FPS NIGHTMARES

[madhair60]

What the fuck. Delete this

IF YOU HAD NEPHEWS AND NIECES YOU'D UNDERSTAND

[madhair60]

Also Shadow Warrior is great, I like it better than Half-Life and Tetris

[Jerzy Bondov]

When I was a teenager I had my own game reviews site on the server space of a doomed Half-Life mod and I caused a meltdown in the forum by giving Tetris 10/10 and saying it was the best game ever made.

[Consignia]

When I was a teenager I had my own game reviews site on the server space of a doomed Half-Life mod and I caused a meltdown in the forum by giving Tetris 10/10 and saying it was the best game ever made.

Why? An overwhelming amount of traffic as people rush to agree?

[Jerzy Bondov]

Just remembered it wasn't 10 out of 10 as I had a percentage rating system. I gave it 100%, and then I shat all over Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 for not being as good as Tetris.

[Lemming]

The most important take-away from the last couple pages is that Deus Ex and Tetris are two of the best games ever made.

[popcorn]

Deus Ex is better than Tetris.

Always found Tetris a bit dull. :(

[Ferris]

Just remembered it wasn't 10 out of 10 as I had a percentage rating system. I gave it 100%, and then I shat all over Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 for not being as good as Tetris.

WHAT THE FUCK

[Jerzy Bondov]

Made a separate thread about my crap game site.

[madhair60]

Deus Ex is better than Tetris.

Always found Tetris a bit dull. :(

Graphics are better in Deus Ex for sure

[PlanktonSideburns]

I mean, tetris,sure but once you've played COLUMNS on the mega drive

Now there's a 10/10

[madhair60]

Columns defo has better graphics than Tetris. I prefer vertical shit to horizontal shit too so big win for Columns.

[Lemming]

Redneck Rampage (1997)





STORY: Bessie the prize pig has been taken away by aliens. To stop redneck brothers Leonard and Bubba from recovering her, aliens have cloned local rednecks and turned them into killing machines. Now Leonard must navigate a twisted hellscape of rural towns.

MUSIC: There is in fact a psychobilly soundtrack to this, that DIDN'T PLAY in the version I got.

I'M GONNA GIT YA BOY, I'M GONNA GIT YA: MAXIMUM DISCLOSURE: I wound up not finishing the game. I started episode three but fucked it off pretty quick, so I'm essentially reviewing two thirds of the game. If the final levels are an epic turnaround then I'll stand corrected.

Let's start off with the element that seems to get praised the most, the humour. It isn't alienating in the way Shadow Warrior is being, but it didn't really land for me, other than the sprite for the sunglasses cop which is fucking funny. There's an alien that throws its shit at you, a "teat gun", fart noises playing every 30 seconds, whiskey as health kits (which can result in you getting drunk and fucking up the controls), all that.

Anyway, the graphics don't look great. There's an attempt at an art style but the game just looks ugly to me. Definitely not one of the better uses of the Build engine, especially compared against Shadow Warrior and Blood, which I guess are this game's big Build competitors from the same year. The sprite work is variable, with some of it just being absurd - what the hell is up with the purple alien female assassin sprite? MESS

Sound design is a fucking NIGHTMARE, you fight the same couple of crap human enemies for the vast majority of the game and you will hear "GIT OFF MY LAND" and "I'M GONNA GIT YA BOY!!!" over five hundred fucking times. Everything's a shitty cacophony. Some levels have their own tinny music playing from the walls for some reason (the looping music at the start of THE NUTHOUSE is one of the worst things I've ever heard, although that was probably the intention, so maybe that's a plus point).

There's a varied arsenal with some cool weapons - dynamite crossbow, sawblade launcher, alien plasma gun - but ammo is rationed in such a way that you're likely to get stuck with the pistol and the shotgun most of the time. The pistol is a piece of fucking SHIT and the shotgun isn't exactly leagues better, especially if you're firing from any range other than point blank.

This is made worse by the fact that every other fucking enemy is a bullet sponge from hell. If you're reduced to the pistol, you'd be better off running past some enemies than even bothering to shoot them the 30+ times (not an exaggeration in the case of some of the big alien enemies) it'd take to kill them.

The assault rifle and dynamite crossbow are the best weapons in the game, objectively. You get limited ammo for both and burn through assault rifle ammo fast, but while you're firing it, for a brief shining moment you feel as though things are coming together. Enemies go down when hit, rather than continuing to walk towards you playing git_off_my_land.wav.

Speaking of the assault rifle, one of its big flagship features is that it actually fires properly. With other guns, hit detection has something wrong with it and everything generally feels like shit to fire. No clue what was going on there. After a while I gave up with it and went to download a port to eduke32, which is what you see in those screenshots. That played a little better and guns at least fired vaguely in the direction they were being aimed.

