Tag: blastfromthepast

Die Hard Nakatomi Plaza

A Blast from the Past Review

Is FBT just another cowboy?

The Past

Die Hard is my all-time fave action movie so I originally approached DHNP like walking across glass barefoot. How could it possibly be any good, even if the movie’s plot is basically a FPS? But in my memory, DHNP trod a fine line; referencing the movie yet sneaking in levels like protecting Argyle and filling out the bit between ‘shoot the glass’ and John in the bathroom. There are two things I remember most clearly about DHNP; it tried very hard to respect the first film and it was as hard to finish as the fifth film.

The game took no prisoners – shooter experience was not part of the equation this time, you realised that. God knows how Hans got all those terrorists in one van – they were everywhere. One wrong move and you’re down before you had a chance to say Ho-Ho-Ho. Still, I recall it as a cracking shooter that let you live out an against-the-odds action movie.

But considering its lacklustre reviews and that it’s not even reappeared on Steam or GOG makes me wonder if my DH love overshadowed the game itself. Was it Yippie Ki-yay or just Motherfucker? I remember a great, if unforgiving game and it can’t be worse than Die Hard 5. Even if it doesn’t run it can’t be worse than Die Hard 5.

Still a Blast?

I’m alone, tired and seeing diddly squat from Windows10. I just couldn’t get past the welcome screen, like John looking for Holly McClane. I lost myself in patches and dead links trying to find a way to make it work, but nothing. I had to find out if DHNP really was a lost classic and not a Die Hard In A Building rip-off. McClane wouldn’t give up; neither will I.

A week later I was staring at that Windows XP wallpaper courtesy of a battered Dell computer off eBay. I get deafened by the start-up tone and begin installing DHNP. It’s good to be back. And it’s even better when DHNP loads up like a boss.

Although it looks pretty dated now, DHNP is really trying. The opening sequence, while truncated is faithful and there’s detail only a Die Hard geek would spot – when you walk to the elevator the second security guard is idly picking at his nails. A major difference is how everyone looks; Holly has the same perm (no one’s gonna trademark that) but Ellis now looks like an 80s porn star. Karl doesn’t look anywhere near as menacing and has his hair in a little ponytail, but the biggest change is John McClane. Because he’s not in it.

Die Hard’s strength as a high-concept movie wasn’t the shooting, it was who’s doing the shooting. John McClane was, as the trailers said, an easy guy to like. You wanted to see him succeed; he wasn’t Arnie shrugging off bullets, he was a regular Joe caught in a situation he had to face. But in DHNP we never see JM’s face, only hear him, even in cut-scenes which is distracting given how much of this is about him; and JM doesn’t always act like JM – at one point, while stalking through Nakatomi’s R&D department, he has the option to gas several terrorists just to clear a fairly easy path. What raised Die Hard above other actioners was that JM was fundamentally decent; he never kills anyone who doesn’t shoot first, yet here, you can kill Tony with the buzzsaw. DHNP’s John is more Doomguy than nice-guy.

As it progresses, DHNP seems to be unsure if it’s for fans of the film or a standalone shooter; I couldn’t proceed until I looked at Tony’s shoes which would make no sense to those who hadn’t seen the movie (since we can’t see JM’s feet) yet Hans is hidden for half the game. I couldn’t work out why until I met Bill Clay – ahh I thought, if I get taken in by that fuckin’ TV accent I’m going to get shot, but Hans doesn’t get the drop on JM this time either, so keeping him hidden makes no sense to a gamer who never saw the movie.

One minute it’s relying on you knowing what’s happening then it’s acting like we’ve never been here before; John finds C4 on a seat next to an elevator shaft which seems fairly obvious, but still needs Al to prompt him before you can use it. By picking and choosing what to reference, DHNP creates huge plot holes; Thornberg is completely absent so how did Hans know to kidnap Holly?

But the biggest ‘huh?’ is Karl, who has his Tony-tantrum then all but disappears, so when he rocks up and says “we’re both professional, this personal” it doesn’t have the same resonance – we don’t even get the “that man is pissed” moment. Plus, he runs off and gets reinforcements! The hell? It also messes with the structure of the film; SWAT enters the building despite the RPG attack occurring and Al mentions they’re sending in Paramedics; it undermines JM’s isolation if folks are coming and going freely – he visits every floor, even going for a swim in the sewers for no good reason, yet never opens an outside door to get help.

So, if it’s not the Die Hard experience I remember, how does it hold up as a shooter? Frantic and frustrating. The AI of the terrorists (who all sound like Arnie) is basic, and there’s hundreds of them. There’s a nice touch in the way they switch to sidearms if you get too close and do lots of duck and rolls, but it’s insanely difficult due to their numbers and accuracy. Even in the finale Hans needs seven or eight shots to the head just to send him out the window. While Holly is doing everything she can to get shot herself.

There is a lot of care here though; the ‘don’t hesitate’ guy pops up – then down onto Al’s car, the receptionist that looks like Huey Lewis is there and others from the movie too, and it’s got the look and feel of the Plaza down perfectly, meanwhile some extensions work really well, such as trying to outfox the terrorists tracking your blood-soaked footprints, reworking the giant fan scene or saving Argyle. Sometimes it does go left-field, most notably in a sequence where John discovers C4 counting down (doesn’t that go against Hans’ plan?) and has to disarm it in a time-sensitive rush.

