FPS NIGHTMARES

[QRDL]

There was a great[nb]Probably shit, but I was a teen.[/nb] FOS mech-type game in the 90s that used sprites, not 3D models, for its robots. Played a demo of it on a PC Format/Gamer coverdisc. You were gadding around rolling green hills and could jump really high. One of the weapons was a long, continuous beam rather than pew-pew Star Wars lasers... can anyone identify it?

Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri ?

[Mister Six]

Yes, that's it! You absolute beaut!

Sadly that was 1996, so we've missed the boat for this thread.

[QRDL]

I too was fascinated by the demo. Couldn't get my hands on the full game back then.
From what I heard it was a hugely ambitious game for its time. More of an immersive-sim than pure FPS or a mech simulator.

[Lemming]

Just came across this. Hell of a cool video, and a TANTALISING GLIMPSE of things to come.

I've started on 1999, but I'm playing the games slightly out of order, simply due to having easier access to some than others. I'll still try to post them chronologically but hopefully, the reviews will all come much quicker, and it won't take six fucking months this time. That's the plan, at least.

[PlanktonSideburns]

Love your posts, whenever they arive

[Lemming]

Thanks! I'm hoping to engage on the most gruelling videogaming marathon ever seen by humanity for 1999, so with any luck I should complete the first game (WW2 GI, from the makers of the great NAM) relatively soon.

[popcorn]

Just ten minutes of Deus Ex?

[Lemming]

Astoundingly, right as PROJECT 1999: THE MOST GRUELLING VIDEOGAMING MARATHON EVER was about to begin, my computer broke. Fan making ultra-loud noise, that's not good, then everything went directly to shit. Even the Build Engine classic, WWII GI, was running at about 5 frames per second and causing the fan to scream like a jet engine.

Disastrous. Nil desperandum, though, because I have a shitty nearly-broken computer with Windows XP hidden away in a cupboard. I guess it's going to make the whole experience slightly more authentic, at least, especially if I'm still stuck like this as we reach the early 2000s.

Just ten minutes of Deus Ex?

NO. Be more draconian. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES am I allowed to skip ahead to games that are fun. This thread is about pain and suffering, not having a good time.

[Jerzy Bondov]

Your PC must be protesting after having you put shit like Extreme Paintbrawl on there

[Lemming]

Going to very tentatively say I've got it working again. After much Fookin' Aboot, the cooling unit turned out to be the problem. A series of heroic field repairs with the entire computer case balanced precariously on my lap, pulverising my bollocks, was carried out. At one point I dropped my screwdriver and couldn't retrieve it without letting go of the CPU fan I was very shakily holding in place, so used one of my acrylic nails as a makeshift screwdriver, which is the single most exciting thing ever to happen in the world of maverick tech repairs, perhaps rivalled only by that time Buzz Aldrin had to use a pen to restart the lunar landing module.

I say "tentatively" because, again, I repaired it myself, which means that there's a non-zero chance it'll be a pile of smouldering scrap by the morning. But it's looking good right now, so PROJECT 1999: THE MOST GRUELLING VIDEOGAMING MARATHON EVER can finally kick off.

[Mister Six]

This thread is about pain and suffering, not having a good time.

YOUR pain and suffering. We're having a good time.

[gmoney]

You'll need liquid cooling to run Kingpin.

[Lemming]

World War II GI (1999)





RELEASE DATE: 15th March 1999 (though some sources claim August 1999)

STORY:


MUSIC: Awful. Tinny, screeching, squelchy 16 bit tuneless racket. Turned it off and just stuck the radio on, which meant the D-Day landings were soundtracked by Teardrops by Womack and Womack. Beautiful.

THE VERDICT: From the makers of 1998's NAM, which is advertised on the box as if that's a good thing. When I launched this game, I went in with quite a sneering attitude of "this'll be shite", expecting another round of NAM's invisible enemies, fuckbrained level design, getting shot from across the map and weapons that were borderline non-functional.

