FPS NIGHTMARES

[PlanktonSideburns]

amazing news. your posts are very good lemming

[Lemming]

Forsaken (1998)





RELEASE DATE: April 24th, 1998

STORY: After Earth gets utterly FUCKED by a big weird nuclear blast, the entire planet is condemned as an unlivable wasteland. Scavengers, pirates and mercenaries flock to the ruined world to steal whatever's left, but there's security robots literally everywhere. And everyone's trying to kill each other too.

MUSIC: More standard 90s dance-y stuff, not dissimilar to Descent. Does a good job.

WHY WORK FOR SOMETHING WHEN YOU CAN STEAL IT?: As mentioned, I played some Frankenstein's monster remaster that stitched the N64 and PC levels together.

At first glance, it's literally a Descent clone, except your craft appears to weigh absolutely nothing, unlike your ship in Descent which felt pleasingly weighty to fly around. After playing a couple of levels, Forsaken's unique identity starts to emerge. Despite basically lifting Descent's core gameplay, it's going for a completely different experience. With that said, I'm going to compare Forsaken to Descent constantly throughout this review - perhaps not always fairly, but given that it so shamelessly mdoels itself after Descent, it's pretty much asking for comparisons to be made.

Whereas Descent was about tough combat, ammo management, and slinking your way through levels relatively slowly to try and evade or ambush enemies, Forsaken is much more about flying at 90 mph into the centre of a group of enemies and then twirling around like a demented bike-riding ballerina as multicoloured projectiles fly all over the place. Descent's levels were abstract and attempted to make you dizzy with trying to figure out where the fuck you were, whether you were facing the right way up, and where to go next. Forsaken's levels are (mostly) much much more straightforward and push you forward through a chain of combat encounters.

The levels in Forsaken also make a vague attempt to represent real places, leading to some memorable battles in capsized ships, decaying subway systems, science labs, a space station and all kinds of other post-apocalyptic locales. This mostly really works and leads to compelling levels, which combine with themed objectives, Dark Forces style (the one that sticks mostly in my memory is the level in which you have to rob a bank by fighting through the adjacent subway system and entering the vault through a wall). Forsaken also adds underwater areas, which are awesome because the controls suddenly shift and you have to quickly get to grips with a completely new style of movement.

Speaking of movement, though, one annoying difference from Descent is that the game automatically rotates your ship upright. In Descent, you could orient yourself in literally any direction you wanted and fly upside down through the whole level, whereas in this you're automatically snapped back into place against your will. Fascist game. It's annoying and I don't really understand why it's a feature, since it undermines part of the 6-degrees-of-freedom concept that the game rides so hard on. WHY DO THIS???

Graphically, the game is extremely impressive for the time. I'd say the visuals haven't aged too well, everything looks quite murky and blurry, but playing through the FPS genre chronologically like this, it's easy to appreciate how impressive this must have looked at the time, and what a step forward it represents visually. There are some properly great effects too - fire looks amazing and water looks doubly amazing. Not sure if the water effect is new in the remaster, because water looks absurdly better than everything around it, but neat either way.

So, again, we have the N64 and PC levels combined together here. You can really easily tell which is which - the N64 ones are short, sometimes laughably short, like 3 minutes long, and occasionally end with a bizarre boss fight against some kind of monster, usually one that looks like it's come straight out of the weirder section of a Final Fantasy bestiary. The PC levels are longer and more puzzle-oriented. The remaster does a great job at scattering the N64 levels into the mix among the PC levels, and they act as a nice way to change things up - a lengthy and maze-like level is followed by a very brief burst of action.

At the end of a level, you're usually attacked by another mercenary-biker-treasure-hunter-bastard like yourself, which act as mini-bosses. After fucking a rival up, you get the ability to play as them. Each merc-biker-pirate-bastard has their own stats, with varying levels of health, speed and so on. They all feel roughly the same, so you might as well just pick the one that makes you laugh the most, which is OBVIOUSLY Cuvel Clark.