So did DHNP live up to the memories? I can see why DHNP faded away. It’s just an Okay Shooter, given a pass by its inspiration. It tries, but relies on your awareness of the movie to fill gaps in its logic, then asks you to ignore the logic where it suits. Can’t have it both ways, and instead of enjoying it I just wish Hans would open the front door for me.

Die Hard Nakatomi Plaza might not have been what I remembered, but the saddest part is what I had to go through to relive it. I now have an obsolete PC lying around. It’s a shame that older games are left to die-hard as the tech marches on; we’re even seeing it in mobile platforms now which were once the last chance saloon for older games – Monkey Island no longer works in iOS 64-bit, which sucks. It’s frustrating when you can’t enjoy something anymore just because the industry decided not to carry the past into the future, worried it would look dated. So maybe that XP rig isn’t obsolete after all; I have a ton of old discs W10 turns its nose up at. XP, come up to the coast, we’ll get together, have a few laughs.

2002 | Developer; Piranha Games | Publisher; Sierra Entertainment

Platforms; Win XP

90s FPS vs Reboots – A Blast from the Past Special

On Doom’s 25th Birthday, FBT compares the Doom-era to its reboots in yet another of his excuses to replay old shooters and bitch about new ones.

Happy Birthday Doom! Thanks to you, FPS is one of the most successful genres in gaming. As I’m fond of saying, Doom was gaming’s Jaws moment, the moon landing; it was bigger than inventing the wheel, discovering fire, evolving opposable thumbs. It was the Big Bang of gaming, and I cannot understate this – the Doom era was the Rat Pack to modern FPS’s One Direction.

What became known as the Doom era lasted until Half-Life. Five or so glorious years of carefree shooting. While both Doom and Wolf managed sequels after Half-Life, the era was over – until 2011 when Duke Nukem Forever finally (crash) landed. What followed was a sudden resurgence; between 2013 and 2016 Wolf, Doom, Shadow Warrior and Rise of the Triad were rebooted; I avoided them all as cynical cash-ins on marketable names after the horrible DNF; it ruined it for everyone. But now they’ve transcended their origins to become new franchises. They must be doing something right. Am I being a Doom-era snob?

For me, the only way a reboot is going to work is by recapturing the spirit of the original; it has to take me back to the first time I heard an Imp growl and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. That’s a tall order for the modern reboots; I have a hairy back now. But, why do the new games have such big reboots to fill? What is it about that era that I hold so dear? Can the original Rat Pack still pack the Vegas Sands or have they been reduced to Cannonball Run II? We all know Doom is the Chairman of the Board, but who is Dean Martin and who’s Peter Lawford? And who from the remakes is Harry Styles and … the other guys?

Dosbox is at the ready and I’m all out of gum.

The Past – Wolfenstein 3D

Like everyone, I was astounded by Wolf wayyy back in 1992 as I mowed down ‘Mutti!’ crying Nazis. But even then it looked a little basic. It was the work of mad genius, but I never felt like I was there. I was exhilarated but I was never in it, never connected to it. It’s the one I went back to the least, quickly overtaken by Doom; I can’t imagine this has aged well at all.

Yeah, this has aged; I want to bang on about the good old days, but this isn’t the good I was hoping for. I’m smiling, I’m enjoying it, but that’s mostly my memories talking, remembering that time – literally, I just remembered I played this on a Time Computers PC.

The missing floors and ceilings, a compromise to keep BJ moving make the game samey and impossible to disappear into; it’s just corridor, room, Nazis, repeat. It’s bright and cartoony, and while levels change, W3D really is a proof-of-concept. FPS had never been done properly before and it feels wrong to moan but Wolf is a tutorial. It’s also over 25 years old and still deserves respect, but that adulation is for what it did for gaming, not what you do in the game.

More than any other Doom-era game though, Wolf kept going. Aside from the sequel, there was Return to Castle Wolfenstein, where BJ goes Call of Duty, followed by Wolfenstein, which no one talks about. Then, the Castle laid dormant until Machine Games moved in.

The Blast – Wolfenstein The New Order

This is what Hollywood calls a Soft Reboot, continuing story elements but resetting the world. Whatever it is, it’s a shame it’s called Wolfenstein. Had it just been The New Order, I might have liked it more. After an opening that sees BJ leaping between crashing planes, getting chased by huge mecha-dogs and taking down Nazis in intense trench fights, our hero takes shrapnel to the head and gets stuck in a locked-in state just long enough for the Nazis to take over. Waking up, BJ regains his considerable strength, links up with the hottie nurse that’s been sponge-bathing him and joins a rebellion in this new world order. I mean, Wolfenstein New Order.

The one thing I can’t get past with W:TNO is BJ’s internal monologue. It’s like listening to Max Payne’s Podcast. BJ never shuts up with his introspective mumbling and now he’s all emotional and awkward? Soft reboot is right. When he gets shot I expect him to shout “I’m a vegan”. BJ should be Austin Powers or Demolition Man, a man out of time but with a unique approach that this new world needs; having BJ on ice for a decade meant W:TNO had an opportunity to explore the differences between the original bad boys of FPS and the modern sensitive heroes. It could have been a great commentary on how shooters have evolved, but instead, BJ is just an arm in a theoretical world run by Nazis. And it’s horrible.

Scenes like infiltrating a concentration camp just feel … off for a game that originally ended with us fighting Hitler in a mecha suit. People in fly-infested bunks, emaciated and crying for food isn’t Wolf – a scene in a cattle-train with screaming people bound for the camp while catching a glimpse of an uber-bitch Nazi holding a baby by its ankles and brandishing a whip is a grave moment – but nevermind ‘cos BJ’s dual-wielding machine guns, piloting mechas and popping into space; is this a Tarantino-style revenge shooter or Schindler’s List The Video Game? Early on our hero takes a chainsaw to a tight-lipped Nazi and that’s fine, but when BJ falls asleep and dreams an original level I’m reminded of why I’m supposed to be here – fun. There’s not much of that in this new world.

