FPS NIGHTMARES

[Ferris]

Watched a bit of someone playing this on youtube because it sounded good. The realistic injury system has limbs flying off like there's no tomorrow - after a particularly long firefight the guy playing said:

"...there's just... legs"

Which summed up the room he was in beautifully. Unintentional (I think?) but really made me laugh.

[Bazooka]

September 11th 2001, a day I will never forget, my copy of Soldier of Fortune for the Dreamcast was waiting for me when I got in, such a violent day.

[Zetetic]

I have it too tied up in my head with the sequel, which I remember as much for its map generation feature as the dismemberment.

(The map generator was pretty neat, but it also responded weirdly to seeds that it didn't generate itself. I guess the randomly generated seeds tended towards a particular distribution, and they'd tested and iterated it around that.)

[Lemming]

I think you're a bit ungenerous to the devs here - particularly with the surrender feature. Making that half-way playable would have taken a fair bit of effort and play-testing.

I didn't mean to suggest that the surrender feature should be expanded upon or anything - I actually like the fact that 9 times out of 10, trying to shoot people's guns gets you into a much worse situation where they're screaming in agony because you've accidentally shot them in the chest, stomach and arms several times, to the point where you wonder if you'd have just been better off shooting them straight in the head. I also like how split-second it all is, and often when you're using automatic weapons, you realise only too late that someone was trying to surrender. The only real problem with its implementation is that there's a few rooms where you have to kill everyone to proceed, and surrendered enemies still count as enemies, forcing you to execute them.

As for the dev's intent regarding the violence, it's hard to read it as anything other than a "wow! cool! this'll have granny pissing herself!" kind of thing, especially as Mullins occasionally gets some action movie one-liners in during the carnage, there's one or two scripted moments that cause enemies to die in "cool" ways like being blown backwards into an electric fence, and the game gleefully tracks "throat shots" and "groin shots" on the statistics screen. Plus the microwave gun later on in the game, which is essentially included just for the sake of a particularly horrific, fantastical death animation.

[Zetetic]

Apologies for lack of clarity - I meant that they had made it at least half-way playable, suggests a degree of committent to the possibility, even if it wasn't at all consistent.

I felt like the games were both actually a bit interested in the reality of violence and what that entailed, but that this was mostly overwhelmed by an attraction to gore exactly as you set out. (Which sort of feels appropriate for a game licensing the name Soldier of Fortune, perhaps.)

Plus the microwave gun later on in the game, which is essentially included just for the sake of a particularly horrific, fantastical death animation.

Yeah, I don't think I'm able to imagine any complexity around that.

[petercussing]

I was curious so looked and here's about this mullens dude, he sounds like a swell https://soldieroffortune.fandom.com/wiki/John_F._Mullins

[Lemming]

Apologies for lack of clarity - I meant that they had made it at least half-way playable, suggests a degree of committent to the possibility, even if it wasn't at all consistent.

I felt like the games were both actually a bit interested in the reality of violence and what that entailed, but that this was mostly overwhelmed by an attraction to gore exactly as you set out. (Which sort of feels appropriate for a game licensing the name Soldier of Fortune, perhaps.)

Oh, I see - yeah, the surrender mechanic does stand out as something surprising, given the nature of the rest of the game.

To throw the devs a bone, I do think they wanted players to react with a degree of shock and unease, and the gore system gets turned against the player in any level where civilians/hostages are present and have nightmarish things happen to them if you're not quick enough to save them. Though the shock starts to wear off through the sheer volume of people you kill - well over a thousand by the end, according to the in-game stats screen.

I wonder if part of the reason people seem to remember the first level in the subway so vividly is - in addition to it being arguably the best level and the one featured in the demo - partially because it takes place before you get desensitised to the gore system, and so it's the part of the game where the violence still has the capacity to disturb. There's something really unnerving and anxiety-inducing about it that no subsequent level really replicates.

I'm interested to get to SoF2, which I have less clear memories of than SoF1, and see how its depiction of violence compares.

