FPS NIGHTMARES

[St_Eddie]

I always thought Manhunt was a creepy game, no idea why Rockstar made it tbh. Ahh, it was just to be controversial wasn't it? See also Bully.

Eh, Bully really wasn't aiming to be controversial, I don't think.  The protagonist is an anti-bully if anything, going out of his way to protect those more vulnerable than himself and the game is essentially just a more modern update of the rather charming and quaint Skool Daze.  The only controversy courting element to the game was the title itself; "Bully" (which is ultimately why the game was renamed to Canis Canem Edit within the UK).

[aunt mildred]

I completely agree but at the time I remember headlines like 'Rockstar making a game where you play the bully in a school'. So yes, it's just the title really. It's not a bad game to be fair.

[The Crumb]

I always thought Manhunt was a creepy game, no idea why Rockstar made it tbh. Ahh, it was just to be controversial wasn't it? See also Bully.

Hi, I'm a newb here, long time lurker. Thanks lemming for this thread, I've enjoyed reading it all as a lurker.

It seems like a cynical cash in on the grounded, violent horror of Saw, Hostel etc, except wiki says it came out a year before either. So the lord alone knows what they were going for. It kind of feels like it might be a meta satire on violence in games, but if so, Rockstar are very much having their cake and eating it.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I completely agree but at the time I remember headlines like 'Rockstar making a game where you play the bully in a school'.

"Rockstar Ate My Hamster!"

[Cold Meat Platter]

A good sequel would be 'Workplace Bully' where it's the same cunt grown up making everyone's life hell in a call centre with map icons.

[Mister Six]

The only controversy courting element to the game was the title itself; "Bully" (which is ultimately why the game was renamed to Canis Canem Edit within the UK).

Mate at Rockstar said they gave it that title because they knew it would encourage people to just call it Bully anyway.

I liked it - full of lots of lovely detail, and a ton of fun. Although the bit where you drug a (male) teacher so the dinner lady can rape him is a bit much.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

A good sequel would be 'Workplace Bully' where it's the same cunt grown up making everyone's life hell in a call centre with map icons.

ROCKSTAR PRESENTS: CUNT

Objective: Microwave Tuna Melt
Workplace Mouseballs Stolen - 6/50

If your health drops below 20% you can listen to Kings of Leon at your desk to restore it.

[Cold Meat Platter]

ROCKSTAR PRESENTS: CUNT

Workplace Mouseballs Stolen - 6/50

If your health drops below 20% you can listen to Kings of Leon at your desk to restore it.

Desktop replaced with screengrab and icons disabled: 11/255

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Lej

[Ferris]

I always thought Manhunt was a creepy game, no idea why Rockstar made it tbh. Ahh, it was just to be controversial wasn't it? See also Bully.

Hi, I'm a newb here, long time lurker. Thanks lemming for this thread, I've enjoyed reading it all as a lurker.

Welcome to the forum! I suspect you're on the money re: Manhunt, I didn't (still don't actually) understand what the game was about and it seems to have been quietly dropped by R*.

(Bully was cack, ironically I think the only cohort who would have found it controversial would be other bullies.)

[Video Game Fan 2000]

A version of Skooldaze set in a call center would be amazing if it wasn't designed by legends.

Ruining pranks instead of setting them. Forwarding anti-immigrant emails to HR. Breaking the coffee machine so everyone gets free joe. Helping interns shoplift. Unionising.

[Cold Meat Platter]

Sounds like it could work in a format a bit like Papers, Please.

[Mister Six]

Basically, Sorry to Bother You: The Game?

[The Crumb]

Actually, going to say that Manhunt was ahead of its time in being a game which attempted to address violence rather than just depict and glorify it. It was an earlier and better version of what TLOU2 tried to do, and even offered the player a limited amount of choice over how much violence to use in reaching their goal.

Manhunt 2 was just mad, they were definitely trying to get banned with that one.

[Cold Meat Platter]

In manhunt basically there was a man having a wank while you were killing people. The stealth was absurd in that if you were a mm into a shadow you were completely invisible and out of that pocket everyone could see you.

[bgmnts]

Manhunt was ace but really annoying to play.

[Lemming]

TimeSplitters is underway, but as long as I've beaten Gunman Chronicles, I might as well post the review for it now:

Gunman Chronicles (2000)





RELEASE DATE: November 20th, 2000

STORY: Major Archer, a member of the Gunmen - a law enforcement agency in a space-western future where humanity has colonised the galaxy - is dispatched to intercept a strange distress call, but finds himself ambushed by his former General, who's out for revenge.