There's an array of primary and secondary weapons, like with Descent. The pulsar cannon is your basic weapon and from that you get the Trojax (weird charged-shot thing), Transpulse (the main feature of which is that it ricochets), Pyrolite (flamethrower), Twin Beam (dual laser beams) and more. You collect Power Pods throughout the level, each of which improves your weapons, and you also collect orbital cannons which add a pulsar shot to any weapon. As in Descent, though, I found myself mainly just using the basic starting weapon, because the Pulsar is weirdly more effective than some of the theoretically-better weapons, and when fully upgraded it absolutely rips enemies to shreds.

Another thing that distinguishes this from Descent is that you lose all your powerups and weapons between levels. This is good because it makes each level a self-contained adventure, unlike Descent where you were encouraged to conserve ammo and be careful not to die so that you'd be able to carry your stuff forward into future levels. Like with a lot of other things in Forsaken, this mechanic exists to let you go a little bit crazy - no need to conserve ammo or worry too much about getting killed since you're going to start afresh at the end of the level anyway, so might as well go CRAZY APESHIT and rush into a group of enemies blasting your flamethrower everywhere.

Enemy variety isn't quite as good as Descent. Descent's robots all had unique designs and abilities, and you really got to the point where you were thinking "oh thank fuck, it's just a room full of the shitty orange ones" or "oh no fuck, it's a room full of the bastard green ones". In Forsaken, everything sort of merges into a grey-brown smudge and you often don't get a chance to see what an enemy actually is before you've exploded it into pieces. There's many airborne enemies and then a variety of turrets and ground-bound enemies, but none of them feel massively distinct from each other. Still, the range of enemies keeps combat from feeling too same-y.

As a final side-note, what's up with the cover art? There's an ad campaign with other photos of the same person, but she doesn't resemble any of the bikers, nor does she represent anyone mentioned in the story (what there is of it). The pictures have literally nothing to do with the game. Why use one as the box art?! I get that magazine ads having nothing to do with the game was standard practice back in the day, but who the hell was like "oh yeah, just take one of the weird pictures we used in the magazines and stick in on the box itself, that's fine, boxes don't need to have anything to do with the game inside them anyway"? That said, I like the box art - there's something weirdly unnerving and mysterious about it, and the mystery only deepens as you play the game and wonder "wait, what the hell does that have to do with anything?" I kept thinking she was gonna show up as the final boss or something, but nope.

FINAL RATING: It's Descent for people who like fun. 4 Inexplicable Box Arts out of 5.


So, which is better, this or Descent? Despite the fact I've just written this entire post about how this beats Descent in most aspects... I actually liked Descent more. I can't even explain why. This is definitely a lot more straight-up fun and a lot more slick, but I liked the gruelling nightmare of Descent. Also, Descent had that little sequence at the end of levels where the ship flies away from an explosion, which was sick.

Next game: Unreal

[druss]

Can't wait for Unreal. I remember thinking that graphics had peaked with Unreal.

[PlanktonSideburns]

love unreals aesthetics. its like a childs dream

[Ferris]

Nice to see you back, Lemming!

Great write up, as always.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Forsaken 64 really did look gobsmacking at the time. The lighting effects in particular stick in my mind - with plasma globs illuminating the area around them. It might have been old news to PC gamers, but I'd never seen anything like it in a game.

I wasn't much of a drum n bass fan, but I remember the soundtrack being pretty spiffy too. It made it feel like one of those 'cool' games I imagined the Playstation was stacked with.

Let's hope Glinner doesn't find out about it...

[beanheadmcginty]

Blimey. I thought that looked a lot like Kate Winslet on the cover. Apparently it actually IS Kate Winslet.

[popcorn]

Blimey. I thought that looked a lot like Kate Winslet on the cover. Apparently it actually IS Kate Winslet.

says who?

[Ferris]

says who?

your mum lol

[popcorn]

What?!

[samadriel]

The best nonsensical videogame cover.

[Lemming]

Look.

This is an ACTUAL PC GAME SCREENSHOT.

NO BULLSHIT

ACTUAL
PC
GAME
SCREENSHOT

[Ferris]

HOLY SHIT

[QDRPHNC]

I miss being an age where my imagination filled in the blanks.

[Bazooka]

Look.

This is an ACTUAL PC GAME SCREENSHOT.

NO BULLSHIT

ACTUAL
PC
GAME
SCREENSHOT

Look at those abs, can almost feel them through the screen.