I was curious so looked and here's about this mullens dude, he sounds like a swell https://soldieroffortune.fandom.com/wiki/John_F._Mullins

One of the most baffling things about it all is that the fictional Mullins was - to quote the game's supplementary material - "in the controversial Phoenix Program" during the Vietnam War. "Controversial" is a major understatement. I have no idea what the hell they were thinking. I don't see any info on the real Mullins being part of the program, so I can only assume some lunatic at Raven Software read about the actions of the Phoenix Program and though "hey, wouldn't it be cool to play as someone involved in this?".

[St_Eddie]

Well, you've convinced me to purchase Soldier of Fortune from GOG, Lemming.  I hope you are very happy with yourself.  Blood (and gibs) will be on your hands.

[Lemming]

Enjoy! The first time you fire the shotgun into someone will blow your mind. And blow your enemy's mind in a more literal sense.

If you have trouble getting it running on Windows 10, as I did, the bizarre fix is to rename SoF.exe in the game's directory to mohaa.exe. No idea why or how that caused the game to suddenly start running flawlessly on Windows 10, but it did!

[St_Eddie]

If you have trouble getting it running on Windows 10, as I did, the bizarre fix is to rename SoF.exe in the game's directory to mohaa.exe. No idea why or how that caused the game to suddenly start running flawlessly on Windows 10, but it did!

I literally just upgraded to Windows 10 last night, so that's some useful advice!  Thank you.

[Lemming]

Perfect Dark has been an unusual experience. Don't think I've ever oscillated back and forth between "this game fucking sucks" and "this is easily a 5/5 game" so many times over the course of a game before. Think I'm near the end now, I've just been captured and taken to the big alien ship and overall I think my opinion on it is settling on being very positive. Might give it another full playthrough before reviewing, now that I know how to do most of the objectives and have foreknowledge of the most bullshit-laden segments.

[Mister Six]

Will you do Soldier of Fortune 2? I just ask because I watched a video to see what the gore effects were like and one level in that game appears to be set in an endless beige corridor sporadically blocked by magazine shelves. I'm assuming it's supposed to be an airport but it looks like no airport I've ever seen, and has a weird dreamlike quality.

Somewhere around the 3 minute mark in here: https://youtu.be/-U3osxTS9lk

[Lemming]

SoF2 is on the list! Funnily enough, that airport level is one of the parts I most vividly remember from SoF2, alongside the levels set in Columbia (which is a blocky, ugly looking endless expanse of vomit-green shrouded in mist and weird 2D foliage). Emblematic of the game as a whole, in a way, since it's a very clunky game with some properly appalling bits of level design and art direction, the airport being an all-time low moment. I think they were rushing to put another game out around the same time and just sort of went "fuck it that'll do" for SoF2, which is a shame.

Regardless, definitely looking forward to eventually reviewing it. There's a level set in China where Rosalind Chao shows up to play a menacing drug lord or something who tries to torture and kill Mullins in yet another classic laugh-out-loud piece of writing.

[Mister Six]

Looking at the video again, it's a wee bit more varied than I remembered, but it's still not actually plausible. More like the dream of an airport than the actual thing. Faintly nightmarish, actually.

[H-O-W-L]

I played the first level of Soldier of Fortune and thought it was complete shit I'm sorry to say. It felt like a floatier (YES) Quake 2 with a right wing sticker over the top.

[Lemming]

Not sure about the Quake 2 comparison, Quake 2's combat is very simplistic and sponge-y compared to SoF's. Although, you definitely can feel Quake in the movement, especially if you run diagonally at the wrong moment and go sliding off at 90 mph.

The right wing sticker point is 100% true, though, but I just found it impossible not to laugh at. The opening cutscene where Mullins (a civilian "contractor") demands, to a SWAT captain, that he be allowed to enter a fucking hostage situation. The captain relents, because this incredibly sensitive high-stakes situation is clearly a job for local NRA member John Mullins. Such a deranged Dale Gribble fever dream, it's uproarious in the same way so much of Rainbow Six's bullshit was.

