vampire bloodline "ghost at midnight"

Gone Home

 

The whole thing is a stretched out hidden object game that  has a tacked on story about a lesbian couple I didn't care about as you get very little to care about, who are they? what are their loves, their hates or fears? It is of comparable quality to that of a point romance novel....hang on! now that I come to think about it, could that actually be part of the 90's theme as well? The point romance books were big in the 90's....so I've been told....moving on...

This game was critically acclaimed and lots of people seem to love it for it's 90's themes, relationship drama and fo supernatural sub plot. I don't hate it, it has some really well paced story elements, the constant storm out side the house really feels oppressive and sinister and the VHS tapes labelled X-files and other supernatural or sci-fi movies and TV shows bring back lots of memories of my teen years. But it's all just so forced and exploitative - this could be set any time period from the 50's to 2015, the 90's theme feels gimmicky and put in to invoke nostalgia so we look past the writing and game length. The teen romance between two lesbian high school girls also feels a little flimsy, you never get to know much about Sam or her girlfriend and the whole bullying at school and the parental indifference is just brushed over- you never really feel their hurt or suffering at the hands of a bigoted society, and the "oh yeah, so the girlfriend is in the army and has to go to war" plot device to separate these star crossed lovers was a bit of a slap in the face.

The parents marital problems are also fairly shallow and the whole thing feels like a cheap paperback novel rather than an adult relationship on the rocks....hang on! the father does write cheap sci-fi so once again maybe this is what they were going for....possibly.

All in all this is soap opera level writing, with a ghost story with a ghost you never see (however "The haunting" this is most certainly not- that 1963 movie was a master class in not showing you any ghost but still scaring the hell out of you anyway with just the idea of them) and a pay off that really feels like a con instead of the ending you were hoping for. Is it wrong that I wanted the lovers dead in a twin teen suicide in the attic or a fade to black and a scream? instead I got a limp bit of voice over work while I read the last entry in a runaways diary. So Dawson's creek .....hang on!...Dawson's creek was big in the....oh forget it. 

 



A fresh perspective on 90's FPSs (see what I did there? fps is first person shooter...and that's a type of perspective!!...i'll get my power armour...)

 

 

The mid to late 90's was a great time for first person shooters, following on from the ground breaking shooters doom and quake, the next generation of FPSs now included dynamic lighting, 5.1 surround sound and higher texture details than ever before.

 

Among the great titles that were released I went back to my two favourites today to see how they stood up 20 or so years later.

 

 

 

Quake 2

In 2007 Quake 2, the follow-up to the 1996 smash PC and Mac game was released. developed by id Software and published by Activision this amazing sequel took the great features  from quake 1 and added loads of new stuff such as a great sound track by Rob Zombie, brilliant sound effects and destructible environments with breakable glass, exploding barrels and breakable walls.

 

So I dug out my old copy of Q2 and installed it on my modern PC. Now anyone who has tried to install an older game on windows 7 will know the frustration of getting anything pre T2K on a modern PC (shadowman, my fav activision title still remains unplayed due to compatibility issues).

After several attempts I finally got it to run in windowed mode and with a little tinkering I got it to run full screen.

 

The first thing you get is the demo mode running a section of the games first level behind the options menu, this really helps as you can adjust the graphics and sound options and se and hear the results in real time- being an older game I ran it in default GL mode to avoid driver issues.

The textures are fairly basic 8 bit ones over low polygon models, however the actual lighting and particle effects look quite good, and the models for the enemies are quite well done and have some truly disturbing death animations, some go down quietly while others fall to their knees bit take a couple of pot shots at you before they bite it, the larger grunts with chain guns for arms get their heads blown off and actually spray off a couple of hundred rounds into the wall and ceiling before kicking the final bucket.

 

Another thing that I really love about this game is the feeling of weight and heft to the hardware, shotguns bark with loud lead spewing coughs, the machine gun kicks and fights in your hands as you try to keep from wasting a whole clip just trying to keep the damn thing level, but the best is the first gun you get your paws on, its the blaster- its weak and small but it spits out hot death and you can see the rounds fizzing through the air towards whichever poor sod you have just unloaded on, plus whenever the grunts open up on you with the blaster you get a taste of your own white hot medicine as gun blasts crackle past your ears as they miss by mere inches- this is where the 5.1 audio comes into play as you hear the shot leave the gun, whistle just past your melon and impact into the wall behind you.