W:TNO is, actually, an incredible game. Its compelling stuff and there’s some great characterisation; BJ and the nurse have an awkward romance (and some hefty sex-scenes) and the resistance are all believable. But it’s not Wolf – even though I was unimpressed with W3D and this is immeasurably a better game, it’s Wolf in-name-only.

The Past – Doom

To explain the effect Doom had on me; Doom was the game that got me back into gaming after I discovered girls instead. Doom is better than girls, that’s how influential it was.

Still, eventually I got bored with it. I started to find the levels wearying, the designs too stark once the initial shock wore off – it was the Clones’ fault. Blood, with its storyline and style, Duke and SW with their humour and self-awareness, Doom started to feel samey. But after all the clones I replayed it and … whoa. This is FPS. I gave up on girls all over again.

I can bitch about the blocky creatures, the repetitive art design, the never-changing slog to find keys but the thing is … the levels are timed to the pixel like some satanic ballet; every single creature is a classic, the art design is perfect, and it’s never dull finding keys – seeing that end-board with the location replaced with a red splash; I did that. Every now and then a level reminds me of some 1990s song, tv show or hangover, but Doom is so well judged I forget I’m playing something 25 years old. Rather than become cute like Wolf, it’s still an intimidating, dangerous game. This is how you do it.

That ‘Doom feeling’ isn’t in its dark corridors; it’s something you get while playing. id knew they were on to something and it’s that enthusiasm you feel, it’s still palatable now. It’s somehow got charisma. See, Chairman of the Board.

I should follow with Doom 3, as it was a ‘soft reboot’ but I don’t want to. DOOM 2016 was the real reboot, it promised to recapture that Doom feeling. Let’s see if it’s better than Girls.

The Blast – DOOM

The reboot is 68Gb; the original was 28mb – I have mp3’s bigger than that. Surely, with that much weight to it, with this legacy to emulate, it’s a better game experience? Nope.

It does look so real it makes you feel uneasy – but weird uncanny-valley realism doesn’t make a scary game; it’s urgent and shouty, the creatures so busy posturing that it becomes a grind. Doom was a moshpit – DOOM is commuting in rush-hour. It’s a punishing game but missing the recklessness, the way the original would hype you up enough to consider punching a Hell Knight. By missing the sense of excitement, fun, the sheer bravado of the original it’s just a by the numbers shooter, closer to CoD Zombie than Doom. You just spend all the time surviving arena battles and that wasn’t where the original’s intensity came from.

Further missing the point of the original, in firefights we have ‘glory kills’ where a dazed imp or whatever can be brutally killed up close during a QTE. Meh. Half the time you’re so swamped you can’t reach the downed guy anyway and an incessant glowing and flashing is just annoying. Doomguy didn’t have time for this kind of crap and it gets worse – the original has secrets but this time Doomguy is also hunting for fricking collectables as well as suit upgrades, and weapons can be improved by completing challenges; Doomguy didn’t need those, he already was the best. He was John Maclane, John Spartan, John Matrix, John Rambo, John Wick. Not John from accounting who needs all the help he can get. How do you misjudge a character who didn’t even have any characterisation?

Doom was the daddy of shooters; DOOM is doing a dad dance. There’s nothing new here; this is not the good-old-days and it’s not giving the modern era a kick in the ass the way Doom did. This isn’t a reboot of the original, it’s a reboot of the original’s reputation. It’s just marketing. It’s infuriating – so much so, my original playthrough ended in a rage quit and so did this replay. The biggest mistake though is unlocking a classic-era level. That’s just triggering me to go back to the original again. I should have played Doom 3.

The Past – Rise of the Triad

I was not a fan of RotT when it came out. The cheap-looking digitised effects, the blocky movement of the enemies, and the basic level design – plus, we’re assaulting an enemy base, why has it got coins floating everywhere – and platforming?! This is a First Person Shooter not First Person Mario. RotT felt like a thrown together cash-in clone.

It’s not got any better. There are some advancements like character selection and enemies faking their deaths or begging for their lives while bleeding out, but the world looks cheap and digitised like an arcade rail shooter. There’s an interesting deviation when it comes to weapons though – you get infinite bullets and dual-wielding and alternative explosive/magic weapons instead of an arsenal, but it feels easy – endless bullets or rockets; more than a match for what I’m facing. Traps, trampolines and floating coins mostly.

About the only fun I have in this game is watching the enemies fall into their own traps. Why is this castle so insanely dangerous? The trampolines let you propel yourself forward or back but rather than a new shooter mechanic it’s only there to collect more of those bloody coins. There’s power-ups but in Doom they’d give you health bumps, invincibility or let you punch like a rocket, here we can turn into a dog. It’s bordering on a kid’s shooter.

I had it mind RotT was a subtle parody but it’s not, it’s just childish and not in a juvenile way like Lo-Wang’s antics. It’s just horrible. It’s not a clone – because it’s nothing like Doom. For the first time I’m actually hoping the reboot strays from its source material.

The Blast – Rise of the Triad

Well, this follows the original pretty closely. Great. The one time I wanted it to deviate … And then … this is a contender for best reboot of the bunch. RotT is the only one to actually remind me of the era; it captures that wild attitude, the unexpected mayhem.

