FPS NIGHTMARES

[Lemming]

FORBES: CORPORATE WARRIOR is on the horizon, and looking like a shoo-in for game of the year.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Visually, Blood does look about 2 years out of date, which back then meant... Very out of date.

[Zetetic]

Not to derail the thread but it's my personal view that games should be free and available in the public domain after a specific period of time.

I note that historically, id (and particularly Carmack) shared this view, at least when it came to the programming if not the art - the code for Doom was made freely available in 1997. (And id continued this practice of releasing code about 5-6 years after games came out, at least until Carmack left in 2013.)

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Yep.

That's just reminded me that Quake was one of the first games I remember livestreaming, no install or anything. Just about worked despite the highly provincial levels of bandwidth on offer in backwater Lincolnshire.

[H-O-W-L]

Blood looks a bit aged for the year it came out in, but I think it's probably the best of the 2.5D stable if you go back to it today. Absolutely all of it feels punchy and satisfying whereas to me Doom pales and feels like poking at napkins on a diner table half the time. It's probably because Blood abuses the shit out of the Build engine's view-punch so every weapon feels like it's rattling in Caleb's dumb cowboy hands.

Plus the drippingly edgy and dark setting is oodles, oodles more scary and threatening and atmospheric than vanilla Doom.

[madhair60]

I can never choose a favourite Build game. I usually go for Duke, I guess. Blood is so good but that first level is so punishing!

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Blood looks a bit aged for the year it came out in, but I think it's probably the best of the 2.5D stable if you go back to it today.

Not the best given it was designed right, right near the end of when the punters would take it.

[Mister Six]

How would that affect whether it was the best or not?

[Wonderful Butternut]

I can never choose a favourite Build game. I usually go for Duke, I guess. Blood is so good but that first level is so punishing!

Always preferred Blood just for the dynamite fetish the game designers clearly had.

[Jerzy Bondov]

Being able to kick severed heads about is one of those great features that hasn't reappeared enough. Should be in Super Mario Strikers for example

[Lemming]

However dated Blood looked on release, I think time has been very kind to it. The strong art direction really holds up today, and most of the levels are relatively enclosed so you don't get too many of the sort of big ugly blocky open areas that remind you the game is over two decades old.

[Jerzy Bondov]

Fucking hell I love playing Doom on the Switch. Doom, Doom 2 and Doom 3 are all on sale at the moment. They've recently brought map packs to the recent console ports, so you now get Final Doom and Sigil with Doom 1/2. Others are on their way too. Hours and hours of fun. Doom 64 is coming too.

Now I want Blood on there. Send this thread to Nintendo and get all these games on Switch, even the shit ones.

[H-O-W-L]

I think my favourite part about Blood is the physics engine it has for NPCs, which I don't think the other 2.5D's had. Watching a Cultist literally fly through the air and splatter against a wall, then drop down and do his death anim is satisfying in a way that ragdolls aren't.

[Lemming]

Outlaws (1997)





STORY: Marshall James Anderson, beloved law enforcement man (beloved because he "never shot an innocent man", reassuringly) heads out one morning to go and say cliched lines to a store keeper. When he returns back to his ranch, his wife has been shot and his daughter has been taken by the titular outlaws! Oh no!!! It's up to James to race after the captors to save his daughter, but unfortunately, an outlaw gang which seems to consist of every single adult male in North America is out to stop him.

MUSIC: Legit one of the best soundtracks to any game, you have to hear it if you haven't before. The first track easily matches the Dollars trilogy theme songs.

WHERE ARE YA MARSHALL?: Have you noticed that when people talk in very general terms about "90s FPS" games, they come up with a few criteria which supposedly define games from the period - usually something along the lines of being "frantic", "fast-paced", big arenas full of enemies, bunnyhopping... on a really bad day, the term "power fantasy" might come up.

I'm convinced there's some kind of wide-spread social contagion going on here, because to me, when everyone talks this way about "90s FPS" games, they're literally just talking about Serious Sam, which isn't even 90s.

