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FPS NIGHTMARES

Started by Lemming, November 17, 2019, 12:23:16 PM

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evilcommiedictator

Redneck Rampage level design was woeful, and the biggest issue was the textures look so blurry you can easily miss things like keys.

At least you've got Strife coming up, do any of the Dark Forces 4: Jedi Knight 3: Jedi Academy 2: Jedi Outcast games qualify?

samadriel

I'm looking forward to your take on Shadow Warrior's return in 2013; I didn't play the whole game, but it seemed pretty good and much less offensive than the original too.

purlieu


Lemming

Quote from: evilcommiedictator on April 19, 2020, 01:23:33 AM
At least you've got Strife coming up, do any of the Dark Forces 4: Jedi Knight 3: Jedi Academy 2: Jedi Outcast games qualify?

I've got the rest of the Jedi Knight games on THE BIG LIST. Unless I'm missing any, there's the Dark Forces 2 expansion coming up, then Jedi Knight 2, then Jedi Academy. Not sure what comes after those, maybe some mad shit like Republic Commando.

Lemming



Insane year. Tech moving forward in leaps and bounds and some incredible games coming out. There were no outright bad games - Redneck Rampage was the lowest rated but it was at least funny and interesting. I only wish FORBES CORPORATE WARRIOR had worked. It's now on the auxiliary list of things that didn't run or couldn't be played for some other reason, but which I'll try to go back to at some point. On the off-chance anyone miraculously manages to get FORBES CORPORATE WARRIOR working either on a 95 emulator or modern Windows, tell me how.

TOP THREE GAMES
Blood
Outlaws
Turok

WORST GAME: Has to be Redneck Rampage.

BEST PROTAGONIST: Kyle Katarn turning from generic tough guy into live-action nerd for Dark Forces 2 was a fantastic move. He's just a much more likable character when he's played by that one guy.

WORST PROTAGONIST: Lo Wang, no more need be said.

BEST VILLAIN: There still haven't even been any real ones. Malcom McDowell I guess.

LAMEST VILLAIN: There's been a few. The evil guy from Dark Forces 2 is utterly impotent, I'm still not 100% sure what he was even up to. And the main bad guy in Outlaws hides behind a fucking curtain while you fight him.

BEST WEAPON: Everything from Turok, especially the fusion cannon. Also, if you set your phaser to kill (you shouldn't!) in Generations, it's pretty amazingly destructive and reduces virtually every enemy (and some walls) into smouldering ash.

WORST WEAPON: Redneck Rampage pistol. Unusable. Terrible.

BEST ENEMY: The omnipresent cultists from Blood, who yell abuse at you in an incomprehensible language.

WORST ENEMY: The army of Nicolas Cage clones from Turok. Total flops who die in like one hit, and it's a miracle if they actually manage to get a shot off on you.

BEST STORY AND/OR SETTING: Blood's unnerving 1920s nightmare is really cool to explore.

NICE SURPRISES: Star Trek: Generations is fascinating, and Chasm: The Rift is much better than its reputation of Naff Quake suggests.

CRUSHING DISAPPOINTMENTS: None really. Shadow Warrior was a touch worse than I remembered, but I was expecting that. Quake 2 was a good bit duller than I remembered but again, expected.

And now, some stats:
TOTAL GAMES REVIEWED SO FAR: 43 (Don't quote me on that, I can't count properly)
TOTAL FIVE OUT OF FIVE RATINGS GIVEN: 4 (new: Blood)
TOTAL ONE OUT OF FIVE RATINGS GIVEN: 3
TOTAL GAMES WITH PLAYABLE FEMALE CHARACTERS: 9 (new: you can be Troi and Crusher in Star Trek: Generations, and Hexen 2 brings the Assassin class)
TOTAL GAMES WITH PLAYABLE FEMALE CHARACTERS WHO CAN'T BE SWAPPED FOR A MALE CHARACTER: 1 (and that was just Ripley)
TOTAL GAMES THAT ARE ESSENTIALLY JUST THE PLOT OF DIE HARD: 3

1998. The big one is upon us. What is "the big one"? Half-Life? Thief? Unreal? No, I am speaking of course of the incomparable KLINGON HONOR GUARD

Zetetic

Quote from: Mister Six on April 18, 2020, 03:59:54 PM
Voice files don't take any more space than any other sound effect.
You could even probably get away with lower sample rates for voice than many sound effects, I'm guessing? So long as you don't mind it sounding fairly awful, but recognisable.