There’s so much carnage to be had, but rather than DOOM’s scraps or Wolf’s atrocities, this is just mad fun. The weaponry works better this time and even the traps, as nonsensical as ever, are fun to navigate and trick baddies into. It’s no longer a kid’s game, it’s a big kid’s game. This is what I remembered. I’m having the same fun I had 20yrs ago.

RotT has really pulled out all the stops – not to reinvent the genre but celebrate it. It doesn’t have any of Wolf or DOOM’s big-budget shininess or epic-ness, and maybe that’s why it’s so good. It’s bolted together, low-fi, smoothed over and a bit cheeky – I’m gonna go play it again. This feels weird but, a reboot wins this round?

The Past – Duke Nukem 3D

Doom might have been the biggest and best, but it was unrelatable; a nameless arm that was knee deep in the dead? Doom gave FPS a reputation, but Duke gave it a personality. I loved Duke. To me he was a perfect parody/love-poem to the Arnie and Sly heroes of the 80s meets Roger Moore-era Bond. And his game was equally awesome. Freed of Dungeons, Castles and Hell, Duke shot through recognisable locations filled with interactive stuff while spouting movie quotes and quips, and women swooned. He was my hero.

DN3D has so much going on unlike the minimalist Doom (or the cluttered RotT); I’m having a great time drinking from toilets, using jet-packs and air-vents, and playing with myself in a time when men were men and women were strippers. Oh.

Admittedly, the flashing strippers and porno theatre feel little schoolboy ‘look, boobs’ now but Duke does tip the strippers and doesn’t make lewd comments – if you shoot them Aliens appear to kick your ass, and it’s not like DN3D created strippers or porn theatres. Not the strongest argument and I’m just trying to convince myself but perhaps Duke isn’t all bad. But that unfortunate element aside, it’s fun to inhabit a super-cool ultra-hero, modern games don’t really do this anymore. Come on!

Thing is, DN3D’s distractions hide a fairly generic shooter and that really comes to the fore once we leave earth for a space station. Away from a real world you realise level design is not 3DR’s strength and they covered it with novelties; aside from the interactions, Duke did have the most varied weapons – who can forget shrinking and stomping enemies? And you never get over the first time he finishes that space boss, pulls down his pants and takes out the newspaper … Still smirking like a schoolboy. But as a shooter, it’s not that cool.

DN3D is great fun but it isn’t up there with Doom’s experience. It’s a bit of a Michael Bay game, shouting without saying anything, but it was a real leap forward for FPS, environment-wise and Duke is still my hero. He needs some sensitivity training, but still. And then …

The Blast – Duke Nukem Forever

Duke Nukem Forever will go down in history for many reasons. Okay two reasons; it’s huge development cycle and being irredeemably shit. Those alien bastards.

The only possible defence you could mount for DNF is its satire; if you’re offended by it, you’re the joke. There are elements that bolster that argument; scenes, references, dialogue and bits of silliness clearly send up Duke and his reputation but you can’t just go ‘it’s parody’ and excuse a level where we search a strip club for a vibrator to have sex with a stripper. Or the “Alien Abortion” game. Or the Glory Hole. Or the twins Duke is dating. Or that sequence. I’ll get to it later (and not much further).

As a game it sucks. It’s graphically uneven and for every fun sequence like a shrunken Duke navigating the Duke Burger there’s dated, uninspired levels – and that doesn’t mean DNF is the throwback I’ve been looking for because they’re either confusingly non-linear or rail-shooter straight with crappy scripted sequences. It’s like playing Steam on shuffle.

Duke is the worst victim though. It’s either mocking him or deifying him and when we meet his incestuous, maybe underage twin girlfriends we don’t think ‘rock n roll’ we think Duke’s a groomer. He’s arrogant now rather than cool and whereas his ego was justified in the original and even a little playful, now he’s just a dumb, misogynistic jock dickhead rewarded for deeply unpleasant behaviour. Thanks DNF, you made me dislike Duke.

So, I reach the infamous level. An Alien nest, where Duke gamely kills women before aliens can burst out of them – fine, that’s in the original and makes some sort of sci-fi horror sense. Except in the original they were cocooned and muttering Aliens’ ‘Kill me’; here they’re topless hotties and that’s not all that’s on display. Duke finds random boob growths in the walls and can give them a hearty slap for a reward – while saying “strange silicon lifeform”. It’s not juvenile, it’s not commentary, it’s just … embarrassing. But then Duke finds his girlfriends, similarly cocooned. As they beg forgiveness for being raped and make abortion jokes, Duke quips ‘looks like you’re … fucked’ – No Duke, you are. Fuck this. Rage Quit.

I don’t get how this happened. More so than BJ, Duke would have been an ideal character to parody moral-choice worrying lead characters, and it’s so offensive I want to believe that was the intent. But without some context, some wit, this is up there with Custer’s Revenge.

The Past – Shadow Warrior

Shadow Warrior wasn’t a Doom clone it was a Duke clone. FPS was moving fast and SW was an innovator at the time. But in retrospect, Lo-Wang was a backwards move.

Lo-Wang is not Duke. We could forgive Duke as he was riffing off the macho alpha males of cinema, but Lo-Wang is a misogynistic asshole. Terrible dad-jokes, repetitive lines (“Time to get erased hehehehe”) and some of the creepiest reactions to female NCPs this side of Benny Hill’s Madcap Chase, Lo-Wang is more No-Wang. There’s moments like a showering woman returns his flirt with machine-gun fire but mostly he’s cornering static buxom anime girls and making sexual overtures that would make Austin Powers blush. It’s clear 3DR were trying to be controversial for controversy’s sake after the accusations levelled at Duke and when he’s not being creepy he’s tittering at everything; we’re playing the class clown here. When you want a silent hero it’s not a good sign.