Outlaws, like Blood and tons of other games featured here already, proves that the common conception of 90s FPS games is strangely off-base. Play on Ugly difficulty as you should (difficulties are Good Bad and Ugly GET IT) and you'll find yourself faced with a game that, without wanting to overstate the case, is almost more akin to a very primitive tactical shooter than whatever people think an FPS game from 1997 is meant to be like.

A couple of bullets are enough to take you out and so you're ducking behind tables, leaping from cover to cover, popping out from behind corners and staggering around with minimal HP left as you desperately search for medkits.

Anyway, the game. It runs on the Dark Forces engine, which is basically Build as far as I can tell. The art style is excellent - everything's this sort of weird cel-shaded cartoon look, with the in-game graphics being meant to emulate the stylised FMV cutscenes you see between levels. If Blood looked out of date, then this definitely does, but again a unique art style help keep it looking decent - or at the very least, not actively offensively shite - to this day.

Maps are great fun and very well-designed, and you're taken through a fantastically cliche-ridden ride through every Western setting you can think of - a town full of BAD GUYS, a saloon, a sawmill, mines, a Native American tribal village, vast canyons, all the rest. And of course a train where you inevitably end up leaping across the carriage roofs while people come up to get you.

You are equipped with a variety of 19th century weapons, and interestingly, the game really goes for this angle by making them all a bit shit. You have to load individual bullets into guns by right clicking, which is unique and leads to some fairly tense scenarios where people are coming to kill you and you're sat there trying to shove individual shells into your awful misfire-prone shotgun like a total shithead.

The game also stands out for a total lack of enemy variety - you're literally just fighting the same four guys over and over again. The only variation is that some people are fat, and people have different guns with slightly different effects, but your tactic for engaging all enemies is the same - stay in cover and fire when you get the chance. I don't think this lack of variety hurts the game at all, given the much more methodical and cautious gameplay this demands compared to something like Quake.

There's a bit of a story to follow, very slightly more than usual for this era, and it's not bad. Basically you have to go and save your daughter, but the people you interrogate along the way reveal that she's been kidnapped by a railroad tycoon who you have some history with.

Oh, and there's a level where you lose all your weapons (the last level, unusually) after being taken prisoner and have to run around smacking people with your fist until you can rebuild your arsenal. I know everyone hates levels in FPS games where all your weapons disappear, but I legit love them. Loved the arena bit in Dark Forces where you have to fight three monstrous aliens and I love the hilarious captivity escape sequence in this where you leap through a rooftop, completely unarmed, and start twirling around like Bruce Lee beating the shit out of the armed guards.

Plus the game has an early contender for worst final boss ever. It's a man stood behind a curtain.

FINAL RATING: Love it. 4 YERE OUTNUMBERED out of 5.



Next game: Not actually sure, because I haven't gotten or installed any of the next games. It could realistically be FORBES: CORPORATE WARRIOR.

[H-O-W-L]

That OST is amazing, and I've been on a real Rooting Tooting Cowboy Bastard kick since Red Dead Redemption 2. Maybe I should give this cylinder a whirl, podner.

[Mister Six]

I bloody loved the demo of Outlaws but never played the full game. More fool me, clearly!

[PlanktonSideburns]

Who doesn't like the all the weapons lost levels? There best.

[Cuellar]

I used to love Outlaws big time. I remember finding it almost impossible, mainly to the fact that as you say one or two bullets would do you.

DON'T BE A FOOL MARSHALL - still ingrained into my brain to this day, and it pops up whenever I see/hear the word/name Marshall.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I vaguely remember Digitizer talking up Outlaws in an end of year retrospective - saying that it beat Goldeneye 64 to some innovation, but was ignored at the time because of it's outdated engine.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Strapline 'Dyin's too good for em' seems inappropriate when the objective over and over again is to make them die.

Kind of implies your cowboy has an alternative plan like remanding them all in custody or torturing them all through some hell portal.

[Lemming]

Hexen 2 (1997)





It's not that dark in-game! Don't ask me why the screenshots are fucked.