 

You don't get a recharging health bar or a shield that will replenish if you hide behind a box, as with the first game, Q2 is hard as nails and will kill you without mercy on anything higher than normal mode, I always feel the halo and killzones we get today let you off easy as if they are too scared you will stop playing if they kill you, where as the 90's shooters will happily leave you in a pile of your own gibs for not being quick enough on the trigger.

 

So Quake 2 remains one of my favourite FPS games of all time, yes its old and the graphics creak a bit, but it runs so damn fast and has such a great look and soundtrack that I can forgive it for a low poly count and low textures- its just pure blood drenched bullet spitting joy. 

 

Unreal

In 1998, just one year after quake 2 blew our minds, Epic mega games and Digital extremes took the FPS to even greater heights. With visuals that made you drool, character and weapon design that was out of this world and even a story of sorts about how you may or may not be the messiah that the local alien life forms prophesied to fall from the heavens and save them from the sky demons ( this is all told in found diary entries and crew logs scattered over the game environment.

So once again I found my copy of the game (it has an amazing box design from back when PC games came in proper boxes (I've posted my feelings about this before- see big box blues).
After patching it, uninstalling it, reinstalling it and finally installing it on my win xp machine I keep expressly for playing old PC games that windows refuses to touch (I'm looking at you soul reaver).

Booting it up gives you what I feel is the best in game intro to a game ever, a looped flyby of a castle with some suitably awesome theme music to go along with it.

Now I had forgotten just how atmospheric this games first level is. You are a prisoner who has just escaped a prison ship after it crashes on an unknown planet, you have no gun, no friends and absolutely know idea where you are- add to this that your entire escape is dogged by glimpses of a half seen alien killing machine that leave torn torsos, blood puddles and general mayhem in its wake, all this achieved with the clever use of steam vents, fire walls and flickering lighting that leave you terrified that it will turn on you next.

Once outside the landscapes are awesome to behold- this game uses the first unreal engine (this is now the go to engine for dozens of fps, adventure and action games and has had multiple versions and updates over the last two decades) and the visuals were like nothing else we had seen before- looking at them now they seem a little blocky and the environments feel allot  more enclosed that they did back in 98, however the lighting and textures still stand up relatively well and the set pieces still work beautifully- a great example is your first proper encounter with an alien react that the locals call the sky demons. You in a tunnel lit by flood lights, as you reach the end you are faced with a locked door, turning round to go back the way you came you see the lights snapping off one by one with darkness spreading up the tunnel towards you- seconds latter you are in pitch blackness only to hear a bestial growl rumble out of the dark- nerve jangling stuff even now.

There is a constant feeling that unreal really wants to one up quake at its own game- in Q2 if you kill an NPC you get little black pixels buzzing around the bodies after a few moments of death- these are supposed to be fly and were a nice touch- however in unreal, you kill an NPC and you get fully animated insects buzz around the corpse instead of Q2s single black pixels.
Where Quake want for Rob Zombie and nine inch nails, unreal had a full orchestral score. and where quake had sky boxes and the spaceship that flew over head, unreal had whole flocks of lizard birds and architecture that towered above the player into the vividly coloured alien heavens.

The verity of environments in unreal is huge, one moment your in a crashed prison barge fighting for you life, the next your climbing a gothic sun spire or raiding a crashed alien bounty hunter ship that seems to have suffered the same fate as your vessel.

Once again, no shield recharge here, just messy spine snapping, neck breaking full body exposition death, and a lot of it.

Summing up.

So, 90's fps games still have allot to offer.
Yes they are ugly by todays standards, they lack the refinement, story lines (Kevin spacey as Irons in AW is possibly the most realised character yet seen in a FPS) and bombast of 2014 shooters. However the speed, single mindedness and determination to actually kill you over and over with no hand holding, screen blurring recovery time or shields and the pure unadulterated fun they offer makes these two games well worth going back to- if you can ever get them to run!