What's perhaps significant is that you'll get a lot more mileage out of a sound effect than a voice clip, usually, given how irritating repetition of the latter clearly is. Which does then make voiced anything more expensive space-wise?

druss

Can Thief be counted as an FPS? I suppose you can shoot arrows.

purlieu

Ah yes, an excellent year on its way.

Lemming

Quote from: druss on April 19, 2020, 05:22:10 PM
Can Thief be counted as an FPS? I suppose you can shoot arrows.

Can't remember whereabouts in the thread it was, but pretty early on the definition of FPS got expanded to be basically "first person real time action game", basically any first-person thing that isn't an adventure like Myst or a turn-based RPG like Wizardry. I did it mainly so I could play the Elder Scrolls games and Thief, but it's also led to being able to play cool games like Jumping Flash! and Quarantine. I've also got LSD: Dream Emulator on the list for 1998.

Jim Bob

Quote from: Mister Six on April 18, 2020, 03:59:54 PM
Doubt it was ever an issue of disc space. How much spoken dialogue did the average LucasArts CD game have, for example?

Indeed.  The likes of Shadow Warrior only took up around a quarter, or perhaps a half of a CD ROM's potential capacity, so there was more than enough room for further voice files.

Quote from: Lemming on April 19, 2020, 03:24:50 PM
I've got the rest of the Jedi Knight games on THE BIG LIST. Unless I'm missing any, there's the Dark Forces 2 expansion coming up, then Jedi Knight 2, then Jedi Academy...

Aye, those are all of the games within the Jedi Knight series.

I was thinking the other day that it would be kinda awesome if they made a new entry which acted as the inverse the the previous games.  It could be titled Sith Lord: Dark Forces, or some such gubbins and like Tie Fighter was to X-Wing, have you playing as an evil lightsaber wielding fella, cutting down rebels and Jedi Knights.  Also, in the same way that Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2 gave you the option of turning to the dark side, this theoretical game could give the player the option of turning to the light towards the end game.  Shame that it will almost certainly never happen (and no, that The Force Unleashed dumbed down nonsense doesn't count in my book; I'm talking about a game that would mix combat with puzzles in the same manner that the Jedi Knight series did).

Zetetic

Quote from: Jim Bob on April 21, 2020, 03:55:09 PM
Indeed.  The likes of Shadow Warrior only took up around a quarter, or perhaps a half of a CD ROM's potential capacity, so there was more than enough room for further voice files.

As the 3D Realms site of the time helpfully points out, Shadow Warrior Registered is only 33.2MB compressed. (The shareware episode is less than half of that.) That's less than 1/20th of a CD.

But as the site also points out, that still might have taken you over two hours to download via dial-up. (Assuming you managed to stay connected all that time.)

Zetetic

I don't know how much dial-up downloads and shareware floppies were really important in 1997, to be clear, but it's interesting that they still considered it relevant.

MojoJojo

CD writers were still pretty expensive, so floppies were still pretty important to shareware.

I remember Quake fit on 22 floppies. And that was enough that you'd expect one of them to fail.

Lemming

Haven't started on 1998 yet because I'm in one of those sleep cycle fuckups where you wake up after a couple hours no matter how tired you are, leaving you PERMASHATTERED and PERMAFUCKED, so decided to catalog the thread so far. Hopefully this makes it easier to navigate if anyone wants to see which games have already been done, see ratings (virtually all of which I already disagree with), count the total amount of games so far etc. Bolded 5/5 games.

1992
Wolfenstein 3D 3/5

1993
The Terminator: Rampage 1/5
Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold 3/5
Doom 4/5

1994 (Retrospective)
Operation: Body Count 3/5
The Elder Scrolls: Arena 2/5
System Shock 5/5
Doom 2 4/5
Super Noah's Ark 3D 1/5
Marathon 4/5
Rise of the Triad 2.5/5
Heretic 5/5
Quarantine 3.5/5