It does have all of those things still, but something weird happened when I started playing. The first level is set on D-Day, and spawns you on a landing boat that speeds towards the shore, then you race up the beach, forced to take cover behind tank traps to avoid being blown apart by machine gun fire from the bunkers. A lot of people reading this will probably remember this exact same scene from the far higher budget and far more popular Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002). While Medal of Honor's version is clearly better, something about WW2 GI surprised me. It's functionally the same as Medal of Honor's mission, right down to having to place explosives at the shingle to blast your way into the trenches beyond, and then clearing the bunkers on your own.

I found this striking because, despite the bugginess, jankiness, and general low-budget nature of the game, it's technically ahead of it's time. It does exactly what Call of Duty and Medal of Honor attempt a few years later. Several times I was amazed by just how similar to CoD this feels - walking through a very abstract representation of what's meant to be northern France, flanked by useless AI squadmates who get blown to shit almost instantly, scrambling through ruined buildings and trench networks and charging across fields while artillery explosions rock the earth around you and (3D!!!) planes buzz overhead. It's exactly the same fucking game as Call of Duty, only very low budget, very buggy, and on the frigging Build engine.

To demonstrate this point further, I'll summarise a few of the levels. There's a level called "DEFEND" which has a little cinematic-y opening where you find the surviving crew of a crashed glider, who brief you on what's going on, before you set about working your way through a forest full of hidden enemies to reach an Allied trench, at which point there's a huge battle with many friendly and hostile NPCs. During the fight, you have to rush across the trenches while under fire, obtain mortar shells, and then race back to the mortar to destroy a building at the far end of the field which stops enemy reinforcements. There's another called "HUNT FOR THE 88s" which sees you creeping through a thick forest at night with a great number of allied NPCs who gradually get picked off or walk into minefields, eventually leaving you taking on several artillery nests alone, setting charges on the equipment and fleeing before they explode. There's one called "A GAME OF BRIDGE" which involves you moving through a small besieged town before arriving at the titular bridge, which is secured by an enemy tank. You're forced to creep up the bridge, slowly taking out enemy forces along the way, while the tank routinely fires at you and blasts you to shit if you're not in cover.

To be clear, none of this was good, per se - NAM's amateurish design still applies here, with grass sprites jizzed all over the map at random (they block bullets too, just to make combat impossible), guns that barely work, enemies placed willy-nilly with little thought for encounter design, and FUCKING PLANES that just come out of nowhere and instakill you with bombs. Plus. hit detection is outright atrocious, often you can fire directly at enemies and they're magically unharmed because there's a completely invisible barrier in front of them.

But, weirdly, I came away liking the game. The devs' ambitions clearly extended a bit beyond their actual ability, and the technology they were using, but there's ideas in here that MoH:AA (2002) and Call of Duty (2003) will recreate in their entirety.

Probably one of the big obstacles to this game's success is the Build engine, which is pathetically outdated for 1999. One of the benefits of playing through all these games in 2020 is that things like this don't really bother me, but in 1999, I can see why people would just pass on this. I think if they'd released this just two years earlier, and gone for one or two final quality assurance passes to take out some of the bugs, this would be regarded a classic. We probably wouldn't mention it in the same breath as Duke 3D and Blood, but it'd definitely be more well-known than it is, and probably people would be calling it "the original Call of Duty" or some shit like that.

FINAL RATING: Don't rush to play it or anything, because at the end of the day it's a buggy mess, but it really is an impressive project for what it is. 3 Doomed Squadmates out of 5.



THE GAME SUMMARISED IN A BOTTOM QUOTE:


Next game: Redline (1999)

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Whatever happened to the Medal of Honor series? It was king shit of the vaguely realistic WW2 FPS subgenre, then it seemed to fade away, as the games that ripped it off rose to domination.

[Lemming]

I think it just got steamrolled over by Call of Duty's sudden and gargantuan popularity. I remember Pacific Assault and Airborne generating minor buzz when they came out, but Call of Duty had already entered its one-game-a-year phase by then and was pretty much unstoppable, sales-wise.