And remember, in the words of the king of the FPS Duke Nukem "power armour is for pussies!"     
     

 

 

  

 



500 reasons to revisit a 16bit classic

After spending 3 hours trying to set up a UAE emulator ( BLOODY KICKSTART ROMS!) I finally gave in to the fact I would actually have to climb into the attic and find my Amiga 500 if I wanted to play Clive Barkers night breed.

Having crawled my way round allot of old boxes and computer equipment (and bizarrely, a whole box of scuba gear the last owner seems to have left behind) I located the box I wad looking for.

I had forgotten how bloody big it was, I nearly got a hernia just lugging it back down the ladder.
Once I had it set up I realised that the modulator for the video out was missing from the box, so it was back into the attic to find the thing. A modulator if you don't know is a device you plug into the back of the A500 to let it output to video or RF out- without it you cant get it to run on a normal TV.

Having found the unit I opened the crate it was in and saw the rf and leads were also missing- this really was not my day, luckily I found an old rf cable plugged into the back of an ancient TV that was once again left by the previous owner (I really need to find that D-bag and burn his new house down).

So after all that crap I plug in the modulator and the rf cable and the power cable and switch on the TV and.....nothing.....the bloody thing doesn't work!!!

Once again, I need to buy more ageing computer equipment online- the wife is gonna kill me :)


 

Rise from my what??!!??

Rise from my what???.

Back at the dawn of time (well the early 90's but still, a bloody long time ago) Sega released its follow up to the Master system, the Mega drive (or genesis if your from a bit further west than me).

 

This amazing machine was SEGA's answer to  Nintendo's NES console and later that decade went on to compete with the SNES  as well.

The mega drive was a fantastic console and it was the first games machine I owned all to myself (the nes being shared with my two younger brothers), When it first arrived in my  house one Christmas morning it came with a side scrolling beat em up called altered beast- now this would have been a fairly forgettable vanilla action title if it was not for 3 things, firstly its 2 player and let you a friend fight through ancient Greek grave yards and the darkened underworld of hades.

Secondly was the fact that after you kicked the crap out of enough hell hounds (Cerberuses?...cerberie?....what's the plural of Cerberus??) you got to morph into werewolves, bears and even electric flying dragons !

But the best bit of the game was the actual digitised speech! Your adversary got some great lines to spout at you as he prepared to carve you a new one "welcome to your doom!" and  "Ha Ha Ha!" as he laughed at your pathetic efforts.

But the best line was reserved for Zeus himself- as he resurrected you and your brother from the dead the king of the Greek gods seems to have developed a speech impediment as he commands you to "wise fwom your gwaves!" unintentionally giving rise to a thousand internet memes .

 Aside from this, altered beast was a really good game with some hefty action, truly unique bosses (how many eyes can one demon have??!!?) and a clever morphing game mechanic that turns the tables on the monsters about halfway though each level.

 

I have many happy memories of playing this and was over the moon to find it included on the 80 game emulator I just bought myself (seem my entry from last week). 

 

Third times the charm.

Third times the charm.

 

Three is an odd number (well yes, it is an odd number, but its also an "odd" number) the third movie in a series usually lets the first two down, batman forever, alien resurrection and of course god father 3 are third instalments that have me waking up at 2 am in a cold sweat just thinking of them.

 

Games don't usually have a third instalment, you will sometimes get yearly update to a fps or the annual FIFA con, but any game that gets to is third iteration has usually lost it's way.

 

One game that just got better with each update and hit its zenith on the third go was splatter house.

 

One and two were good your usual 2D side scrolling beat em ups with a gory horror twist, however when number three hit you got a third dimension as well.

 

 

You didn't just scroll left and right cutting the limbs off rotting zombies and skinless babies, you got to move around rooms golden axe and streets of rage style.

 

Another add on for the third outing was when the protagonist Rick had caused enough claret to be sprayed up the walls he could mutate into a hulking mussel bound monster and tear bad guys to bits with his bare hands.

 

The story telling was also greatly enhanced as well, with branching story lines and events that were dependant on how quickly you could clear areas and slay boss monsters- fail to complete the first floor in time and your girlfriend Jennifer gets eaten by bore worms, nice.

