Randviews: Reheated Leftovers

Posted in Anno Domini Wed Feb 11 2026

I beat a few old (and occasionally reheated) games on-stream throughout the holiday break. Usually I like to mix these reviews up with reviews of non-game things, but my reading list sits half-finished, my watch-list sits untouched in favor of vegging out in front of summer sports, and I want to chew on this album I bought recently a bit more.

As such, these reviews have been gathering a bit of dust over the last couple of weeks, so I'm gonna kick them out on their own so I can think about other things. Hopefully I'll get more out in a matter of weeks instead of years like last time...

Blake Stone: Planet Strike

looks great, totally different enemy, ship it

Early last year, I beat Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, a charming sci-fi Wolfenstein-alike using an enhanced version of that game's engine that presented another 60 levels of tile-based proto-FPS action with a few more gimmicks bolted on. It was fun and I enjoyed (most of) it, so why not make a return trip a year later to hit up the kinda-sorta-sequel?

The short, brief and not-entirely-fair summary of Planet Strike is that it's much the same game as Aliens of Gold, except every individual aspect is weaker. The 60 levels of AoG - with their, uh, variety in quality and memorability - give way to 20-ish consistently dull levels, with a thimbleful of new gimmicks that are either over or under-used with no middle ground. Just as every level in AoG required you to grab a specific keycard to unlock the next level, your goal in Planet Strike is to grab a bomb and place it next to a security doohicky. It's much the same, but with a extra step that alternates between tedious and pointless depending on how much sleep the level designer got that night. Meanwhile, trigger tiles can cause barriers to raise and lower, which has some interesting potential - one level closes off the way you came in behind you, forcing you to do a full lap - that is rarely tapped.

The bestiary is much the same as in AoG - a handful of humans with a full eight sprite rotations and a batch of comic-book mutants and 50s-sci-fi robots with only one front angle - but here you can really see the budget fall through the floor. The human enemies (with the exception of the scientists, who remain identical to the previous game, right down to the same unhelpful hints - Electro-Spheres can be a nuisance, I agree!) have had their heads hastily redrawn to look less human, their bodies poorly recoloured, and their sounds played in reverse. The larger mutant enemies somehow have even less effort put in, their sprites simply swapped out with the sprites of boss monsters from the previous game! One new weapon has been added to the arsenal, but it evaporates your ammo supply (which, as ever, is shared across all your weapons) so quickly that it'll spend the game gathering dust in your backpack... outside of maybe the occasional boss battle if you're very confident in your aim and/or eager to handicap yourself.

All-in-all, not the worst Wolf-alike I've ever played (far from it, in fact!) but clearly choked out to fulfil a retail distribution deal that was inked well in advance, before the first game's sales were annihilated a month after release by Doom's emergence.

Battleship (2012)

this ain't your daddy's "i fire on e6"

Remember the board game Battleship? Remember the movie they made of it with Rihanna? They made a low-budget Call of Duty clone out of it with a weird, largely tangental strategy bit bolted on where you command ships around a map to fight other ships or provide artillery support, using powerups earned through the FPS gameplay to make your ships more powerful in the strategy gameplay. It's fun at first, with some amusingly over-acted dialogue from the faceless NPC soldiers helping you, but the ship combat bit becomes trivial halfway through, there's an... economic amount of content in the game (something like four enemy types and five weapons stretched across seven levels, one of which recycles a previous level's geometry Halo-style!) and in some cases the entire back half of a level won't have any checkpoints, so if you die you're going to be sent back a profanity-inducing distance.

I wouldn't call this some shat-out nothing job, though - the developers were Double Helix, who would go on to do the excellent Strider reboot and the kinda-forgettable first year of Killer Instinct 2013 before getting swallowed whole by the Amazon monster, never to be seen again. There's clearly talent and skill here, but it's tied down and restrained by the three grim horsemen of reality: budget, deadlines and licensor appeasement. It doesn't really work out, but lord knows, they're certainly trying to do something a little weird within their restrictions, and I'm at least slightly more forgiving on that even when it falls flat on its face.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone - this is clearly intended to be The Call Of Duty That Grandma Can Buy You For Your 13th Birthday - but I don't regret scratching my curiosity about it.

Bio Menace Remastered

Some of the Easter Eggs in the new episode are just delightful.

I count myself as something of an MS-DOS Platformer Sicko™ but I never really beat many of them between their oft-intense difficulty and not being able to afford the registered versions (or for that matter, to convince my family to mail a cheque to the other side of the planet to register!) As a result, I never managed to play Bio Menace too deeply, despite loving its weird cutesy-horror EGA pixel art aesthetic, on account of its violent hatred of anyone seeing more than two levels in.

This remaster, by the developer of the excellent RigelEngine source port for Duke Nukem 2, makes some clever choices to make things more bearable while not removing the teeth completely. You now have infinite lives, but you get a big score bonus for completing a level with no deaths to your name. Combine this with big score bonuses for finding 1ups, a "kill streak" system to encourage wasting multiple enemies quickly, and some time and score leaderboards, and you have a fun way to recontextualize the existing content - no longer insurmountable, but a fun and repeatable challenge for hi-score chasers and speedrunners.

The original Bio-Menace was primarily developed by one guy, and frankly, it shows in the level design of the original three episodes, which by and large are pretty same-y and usually an S-shape of some kind taking up most of the level editor grid with some holes cut in it. However, this release comes with a new episode developed by the new, 2026 development team. So, how is it? Good, I'm pleased to say, but still far from flawless. The level design is a bit more complex (sometimes to a fault), and the new gimmicks are often fun (the surprise finale is great!) but some of the levels are utter stinkers and some of the new pixel art can veer on the amateurish compared to the original - the first level in the city is great, but the second has some contrast issues where it can be a bit tricky to tell the difference between solid and non-solid tiles, and the third is mostly just one tile copy-pasted forever.

All in all, the new episode is great fun, but not without qualifications - the new music is excellent, the secrets and Easter Eggs are a blast to find, but the tilesets and level design quality is more or less a sine-wave.

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