Level design is pretty awful most of the time. There's some moments of creativity and cleverness but mostly it's needlessly oversized maps with lots of side areas that have nothing interesting, just rooms made of the same recycled textures and props the game reuses constantly throughout. I don't like looking for keys at the best of times and Redneck Rampage's levels have absolutely no intuitiveness to them, keys could be fucking anywhere, the game just throws locked doors for which you "AIN'T GOT THE KEY!" at you constantly with no guidance or logic behind where the key might be. There wasn't a single level I played that "flowed" (for lack of a better word) in the way the best Doom, Blood, Duke 3D etc levels do. More than a couple times I spent up to 20 minutes walking around looking for obscurely-hidden keys which was almost a relief since it was at least a break from the spongey combat.

The levels are filled with secret areas to find and such, so you are rewarded for exploring, but getting lost in identical corridors for half an hour isn't something I've ever enjoyed in these games, so when I stumbled upon a "YER SECRET PLACE" my reaction was frothing, burning rage that I still hadn't found the key I needed.

The game is hard as shit and poses a decent challenge but I didn't get much fun out of it, chiefly since the difficulty comes from enemies having stupidly high health and/or your weapons being stupidly ineffective. By mid episode 2, I gave up and just restarted the episode on Wuss mode to get through it.

I guess the game being a total mess is all part of the joke, but it doesn't quite reach so-bad-its-good B movie level for me. It is funny how half-assed the game is, but the joke wears out around E1M2 and then you're just left with a clunky boring game that doesn't play well.

The only real redeeming factors I can think of are the creativity in weapon types and enemy types, but again, the game doesn't really let you play with them as much as it should, because it loves to throw you back into samey buildings/farms and stick you with the shotgun and the same couple enemy types. And we've already seen some insane weapons in other games by this time, so it's not like having a pair of machine gun tits is super revolutionary. I do like the whiskey health system and the resulting fucked controls, reminds me of the mushroom thing in EarthBound that made it impossible to walk properly.

But overall the game feels like a lot of the worst elements of this era of shooters condensed into one - confusing levels where you spend more time walking back and forth looking for keys than actually having fun, repetitive enemies, difficulty that's so bad on higher settings that it can't have even been playtested, humour that wears out its welcome early on...

FINAL RATING: Honestly, it's not good. I tried to like it since I vaguely remembered playing it as a kid, but it's just not worth it. 2 GIT OFF MY LAND out of 5 and that's pushing it.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

you will hear "GIT OFF MY LAND" and "I'M GONNA GIT YA BOY!!!" over five hundred fucking times.

fuck me

[madhair60]

Fucking love Redneck Rampage. It is shit though tbh.

It's a shame the soundtrack didn't work because it massively enhances it for me.

[Wonderful Butternut]

Yeah, that is pure ear-rape when you're near an enemy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIS6i0UkwR4

"I'M GONNA FUCK YA! I'M GONNA FUCK YA!"

[Jim Bob]

I mean, tetris,sure but once you've played COLUMNS on the mega drive

Now there's a 10/10

Pfft.  Everyone knows that Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine is where it's really at.

fuck me

Only if ya squeal like a hog, boy.

[Jim Bob]

Yeah, that is pure ear-rape when you're near an enemy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIS6i0UkwR4

"I'M GONNA FUCK YA! I'M GONNA FUCK YA!"

I had this game as a teen and I don't remember it sounding that obnoxious at all.  I suspect that actually having the CD soundtrack playing as intended by the developers during gameplay makes a world of difference, as it would drown out the constant barrage of looped soundbites.  It's criminal that the digital copies being sold these days are lacking the soundtrack.  It's possible that the files are in the folder and simply have to be mounted as an ISO image, mind.

[Al Tha Funkee Homosapien]

Fucking love Redneck Rampage. It is shit though tbh.

It's a shame the soundtrack didn't work because it massively enhances it for me.

I agree with that guy.

[madhair60]

Pfft.  Everyone knows that Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine is where it's really at.

Puyo Puyo is indeed the handsome Prince of the puzzle genre. I like it better than Half Life

[Jerzy Bondov]

What is the best sequel: Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, or Half-Life 2?

[Ferris]

I'd rather play Turok. I like it! I think it's good!

[Lemming]

Finished Shadow Warrior, I'll write the review later today, but first: FORBES CORPORATE WARRIOR update

The game wouldn't install on a Windows 95 emulator, but strangely, would on a 3.1 emulator. Behold:


But trying to run it is a lost cause:


Can't get it running in 95 either. The CORPWAR folder, however, is now accessible from Windows 7 (yes I still use Windows 7, fuck off). Trying to run it grants this pretty hilarious message:



It says this from the very folder that holds the full installation, which the game's own setup.exe made just a few minutes earlier. Compatibility mode faffing has no effect.

