FPS NIGHTMARES

[PlanktonSideburns]

that scientist and alien look like theyre going for it in an outdoor rave

[Ferris]

I don't think I've ever played Half Life, Quake, or Unreal (though I deffo got stuck into Unreal Tournament).

Am I missing out here?

[purlieu]

Play Half-Life now.

[Mister Six]

Yeah Half-Life is brilliant, and has held up much better than the sequel. Although the monorail bit at the start is a bit shite now that cinematic FPSes are no longer a novelty.

Never played Unreal. Is the one-player game decent?

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

The officially endorsed fan made Half-Life remake, Black Mesa has finally been finished, after nearly a decade in development. It runs in the Source Engine, so it's not exactly cutting edge itself, but it's well worth a play if the original version seems a bit too old.

[Ferris]

Is it on consoles? I have a PS4 and Switch.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Black Mesa is just on Windows and, for some reason, Linux. Given how old the Source Engine is at this point, I'm guessing you wouldn't need a particularly beefy PC to run it on.

[Lemming]

Black Mesa is a great game and a markedly different experience from the original in some really interesting ways. Both it and Half-Life are definitely well worth playing, they complement each other very well.

Never played Unreal. Is the one-player game decent?

Absolutely! The atmosphere, worldbuilding and music are still ace after all this time, although the gameplay itself is quite dated in a lot of ways that some of its contemporaries (like Half-Life) aren't. Also if you're used to the incredibly cool Unreal Tournament versions of Unreal's weapons, the originals can feel really underpowered and wimpy in comparison.

[Blue Jam]

Just dropping by to say I love this thread. Cheers, Lemming.

[Ferris]

Looks like I can get it on steam, and then work out a clever way to connect a console controller to my laptop and get stuck in. Good project for my 2 week quarantine...

[popcorn]

I think HL1 is free on Steam at the moment.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I think the entire series is free for the next couple of weeks, up until the new Alyx game is released.

[popcorn]

I think the entire series is free for the next couple of weeks, up until the new Alyx game is released.

Yes, though not including the HL1 remake Black Mesa, which isn't made by Valve.

I played Black Mesa a few years ago when they released a version without the Xen chapters. It was impressive and good fun, but on the other hand I remember almost nothing about it.

[Mister Six]

Absolutely! The atmosphere, worldbuilding and music are still ace after all this time, although the gameplay itself is quite dated in a lot of ways that some of its contemporaries (like Half-Life) aren't. Also if you're used to the incredibly cool Unreal Tournament versions of Unreal's weapons, the originals can feel really underpowered and wimpy in comparison.

Cheers. Not a fan of multiplayer stuff unless I'm in a room with the other person, so never got into UT or any of the other online shooters. So hopefully that won't spoil it for me.

[Inspector Norse]

I played Black Mesa a few years ago when they released a version without the Xen chapters. It was impressive and good fun, but on the other hand I remember almost nothing about it.

I'd agree with that and in a way it's worth getting if you want a graphically more modern version of the game, but I don't recall any of the new stuff or changes; then again I've played the original through five or six times so Iknow most of it off by heart.
I don't think there were any huge differences in Black Mesa anyway. A few rooms had had some feng shui basically.

[purlieu]

Looking forward to your review of Chasm, which is surely just around the corner. Shooting limbs off fun.

[Lemming]

Funnily enough I've just come across a cool big double page advert for it while reading more old issues of Computer Gaming World:


Meanwhile here are some truly breathtaking photorealistic graphics I've just encountered in the next game, Turok:


I really miss the brief period in gaming where devs would just take a photograph of themselves or someone they knew, mess with it in photoshop for five minutes, stretch it hideously over a low-poly model and think "yep, looks great".

[Ferris]

Meanwhile here are some truly breathtaking photorealistic graphics I've just encountered in the next game, Turok:

Nicolas Cage is looking well.

[Bazooka]

None as handsome as Shigeru Miyamoto in Perfect Dark.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Why didn't they also take a photograph of someone's upper arms and stretch them hideously across a low poly model?

[popcorn]

[Lemming]

Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (1997)





This is yet another Nightdive remaster. It looks good, plays well and as far as I can tell is visually very close to the original, bar some new water effects or something.

STORY: No clue, but Wikipedia says it's about an "American Indian time-travelling warrior" who must protect "the barrier between Earth and the Lost Land, a primitive world where time has no meaning". You'd never get that from playing the game.

MUSIC: Some unbelievably good tracks here. What's going on with the underwater music though, it's terrifying.

I AM TUROK!!: Let's start with the graphics - these are probably some of the most impressive environments in any FPS game so far. You can tell it was ported to PC from the N64 but it still looks great. The only catch is the relatively short draw distance but that ends up working in the game's favour, since dinosaurs rushing at you from beyond the fog looks cool. Like in Tomb Raider except this time it's like five shitty dinosaurs instead of one terrifying one.

The range of weapons is great and literally all are good. The starting bow is crap at first but when you get Tek Arrows it's one of the most powerful weapons you'll have for much of the game and is a hell of a lot of fun to fire since you have to account for your arrows arcing through the air and adjust your aim accordingly. You've also got a pistol, a shotgun, an assault rifle, all of which are great to use. The shotgun has two types of ammo which actually ends up being annoying because there's no way to switch between them at will as far as I could see (I glanced over the key bindings menu and saw nothing, so if there was an easy way to switch ammo that I missed, you can laugh at me now). The grenade launcher and quad rocket launcher (wow) feel as powerful as they should. After that come the more exotic weapons, like the plasma rifle and the "alien weapon".