Everything involving the bookstore is deliriously funny - the stupid pointless code-phrases John and his pals use to talk to each other, the wall opening up to reveal rows and rows of shelves filled with guns, the fact that the entire high-tech secret briefing room can be accessed through a creaky wooden door that leads out into a public alleyway, all that.

[H-O-W-L]

It's the damage system, funnily enough. It reminds me of the very simplistic material-swap damage system Quake 2 and SiN had.

For all the game touts it I think it's mostly sound design and animation that carries the violent elements rather than the actual gore, as the actual visual execution of it is very underwhelming compared to what the latter two elements imply. I sort of loathe the obnoxious levels of violence in modern games (Vermintide II, a game I quite enjoy, has been narking me with the amount of gigaheap bodypits it just has everywhere. It makes no fucking sense! This is more people than are alive in the entire world!) but I think that Soldier of Fortune's visual execution of the gore is... more naff than it is neat.  It wasn't enough to keep me interested in the game in the least since it felt very samey after just one level of firing the shotgun and seeing a guy go "AAAAH ME FUCKIN ARM FUCKING HELL ME FUCKIN ARM" as the game did little more than hide the vertices and slap a red block in its place. Not helped by the fact that dudes don't fall in place all the time, sometimes they linearly fly backward at 2000mph on the horizontal plane, instead of dropping in place... but their feet remain rigid as if they're in the middle of the air. Sure, this is a fact of it being 21 years old, but at the same time it doesn't feel like little more than a step-stone iteration of a game that released 3 years prior.

Compare it with say, the (unused on PS2) gibbing system of GTA3 which would come about a year later, and there's just something about SOF's actual gore that makes it really stand out. The inclusion of some detail in the wounding skingroups that appear during mild injury means that the larger, more graphic injuries that should be more graphic and detailled but retain the same level of "you can sort of see a rib if you squint a bit" stand out as being undetailled, IMO. Hitman, another game to come out the same year as SOF, used ragdolls but no gore (albeit it had 'chunky' blood effects) and feels vastly more violent and interesting to watch in combat even if the ragdolls are ludicrously light and fly around like bouncy balls. The suspension of disbelief remains intact because it's a linear line rather than one with peaks and troughs.

Half-Life, too, the inevitable parallel: The gore/violence system in that is simple: Blast the cunts into chunks or shoot them and let them drop. It remains constant, there's no half-in-half-out that disrupts the visual language of what's going on. I felt the same way about Left 4 Dead 2's iteration on L4D1's vastly simpler gore system. In L4D1 it was simply "shoot an arm and it flies off", but in L4D2 they added all this really disgustingly detailled anatomical dismemberment... but then the old, low-poly, small-resolution-texture gore effects still show up 5 out of 10 times anyway, creating this jarring dissonance.

I'd say the same about a car damage system by the by I'm not wanking off about the minutiae of the actual viscera. It's one of these things where having it up to the imagination is stronger than detailling it only partially realistically.

[Lemming]

It's one of these things where having it up to the imagination is stronger than detailling it only partially realistically.

As it happens, I'm writing the review for Perfect Dark right now and I included a paragraph about this kind of thing! Something about the death animations and accompanying sound effects in Perfect Dark really unnerved me, the way no gore is shown but people are implied to have had their eyes shot out, or are clutching at their throats, or are trying to walk but collapsing as their life fades away is just disturbing in a totally different way to Soldier of Fortune.

[Lemming]

Perfect Dark (2000)





This is running on the 1964 emulator, with full mouse support, which works so well that you wouldn't even know that this game wasn't originally made for PC! Big thanks to H-O-W-L for hooking me up with the emulator!

RELEASE DATE: 22nd May, 2000

STORY: In the distant, far-off future of 2023, a human agent is caught in a war between two alien races.

MUSIC: Insanely good soundtrack, every track is a winner. Sort of like a more action-y Deus Ex soundtrack. The track from the Pelagic 2 level got stuck in my head for hours.

MY GUN!: First off, have to say that the game looks graphically great (so much so that it apparently ran like shit on console back in the day).