MUSIC: It's exactly what you'd expect.

IT'S HIGH NOON IN DEEP SPACE: Is "it's high noon in deep space" the best tagline ever or what?

Gunman Chronicles started out as a Half-Life mod, before eventually getting to be released as a standalone game. You can instantly tell it's a mod, but it's a really good one, with (almost?) entirely original assets. This means that me spending half the review talking about Half-Life will be justified for once!

The weapons selection is fairly limited at first glance - you have a pistol, a shotgun, a machinegun, a rocket launcher, and later on a beam weapon and a chemical gun. They're all fun to use so the seemingly-small selection wouldn't be a problem anyway, but the game has another trick - every weapon except the machinegun has various settings which can be changed for totally different applications. Your pistol can be set to fire in short, accurate bursts, in a sustained fully automatic but less accurate barrage, or to charge up powerful shots. It can also transform itself into a sniper rifle for some reason.

The shotgun, meanwhile, allows you to adjust the number of shells fired in a single shot, and the spread. So you might choose to fire four shells in a wide-ish spread, like a traditional shotgun... or you might choose to fire two shells in a focused, accurate spread, making the weapon more like a rifle. The chemical launcher is cool too, you can fuck about mixing different chemicals together to see what ends up getting fired out. Absolutely loved this mechanic, and spent about ten minutes just pissing about with each weapon's settings after first picking it up. The rocket launcher in particular is just ridiculous, there must be over 10 options to mess about with and combine.

Enemies aren't anywhere near as varied as Half-Life, but there are a range of both human and alien lifeforms to fight, and they're all perfectly serviceable. The human enemies, in the best encounters, show flashes of Half-Life's HECU marines. In their worst moments, they'll run into their own explosives and stand still while you shoot them, but hey, so did the marines so fuck it.

There are also vehicle segments, but wait! For the first time ever in an FPS, they're not shit! You drive a tank which is easy to control and fun to fire with, and the game pre-empts the style of vehicle level seen in later games (like Half-Life 2) by repeatedly forcing you to abandon the vehicle, navigate obstacles on foot, and solve some kind of puzzle to make way for the vehicle, a formula which works very well here. Only snag is that you literally can't fucking die, the tank almost never takes any damage, bar a couple of traps which you'll still probably survive.

The story is the best part of the game. Without going into too many spoilers, you get to visit three different planets, each with their own distinct atmospheres and climates, and the plot revolves around stopping the crazed General from sending an army of genetically engineered killing machines across the galaxy. Along the way, you're tormented by a crazy AI that's clearly an affectionate pisstake of SHODAN. After you destroy the AI's base, it downloads itself into a portable memory core and asks you to rescue it, which you do, and from that point on you're carrying it around in your inventory, with it giving a running commentary on every other thing that happens. You can also sometimes plug it into walls to give it access to electronic systems to open doors for you and things. Despite the rocky, mutually murderous start to the friendship, Archer and the AI quickly become allies. This character honestly pushed the game into the next level of quality for me, it's a laugh having a demented AI bark orders at you every five minutes. Having your companion be an item in your inventory is an ingenious way to get around the fuckups that usually plague AI teammates in FPS games. And maybe it's just because I've played both System Shock games relatively recently, but having SHODAN on your side for once (after a certain point, anyway) is pure catharsis.

Taking cues from Half-Life, the game knows the value of setpieces. You can see in the first screenshot that a giant fucking dinosaur shows up on the first planet, and you have to rush along a courtyard while it swishes its head down to bite you. Later, you're in an underwater base where a giant squid breaks free and starts eating the entire facility, forcing you to dodge its tentacles as they break through the walls. Later, you install your AI mate into the base's mainframe and, with full control, she immediately sets about blowing everything the fuck up around you. Plenty of similar such memorable "what the fuck is going on" moments that give you a good laugh.

The only real complaint against the game is that it's too easy. Even on Hard, while it's not a total joke and you will get blown up more than a couple of times, you're sort of unstoppable unless you get cheap-shotted by a rocket launcher enemy.

All in all, to compare it to Half-Life - which is a justified comparison for once - it's not as tightly designed as Half-Life, but it shares a lot of the same design philosophies, and ends up with a similar sort of result - it's basically a theme park ride through lots of different scenes and setpieces, with an endearingly B-movie-ish story propelling you forward so effectively that you don't even notice the core gameplay mechanics, like the combat, aren't that great.