The game itself is a mixed bag. The levels are a lot richer and have greater depth than Duke’s, with recognisable locations and Japanese imagery, but there’s a lot of backtracking and the fights are boring and repetitive. It’s got no direction, no urgency and Lo-Wang’s clowning doesn’t cover the faults the way Duke’s cool did. There’s some major improvements though; 3D creatures, vehicles, multi-depth design, alt fire and puzzles; all of it wasted on an uninspired game and a git of a hero. Modernising a guy who should be on the sex-offenders list is going to be a tall order. Lo-Wang Forever?

The Blast – Shadow Warrior

Setting itself up as a prequel, Young-Lo-Wang is a cocky henchman ordered to get an ancient katana for his boss’ collection, but the deal goes south when a horde of demons storm the place. A spirit called Hoji explains the katana is no ordinary sword – it can slay immortal beings who rule the demons, making the sword’s master their master … Hoji agrees to help YLW claim the sword in return for a favour, and we’re off.

It’s a master-stroke setting this before the original; freeing itself of LW’s past (future) misdeeds, SW succeeds in making YLW palatable; he is full of himself and during the game develops his recognisable persona and look but leaves the perving behind. He’s a really fun, brash character and the dynamic with Hoji, a trickster-like spirit is great. This is damn good. Where it’s less damn good is in the fighting. Guys, you rebooted the wrong game.

YLW walks into an area, then hordes of creatures pour out of everywhere. Once clear, the exit opens. This is Serious Sam. It is all in good fun, and the battles are frenetic, set in intricate and clever levels (not that you get a second’s breath to consider anything tactical), and it looks amazing, but it’s exhausting and not really the style of the Doom era shooters. I know I bitched about the original having dull fights but now you’re just being silly.

Still, kudos to the devs for keeping LW recognisable but respectable – without turning him into BJ’s mumbling softie. But like Wolf, it’s as modern as they come; YLW has skill trees, special moves, magical abilities and uses money to upgrade weapons – but it is reminiscent of the original where it counts, and of all the reboots, this might be the best ‘reimagining’.

A Blast from the Past?

So are the originals still better? Yes … but … maybe the 90s FPS era isn’t quite as bullet-proof as I remembered. Still, did the era need rebooting?

No. They didn’t add anything, let alone took you back to the era and made you realise what’s missing in modern FPS. But the bigger issue is their success encourages the industry to keep looking back not forward. We need new, imaginative FPS experiences not reheats; if they keep punting new titles masquerading as our heroes we won’t see original, forward-thinking games like Mass Effect or Bioshock anymore; how long before their publishers decide to reboot them rather than chance something as untested as they were on release? DOOM has a sequel incoming and Lo-Wang returned; Wolf got a sequel, with a third announced; Wolfenstein Youngblood, which is a spin-off … when will it end?! The industry needs to find new ways to shoot people.

Thankfully, Redneck Rampage, Blood and Heretic were spared reboots, so they can remain perfect in my mind; otherwise my steadfast belief that the Doom era was the best time in gaming would be seriously shaken by some of those replays … but it was the best time and the innovation, the energy, the originality is still there. The Doom era was basic, but it was more than the sum of its (gibbed) parts.

What I loved most about this old vs new playthrough was the reboots that got closest to that era, RotT and SW both came from indie outfits; just like id and 3DR were. They weren’t developers under the watchful and marketable eye of major publishers, they were gamers making games for gamers. SW and RotT reminded me of when we’d excitedly type ‘doom.exe’ into DOS and that’s what I was looking for. Those guys should have rebooted Duke (ironically, RotT’s devs started out remaking DN3D before Gearbox put the kybosh on them); anyone who can make Lo-Wang less reprehensible could reign in Duke without neutering him. Shake it, baby!

Fallout 3

A blast from the past review

FBT falls-in with Fallout again.

The Past

It’s odd to do a Blast from the Past on a game that’s only a few years old. Sorry? Released 2008? TEN YEARS AGO?! It can’t be, Fallout 3 can’t be a decade old. Have I been frozen in a vault for all that time? I hope not, that would make a terrible basis for a Fallout game. Ten years…

For the longest time F3 was one of my fave games, easily in the top five, but over time it slipped away as I just couldn’t face repeating that huge slog through the wasteland, the impossible scale of it. Until Bethesda took free-roam indulgence to 100 with Skyrim, I couldn’t imagine a bigger game (other than their Morrowind). But although I call it a masterpiece, I just recall endless rubble, raiders and botflies, have flashbacks to never managing to reach my destination without being distracted. I remember having a crush on the off-kilter girl writing the Survival handbook, wearing a ghoul’s face for a mask and everyone chatting to me like it was normal to be walking about like Hannibal Lector. Wasn’t there a giant robot at the end? I know it was all to do with water and my Dad but the more I think about it, all I remember is that rubble, those raiders and damn botflies. I played it multiple times but I think I only finished it once; once all the DLC was added it never ended. It’s time to go be Liam Neeson’s sonaughter again. Ten Years!

Still a Blast?

