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Proper old-school FPS titles

Started by madhair60, April 24, 2018, 12:38:24 PM

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madhair60


Been on that Duke Nukem 3D last week or so and absolutely obsessed with it. I miss this style of game so much. It seems to be making a comeback with the likes of Ion Maiden (Build Engine) and Dusk (like the original Quake) coming out recently in early access, but let's talk about the originals.

That sense of finishing a level and seeing "Secrets Missed: 8" just sparks something in me. Duke 3D is, like all these games, absolutely dense with content and made with real loving care. Loads of enemy variety, tons of weapons and labyrinthine levels to explore.

Duke 3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood, Redneck Rampage and Exhumed are all amazingly fun Build Engine games, and I haven't talked about Ultimate DooM, Heretic, HeXen, etc. Wonderful.

I think broadly speaking gaming these days is better than ever, and the fact we're getting a resurgence of properly old-school FPS games - not fucking Serious Sam - is the icing on the cake. I love it when games actually reward curiosity and these do in spades. Some of the secrets are utterly esoteric and bizarre - I managed to squeeze my way into a tiny passage on the "Toxic Dump" stage of Duke 3D only to find a message reading "How did you get here?" on the wall. It ties into my love of old Amiga platform games where the secrets were found by trying to run through random walls, just rewarding you for fucking about and trying stuff, rather than giving you an invisible wall and a big arrow saying "go do the objective".

Bhazor

The lack of proper obscure secrets is one of the disappointing things about Doom 2016.

There were some insanely ambitious first person shooters in the early days. I've always had a soft spot for Robinson's Requiem. A first person survival game where you could die from hypothermia if you went swimming and didn't change out of your wet clothes. Or end up with a permanently black screen if an eagle claws your eyes out. Still pisses on the modern sandbox survival games.

madhair60

Quote from: Bhazor on April 24, 2018, 12:45:03 PM
The lack of proper obscure secrets is one of the disappointing things about Doom 2016.

There were some insanely ambitious first person shooters in the early days. I've always had a soft spot for Robinson's Requiem. A first person survival game where you could die from hypothermia if you went swimming and didn't change out of your wet clothes. Or end up with a permanently black screen if an eagle claws your eyes out. Still pisses on the modern sandbox survival games.

Bizarrely, I seem to have this on GOG.com. I've never downloaded it to try it out but I will now.

I have fond memories of Rise Of The Triad, the way some of the guards used to beg for there life, then shoot you in the back.

Bhazor

#4
Quote from: madhair60 on April 24, 2018, 12:49:00 PM
Bizarrely, I seem to have this on GOG.com. I've never downloaded it to try it out but I will now.

It is more Ultima Underworld than Doom but when you get a gun it does fire in real time. I think I remember the sequel being a quite a bit faster paced and with more pure action. But to me Robinson's Requiem is all about sawing your own leg off to prevent gangrene and killing yourself with a painkiller overdose. So I never spent much time with the sequel.

For straight shooters of the era I've always loved Strife. Which is like Deus Ex complete with open world and stealth but made in the original Doom engine. Again just insanely ambitious.

The only decent video I can find of it unfortunately has a "funny reviewer" yammering over it. But you get the idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPrU7LSqiX0

bgmnts

Cant really get better than Wolfenstein New Order and Old Blood in the modern era.

Norton Canes

Duke Nukem 3D, is that the one with a level that starts like you're just in an army base or something, then when you get to the control room a huge screen raises up and the Earth is hanging in front of you and it turns out you're on a space station?

And when a closing door squashes a monster the goo remains between the two halves?

Liked that one.

Cuellar

It's the one where you could chuck dollar bills at strippers and they'd get their tits out.

FredNurke

And kick with both feet at the same time while moving around.

madhair60

Quote from: FredNurke on April 24, 2018, 01:48:22 PM
And kick with both feet at the same time while moving around.

Annoyingly they took that out of every version bar the super early ones iirc. Cossack dance Duke was great.

biggytitbo

I have fond memories of Kingpin, which was one of the first games I played when I first got a PC. There was a good deal of sneaking about in that one iirc, along with the ultra violence.

Cuellar

Oh yeah Kingpin was good. Was that the one where everyone was big slabs of meat? And you could bash their bonces with a pipe.

I enjoyed Soldier of Fortune (was it?) for the revolutionary feature of being able to blow people's limbs off.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

If you haven't done so, check out the Brutal Doom mod. I think it must have been a big influence on Doom 2016, moreso even than the original unmodded version.

madhair60

By all means check out Brutal DooM as long as you don't say something like "It's better than DooM" because then I will lunge out of your screen like in Ring and kill you.

ASFTSN

I started a thred on CaB a while back asking if anyone was up for playing Doom 2 online but it sort of fizzled.

Blood is one the greatest games ever.  EVER.  Duke3d is amazing too, been considering a replay soon.

And thankyou, madhair, for mentioning Heretic and Hexen too.

ASFTSN

Brutal Doom...I applaud the efforts of the guy behind it, he clearly has his heart in it - but I think the pace and aggression of playing unmodified Doom 2 feel far more brutal!

ASFTSN

Just got a warm feeling thinking about the Drunk Missile in Rise of the Triad.

mikeyg27

Quote from: madhair60 on April 24, 2018, 12:38:24 PM
Duke 3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood, Redneck Rampage and Exhumed are all amazingly fun Build Engine games, and I haven't talked about Ultimate DooM, Heretic, HeXen, etc. Wonderful.

Exhumed is maybe the only FPS I can think of (certainly from this mid-late 90s / PS1 era of gaming) where the console version is better than the PC version. The PS1 and Saturn versions are pretty ambitious games almost-metroidvania style exploration, whilst the PC version is just a straight-up linear shooter (which feels the opposite way around to what it should be).