Gunman Chronicles isn't scared to wear its Half-Life origins proudly - the game even starts with a tram ride, and the desert planet has you use a rocket launcher to take out a helicopter that's chasing you through a canyon - but it makes plenty of successful attempts to differentiate itself. And almost all of its new ideas work - the AI companion, the tank segments, the weapon modes, etc. Probably the best compliment I can give it is that, for the most part, I forgot I was playing a Half-Life mod.

FINAL RATING: Just great fun, and doesn't overstay its welcome. 4 Demented AI Buddies out of 5. Just don't go into it expecting the next Half-Life.

[Mister Six]

This sounds amazing! How have I never heard of it?! I suppose it was around this point that I was transitioning to console gaming via the Dreamcast, so maybe it got lost in the mix. Shame.

[popcorn]

I seem to recall that some valve staff worked on that somehow.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Never played it but remember it on release getting some decent ratings.

[Lemming]

TimeSplitters (2000)





RELEASE DATE: October 26th, 2000

STORY: TIMESPLITTERS, bastard flesh monster things, are interfering with Earth's history.

MUSIC: It's so good, on every map. Listen to this shit.

THE VERDICT: First off, I'm playing only the single player, due to having no friends :( Nah it's because I'm playing on an emulator. I actually have 104 friends. As with a few other games covered in this thread, this one's meant to be all about the mulitplayer, but there is nonetheless a single player campaign, and that's what I'm reviewing.

First thing to mention is that, after umm'ing and ahh'ing for a bit, I ended up playing this on PC through an emulator, using mouse and keyboard. While TimeSplitters 2 has been apparently been made by fans to work perfectly for mouse and keyboard, TimeSplitters 1 has no such support, and so it basically fell to me to fuck around with the emulator settings, adjusting the deadzones and sensitivity by 0.1 at a time to check the results. I actually love doing this kind of shit, so no problem. In the end, I got it working in a way that was more than serviceable, but still obviously not quite as ideal as playing on a controller as the developers intended.

TimeSplitters is interesting because, in an era where developers are trying to put more and more into games, it does the exact opposite and strips the FPS genre down to the most basic level it can possibly go. You're dropped into small levels, none of which take more than a couple minutes to beat, which send you through a relatively straightforward map filled with enemies and weapons. You blast everything in your path, rush to the objective, then rush back as a bunch of fireball-hurling bastards beam in. That's quite literally it. The challenge is to unlock all the characters and maps by beating each level on the hardest difficulty within very short time limits.

This leads to a gameplay loop of learning the levels back-to-front, which is fairly easy given how small they are, and then rampaging through them as fast as possible. And it's a lot of fun, especially when the time finally comes to go through them on Hard. Some of the maps are better than others, but all are at least decent, except for the zombie mansion which can FUCK OFF. Other lowlights include chemical plant and the docks, both of which didn't really land for me. My favourite map by quite a margin was the 1970s Hong Kong level, which is just a fantastic burst of action. Love the first map with the Egyptian tomb, too, since I think the game lends itself well to fights in very tight corridors.

Being developed by people who worked on Perfect Dark, you can pretty much immediately see the influence. The gunplay is similar, although the manual aiming mechanic doesn't feel quite as good here as it did in PD. In fact, auto-aim is so generous that I found the best strategy to almost always be to just run around firing from the hip, never stopping to actually aim. I don't think the awkwardness of auto-aim was down to playing with a mouse, since everything else went smoothly. The only time it makes sense to use auto-aim is when you're forced to decapitate the zombies and timesplitters so they don't get up again to fuck you over.

There's a shitton of different guns to use, often unique to the map. The blunderbus you get in the first level is an absolute shit-kicker, you don't even have to aim, just fire in the general direction of enemies and watch the mayhem. My favourite gun in the whole game was the laser carbine though, that thing just shreds everything apart. Most of the guns, no matter how exotic they appear, fall into archetypes - the blunderbus is a shotgun, the laser carbine is an assault rifle, etc, so everything feels immediately familiar and easy to use.

The game has a very good difficulty curve - it starts out laughably easy as you go through each map on Easy, barely taking any hits. Medium gives a fair challenge, and by the end, Hard is fucking ridiculous. Getting the shit kicked out of you is all part of the fun, though - you'll generally make it further and further into the level with each attempt, learning where enemies spawn (the game likes making them run up behind you) and where to go for the quickest possible route. Gaining this metaknowledge of the maps is basically what the game is all about, and it's always satisfying when you finally become skilled enough and familiar enough with the maps to get the best possible time on Hard.