Oh wow I remembered my own birth. As I go through the classes and appearances it’s a nice character build sequence. Bethesda always did those well, from Morrowind’s immigration questions to this glimpse into who I’ll be as we go from cute toddler to a bratty teen taking their aptitude test. It’s a nice way to get to know myself without being a preachy tutorial. I don’t get to know Mum, who dies in childbirth. Least I still have Dad though.

Dad’s gone! And somehow it’s triggered a riot. I escape the vault, my home for the last two decades, and it’s an oddly bitter-sweet moment. On my first playthrough TEN YEARS AGO I blazed through this sequence itching to get going but this time I’m a bit more relaxed about it. Vault life isn’t so bad. I even try sticking around after the riot but eventually everyone just tells me to leave. The party’s over. Wearing my Fonzie leather jacket and a birthday hat I got for my tenth birthday, I’m well prepared.

Following the original games’ overall story-arc, in 2077 a short-lived nuclear war broke out, with predicable results. Playing off paranoia and threat, “Vault-Tec” had begun building shelters all over the country (in this case, Washington DC) and now they had a captive audience. Vault-Tec added additional tests, events and scenarios to better understand human nature or something probably more insidious. Those in the vaults created their own societies for two hundred years, while outside, survivors and Vault-escapees did the same.

Stepping out into the wasteland still packs a punch. For a decade old F3 still looks great; games might have more pixels now but it’s all about belief and for all its sci-fi, F3 feels real. This is the aftermath of a nuclear war. In this reality though Apple never got out of Jobs’ garage; their style over substance approach is nowhere to be seen (maybe somewhere there’s a Vault that looks like an Apple Store). F3 is one of those fifties ‘the world of tomorrow’ films come to life. An over-designed, art deco, Vic-20 meets Nostromo world buried under an apocalypse. Ten years on and I’m still marvelling; Bethesda know how to build a world. Fallout 4 might have watered down the memory with its retread but this feels more gritty, more real; the immediate danger has passed but there’s no real hope of rebuilding. Instead, folks are eking out a living the best way they can; I just came from a vault which while restrictive, was safe and had water that wasn’t eradiated.

It turns out that’s what Dad was after all along. He was a huge fan of bottled water and his project, Purity, was a way to cleanse the area’s water and the first step towards rebuilding civilisation. But it’s taken a huge amount of steps to reach this point. Like all good RPGs, you follow the mission marker less ‘how the crow flies’ and more like ‘pissed bumble bee’. It’s impossible to walk in a straight line. There’s hundreds of things to go look at and those things have things in them that you spend hours ferreting through or send you off looking for other things that you don’t reach because other things. I’d forgotten how hard it is to get anywhere without being pulled somewhere else. What’s that?

The main mission is brilliantly done; our character has questions, there’s a nice tension between me and Pa, and Dad realises his kid doesn’t need him anymore. You can play the character as pissed off, indifferent or desperate but no matter how you react, nothing will be the same again. As you attempt to finish Dad’s Purity Project, you draw the attention of the Enclave, a remnant of the previous government who realise controlling the water is a means to reasserting power – coincidentally that’s the plot to Tank Girl and both antagonists are played by Malcom McDowell. I’m also dressed like Tank Girl.

It’s fun to dig into your inventory and work out what items you can cannibalise, although it’s not as detailed as I remembered, especially with the weapons. Similar items can be folded into others to raise their stats, but you never really alter or jury-rig stuff the way you should, leaving you to carry multiples of everything, weighing you down. Mostly you’ll be carrying junk, digging through everything like Steptoe in the hopes of uncovering something valuable – or a bobbypin so you can unlock items to find more junk. Although this does feel a bit endless and slows everything down, I’m still enjoying wandering eerie old schools and decrepit Nukacola factories hoping to find something. Usually bloody radroaches. Usually.

There’s a whole host of beasties to battle, and to help there’s the VATS system, which stands for something. You can pause and pick where you want to aim and you’re given a percentage of how likely the hit is. It’s a bit like an intellectual’s Bullet-time but fun watching the shootout in slow-mo. It’s also fun using VATS to fatboy a botfly. Swatted the bastard.

But, the botflies and radroaches soon give way to speedy giant scorpions and Guai; I’d forgotten about those werebear things; but I hadn’t forgotten about the bloody Deathclaws, apparently a war-time super-weapon gone awry. Also very awry are those Super-Mutants and their side-kicks, those nightmarish Centaurs. There’s also the ghouls, folks who survived the nuclear fallout but lost their sanity (and looks, but not their clothes. Even zombie America is concerned with modesty), and giant ants referencing the infamous fifties movie Them! but mostly we’re fighting raiders who figure the best course of action is swing a lead pipe at the gal in power-armour. When Fallout was adopted by Bethesda, there were grumblings from the original series’ fans that it would become The Elder Scrolls, and to be fair, it has. This is Oblivion without spell casting, but it’s a lot more focused and you do more digging around, and the setting is much more relatable. Plus, no Oblivion gates popping up every ten feet. It is its own game and ten years on I’m still finding new areas, new experiences and loving the post apocalypse.

The good thing is, unlike more recent RPGs (like Fallout 4), the main story is nicely non-urgent. Almost from the outset Dad says the water purification project won’t save the world and it’s freeing to not be that heroic, to not have pangs of guilt when I return to Megaton again to offload junk then go do something for folks who need this, want that, send you there. We’re getting a priest to realise he’s in love, putting a stop to cannibals (or not), and researching lovely Moira’s Wasteland Survival Guide. We’re looking for old civilisation artefacts, rescuing folks from Super Mutants and Slavers – unlike Fallout 4 and Skyrim’s disheartening ‘radiant missions’ this feels more realistic than endlessly visiting a smug Jarl who’s yet again bitching about a Dragon that’s outstayed it’s welcome. Instead, there’s just enough to lone wanderer into. Unless your lone wanderer prefers company.