 

With the inclusion of these new features, better sound and graphics and a new map system, Splatter house was an amazing third part to the splatter house game series . It's just a shame the 2010 Xbox 360 3D remake was so god awful.

 

   

 Sigh.....

Axe to grind

Axe to grind

 

Konami was responsible for some of the best games of the early 90's, everything from castlevania to super probotector, Konami made some stone cold classic gaming.

 

However as good as all these games were, one stands out in my mind above all the rest, Axelay.

This gem pushed the SNES to breaking point, with both top down and side scrolling levels, amazing mode 7 effects and end of level bosses that take up half the screen.

 

The first level has you viewing your ship, Axelay, from the top down as it soars over the clouds and navigates rock formations and squadrons of enemy fighters. After you get through you are faced with a giant robotic space spider- this huge cyber arachnid needs to be blasted into pieces before you can proceed to the second stage.

 

For me the second stage is the least interesting level but with the best final boss of the game.

After you have traversed the side scrolling second stage you get to face off against a giant ED209 style walker that has a massive laser that burns half the screen while you desperately try to avoid a fiery death.

 

 

The second to last boss of axelay is just spectacular, its the size of an aircraft carrier and is made of larva, because if your going to follow a giant spider or ED209 you have to step it up a notch.

It attacks you with two arms made of magma and the worst case of halitosis ever recorded.

 

 

This boss is so awesome that he makes the front box art over the other awesome boss battles that you face in the game.

 

Axelay stands the test of time and I really hope it gets an update or a retro release on the Wii U or Xbox live some time in the future- however if you can't wait till them there are several good snes roms available online- not that I in anyway encourage you to download the ZSnes emulator  and play game roms on that great bit of software....

 

 

   

A mega alternative to the original.

A mega alternative to the original.

Having dug out my megadrive to play Sonic 2 with the Mrs, I was appalled to find that the leak in the roof last month had caused water to run along the rafters and onto it's box- the box and system were ruined, I'm not really comfortable plugging in a 20 year old games console that's been soaked in rain water for two weeks as I have an allergy to fire and high voltage.

 

Looking over the listings on eBay for a new console I happened upon this modern little beauty.

It called the plug into TV Megadrive. Basically its a very scaled down Megadrive with 80 roms encoded to it that are played without the need for the cartridges, and also the ability to play original carts as well, add to this the ability to actually plug in the real mega drive controller and you have what could be a viable replacement for a certain waterlogged retro console.

 

 

Well, the first strike against it is the roms included in it. Don't get me wrong there are some great games included, its just that with 80 games included I would expect at least 50% of them to be good- or at least actually be games anyone had ever heard of!!

For every Sonic or Comix Zone there is a Bulls and cow or bottle cap race., basically 40 out of the 80 games included are just crap ports of master system titles and 8 bit rip offs.

 

The second issue is the fact that the included game pads (there are 2) work via infrared so need to be in line of sight of the main unit to work.

However both pads work well and I found no lag in the button inputs.

 

The games run quickly and with negligible lag, but the soundtrack is slightly off, the tone is just slightly flat and a little slow.

This dose not affect the carts you plug into it, they run fast as with no sound issues.

 

All in all the system runs roms fast with few issues and plays original carts with proper control pads as well.

 

It's a little cheap and plasticy and you have to point the pads at the box unless you pick up a real pad off eBay for about a tenner.

 

At some point all the mega drives in the world will die of old age and go to silicon hell, so its good to have new hardware that's not just a poorly coded emulator on my PC.         

 

 

 

 

Incomplete nightmare.

Incomplete nightmare.

 

Looking back over the PS1 games I have picked up over the last few days for my new PlayStation (see my last blog post) I found several titles that really deserved next gen remakes.

 

Now I know that some of them got same gen sequels and "spiritual successors" but these are just a few that I think should get next gen remakes for PS4 or Xbox one.

 

 

 

Nightmare Creatures

A fantastic hack and slash game from Kalisto entertainment and Activision for the PlayStation.

You played as  Ignatius, a monk who works for a secret organisation who protect the world from hidden supernatural threats  or Nadia, the daughter of an American academic who is drawn into the fight when her father is killed.