Going to talk about the combat first, since IMO it's the game's big strong point. As with other early console FPS games like Goldeneye and Medal of Honor, the crosshair can be controlled and moved around  the screen. I always wonder why this mechanic was discarded as time wore on, and why PC FPS games never got into it, because it's really great fun at times. Gunplay typically involves moving into cover and then popping in and out to line up headshots on enemies - usually ludicrous amounts of them. Enemy AI isn't white-hot, but it's not bad either. They'll generally file into rooms one at a time while you shoot them, but they will also take cover and have decent aim.

The range and types of weapons you get to use are pretty great, though (with the exception of the Reaper which is SHIT) anything with a high rate of fire is an automatic winner, since headshots kill instantly on anyone not using a shield, so you'll generally just pick whichever gun can shoot the fastest. Everything also has an alt-fire mode, often useful. Oh, and you have grenade launchers, but explosions in this game are the biggest load of bullshit ever and every explosion lasts for like three hours, and if you walk into the sprite during that time, you die almost instantly.

Other than fighting your way through each level, Perfect Dark also revolves around themed objectives. Depending on the level, I personally found this design philosophy to be either a huge success or really grating.

In the best levels, the objectives helped to tell the story and helped you feel like you really were playing as a secret agent. In the worst levels, the obtuse nature of some of the objectives could be really tedious. Honestly, I'm not a fan of the objectives model to start with - I prefer when FPS games are focused almost totally on game mechanics and levels are about getting from Point A to Point B, overcoming obstacles along the way, and I don't really see what it adds to the game to go wandering back through an empty level you've already cleared looking for a small switch or interactive computer to press USE on before you're allowed to finish the level. It's basically a glorified version of keycard/switch hunts in older PC games, and those were almost never fun. Mixed in with a dash of Thief: The Dark Project's "well, you beat the level undetected, but you're 1 below the loot total so fuck off and find a small object somewhere before we let you proceed" thing. Feels like it's artificially padding the length of the game, honestly.

There are exceptions, obviously - System Shock is a game I can't stop raving about, and that's based almost entirely around running back and forth trying to find what you missed in order to proceed. But Perfect Dark's objectives can get irritating for a few reasons:

Firstly, half the time it's not really clear what to do, especially with some of the objectives on Perfect Agent difficulty. You essentially have to walk around the whole level trying everything to see if an objective gets ticked off. It wouldn't be so bad if there was a bit more clarity given in the introductory cutscenes to each level, but there's usually no direction given to you at all. Secondly, there are fail-able objectives, which sounds like it could be fun (and occasionally is), but in practice it's often not. The worst of these revolve around one-use items in your inventory, which, if placed incorrectly, will end the level, forcing you to restart from the beginning. Get fucked. Thirdly, the amount of objectives you're given, and their complexity, is tied to the difficulty level. This means that on easy, you get few objectives but combat is also laughably easy. On hard, you get all the objectives (and therefore all the plot points and story) but combat can get pretty brutal. I would have preferred a bit more control over this, as in the way System Shock allows you to control the exact difficulty/complexity of each aspect of the game to get the experience you want. I played on Perfect Agent because I wanted the best combat experience, and the result was that I was also lumbered with the most objectives.

I suppose this is really what the game is all about - you're intended to eagerly explore all you can, learn the layouts, learn the objectives, experiment and fail many times forcing you to retry over and over again until you finally understand what's going on and can plot the perfect course through any given map. While I understand the appeal, that's not my kind of thing, and much of my first playthrough was spent walking through already-cleared corridors trying to figure out which minor unremarkable prop the game wanted me to mash the use key with, or which part of the wall I'm meant to make explode to reveal the next room, or whatever. My second playthrough, where I knew exactly what to do in advance and could therefore focus entirely on the combat and setpieces, was far more enjoyable.

Perfect Dark, overall, tends to get better as it goes on, in my opinion. The later levels are particularly good. Everything from the deep-sea lab onwards is superb. Not only does the plot get a lot more enjoyable as the game progresses, shifting from boring and generic corporate espionage story to a batshit crazy tale about warring alien races and running around Area 51 with your unconscious alien buddy, but the objectives also (generally) become clearer and more intuitive, cutting down the amount of time you have to spend wandering around trying to figure out what the fuck to do.