[Jerzy Bondov]

I like how that magazine bills itself as the number one computer and video games authority. No mere magazine here. This is the last word on games, and it says 'Yes, this is a an actual PC game screenshot. Not a photograph, like what you thought'

[The Crumb]

I had never heard of the M2 before now. Safe to say, I don't think Street Fighter 3 kept its disappointment of the year trophy.

[MojoJojo]

I had never heard of the M2 before now. Safe to say, I don't think Street Fighter 3 kept its disappointment of the year trophy.

It was a follow up to the 3DO. It found some success as a coffee vending machine.

[Ferris]

"Life After Mario 64?" is easily the saddest episode of Kilroy.

[GoblinAhFuckScary]

I'm well late, but wanna say this is a wonderful thread.

[Lemming]

Unreal (1998)



This is really cool - the box art for unreal was this weird design with the CD case visible in the centre. There were a few different designs, each with an in-game screenshot, the idea being that the graphics were so good that they'd actually work as game box art.



I'm fairly sure there's a texture pack installed here. I had the game already installed on Steam from ages ago and didn't bother to do a fresh install, so I was greeted with this, which doesn't look quite right according to my memory, but I couldn't be bothered to change it.

RELEASE DATE: May 22nd, 1998

STORY: A prison ship, the Vortex Rikers, is unexpectedly pulled towards Na Pali, an uncharted planet with an unusually strong gravitational pull. The ship crashes hard into the ground, destroying much of the prison section, and the surviving crew disembark to find help. When one of the prisoners manages to regain consciousness some time after the crash, she finds the ship strewn with mutilated corpses, some kind of lizard thing stalking her through what's left of the vessel, and absolutely no way to get off the planet. Shit!!!

MUSIC: Top-of-the-range soundtrack, many great songs. Dusk Horizon, Shared Dig, Surfacing and Sunspire are all excellent.

THE SAVIOR PRINCESS COMES FROM THE STARS: Unreal was marketed strongly on its graphics (can you believe that that was an ACTUAL PC GAME SCREENSHOT?!?!?!). That's no surprise because the graphics are stellar. They are beyond stellar. The graphics are fucking MINT. They're actually that good, they're good enough to be called mint. Even with this dodgy texture pack I had installed.

The game starts like no other FPS game before. You begin weaponless and injured, stumbling to your feet in your prison cell. As you race to escape the ship, it crumbles around you, debris falling from above (which can kill you if it hits you), machinery and computers exploding (again, lethal if you're caught in the blast), all as the automated announcement system reads out a list of emergency reports drowned out by the sounds of creaking metal and collapsing walls. It'll be outclassed by Half-Life in a few months, but as it stands, this is the most intense introduction to an FPS game so far. There have been games that have tried to place you in "cinematic" scenarios before and with a real sense of peril - System Shock being the obvious example - but Unreal really goes all the way with it. You even get stopped by a door, and you're forced to listen to the sounds of screaming and gunfire in the room ahead before it finally opens and you enter to see the aftermath of the fight - a technique so common in games now that it's mostly just annoying when it occurs, but here's one of the first examples of it.

Then you make it out of the ship, and as the music starts up, you survey the breathtaking scene of the prison ship crashed into the side of a mountain, overlooking a vast chasm with a stream and trees below, vast waterfalls running down the cliffs all around you. Alien birds circle in the air above. It's properly amazing, and it's impossible to believe that it's been less than 5 years since Doom.

But Unreal's major problem is that most of the good things you can say about it are things of this nature. I can talk about the Sunspire, the colliseum, the occupied Nali temple, and so on. What I can't talk about with anywhere near the same enthusiasm is... the actual game. As in, the combat, the enemy design, the weaponry, the level design in terms of gameplay rather than visual spectacle.

Let's talk quickly about the gameplay. The weapons here are prototype versions of the ones from Unreal Tournament. But while UT's weapons are some of the best in gaming, Unreal's versions feel somehow underpowered and almost pathetic at times. The automag is cool (you can fire it sideways like a gangster!!!) but functionally useless after the earliest stages of the game, the weird blue crystal minigun thing is just shitty, unless you score direct hits with its alt fire. Even the Flak Cannon, the UT variant of which is simply one of the best weapons ever in a videogame, feels wimpy and almost unwieldy. The Rifle is really the best weapon around, but it still lacks the punch of pure power that the sniper rifle in UT has. The Shock Core at least is about as cool as it was in UT, and Unreal also has a unique weapon in the Dispersion Pistol. As the first weapon you gain, it's laughably weak, but upgrade canisters scattered across the game can turn it into an absolute powerhouse.