There's also the legendary CHRONOSCEPTRE, which you have to assemble all the pieces of. I apparently didn't get all the pieces, so I have no idea how it works. I'm sure it's nice though.

Ammo is rationed fairly tightly, especially in the earlier levels, so you're constantly switching between your weapons. That's a good thing because it gives you a chance to get to grips with every weapon and test which are more effective against which enemies, and avoids the problem of games like Quake 2 where you just pick your favourite gun (or rather, the gun that's objectively just the most powerful) and stick with it for the vast bulk of the game.

One thing I really like about this game is that it's not scared to throw a ton of weak enemies at you, because it seems to realise that mowing down tons of losers is actually really fun. You get a lot of weird army guys (absolutely NO idea who they are or what they're doing here) with Nic Cage's face and they'll go flying across the room spewing blood everywhere at the slightest touch from any of your weapons. This not only makes every weapon feel satisfying to use but also gives the game plenty of opportunities to take the wind out of your sails when it switches out the weak human enemies for FUCKING DINOSAURS. Later, robots and aliens show up, which still go down pretty easily with the right weapons.

The game follows a sort of hub design - that's non-descriptive I know but I don't know how to refer to it. Like, there's a central hub with lots of portals that lead to worlds where you have to find keys. Like Crash Bandicoot or Spyro.

These levels are all good, but my favourite level by far was level six, the Treetop Village. It starts pretty weirdly - you're on a rather small mountainside and far below you, over the edge, is a sea of clouds. After a relatively short walk you find yourself stuck with nowhere to go. With no alternatives, you risk a difficult jump across a chasm but don't make it and fall into the chasm, landing on a small isolated wooden platform. "Fuck", you think as you look around and see no way back up. Just as you're about to suicidally throw yourself over the edge to restart the level, you notice a shape at the very edge of the draw distance below. You jump for it and the cloud layer below you clears to reveal an entirely new area below. Then you realise this level's gimmick - it's almost entirely vertical. No joke, its as tall as most levels are wide. One of those WOW MATE moments that make you remember why you like videogames in the first place.

Some of the environmental puzzles are fun, some are irritating, but overall the level design is great and the amount of freedom it gives you in certain levels is pretty staggering, letting you explore and uncover the level's secrets at your own pace.

This hub design leads to the one big problem I had with the game though. You have to collect three keys from each world and bring them back to the hub to unlock the next level until you finally assemble the keys for the final level. Some of these keys are easy enough to find, but others are just fucking hidden away and you end up trawling around empty levels over and over looking for the one thing you missed. You can say what you want about Half-Life's influence on the FPS genre and whether it was a net positive or net negative, but at least it got rid of FUCKING KEYS. I CLEARED THE LEVEL AND I HAD FUN DOING IT, BUT NOW I HAVE TO GO BACK THROUGH THE EMPTY LEVEL WALKING AROUND THE SAME FEW ROOMS OVER AND OVER UNTIL I FIND THE SECRET SWITCH THAT OPENS THE SECRET DOOR THAT LEADS TO THE KEY I NEED. FUCK YOU

The other problem with the game is the boss fights, which universally suck. They're all technically very easy since you can win by circle-strafing half the time, but they go on for several minutes as you drain through all your ammo on each weapon in turn while watching the BOSS health bar go down at a laughably low rate.

FINAL RATING: Really fun, and pretty short so it doesn't overstay its welcome. It's really well paced and keeps feeding you new enemies, weapons and levels at just the right rate to keep you playing. 4 Probably Racist Or At Least Culturally Insensitive Protagonists, But It Was The 90s And There Are Worse Native American Caricatures Like Chakotay From Star Trek Voyager out of 5.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Nice, made me want to play it again.

[Ferris]

Shit, is it actually the face of Nic Cage? I was joking

[Lemming]

Haha, not as far as I know - I was just referencing your joke. If only it was him we could add him to the list of incredible celebrity cameos in 90s games.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Ah, Turok. That milks my nostalgia glands. I never owned it myself, but I went on a foreign exchange trip to Germany around then and played it a lot with my Deutsch counterpart. The Fusion Cannon was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen in a game at that point.

[madhair60]

are you ready Turok

[Lemming]

Stop Turok, can't stop Turok
You can't stop Turok
Can't stop Turok
You can't stop Turok
Can't stop Turok

[Inspector Norse]

EDIT: just realised that is Bowie, from some other game. Thought it was supposed to be the Cage face referred to above.

Here's Cage, though I get more of a Michael Imperioli vibe:



I never actually played Turok though I remember schoolfriends raving about it. I think I had the weird idea in my head that it was some kind of boring hunting sim except with Allosaurus instead of ducks.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

The adverts for it that played on the radio wouldn't have helped dispel that impression. They took the form of a mock charity thing, with a very stern bloke talking about how terrible Dino hunting was. E.g.

Bloke: "This is the pain caused by a high velocity sniper's bullet."
*BANG*
Dino: "Uuuuurrrng!"
Bloke "How can we glamorise tragedies like this in games like Turok: Dinosaur Hunter?"

Very strange ad campaign.