[MojoJojo]

It had a reboot in 2010 with, er, Medal of Honor. But the sequel to that was rubbish and it got cancelled.

[Mister Six]

Wasn't it CoD's switch to the Modern Warfare brand that did it in? The market was oversaturated with WWII-era narrative shooters, and it turned out kids were more interested in slotting brown people and Russians with sexy machine guns and claymore mines than recreating their great-granddad's stupid battle against boring Nazis in shitty Normandy for the 100th time.

New Medal of Honor supposed to be out in a couple of weeks, apparently.

The game takes place in Europe during World War II, taking the franchise back to its roots, with the main protagonist being an OSS agent and fighter in the French Resistance. The game would also feature multiplayer modes.[1] As players progress in the game, the player would gain access to the Gallery, which is a collection of short documentaries featuring veterans of the World War II.[2]

Sounds EDUCATIONAL and SHIT. I want to teabag a dead Chinese soldier while screaming about Communist FAG CUCKS at an exhausted 33-year-old who's just trying to distract himself from the impending loss of his job, not watch some OLD CUNT talk about how he watched his best friend bleed to death in a Paris sewer, the FUCKING QUEER HOMOTRANS.

[Wonderful Butternut]

Sounds EDUCATIONAL and SHIT. I want to teabag a dead Chinese soldier while screaming about Communist FAG CUCKS at an exhausted 33-year-old who's just trying to distract himself from the impending loss of his job, not watch some OLD CUNT talk about how he watched his best friend bleed to death in a Paris sewer, the FUCKING QUEER HOMOTRANS.

SJWs ruining my paranoid white bloke shooters.

[Lemming]

Redline is a write-off. Not because the game's necessarily bad, but because it runs like shit and keeps freezing on Windows 10.

Very, very short review: it's a game in a Mad-Max-esque post apocalyptic world where raider gangs and assorted bastards are roaming around causing trouble. The player's some kind of merc or something who goes on various missions to fuck shit up. The big draw of the game is that you can switch between (terrible) first person combat and (better) vehicular combat. It seemed interesting but it won't run properly, audio is all fucked up, and it freezes massively during loading times and cutscenes.

Overall verdict is that, from the little I got to play, it seemed ok.

I've been playing the next game instead, Requiem: Avenging Angel. Review SOON

[Lemming]

Requiem: Avenging Angel (1999)



 

RELEASE DATE: March 31st, 1999

STORY: In the future, a group of defecting angels, led by Lilith (the biblical one, I guess?), have infiltrated Earth society and installed a fascist regime. They work to ensure humanity completes its first starship, the Leviathan, which will allow them to reach heaven. God is pissed about this, it's the tower of Babel fiasco all over again, and so sends one of his top angels, Malachi, down to Earth to put a stop to Lilith's plans. Yes, I have described this plot accurately and no, it doesn't really make sense.

MUSIC: Sort of background noise, and it plays this one suspense track over and over again.

HOW THE HELL DID HE DO THAT?: There's no way around it - the big question for single-player FPS games in 1999 was "how does this match up to Half-Life?". We're now firmly in the shadow of Half-Life. If you check out contemporary reviews of Requiem, you'll find comparisons and contrasts to Half-Life crop up in every single one. It's a shame because not every game has to be Half-Life, but at the same time, it's understandable - whatever you think about Half-Life overall, three aspects of it should be pretty uncontroversial: it looked great, it played smoothly, and it was very tightly designed (too tightly, if you're one of Half-Life's critics). Let's not beat about the bush, in terms of production values and polish, Half-Life made all its competitors look like total shit. Even the technological marvel of Unreal, which enjoyed a couple months in the limelight before being swept away by Half-Life, feels rough around the edges by comparison.