Anyway, I seem to have all these games on GoG, so I guess I like them too? Just to throw out another one I have fond memories of: Marathon. It's still pretty tense and eerie playing it nowadays, though it is awfully paced.

Flouncer

I've been hammering the first Quake this year. I've been sort of practising it on Nightmare mode with a view to having a go at running all the way through it in one go. I fucking love the atmosphere of that game; the soundtrack suits it so well, and the level design and monsters are brilliant. Even now it shits me up sometimes; when you don't realise that there is a fiend sneaking up behind you and it suddenly starts tearing into you, it's genuinely quite scary especially if you're playing in the dark with headphones on. I never really played it back in the day; I have a vague memory of playing the early levels of the shareware version but somehow it didn't grab me, maybe because it lacked the soundtrack. I loved playing Duke in those days, though - I know the first episode like the back of my hand because that's the only one I had access to at the time.

Blood is one of my favourites too. The jokes and references are great fun, as is decapitating zombies and kicking their heads around like footballs, setting fire to cultists then watching them run around screaming... The atmosphere is really grimy and dark; the cultists having their own language adds to the effect. It's a lot of fun.

I also feel the need to mention one of the earliest Build shooters - William Shatner's TekWar. You play a criminal sentenced to cyber-sleep who is awoken to take out drug dealers known as TekLords. It has video cutscenes featuring your man Shatner, who gives you your mission at the beginning and debriefs you at the end - if you kill too many NPCs he will give you a bollocking and threaten to have you frozen again. It is rudimentary and dodgy in places; the weapons are clunky and the enemies are shitty sprites, but it has an open-world feel that was really fresh at the time. You catch a subway train to get to the various districts in the game, each of which have their own feel. You have to fight your way through each level collecting keycards to eventually find that level's TekLord. You can shoot NPCs and policemen if you don't mind getting shouted at by Shatner, and amusingly some of them explode because they were androids. If you use certain weapons you can reduce your enemies to a pile of offal, which is fun. Some levels have moving cars and boats. It has a lot of cool ideas but they aren't particularly well implemented; in fact it seems unfinished in places (killing a TekLord gives you access to an unfathomable bonus level where you move a glove around a weird neon landscape with no discernible objective). Looking back you can't say it's a great game or even a good one, really, but it introduced some stuff that later games went on to do really well. I had fun playing it when I was a kid anyway.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

The thread cannot be considered complete without a mention of Painkiller. Released in 2004, the same year as Half Life 2, but distinctly older in terms of style.

Mister Six

Not an FPS game, but I believe it was made in Build 3D - some kind of top-down post-apocalyptic shooter in which you run around a knackered city shooting up various factions of crazies. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

madhair60

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on April 24, 2018, 06:41:07 PM
The thread cannot be considered complete without a mention of Painkiller. Released in 2004, the same year as Half Life 2, but distinctly older in terms of style.

Painkiller is good fun, but like Serious Sam it's nothing like old FPS games. They were never just arenas full of hundreds of enemies, they were intricate mazes with puzzles and keycards.

madhair60

Quote from: Mister Six on April 24, 2018, 06:42:17 PM
Not an FPS game, but I believe it was made in Build 3D - some kind of top-down post-apocalyptic shooter in which you run around a knackered city shooting up various factions of crazies. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

Take No Prisoners?

Had a fantasy cousin in Mageslayer, both made by Raven I think.

Famous Mortimer

So the Megaton edition of Duke 3D or the 20th anniversary world tour one?

asids

I played the Megaton Edition of Duke Nukem a couple of years ago and got all the achievements. Worth it. Also played through Shadow Warrior and got all achievements in that, as well as Doom 1, 2 and Final Doom around that time. Don't know, just had a kick for it at the time. I haven't played Blood or Heretic or whatever but I'll get around to them some time.

They're still really fun games. Traversing the entire level trying to find a keycard you somehow missed is a pain in the arse mind, but other than that, great fun.

ASFTSN

Go for Blood next!  Truly it takes Duke and ramps up the atmosphere.  If you've got any appreciation of the horror genre I'd say it's a must.

Mister Six

Quote from: madhair60 on April 24, 2018, 07:27:36 PM
Take No Prisoners?

Had a fantasy cousin in Mageslayer, both made by Raven I think.

Yes! Thank you!

Ferris


madhair60

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on April 25, 2018, 02:45:20 PM
So the Megaton edition of Duke 3D or the 20th anniversary world tour one?

If you somehow find a way to buy it, Megaton. Both versions are great though.

Megaton has the original four episodes from the Atomic Edition plus the three authorised expansions Life's A Beach, Nuclear Winter and Duke It Out in DC, total of 66 levels.

World Tour has the original four and a new fifth episode by the original level designers (which is excellent), but it doesn't have the other expansions, total of 49 levels. Also has improved engine, true 3D without sacrificing the game's look, dynamic lighting etc. That can all be toggled on and off with the touch of a button.

You can't go wrong with either to be honest. But Megaton Edition got pulled so it's hard to buy now.

madhair60

Quote from: ASFTSN on April 25, 2018, 03:25:37 PM
Go for Blood next!  Truly it takes Duke and ramps up the atmosphere.  If you've got any appreciation of the horror genre I'd say it's a must.

Blood is fabulous. If I could level any criticism, it's really, really hard at the beginning, that first level is a total bitch even on Easy.

There's a "source port" of the game called BloodGDX which makes the experience a hell of a lot friendlier. Buy the One Unit Whole Blood pack on GoG.com or somewhere, then use BloodGDX to play it. It's negligibly different to the full game in that way only total fucking nerd permavirgins care about