With each new accomplishment - whether it's beating a new map, beating a new difficulty setting, or beating a new time limit - you're rewarded with more characters, maps and even cheats. The devs were wise to keep the rewards flowing consistently, since getting a steady stream of new things takes a lot of the sting out of being killed on thE FUCKING ZOMBIE MANSION FOR THE 500th TIME

When you beat all nine levels, you unlock CHALLENGE MODE, which has you doing things like escorting NPCs (NIGHTMARE) and unique objectives like shattering every window on a level. Some of the objectives are pretty novel, and it's a cool reward for beating the story mode. You can also unlock shit in Arcade Mode, which includes Last Stand, which is my favourite gamemode. You just sit on a turret and shoot the shit out of endless waves of enemies, which is a nice change of pace, and starts to get hilariously anxiety-inducing as enemies swarm in from all sides faster than you can take them down.

Oh, there's also a map builder! You put pre-designed rooms and corridors together to make your own maps. You'll never be able to create anything quite on the same level as the maps made by the devs, but you can create a long structure that looks like a cock and balls and fight your way through it.

FINAL SCORE: Focusing just on the singleplayer, it's a lightweight game, but there's a strong appeal in having the FPS genre distilled down into something like this, all the action and gunplay without any of the window dressing that other games of this era were starting to lean so heavily on. 3.5 FIREBALL-THROWING BASTARDS out of 5.


The zombie mansion can FUCK OFF THOUGH

[Ferris]

It was all about multiplayer (which was excellent), but I'm glad you enjoyed it. I love this franchise (TS2 is my favourite game of all time) and the flow of rewards and challenges was insanely addictive. One of the challenge modes in the second one was "break every pane of glass" in a collection of small buildings, and it took me literally days trying new strategies and runs and directions to beat it[nb]I think there are two choke points where you can shoot three panes of glass out at once which I figured out how to insert into the run[/nb], which I did!

...and unlocked the challenge "now do it with a brick". Which took fucking weeks to do, but I managed it! The reward - unlocking "brick" as a weapon in multiplayer. If you haven't guessed, the brick is fucking useless. That whole sequence made me laugh more than any other video game. The sheer ludicrous nature of the challenge and the reward was brilliant.

I think it introduced the idea of trophies/completion stats which are now ubiquitous in gaming. You could get hidden "platinum" ones on certain levels if you were good enough (I was, of course). I don't remember the zombie/house level, but the NeoTokyo mission from TS2 can fuck off. I hate stealth levels to this day as a result of that.

[popcorn]

I think it introduced the idea of trophies/completion stats which are now ubiquitous in gaming. You could get hidden "platinum" ones on certain levels if you were good enough (I was, of course).

Surely the same team had already done it with GoldenEye, where you could get different scores for different mission goals like Agent, Double Agent, Ponce, Nonce, etc.

[Ferris]

Reading about TimeSplitters made me think about other games I've played into the ground and I thought about the House of the Dead series. Does that count as an FPS? I know rules are being bent here but how far are we going?

[Lemming]

I remember having HotD 2 for Dreamcast and being endlessly amused by the discrepancy between where you aim the light-gun and where the bullets actually register.

Apparently some of them were released on PC, which I never knew, so I'll give them a look. Playing them with a mouse sounds like such a strange experience that it's got to be worth a try.

[PlanktonSideburns]

Typing of the dead seems to be available for PC on lots of abandon ware sites and is ace

[Ferris]

I remember having HotD 2 for Dreamcast and being endlessly amused by the discrepancy between where you aim the light-gun and where the bullets actually register.

Apparently some of them were released on PC, which I never knew, so I'll give them a look. Playing them with a mouse sounds like such a strange experience that it's got to be worth a try.

I remember trying to play it on Dreamcast using the fishing rod peripheral for a laugh. Bloody students eh.

[Pink Gregory]

Actually, going to say that Manhunt was ahead of its time in being a game which attempted to address violence rather than just depict and glorify it. It was an earlier and better version of what TLOU2 tried to do, and even offered the player a limited amount of choice over how much violence to use in reaching their goal.

Manhunt 2 was just mad, they were definitely trying to get banned with that one.

Didn't the Wii version feature simulated garrotting with the wiimote and nunchuck?  Or is that my fevered imagination?

[Rev+]

Typing of the Dead:  Overkill is hilarious, but it seems like some people are struggling to get it working on Windows 10.  It does have the option to switch it to the normal HOTD shooty version, but then you'd be missing out on stuff like zombies coming at you shouting DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING and CAREFUL NOW, or the evergreen classic U R SHIT AT THIS GAME.

[PlanktonSideburns]

I downloaded the original Todd somewhere, works good on Windows 10