So, the bar has been set. The kind of muddled, confusing and meandering level design we've seen in a lot of the earliest 3D shooters won't fly anymore. The first "pure" FPS (ie not Thief) to follow Half-Life was Blood 2, which was a bit shit. Then we had South Park, which, yeah. So far so shit. Next up is Requiem.

I've got a lot of complaints to make about this game, but thankfully it gets the core gameplay down very well, so let's start there. Combat is a lot of fun. You choose between supernatural powers and conventional weapons. Not all the powers are useful (and some are too gruesome to use - no, I don't want to cast "Boil Blood" on anyone, especially not after seeing the animation for it), but there are a wide range of powers, and the devs have put some thought into making them useful in different situations. Pentecost is your main one, which fires a charged ball of lightning out that deals substantial damage to everything in its path. This is superb for crowd control, as well as functioning as a great early-to-mid game weapon in general. Locusts calls down a swarm of locusts on a single target, good for stronger unarmoured enemies, but can't penetrate armour. Apocalypse is fucking dumb, it creates a mad shockwave blast that's as likely to gib you as it is enemies. You can also turn people into pillars of salt, which causes them to freeze in pain before disintegrating. Remember, you're meant to be the good guy.

The conventional weapons are great. The starting pistol is pure dogshit, but you soon get the assault rifle, which is straight-up one of the best assault rifles I've seen in a videogame. The rate of fire is absurdly high and the game supplies you with plenty of ammo to encourage you to go crazy with it. The shotgun is also extremely satisfying to use, and fires in a wide spread that can catch multiple enemies. Things fall down a little with the grenade launcher (shit), rocket launcher (does way less damage than it should) and the sniper rifle (very shit), but, as with most games, it's all about switching between the assault rifle and the shotgun anyway.

Combat is helped by decent enemy AI, and, crucially, enemies stagger. I can't explain how good it is that enemies actually react to being hit in this game. It's something so many games from this era are lacking. Even Half-Life had lackluster combat primarily due to this issue - it's no fun to unload an entire MP5 clip into a marine's face, only to have him calmly raise his shotgun to your face and blow you away despite the fact that blood is spraying out of his head the whole time. In Requiem, when an enemy gets hit, they stop attacking and play a brief stagger animation for about a second. This is critical because there's so many enemies attacking in groups in this game. You need to think about who you want to stagger and when - the shotgun's wide blast can be useful for disrupting a whole gaggle of enemies, for example.

On the other hand, there's a lot of bullshit in this game too, mostly in encounter design. The biggest complaint is that the game spawns enemies behind you. This happens constantly. Normally, you'll clear a room,  then walk to the opposite end to leave, at which point you'll hit an invisible trigger which spawns enemies right behind you, who begin firing at you about one second after popping into existence. Given that your health drains very fast, this is just a fucking awful design choice, and it's recurrent through the whole game. Some areas are made specifically so that you get shot by people who materialised an inch behind your back, killing you instantly and forcing you to replay the level several times until you've learned all the points where the game's going to fuck you over.

Graphically, the game doesn't look great, honestly. It's not awful, but it's not appealing at all.  It's not helped by the game not really having a distinct art style - it's just the "near-future industrial dystopia hellhole" setting we've already seen a billion times (Cybermage, Strife, SiN, Blood 2, Forsaken, SHOGO) and will no doubt see again (Kingpin). It's got all the usual mandatory areas - sewers, factories, streets with guards yelling at you, and of course, a janky train level where you just walk in a straight line through various carriages while people shoot at you. There's also a couple brief segments set in hell, which are visually more memorable, at least. Oh, and there's a space station later on, but it's still just a mess of samey-looking corridors. I don't know what engine this is, but in addition to it having drab visuals, player movement is terrible. After the smooth and precise movement of Unreal and Half-Life, this is a total step back, and feels about two years out of date.