Enemies are visually fantastic and show impressive AI gimmicks, for example Skaarj troops roll left and right, dodging your projectiles. The Mercenaries can turn invulnerable, which is pretty fucking annoying really but still at least it changes the texture of combat. But the problem with all the game's enemies is that they're pure bullet sponges. Your shitty weak weapons combined with enemy's absurd health means that every fight turns into a long boring protracted battle where you hop around each other like a pair of jackasses - you dodging everything that comes your way, and the enemy absolutely eating shit but not reacting to the 50 bullets you've emptied into their face, until their invisible health bar finally depletes.

The level design, though fantastic atmospherically and visually, doesn't lend itself well to gameplay. The biggest problem is that the game is obsessed with putting you in outdoor areas - understandable, given that outdoor areas in full 3D games aren't super common by this point in 1998, and they've gotta show the Unreal engine off - but the devs didn't seem to really know what to put in them. So you're left wandering through huge but rather empty spaces, and as much as you might ooh and aah at the graphics, the fact that a significant amount of the game is spent slowly walking through nothingness really isn't a point in its favour. Indoor levels are more tightly designed, but (to invoke the inevitable Half-Life comparison at last) the enemy placement feels sort of random, unlike, say, the marines in Half-Life. The result is that indoor battles usually end up like outdoor battles - a spectacle of everyone rolling around and leaping across the room while firing wildly at each other until someone eventually dies.

The large levels do house the occasional side-areas and secrets, however, which not only give you the obvious rewards such as ammo and items, but also have little examples of what the kids these days call "ENVIRONMENTAL STORYTELLING".

What makes Unreal really click though is the atmosphere. Despite the constant combat, there's something lonely and reflective about the journey across Na Pali. You meet exactly two other living humans in the whole game - one is a badly wounded man in the first level who dies as soon as you approach him, and the other is in the second level and is similarly immediately killed. Other than them, everyone you meet is dead - and from their PDAs, you find out they died mere hours before you arrived. There are other survivors from the Vortex Rikers making the same journey as you, but you only ever find corpses. The Naali are the only friendly people you meet, but they're basically pathetic and they can't help you, and they can't even communicate with you due to the language barrier.

So you wander around the planet alone, piecing together what's happened and where you are, and there aren't necessarily always answers. The Nali seem to be pacifists now, but early on you find a huge terrifying coliseum full of torture devices, hinting at something terrible in the Naali's past. You find temples to gods full of iconography and art, but you can't really understand any of it. As  the journey goes on, you find fewer and fewer corpses of other Vortex Rikers crewmembers and prisoners, and eventually they run out, and you realise you're the only survivor to make it this far.

The best thing in the plot is the ISV-Kran, a merchant ship from Earth that crashed into Na Pali some time before your ship did, again due to the planet's unexpected gravitational pull. There's a very short level called The Trench which introduces the Kran, and a few seconds into the level, you realise that the titular trench was formed by the force of the ship hitting the ground and skidding along for some distance. On board, you find out that the crew held out for a long time before being overrun - and, of course, they only got overrun a relatively short while before you arrived. This leads to a sub-plot in which you find a trail of corpses of the Kran's crew across the next couple of levels, with their PDAs suggesting that one of the crew might still be alive. This is the only hope the game gives you that you might actually meet another human on the planet. You eventually find her and, of course, she died very shortly before you arrived.

It's not all moody gloom, though, because Na Pali's, uh, unreal nature leads to moments of awe. Serpent canyon is the big one - you ride a little wooden boat out down a stream which slowly opens up into a river flanked on all sides by trees and wildlife, and this music plays. You also scale the Sunspire, a mega-structure who's purpose you can only guess, while this music plays. Late in the game, you enter a small gondola thing and find it ascending upwards, leading you to a floating continent that houses a rural city in the clouds. You also begin to see the Nali resist the Skaarj occupation, apparently lionised by your arrival - religious texts in one level relay a Nali legend that a "saviour princess" would "come from the stars". Obviously, they think that's you.