Unlike Oblivion, followers are more than bullet-catching NCPs. The best is Dogmeat. A mutt we rescue, he becomes a doggo liability, running off to attack something ten times his size, falls off cliffs and constantly get in the way. After a short while I leave him at my digs in Megaton, terrified I’ll lose him. There’s various mercs, thrill-seekers and more than a few quest-related folks who make life interesting by following then disappearing, getting stuck or dying and leaving the mission unfinished forever. Followers haven’t been quite perfected in F3 and they kind of undermine the ‘Lone Wanderer’ shtick our character is rocking, but at least they can carry stuff for you. Just don’t give them anything valuable.

Another Oblivion nod is the Karma system. This was much better utilised in New Vegas, here it means getting pestered by do-gooders and having marginally better dialogue choices, but also draws the attention of mercenaries who don’t like nice people. If you decide to be a mercenary yourself, the ‘Regulators’ come after you instead, and being a dick doesn’t block you from mission opportunities, just more evil options once you’re mean enough (bye, Megaton hovel, hello penthouse in Tenpenny Tower).

I’d like to say a lots happened since F3 was released, but … has it? Playing this now, I realise RPG hasn’t moved on, it’s just repeated itself. F3, along with Oblivion, got it perfect and as I play and remember moments, events and set-pieces I realise how much Fallout 3 informed my expectations of RPG. It’s good. When’s the last time you had a hundred-foot-tall robot as a follower? F3’s scenery does become samey but there’s so much layered into the game that it becomes more than endlessly clambering over a tip. The loose societies and clans that have sprung up, the communities like Megaton or Rivet City and heavy-handed groups like Enclave and Brotherhood of Steel – this is how its going to go when someone finally presses the button.

When you add in a compelling but unpressured main story, tons of side-missions and events, and some stellar characterisations and observations, you’ve got a decade old game that’s timeless. Graphics might continue to impress and advance, and one day Fallout 3 might seem creaky and basic, but it’s spirit will still be indomitable and that’s missing from modern RPG; Fallout 4 and Skyrim included.

Like lovely Moira’s Wasteland Survivor’s Guide, Fallout 3 should be required gaming for anyone planning on taking up RPG so they understand how it’s done; and it should be a tutorial for anyone planning on developing one – and that includes Bethesda. Fallout 3 is back in my top games list. Play Fallout 3; make Liam Neeson proud.

2008! Developer; Bethesda Softworks | Publisher; Bethesda Publishing

Platforms Win, X360/One, PS3

Medal of Honor: Airborne

FBT jumps out of a perfectly good aeroplane in the name of honor

The Past

Medal of Honor Airborne was a marmite of a game, either a realistic war experience or a plotless offline multiplayer.

I landed in the ‘really love MoH:A’ camp when it first came out. The parachute sequences where you looked down and realised nothing could stop you from landing right in the middle of a raging battle was thrilling – tired of the spoon-fed linear shooters but finding non-linear shooters too meandering, MoH:A seemed the perfect compromise. Everything was against you, but it was on you to find a way, not follow a path and it taught you war was hell. Or maybe it was just a bot-controlled offline multiplayer now I think about it. I rinsed it back in the day, earning every medal and star. Time to re-earn my paratrooper wings.

Still a Blast

There is something very classy about MoH:A. It looks good for its age and there’s some great detail to it – according to a nice behind-the-scenes on the DVD, developers EA LA (who were DreamWorks, later Danger Close and now DICE LA) took it very seriously, recording the real planes, weapons and even the boots of the different factions (Not that I ever heard footsteps and thought ‘ahh yes, that’ll be the Italians approaching’). Although there’s not a lot of character or scene-setting, once we’re aboard the plane it’s tense. Your fellow grunts have a well-observed bravado-meets-fear feel to them and more often than not, our plane gets battered while reaching the dropzone. We’re flung out and there’s a horrible silence until we’re close enough to hear the guns and shouting. There’s an excitement in seeing the scale of what’s below; that’s missing in linear games’ walk-in events. I have to survive that?

I float down trying to spot an edge, or a ledge I can land on to strike from but its mayhem down there and I always change my mind as I get closer. As I land (usually a ‘Botched’ landing where I get pulled by my chute or stumble while getting my bearings) I’m right in the heat of battle or at some Nazi’s feet and get shot to pieces while trying to recover. It is instantly intense. Unfortunately, I can’t desert. Once in, its non-linear but fairly close-quartered. Each mission has a different layout – an early level is an Italian village and we’re sliding across pottery roofs, through tiny alleyways and in and out of houses while troops on both sides tear about, while later locations are set in old ruins or camps behind enemy lines – it’s never the same experience twice. Unless you get killed.

Every time you’re shot, stabbed or blown up, you return to the plane to try again. Although we’re always playing the same silent hero – Boyd Travers – the constant respawn feels like a new grunt thrown into the fray and that sheer numbers will win this, not a lone hero. That’s lucky because I get through a lot of Boyds.

Part of that brutality is we’re always outnumbered, but really it’s down to the sheer confusion – in a realistic way; I have no idea what we’re doing; the mission briefings are little more than pep-talks and once down all we have is a mission marker or a radio message telling us to ‘secure’ something as the mission parameters change.