STORY: The fucking Serpent Riders are at it again! Technically, it's now just the Serpent Rider, singular, given that the other two got blasted to shit. Anyway, the oldest and strongest rider, Eidolon, has taken over the world of Thyrion. As usual, it's up to one hero to fight through the Serpent Rider's legions and personally kill the tyrant, freeing their dimension.

MUSIC: Standard, fine. Not super memorable.

NO ROOM TO STAND UP HERE!: Hey, it's the Quake engine! And, visually, it's used really well!

The game features multiple zones each with unique texture and model work, and the Ancient Egypt zone in particular looks really great. Probably the best possible use of the Quake engine at the time.

On top of that, the art design and enemy animations are fantastic throughout. The enemies all have that slightly stop-motion quality that Quake enemies had, but the animations are so detailed. You have to fight the four horsemen of the apocalypse, one in each level set, and their animations are genuinely spectacular.

So anyway, THE GAME. As before, you choose from one of several heroes - Paladin, Crusader, Necromancer and Assassin (another still-rare female protagonist for the list). They all have little biographies in the manual and they're all horrible scumbags except the Crusader, so I chose him. Just as in Hexen 1, each of these classes comes with different weapons and stats, and having played through the opening level as each of them, they're not even remotely balanced. In Hexen 1 they really clearly wanted you to play as the Warrior, in this I'm pretty sure they want you to play as the Paladin.

To experience the game in full probably requires multiple full playthroughs as each character to see all their weapons and especially their superweapons. As in Hexen 1, each character gathers the pieces of a superweapon over the course of the game.

Combat still isn't the focus though. You're armed with a melee weapon and a bunch of ranged weapons, everything's basically functional but unimpressive. Enemies are fucking annoying for the most part. Among the most bullshit of the enemies is this jaguar or cheetah thing that rolls left and right, dodging attacks, has a weird hitbox that projectiles just fly through, and FUCKING STANDS STILL AND BECOMES IMMUNE TO DAMAGE SOMETIMES. I'm not joking, it points it head at the sky, roars and stands still, and you CANT HURT IT AT ALL. What the fuck is this? And if they attack in groups which they always do, it means you're basically going to get fucked when they each turn invincible at random. Terrible idea.

Mana (ammo) is very limited and you'll have to be really careful. I played on the second highest difficulty and ran out of ammo frequently, which left me using the shitty melee weapon against enemies who could always get the first hit in no matter what. The Crusader totally sucks shit because his melee weapon is a crappy hammer, his blue mana weapon is a crappy ice staff and his green mana weapon is a rocket launcher that runs out of ammo after four nanoseconds. His super-weapon is the Sunstaff of whatever it was called, which finally deals reasonable damage but comes relatively late in the game.

Hexen is all about the puzzles though. Whereas Hexen's puzzles could be total horseshit, relying on hidden switches in impossible-to-find areas, Hexen 2's puzzles are much more logical horseshit. You have to do insanely obtuse things still, but they're dressed up as logical tasks (finding a shovel to dig for a key, using a forge to craft an item that will open a door, and so on). It helps that Hexen's abstract maps have been switched for recognisable locations like towns, temples, courtyards and pyramids, giving you some sense of where the fuck you are and how to proceed.

The game also throws you some hints. Messages come up on screen telling you very broadly what you're meant to do to proceed - "you need the Dildo of Might to pass through this door", stuff like that. Levels are also occasionally designed in a style where you gather several objects and return them to one central room - the second set of levels has you doing this with elemental crystals and gemstone skulls.

Despite this, the maps still don't always flow too well, and I'm not even going to pretend I didn't resort to a walkthrough. There are parts that just don't make fucking sense, or parts where the way forward is in the corner of a dark room where you need to push on a nondescript wall to find that it's actually a secret door leading to an entire new map. This is about as annoying as it was in Hexen 1.

The big problem with Hexen 2 is that last year's PowerSlave did this formula far better. After seeing how well this backtracking-through-levels-to-do-puzzles approach can work, Hexen 2 feels sort of unorganised and clumsy by comparison.

Another issue is feeling of progression. With only a handful of weapons for each class, the game doesn't have much to let you feel like you're moving forward or getting stronger, unlike PowerSlave which gave you special skills and a larger range of weapons over the course of the game. With Hexen 2, the devs tried to insert some progression with a level system - as you play through the game, you level up which increases your maximum health and a couple other things but it's a very limited feeling of progression.