Also, what really works for the game is that it lives up to its title by making everything just sort of vaguely wrong and alienesque. The guns might not be fun to use, but they're all fascinating. The shitty crystal minigun thing, for example, behaves like no other minigun in a videogame. We've come to expect a fast-firing hitscan weapon, but it fires laughably slow-moving shards at a fairly slow rate, and it's alternate fire is basically a shotgun. The Shock Core is just strange and has no real equivalent in any other game. The Razorjack is similarly just completely peculiar. The Rocket Launcher - almost universally the most powerful weapon in any FPS game it appears in - is here a basic early-game weapon, and both you and enemies can shrug off direct hits from rockets. Instead of carrying a medipack with you, you carry seeds which, when planted, will grow into a fruit plant before your eyes. The longer you wait, the bigger the plant gets, and the more health it heals. Everything feels subversive, and U N R E A L.

So, in the end, it's basically a showcase for the Unreal engine, and the actual gameplay is an afterthought. But it doesn't matter, because it's an incredible showcase which gives by far the most detailed and "immersive" adventure in an FPS game yet, and on a really fascinating alien world.

By the way, this is yet another female protagonist, if anyone's keeping track. And for once, she's the default choice, although you can still swap her out for a male counterpart.

FINAL RATING: It's an engine demo, but what a fucking engine demo. Rating it is tough - it's one of my favourites, but looking at it purely objectively, it's a lot of needlessly big levels with crap enemies and crap weapons. It's hard to rate then, but maybe we can settle on 3.5 Actual Reflective Surfaces, Wow out of 5.



Next game: NAM

[Bazooka]

Can you post some actual shots of the game please, these are just photos from outside your window.

[Lemming]

Shit, you're right, I must have gotten mixed up - surely no game could look that good.

Wait, no, on a closer inspection, those are ACTUAL PC GAME SCREENSHOTS, unbelievably enough!

[purlieu]

I'd love to go back in time and show those magazine editors this thread. That'd show them!

[beanheadmcginty]

says who?

Sorry, I misread something. It's actually a model called Donna DeCianni, who doesn't look like Kate Winslet in any photographs except that one.

[Lemming]

NAM (1998)





RELEASE DATE: July 31st, 1998

STORY: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

MUSIC: Copyright-dodging knockoff of Paint it Black

GOOD MORNING VIETNAM: Serious question: what is going through the minds of game devs who make FPS games based on real conflicts, especially one as relatively recent as the Vietnam War? Strategy games I get, especially grand strategy where everything's abstracted, but an FPS game that puts you in the role of an actual soldier directly shooting at other people? Shooting at a horde of hellspawn in Doom or a gang of cultists in Blood feels somehow different to shooting at, you know, the Viet Cong, a real group from a conflict that occurred only 20 - 30 years before this game was released. Anyway, not to whine about it, especially since we're rapidly heading towards the military shooter nightmare of the 2000s where every other game is based on a real war or real counter-terror operation.

NAM sucks, basically, but it's not all bad. I'll rattle through the list of things that make this total shit first and then swing around to talking about why I don't quite hate it. Oh, also, it's the Build engine! Laughably outdated in the face of the full 3D games we're dealing with now, but hey. This is, I believe, the last time we'll see the Build engine, up until Ion Fury in the far future of 2019.

So, it's a pretty standard Build affair. Happily, it's compatible with the eduke32 engine, which is what I'm playing it on.

NAM is basically a game about savescumming. Everything will kill you and it'll do it very quickly. It doesn't help that the game looks like fucking shit and the developers just haplessly spammed every sprite they had absolutely everywhere, presumably in a calamitous attempt to make the jungle look more "realistic". Enemies hide in tall grass and are literally impossible to see. This might be cool if it weren't for the fact that, of course, the AI doesn't give a shit about grass and other visual clutter and will fire at you the instant you step into view, long before you've had any chance to see your assailant.

Inexplicably, the devs also saw fit to put landmines - represented by very small sprites that are the same vomit-green colour as everything else, blending into the background - virtually everywhere. Step on one of those and it's down to about 10 health. Unless you've already been hit, in which case you'll fly 300 feet into the air and come down in a rain of gibs.

