1/6/2024 0 Comments The witcher monolithsPerhaps the worst thing is that, when a character speaks, their portrait appears in the top left corner, which shows you what they should look like. Worse, the bits which do resemble anime really stick out, from the skimpily dressed anime girls adorning the game world on posters and vending machines, to the exclamation marks that appear above character heads when they spot you. In fact, it looks like every other FPS released in the mid-to-late 90s. SHOGO looks nothing whatsoever like anime. When you've got a Western developer with an early and experimental 3D engine aping a highly stylised Japanese artform, the results are predictably catastrophic. Back in 1998 however, Lithtech was basic even compared to contemporaries like Unreal and Thief, with blocky environments and character models that are straight out of a Lynchian nightmare-scape. The problem is that SHOGO is also the debut game for Monolith's LithTech engine, which would go on to power visually groundbreaking games such as F.E.A.R, and is still used today in Shadow of Mordor. In and of itself there's nothing wrong with this. SHOGO itself takes inspiration from mech-tastic Manga series such as Appleseed. SHOGO rides a wave of Western interest in anime that arose in the mid-90s, commencing with the release of Ghost in the Shell in 1995, and culminating in the release of the Matrix in 1999. Influence in game-making between Japan and the West has crisscrossed over the Pacific since the days of Donkey Kong, but SHOGO is a specific and unusual variant of that, namely, an American developer making a game directly inspired by anime. SHOGO is a strange game from the concept up. Yet somehow it still ends up fun to play. It's janky, it's thematically confused, and its ambitions stretch way beyond its capability. SHOGO makes a ridiculous number of mistakes in its execution. This is probably the most detail you'll see in any screenshot of SHOGO. Not because it's a fantastic shooter, but because it's such a fantastically odd shooter that's as broken as it is brilliant. It took a few years before I got around to doing this, but now I have I can't believe that I forgot about this game. All the memories came flooding back, and I resolved to play it again. I then promptly forgot about it for ten years, until news circled around that it had been re-released on GOG.Īt this point a small and dust-covered trapdoor was unlocked in my mind. It just appeared in my house, like a MacGuffin that unleashes an evil spirit in a horror movie.Īnyway, after being initially put off by the anime stylings of the cover, because I didn't know what anime was back then and thought it was a cartoon for babies, I played it and enjoyed it far more than I thought I was going to. Weirdly, I have no recollection of buying it or borrowing it. The first time was a few years after it released in 1998, when I found the CD case in my game collection and decided to give it a shot. SHOGO is Monolith's forgotten shooter, and nothing demonstrates this more aptly than the fact I have discovered it twice.
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