FINAL RATING: Is this what we've waited for???? Is this the QUAKE-KILLER???? Obviously no. It's a little better than the first Hexen in most ways, worse in a couple of others. Seems fair to give it 3 Catapulted Sheep out of 5 - I think I overrated Hexen 1 a little with 3.5.



While I'm generally avoiding map packs and expansion packs in this thread (Final Doom, Quake mission packs etc), I'm going to play next years' Portal of Praevus expansion for Hexen 2, because it takes the game off in an interesting direction.

By the way, we are now officially gaming in the Blair years. Will it be the case that Things Can Only Get Better for the FPS genre from here onwards? The answer is essentially no.

[purlieu]

Will you be doing the Portal games?

[Jerzy Bondov]

Will you be doing the Postal games?

[Al Tha Funkee Homosapien]

Will you be doing the Turok games?

[Lemming]

Will you be doing the Portal games?

Yep! Might also check out Narbacular Drop, the bizarre janky-looking prototype for Portal.

Will you be doing the Postal games?

The Gonorrhea Piss Stream is pretty much guaranteed to be Weapon of the Year 2003.

Will you be doing the Turok games?

The Cerebral Bore is pretty much guaranteed to be Weapon of the Year 1998.

[Jim Bob]

The Cerebral Bore is pretty much guaranteed to be Weapon of the Year 1998.

I've been accused of being a cerebral bore more times than I care to mention.

[purlieu]

Yep! Might also check out Narbacular Drop, the bizarre janky-looking prototype for Portal.

Ah splendid. I'm about half-way through Portal 2 at the minute (did all the Half-Lifes and the first Portal), so it'll be nice to read about more games I've actually played!

[Lemming]

Quake II (1997)





STORY: Space Marines (not the FOR THE EMPEROOOOR ones, different ones) are being sent to a planet overtaken by an alien species known as the Strogg. After his dropship veers off-course and leaves him alone behind enemy lines, it's down to one lone marine to do literally absolutely everything himself.

MUSIC: T R E N T  R E Z N O R

TRESSPASSER!!!: Is this it? Have we at last reached THE QUAKE KILLER, and it comes in the form of Quake's own sequel?

Popular opinion towards this game seems to be all over the place. Some decry it as having a very boring single player campaign, others stick it in their BEST OF ALL TIME lists. Personally, I think it's basically fine. It drags like fuck after a certain point, but it's basically fine.

Might as well start with the graphics. Needless to say these are some of the most impressive visuals we've seen in an FPS game yet, this in spite of the dev's determination to cloak everything in stupid levels of darkness or very low light. Everything is full 3D, enemies have more animations and reactions than ever before, weapons look and feel powerful and weighty, lighting effects will BLOW YOU AWAY, all that. The main problems come from the art direction. Everything looks samey and boring and the lighting is consistently this dull orange glow that makes everything look like shit.

Unlike Quake, Quake 2 is sort of hub-based. The game is divided into "units" and you can move between the maps of a unit freely. This lets the game set objectives across multiple maps, or have you leave a map to return to it through another entrance.

But one of the big problems with the game is the backtracking between levels. They usually spawn new enemies across old maps whenever you hit a switch or whatever it was you were meant to do, but it's still tedious to go through the same unattractive and near-identical looking levels back and forth as you search for whatever the hell the switch you just pressed did. I don't really know why the game was designed like this, walking around getting lost like Hexen-lite isn't really playing to the game's strengths. The game is at its best when its just pushing you in a relatively linear direction and throwing enemies at you, because that's really what it's all about.