But wait, there's more! On virtually every map, missiles and bombs will rain down on the battlefield. There's seriously no way at all to predict when or where this will happen and no visual warning that a strike is incoming, other than a missile sprite which appears on the screen for about half a second before the blast consumes you. In other words, in gameplay terms, sometimes the ground just explodes for no fucking reason with no warning. Like everything else, this will instantly kill you. I died to this shit far more than I did to actual enemy fire.

By far the most inexplicable design decision in NAM though is that it loves to set things at night. If you thought you couldn't see shit during the daytime, have fun walking around these dogshit levels in pitch darkness with no light source. The goal is to make you use the nightvision goggles, which are shit. Yes, enemies are just as eagle-eyed as ever and still hiding invisibly in long grass behind 20 rows of mines, except now you can't see a meter in front of your face. Outstanding.

Your array of weapons is actually pretty sound but there's no reason to use anything other than the M60 and the M-16. Explosives are stupid and best saved for using to clear the thousands of fucking mines everywhere.

There's no real enemy variety, bar the presence of some suicide bombers who rush towards you to blow themselves up. As you'd expect, shooting them creates a big explosion which catches anyone stood nearby. Everyone else is just a standard soldier who'll shoot you from across the map with absurd accuracy.

Level design wise, it feels a lot like the inferior PC version of PowerSlave but without any keys. In fact, one thing I will give this game is the lack of keys. The devs realised, I suppose. that key hunts were no longer en vogue and instead created some maps that basically amount to big battle arenas where your goal is just to move forward to the end zone. I'm not against keys and doors as a concept, but in NAM, I was just thankful to get levels over and done with.

So, why is it not all bad? Well, as the first game we've played based on a real conflict (Wolfenstein 3D doesn't count obviously), it's got something weirdly unique about it. Whatever ethical concerns you might or might not have about making a dumbass action game based on a real-life nightmare... it kind of works at what its going for. You scan the trees for snipers, you fire your M-16 blindly and wildly into the long grass, sometimes hearing the scream of an enemy you didn't even know was there. You dash through hails of enemy fire and leap into foxholes, where you cower as explosions burst around you and bullets sail over your head. You move through pitch-black Viet Cong TERROR TUNNELS, firing your shotgun in a panic as you round a corner and find yourself face-to-face with a soldier already bearing down on you. It does feel like you're in a sort of ridiculous, movie-like recreation of the Vietnam War.

FINAL RATING: Honestly don't know. It's a fairly brief game so it didn't have time to really start pissing me off like Redneck Rampage did. 2 Brutally Realistic Depictions of War out of 5, though I might be being half a point generous there.



Next game: Rainbow Six

[Ferris]

The horror. The horror.

[Evil Knevil]

NAM (1998)

Laughably outdated in the face of the full 3D games we're dealing with now, but hey. This is, I believe, the last time we'll see the Build engine, up until Ion Fury in the far future of 2019.

Actually, apparently there's a sequel to this that uses the Build Engine World War II GI ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_GI). Which I sincerely hope you'll play when 1999 comes up! I had a friend in school who was obsessed with the Vietnam war and played this game, along with like M.I.A, Steel Panthers and later some vietnam mods for Counterstrike type games. A 15-16 year old British boy who could firmly, incorrectly and persuasively argue that the US didn't lose the war and could have won if it hadn't withdrawn.

This is real blast down memory lane-- I remember being a teenager when Quake, Unreal etc were first published and seeing the continuous improvements in graphics and game development was astounding back then-- and reading your reviews really evokes that astonishment and sheer joy (wish I was that innocent again!)

Basically I'm just trying to say thank you, I read these avidly and I hope you keep up the good work :)

[Pink Gregory]

Did anyone ever play Damage Inc. on the Mac?

Or was that a dream I had. 

Surprisingly you gun down white supremacists and confederate seperatists.

[evilcommiedictator]

That intro song, yes, just legally enough not to be Paint it Black. I enjoyed playing Vietcong though, but that's in 3d and includes tunnel shit.

Geez, Rainbow Six is going to be such a massive step up from this