Levels try to offer you a bit of variety in gameplay - there's a level based initially around being a stationary sniper, there's a couple of stealth levels including a disguise mechanic, there's pure combat levels, and there's one where you have to defend the Carrington Institute from attack.

The plot is good, mostly stupid, fun. You play as Joanna Dark, an agent for the Carrington Institute, who are allied with an alien race called the Maians. Your enemies are dataDyne, a corporation allied with an antagonistic alien race, the Skedar. What starts out as sneaking around dataDyne's offices quickly goes apeshit and you're teamed up with a Maian named Elvis, with whom you go on various escapades, including sneaking aboard Air Force One to rescue the US president. Eventually, you stumble upon a world sacred to the fanatical Skedar, and attempt to secure galactic peace by destroying their temple. It's a lot of fun to just roll with the increasingly bewildering situations the game throws you into.

Maybe it's just coming from Soldier of Fortune, but something about the violence really disturbed me in this game. People react to being shot anywhere in their body, and have some pretty extended death animations, often while screaming and begging for help or audibly choking on their own blood after being shot in the throat. And yet there is no blood (except light red smears where people are hit) and no gore, people just fall to the ground seemingly unharmed while writing in pain, clutching their throats, and gurgling. Freaked me out way more than Soldier of Fortune, in a way! At least SoF confronted you with (a heavily stylised version of) the reality of violence, while Perfect Dark straddles a strange line between depicting violence and sanitising it. Scary! Almost definitely wouldn't mention this at all if Soldier of Fortune hadn't been the game right before this one.

A final thing... this game is very similar to No One Lives Forever. There are the obvious superficial similarities - both games cast you as a female British secret agent, both games are about spying and espionage, both games flirt with knowingly silly sci-fi tropes, etc. But the level variety is pretty similar as well. The comparison first hit me during Perfect Dark's sniping level, where I remembered that the first level of No One Lives Forever is conceptually almost the same thing! Both games have stealth levels (with disguises), both games have gadgets that you've got to figure out how to use in action, both games have tutorial segments set inside your HQ, and both games have levels taking place underwater, in space, and on a plane which inevitably gets boarded by hostiles and blown apart in mid-air, though No One Lives Forever takes it a step further by changing the game mechanics. Interesting, anyway. They were released so close to each other that you can hardly accuse anyone of ripping anyone else off, but it's an amazing coincidence that so many concepts and level ideas from Perfect Dark reoccur in No One Lives Forever.

FINAL RATING: It's tough to rate, because ultimately I think what I want in a game and what Perfect Dark offers are often at odds. Again, I'm glad I did a second playthrough, because knowing where to go in advance basically cut out all the elements I didn't like and resulted in a very enjoyable game. It's creative, the combat is insanely fun, level design is occasionally clever and the story is absurd nonsense that's fun to follow along with. The rating system is already a meaningless shambles, so let's go for 3.75 Elvis out of 5, with those final levels almost dragging it up to 4.



THE GAME SUMMARISED IN A FATHER TED QUOTE:



Alright, it's time.

It's finally time.

The time has arrived.

It's time for John Romero to make me his bitch.

Will I be able to SUCK IT DOWN? Stay tuned.

[Wonderful Butternut]

Will I be able to SUCK IT DOWN? Stay tuned.

Make sure you don't leave without your friend Superfly.

[popcorn]

Bit worried about Lemming. Is John Romero about to make him his bitch?

[madhair60]

Daikatana was the last classic FPS far as I'm concerned. Love it.

[Lemming]

Bit worried about Lemming. Is John Romero about to make him his bitch?

No, and any rumours to the contrary are fake news, which you sh-

agh!!! (grabbed by John Romero)
hrrrrk!! (being made into his bitch)
gglhlgh (sucking it down)

[Lemming]

Really though, it's beating a dead horse at this point, but what the fuck is going on with that marketing campaign.

Putting aside the obvious offensiveness, why did they think "try our game! it's like being made to drink rancid cum" would get people hyped?