The arsenal is varied but, as with too many FPS games, you basically end up using the same three weapons for most of the game. The Super Shotgun is your main weapon, backed by the SMG. The Hyperblaster comes a little later and is a great weapon - its not only powerful but it also has a weird firing system where it fires in bursts that are slightly beyond your control. It's really cool and makes it feel like you're actually trying to control an unpredictable deadly weapon, sort of like Half-Life's Tau Cannon. Some weapons are just impractical - the BFG is only in the game because it's expected to be there, the chaingun is idiotic and just wastes ammo unless it's a boss fight, the railgun or whatever its called is good but you'll want to save it up, the grenade launcher is great for emergencies, the rocket launcher is actually terrible... it's all about Super Shotgun, SMG and Hyperblaster.

A big problem that undermines combat though is that while weapons feel powerful and satisfying to fire, enemy reactions to being hit are pathetic. Sometimes they just ignore it and keep attacking, other times they'll flinch for like half a second under the assault of your fucking chaingun rampage. The game has a really weird feeling where you're firing big bulky weapons that barely seem to hurt enemies.

The enemies are similarly varied but most sadly aren't much fun to fight. The basic marines go down in an instant (and often play annoyingly long death animations where they can still shoot you), the rest of the enemies are just a matter of learning how many bullets you need to put into them for them to go down and then rushing over to them and doing it over and over. That is until you get to the airborne enemies, who in my experience were best taken out with the grenade launcher. The AI isn't particularly good for any of these and, like in Quake, bunnyhopping circles around everyone is a pretty sure-fire way to confuse them to the point where they're totally ineffectual. On the plus side, the devs tried to make each enemy feel unique with their own behaviours and abilities, and that works. No idea what they're called but my favourite enemies in the whole game are the weird thing with swords for arms who scream TRESSPASSER!!!!!! at you and then run over at like twice the speed of sound to eviscerate you.

Finally let's actually talk about the story, of all things. I know it's intentionally minimalistic window dressing, but I think the lack of story hurts the game. I'm not asking for shitty 45-minute cutscenes - or any cutscenes - or even any dialogue at all, but the fact that the game is mission-based (you have a PDA thing which tells you what you're meant to be doing) and yet simultaneously resists any kind of worldbuilding just makes it feel odd. Like, they put in unique objectives to make it feel like you're doing something more than just walking around shit-brown factories pressing switches, while also making sure that the story is intentionally indecipherable and near-nonexistent. Which makes the relatively impressive engine feel like its going to waste.

To clarify what I mean - why couldn't the Strogg homeworld (or wherever the fuck you are) make at least some kind of sense? Look at 1998's Unreal - like Quake 2, it's a game about shooting above all else, set in somewhat abstract environments with absolutely no dialogue, minimal story and a PDA being your only real source of info, and yet Unreal's world is engrossing and emotionally involving (no, really) and you end up understanding something about the culture of the Nali and the Skaarj, whereas Quake 2 actively and intentionally defies any attempt to do the same.

I'm not actually sure what I'm advocating here. It's just weird that they give you a PDA which shows reports from your commanders, FMV cutscenes detailing where you are on the Strogg planet, themed objectives, they send you to believable places like a power plant, a prison and a planetary shield generator thing, they even show other crashed dropships like yours and show you what's happened to the other marines... and yet it's all for absolutely nothing because there's nothing to get into, nothing to understand about the Strogg or their world beyond a shooting gallery. There's obviously nothing wrong with having a game with no story at all, but then why did they go halfway with the cutscenes and setpieces and all that, hinting at a story that isn't there? Who knows.

FINAL RATING: Ultimately, a really cool new engine can't quite mask a very standard and uninspiring game. It's not bad. It's paradoxically aged worse than Quake. I want to say 2.5/5 but it seems kind of harsh, but 3/5 seems too high. No choice - have to settle on 2.5 THE HORROR THE HORROR THE HORROR out of 5.

[PlanktonSideburns]

man, yea unreal is some proper good worldbuilding

[Lemming]

Reading some old magazines to see what critics at the time thought of some of these games, and I've chanced upon some really interesting ads:


Look at this! The weird early screenshots and scientist model!

There's also an early (this issue is from January 1998) advert for Unreal, telling you that you better hurry up and upgrade your shit if you want to experience the full imminent glory of Unreal:


Check it out here. It's also got a review of Fallout, which the IDIOT reviewer wrongly gave a 4.5/5 rating when it's actually objectively 5/5.