 

The story is the usual mish mash of horror tropes with a mad scientist getting hold of a forbidden text (Samuel peep's secret diary....really??) and using it to raise an unholy army of zombies, demons and home made monsters stitched together from the bodies of the dead.

 

The gothic horror and 3D beat em up mechanic would work really well on a modern game engine. The original game had allot of pop up issues and a very short draw distance- a new engine on the new consoles would mean theses issues would be a thing of a past.

 

With so many older games getting remakes I cant see this one being top of the list for updates though.

 

Clock Tower 

 

 

 

Clock tower was a game for the super famicom that never made it out of Japan and didn't get a European release.

Unlike allot of other horror games, clock tower was about running, hiding and cowering in boxes while a monster (well a deformed kid with giant scissors) stalks and tries to slice you up.

With the likes of outlast and Alien: Isolation  making waves on consoles then this blend of scares and gore would go down really well.

 

 

 

One gen further back

One gen further back

 

 

 

 

 

After my purchase of the PS2 last week I decided to look back a little further into the past.

 

A few hours of digging through crap cardies and scratched Mungo Jerry LPs I found what I was looking for, a slim PS1 (there were no original large ones available) with a memory card and 2 controllers, and mine for less than a fiver!

 

Games were not a problem either, I got tomb raider one and two for £2 each, resident evil 2 for £4 and Tekken 2.

 

After hooking it up to my TV I found that there was a disc inside the console already, it turned out that the disc was Ridge Racer- I have great memories of this game, it took up so little system memory that you could take the disk out after it loaded and you could put in an audio CD and play it as you raced- an amazing feat.

 

I'm looking forward to playing castlevania and res evil 2 on their original system again, I just need to keep an eye on ebay.  

Charity shop bargains

 

After seeing it in my local Oxfam for the last week on the way home from work, I finally gave in and went in to buy the PS2 they had in the window.

 

The old man running the shop would not allow me to look at the system until he told me all about how his grandson knew all about the modern plague that is computer games- apparently its all beeps and flashing lights, I think he may have gaming confused with traffic lights but I let this slide.  

 

After waiting for the old guy behind the counter to find the keys to the window display I got to have a look at it.

 

The system was in full working order if a bit sticky with old cigarette tar and dust, it came with a controller, memory card and all the cables. after a bit of research online I took the dust cover off and cleaned up the vents and fan which where liberally with greasy fudge.

 

 

After half a packet of flash wipes and a couple of rolls of kitchen roll the fans were clear and the whole system was lemon fresh.

 

The whole lot cost me just under a tenner, not bad for a system that sells on ebay for about £30 .

 

After plugging it in and several attempts to hook it up to the digital in on my amp, the system booted and displayed the minimalist menu and played the windy sound scape background noise I had forgotten all about. 

 

A quick trip to CEX (after I had my back up tetanus and hepatitis shots) and I had a slightly grimy selection of PS2 games including  silent hill 2, extreme G 3, GT3 and the over looked classic R-type final.

 

The copy of need for speed most wanted booted but for some reason loaded with out  road or street displayed under the cars leaving what I can only describe as the oddest flight sim I have every played! 

 

I just need the first two guitar hero games and lips and I can relive the early part of 21st century gaming all over again.

This is a triumph!

 

After years of wanting my very own Aperture labs portable sentry turret I have the next best thing.... a small Aperture labs sentry turret LED flashlight.....well it's the best I could get without endangering the lives of my family and friends.

 

 

 

 

The turret stands at about 3" tall and has an LED that lights up at the front. The best thing about it however is the random sound effects it plays, nothing freaks out a gamer like entering a room to see what the red glow is and hearing "target acquired" and "are you still there...? coming out of the dark, where is your weighted companion cube when you need it?


The other awesome thing about it is the box art- It's taken straight from the Aperture science production line.

The Box also has more warning tiles than a GLaDOS designed test chamber!

 

 

 

 

 

 



There are stills taken directly from the spoof turret
sales adds featuring Cave Johnson that Valve software ran as
part of the promotion for Portal 2.

Even though this is not the fully functioning home defence turret I dreamed of it is still a really nice desk Knick Knack. LED flashlight turret "I don't hate you" :)