But there's some consolation. There's a TEXTURES folder which offers exciting insights into just what exactly the fuck is in this game.



BEACH.bmp. Could this be your newest and greatest desktop wallpaper???



LG15.bmp. No comment.



MS3.bmp. Mystifying.



SCORE.bmp promises that we could become Certified Corporate Warriors if only we could get the bastard thing running.



And heres SHLP_02.bmp, a list of weapons.

[purlieu]

That and Redneck Rampage are games I never knew existed and wouldn't have believed existed without actually Googling them. Madness.

[Lemming]

Shadow Warrior (1997)





This is "Shadow Warrior Classic Redux", a very good remaster in much the same style as the Blood remaster.

STORY:


MUSIC: Not bad but it didn't have much of an impact on me. One song reminded me of the opening to Japanese Boy by Aneka though, which I went to listen to instead and had a GREAT TIME.

WHO WANTS SOME WANG: Last year, 3D Realms brought us Duke Nukem 3D, a cutting send-up of something or other, might have been films.

This time around, we're treated to a satire masterclass in - you guessed it - Chinese accents.

Yes, it's time for Shadow Warrior, a game in which you play as a guy called Lo Wang! Get this - his name means cock! And he can't pronounce the letter "L"! What's more fun than slicing people in half with a sword? Only hearing "OHOHOHO SPRIT PERSONARITY!" or some other """"funny"""" variant every other time you do it. Every other time.

Just when you're wheezing for breath from the laugh-onslaught of Wang's hilarious accent, the game hits you with its next joke - Fortune Cookies! They say funny things! And Wang says "ANCIENT CHINESE SECLET"!

But wait! Hold onto your sides - this game is NOT a one-trick pony. It has not just one joke to offer, or even two - this game has THREE entire jokes! Yes, the third joke is anime! Pretty funny! Remember anime? It's in the game! Yes!!! Some off brand, copyright-dodging* stock female anime characters are scattered around the place, usually in various states of undress. PHWOAAAAAAR! Lo Wang can irritate them by saying lecherous things to them. Laugh-a-minute stuff.

*And some non-copyright dodging ones - Usagi from Sailor Moon shows up for some reason or other, in a bikini and "sexy" pose with hugely inflated tits. 14 years old she is in the series. Good going 3D Realms.

Don't worry - you'll get to hear these jokes a lot! Again and again. And again, and again, and again. They really don't lose anything on the 19th consecutive reappearance.

It's all tedious. Duke 3D was so confused and bizarre with its strange anti-jokes that you could almost assume there was some kind of genius satire you were missing. Not so with Shadow Warrior - I think this game answers the question once and for all. 3D Realms are unquestionably just witless turds. Both games are about as funny as suddenly finding out your universal credit has been stopped but the crappiness is just transparent with Shadow Warrior. While playing, I experienced vivid visions of the gangly nerd fuckheads who made the game sat in their shitty little office snickering to themselves and saying some of Wang's lines out loud, writing down their best zingers to send on to the poor bastard of a voice actor. The edginess just radiates off the game, and buries you under an avalanche of second-hand embarassment.

It's worse though, because Lo Wang literally NEVER shuts the fuck up. At least Duke closed his goddamn mouth so you could play the game, but not so with Wang. The team at 3D Realms really thought it'd be a good idea not only to have him talk every time something happens, but even if you just do routine, unavoidable things such as SWITCHING WEAPONS. "I RIKE SWORD DAT'S A PERSONAL WEAPON", "WHO WANTA SOME WANNGGGG", incessant, unfunny, nightmarish.

Alright, no more about the shitty trappings of the game, let's look at the actual game itself. This is the third of the Build BIG THREE - Duke 3D, Blood and this. Even though Blood is clearly and objectively the best of the pack, Shadow Warrior stands pretty firmly alongside the better Duke levels in terms of quality. I mentioned in the Duke 3D review that as a kid I always preferred this one, and having replayed both games, I think that's still true now.

Level design is much tighter across the board than in Duke. Rarely are you totally lost and forced to go on a miserable key hunt. Levels are compact and make excellent use of space and so you're always searching in a reasonably-sized area, unlike Redneck Rampage. Keys are mostly fairly placed - of the handful of times I got lost, a few were definitely my own fault for missing obvious keys, rather than the dev's fault for putting keys in stupid places. "Fuck I'm dumb it's my own fault" is pretty much the ideal reaction you want from the player in a game like this, so they did well!