On top of that, nobody says, or has ever said, "made me their bitch" in relation to enjoying a piece of media. "Wow, Mariah Carey really made me her bitch with Daydream (1995)!" "Man, Adam Hart-Davis totally made me his bitch with this episode of What The Romans Did For Us!" It's not even a phrase people say.

[popcorn]

I think it might have been successful if the game really had been a blistering high-octane achievement, like the equivalent of Doom 2016 but in 2000. It was the hubris that made it notorious. I mean imagine being bummed by a massive strapping American football player with a 12-inch stonker, you'd be like "fair play, I can't deny that I have been made his bitch, I got what I signed up for", but the reality was that Rick Moranis turned up on crutches and then couldn't get it up.

[thelittlemango]

Eagerly awaiting the No One Lives Forever review after the mentions in the Perfect Dark review. To me both games have a completely different tone, Perfect Dark is goofy but still has quite a serious central theme, whereas No One Lives Forever is breezy and camp throughout and full of little bits of humour and in-jokes if you lurk around and hear guards talking amongst themselves. One of my favourite FPS ever, I found it a joy from start to finish, whereas I find Perfect Dark a bit of a slog at times.

[Mister Six]

I think it might have been successful if the game really had been a blistering high-octane achievement, like the equivalent of Doom 2016 but in 2000. It was the hubris that made it notorious. I mean imagine being bummed by a massive strapping American football player with a 12-inch stonker, you'd be like "fair play, I can't deny that I have been made his bitch, I got what I signed up for", but the reality was that Rick Moranis turned up on crutches and then couldn't get it up.

Pure poetry.

[Lemming]

Making inroads into Daikatana and fuck's sake I forgot how irritating the companion AI is. Stuck in an endless loop of "I can't leave without my buddy Superfly!" and "I can't leave without Mikiko" as the two morons in question bump into each other and slide at impossible angles away from me, occasionally stopping to have the same exact conversation over and over ("how ya doing, Soup?" "TAKEN SOME PRETTY BAD HITS")

I'm also utterly appalled at the end of the map The Vault. You walk down a corridor towards an empty room, but hang on, the corridor has a level transition trigger in it. You're suddenly locked in place during the loading screen - possibly stuck looking back to see if your dipshit buddies are following you correctly - and then enemies just fucking magically spawn into thin air in the room that was clearly empty a second ago. What's more, one of them has explosives, meaning that you, Mikiko and Superfly are all dead in seconds. If you somehow avoid this, Superfly and Mikiko will make absolutely sure to run out, attack nobody, stand still and get executed before you have a chance to react, giving you yet another game over.

Hate hate hate. Killed by magic level transition.

[Cold Meat Platter]

In the latest fan patch there's an option to turn off the companions I think.

[Wonderful Butternut]

Making inroads into Daikatana and fuck's sake I forgot how irritating the companion AI is. Stuck in an endless loop of "I can't leave without my buddy Superfly!" and "I can't leave without Mikiko" as the two morons in question bump into each other and slide at impossible angles away from me, occasionally stopping to have the same exact conversation over and over ("how ya doing, Soup?" "TAKEN SOME PRETTY BAD HITS")

I'm also utterly appalled at the end of the map The Vault. You walk down a corridor towards an empty room, but hang on, the corridor has a level transition trigger in it. You're suddenly locked in place during the loading screen - possibly stuck looking back to see if your dipshit buddies are following you correctly - and then enemies just fucking magically spawn into thin air in the room that was clearly empty a second ago. What's more, one of them has explosives, meaning that you, Mikiko and Superfly are all dead in seconds. If you somehow avoid this, Superfly and Mikiko will make absolutely sure to run out, attack nobody, stand still and get executed before you have a chance to react, giving you yet another game over.

Isn't there a patch (one of many that have tried to fix Daikatana, but only succeeded in making it slightly less broken) that at least makes them invincible, so you only have to worry about their inability to navigate their way down anything more complicated than an open corridor, and not about keeping them alive and managing their health and weapon pickups?