1995 (Retrospective)
Star Wars: Dark Forces 3.5/5 (later revised to 4/5)
Descent 3/5 (I rated this too low as well, deserved 3.5 or 4)
Jumping Flash!  ROBBIT/5
CyberMage: Darklight Awakening 2/5
Witchaven 3/5
William Shatner's TEKWAR Shatner/5
Hexen 3.5/5
The Terminator: Future Shock 3.5/5
BONUS THING: The Terminator (1990)
Marathon 2 2.5/5
In Pursuit of Greed 2.5/5
Mortal Coil: Adrenalin Intelligence 1/5

1996 (Retrospective)
Duke Nukem 3D 3.5/5
Strife 3/5
PowerSlave (console version) 5/5
PowerSlave (DOS version) 3/5
Alien Trilogy 2/5
Quake 4/5
The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall 4/5
Eradicator 3.5/5

1997 (Retrospective)
Blood 5/5
Outlaws 4/5
Hexen 2 3/5
Quake 2 2.5/5
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter 4/5
Chasm: The Rift 3/5
Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2 3.5/5
Star Trek: Generations 3/5
Redneck Rampage 2/5
Shadow Warrior 3.5/5

Shoulders?-Stomach!

This is still brilliant reading, Lemming.

Mister Six

Yeah, I love this thread and this project. Fantastic stuff.

A while away yet but looking forward to Unreal Tournament.

Wonder if the Bunny Track servers are still going?

Abnormal Palm

I have almost no interest in the genre or PC gaming whatsoever but this is top tier CaB.

popcorn

My threads are good too though aren't they?

Ferris

Quote from: popcorn on April 22, 2020, 05:53:39 PM
My threads are good too though aren't they?

Not as good as my one about several men holding a fish.

popcorn

Quote from: FerriswheelBueller on April 22, 2020, 06:12:07 PM
Not as good as my one about several men holding a fish.

Ooh that does sound interesting. But oddly I don't seem able to find it.

I can find a thread called "Picture of a man who caught a fish", but that can't be it, because obviously that's only about one man who caught one fish. Unless the title is actually incredibly misleading and wrong? But that would be grounds for banning.

Lemming

Thanks for the nice feedback, I'm glad people are enjoying this Monster Energy fueled descent into gaming hell as much as I am.

Decided to start trying to play the games in true chronological order of release, to more fairly look at how technology and design changes. Here's a preliminary list for 1998, ordered by release date. I'm probably missing at least a couple things:

Klingon Honor Guard (February 9th)
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith (February 17th)
Hexen 2: Portal of Praevus (March 31st)
Forsaken (April 30th)
Unreal (May 22nd)
NAM (July 31st)
Rainbow Six (August 21st)
Shogo (October 15th)
Delta Force (October 21st)
LSD: Dream Emulator (October 22nd)
Montezuma's Return! (October 27th)
Trespasser (October 28th)
Extreme Paintbrawl (October 31st)
SiN (November 9th)
Half-Life (November 19th)
Blood 2 (November 25th)
Carnivores (November 30th)
Thief: The Dark Project (December 1st)
Turok 2 (December 10th)
South Park (December 12th)

popcorn

For fuck's sake it's going to take ages to get to Half-Life.

And even then I bet Lemming only gives it four barnacle tongues out of five.

Lemming

It's a guaranteed Five Shit 90's Ponytails out of Five, don't worry.


AsparagusTrevor

I never realised the Unreal-engine powered 'Klingon Honour Guard' came out before 'Unreal' did. Interesting.... to, me anyway.

Mister Six

A bit like Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines coming out before HL2, despite using its engine.

Jim Bob

#506
Quote from: Lemming on April 23, 2020, 02:48:10 PM
It's a guaranteed Five Shit 90's Ponytails out of Five, don't worry.



I've being playing the Half-Life remake Black Mesa recently and at the very start of the game, once arriving at the facility for work, a security guard comments upon Gordon having cut his ponytail off.  This ruined the game for me.  Where's the fun in roleplaying as a man without a shit 90's ponytail?!  Worst. Remake. Ever.

Lemming

Fully agreed. Most of the tension in the original came from thinking about the ponytail - worrying that it'd catch fire in the incinerators in Residue Processing, fretting that it'd get caught in the electrified rails in On A Rail, panicking that it could get cut off by the haywire surgical machine in Questionable Ethics, etc.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

The shit 90s ponytail was the friends you made along the way.

AsparagusTrevor

It wasn't the ponytail on your head, it was the ponytail in your heart.