There are some pleasingly well-done puzzles in many levels. They're all fairly simple and gimmicky but that's exactly what you want - a brief minute-long distraction from combat just to change things up. There's a particularly good one about mixing different colours that makes you feel clever when you realise what's going on.

Graphics are great, they managed to wring some quality visuals out of the Build engine. It doesn't look quite as good as Blood IMO, chiefly due to Blood's very strong art direction which Shadow Warrior doesn't really have an equivalent to, but levels are detailed and attractive. They manage to look even more like believable real-life locations than most Duke 3D maps ever did too.

Onto the weapons. The shurikens are a fucking joke and the rail gun is shit (don't argue) but other than that the weapons are great. The dual uzis are your staple weapon but the riot gun, grenade launcher and missile launcher are all likely to see heavy use. The game throws plentiful ammo at you so it's up to you which weapons you decide to favour. The only one I didn't bother with was the Ripper head, mainly because I couldn't be bothered memorising which setting did what so I just used it as a flamethrower. Speaking of which, that's a feature in this game. Weapons have various settings which can drastically alter how they work. The shotgun can be set to single or burst fire for example, and the missile launcher has heat-seeking settings and some setting that made it start shaking like crazy so I got scared and switched away without seeing what it did. Great feature which adds an extra kick to the gameplay as you're forced to make decisions about not only which weapon to use for any given encounter, but also how exactly to use it.

There's a great range of enemies, airborne and waterborne types included. They don't really demand different strategies to beat them, but some do have unique abilities. These weird ninja things can grab onto walls for example, but in practice it always goes totally tits up for them and just makes them easier to shoot at. The difficulty feels like its been balanced to near-perfection on every difficulty setting, an accomplishment which Duke 3D and Blood can't boast.

There's a selection of items to use as is standard for most of these games, and, like most other games, they're useless shit. Caltrops, great. Just setting a trap for yourself more than anything. The game does inherit Duke 3D's portable healthkit which is a feature I'm a big fan of, so there's that.

Finally, there are also vehicle segments which completely suck shit and really shouldn't have been in the game.

Overall the game has a level of polish that sets it apart from Duke. It all feels like they spent a little more time on each level, checking it over and testing it. In other words, it's like a whole game made to the quality of Duke 3D's LA Meltdown.

FINAL RATING: It's a good game wrapped in a charmless and irritating package. Really the game is pushing 4/5 on a good day, but I'm giving it a low 3.5 because, over the course of the few hours the game took to beat, I had to listen to an endlessly looping cycle of vaguely racist and sexist non-jokes from a third-rate voice actor doing a stupid accent. I'm serious, I am deducting half a point for this shit. Before anyone objects, please remember that these ratings are LITERALY MEANINGLESS

3.5 Absolute Comedy Masterminds out of 5



That's the last Build game. So, in the end, what's the overall Build game ranking? Like I said, Blood easily runs away with it for me. Monolith destroyed 3D Realms at their own game. But after that I'd put Shadow Warrior in second place and Duke 3D in third, although I enjoyed Duke 3D more this time around than any other time I've played it. So it was pretty close - Duke 3D and Shadow Warrior are both solid games with great moments, and both left me feeling like 3D Realms were a pack of knobheads. Do people agree? What is your own PERSONAL BUILD RANKING? If anyone puts Witchaven in first place, they'll be shot.

[Wonderful Butternut]

STORY:

I fucking calved.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

What is your own PERSONAL BUILD RANKING?

HS Art topic idea

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Incidentally, at this point how did these games manage to cram in so many audio files of AHARARH HIRALIOUS JOKAS?

Most games of the era I remember are very very light on any audio, particular voice acting, I assume to save disk space. Even the characters on Skyrim seem to say about 40 things in total.

[Mister Six]

Voice files don't take any more space than any other sound effect. I think FPS games have silent protagonists mostly due to inherited convention set by Doom (especially around the time of Duke Nukem 3D) or as a deliberate stylistic choice to let the player "inhabit" their character more fully (cf. Half Life 2, PS4 Prey). Shadow Warrior-era game devs probably also didn't want to go through the rigmarole of casting voice actors, hiring recording booths, writing scripts etc, back in a time when that was mostly unusual for their genre.

Doubt it was ever an issue of disc space. How much spoken dialogue did the average LucasArts CD game have, for example?

Skyrim had plenty of voice acting, but a limited number of voice actors, presumably to cut costs.

[philanselmo]

Loving this thread & the reviews.

Shadow Warrior for the win.
Blood is waaay to difficult, & I'm bored with Duke & all the reissues of that legacy.

Agree with you about voice acting / racism but I get around it by taking the opinion that it was simply a product of its time.
Proto-Edge-Lord programmers, trying to make a name, possibly.

Keep up the great work!