Level design is variable. Some areas are decent but a lot are needlessly big and occasionally confusing. The game works on an objective system, which sucks because a) it never gives you reasonable clues as to where your objectives are, and b) when you complete an objective, usually a door mysteriously opens somewhere, and you haven't got a fucking clue where. There's a bit of awkward backtracking in the early hub-like city area, and a few attempts at being slightly nonlinear later on, which make you wish they'd just pack it in and give you a nice linear corridor to go down. To return to the inevitable Half-Life comparison, this is where Requiem really falls down. After Half-Life's carefully planned and perfectly paced levels, going back to the kind of "here's a huge ugly 3D box with a few catwalks and things, go run around it and kill everyone" or "here's a maze of identical corridors with respawning enemies, have fun!" gameplay of earlier games is just totally grating.

Overall, it's a pretty decent game. No doubt it suffered by coming out relatively soon after Half-Life - like most of the other FPS games surrounding Half-Life, this really can't compete, neither technologically nor in terms of design. It also feels like yet another case of a game that could have benefited hugely from a few extra months spent doing quality passes, tightening level design and such, because as it stands a lot of these levels are crap. Still, solid combat mechanics and satisfying weapons make the game relatively painless to breeze through.

FINAL RATING: Not the best, not the worst. 3 Fashionable Goth Nail Polish out of 5.



Next game: Aliens vs Predator (1999)

[druss]

Oooo loved me a bit of AVP. Marine and Alien were the most fun from memory.

[Mister Six]

Wow, Requiem sounds great. Hadn't even heard of it until now. Did it just disappear into the ether upon release, or did I somehow miss out on the buzz?

Also - no Bottom quote? For shame!

[Lemming]

Wow, Requiem sounds great. Hadn't even heard of it until now. Did it just disappear into the ether upon release, or did I somehow miss out on the buzz?

Wikipedia suggests it was eclipsed by Half-Life right before it and Kingpin right after it, and only achieved low sales. Definitely a shame, since it's not a bad game at all.

Also - no Bottom quote? For shame!

SHIT! I knew I'd forgotten something. Here it is:

[Ferris]

no, I don't want to cast "Boil Blood" on anyone, especially not after seeing the animation for it

Confirmation that Lemming is soft on avenging angels, and soft on the causes of avenging angels.

Also a avenging angel sympathizer and/or voted for Corbyn? Hard to say, hard to say.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I've not been paying close enough attention. When did FPS games go from having the gun in the middle of the screen, to the corner?

[Lemming]

Confirmation that Lemming is soft on avenging angels, and soft on the causes of avenging angels.

Also a avenging angel sympathizer and/or voted for Corbyn? Hard to say, hard to say.

I've not been paying close enough attention. When did FPS games go from having the gun in the middle of the screen, to the corner?

Star Wars: Dark Forces was the first to do it, I think. Elder Scrolls: Arena too, but that was with swords.

[PlanktonSideburns]

just played through avp2, the ailen mission

its a nhilistic masterpiece, the way you tear about a bleak space dump, tearing people limb from limb

occiasionally cutting to cut scenes of human dialouge, people making plans, that you totally ruin instantly by exploding out of a chute, smashing all their stuff and tearing peoples heads off

feels like a love letter to the sheer futility of human endeavour

[Lemming]

Made a start on AVP99 and it's giving me a similar feeling, playing as the alien, albeit with an added amount of motion sickness.

Fisheye lens + extremely fast running speed + confusing, twisting levels = have to look away from the screen every few seconds.

[PlanktonSideburns]

There was a moment, scuttling across a courtyard to the next canteen full of petrified crying humans to brutalise, where i happened to looked up at the sky, and there was a massive swirling vortex of clouds above me, like an upside down tornado with silent lightning going off in it, a howling void leading to nothingness, very lovecraftian

[Ferris]

There was a moment, scuttling across a courtyard to the next canteen full of petrified crying humans to brutalise, where i happened to looked up at the sky, and there was a massive swirling vortex of clouds above me, like an upside down tornado with silent lightning going off in it, a howling void leading to nothingness, very lovecraftian

Yes, but how was the video game Alien vs Predator?