As you use weapons they gain XP, awarding you better magazines, reduced recoil, accuracy etc. which feels right, representing a more experienced, aware soldier who finds and utilises anything they can on the battlefield. You’ll need the edge; the AI of the Axis is either brutally efficient or vacantly scripted depending how you look at it. They’ll run to you as you land, bayonets and rifle butts at the ready and dart about aggressively giving it an edgy, unknown feel, but that also makes them appear set in random mode and you rarely feel like you’re fighting something that’s aware or making decisions. But then again, that’s just how I’m behaving; barrelling around like an armed headless chicken, I imagine this is how a lot of war goes – a perfect plan descending into chaos as soon as a shot is fired.

Most of the moments we face are drawn from real battles and how the Paratroopers aided the war. Early on we’re taking out anti-aircraft guns before moving onto spotting-towers, radars and eventually work up behind the shoreline of Normandy to knock out the pillboxes. It’s all thrilling, realistic stuff. At least until Operation Market Garden, when it seems we’ve parachuted into Call of Duty.

While cutting through a decimated village trying to avoid a tiger tank and more troops than seems fair, we reach our objective; keep a bridge open for our tanks. It’s under attack from Nazis trying to blow it up by using RPGs which they fire at us too, even in close quarters. There’s just something ‘game’ about a battalion of RPG troopers and it starts to lose that realism. I can’t parachute in behind them; once you get midway through you stop dropping as it becomes a linear push. Can’t get more linear than a bridge filled with RPG troopers firing annoyingly accurate rockets at you point blank.

And the CoD-style OTT continues. There’s a nice mission in a munitions factory at a rail station, which is spoilt by the arrival of ‘SS Storm Elite’ troopers who wear gas-masks and wield the kind of firepower that reminds you of that scene in Predator after Blain gets it. They’re fun to take down, but hardly believable. Then the final mission has our multiple-hero assault a huge flak tower which is a great bit of business but doesn’t make a lot of sense since the goal is to reach the basement and blow it up. Couldn’t we just land at the base then? We did walk out of an open door at the end.

Those final few missions really do take the edge off MoH:A – I’d forgotten how silly it got, but the biggest disappointment in this Blast is how the respawning removes the camaraderie we see aboard the planes; once, one soldier got shot yet refuses to stay behind, insisting he’s ‘jumping with you guys’ – really bringing home that brotherhood sense, yet Boyd is frustratingly hollow; there’s no cut-scenes, no characterisation – all we get is his ‘after action report’ voice-over as we pan over the dozens of Boyds strewn across the battlefield. Most of the MoH games have stoically silent, emotionally absent heroes, but MoH:A spends a lot of time personalising if not deifying the Paratroopers; each mission opens with a quote about them, we see the sheer stress and danger they’re put through, understand that every jump is a suicide mission; in-game there’s some horrible moments like getting close to a burning tank and hearing the men inside screaming. Yet Boyd is absent, a Doom-era arm when he should be Private Ryan. Most games have respawn and autosaves but their characters appear in cutscenes, you inhabit them and when you die, you start again whereas here, the battle continues below – it feels like an endless respawn rather than an adventure and that turns MoH:A into an offline multiplayer game which is frustrating.

MoH:A is a good game with tons of effort and consideration built into it, but it’s a game of two halves – the in-game action which is mostly brilliant, and the build-up which is affecting. Instead of coming together, they cancel each other out like you parachuted into the wrong game.

2007 | Developer; EA Los Angeles (DICE LA) | Publisher; Electronic Arts

Platforms; Win (Origin), X360, PS3

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

A BLAST FROM THE PAST REVIEW

FBT stops to ask directions to Castle Wolfenstein

The Past

The whole point of Previous Weapon’s Blast from the Past is to recall an old game, have an opinion of it then replay and see how badly wrong you were. Problem is I can’t recall anything about Castle Wolfenstein, other than some sexy leather-clad Nazis which is weird, for both the game and me. But beyond that, I can’t remember a thing. If anything, for a long time I mixed this up with the other reboot, Raven’s misfire Wolfenstein (2009) which is so embarrassing it’s not even available on Steam or GOG. But I still have my Return to Castle Wolfenstein DVD so I must have played it. Guess there’s only one way to find out. B.J. Blazkowicz to the rescue. I’m assuming he’s in it.

Still a Blast?

During a flashback, Saxon mentalist Heinrich lays waste to everything before being tricked and imprisoned alive. Flashforward and Himmler, the occult nut, sends a group of Nazis to find and release Heinrich, to inspire the Nazis and destroy the Allies. Isn’t that the plot of Blade 3? BJ and another agent are sent into Castle Wolfenstein where the experiments are being carried out, only to be captured. Rebooting the original, BJ fights his way out of Wolfenstein, reports on what they’re up and is ordered to stop the Nazi’s resurrection plan.

Wait, I thought we were returning to Wolfenstein. Did we just leave? The first post-Wolfenstein level, battling through catacombs filled with zombies, the undead and those leather-clad Nazis I so well-remembered is great, but soon we’re assaulting labs, bases, foiling a V2 attack, stealing an experimental jet plane, saving Nazi-defectors in bombed out cities, protecting a tank and trying to stop a u-boat. You could easily mistake RtCW’s middle section as Call of Duty 2, in both style and approach. We jump out of planes, have stealth missions around outposts, get cut-scenes where bosses discuss the war effort and it reaches the point where Wolf-style scenes with experiments and abominations seem at-odds with the military tone instead of the other way around. There’s a strong feeling this is Wolf in name only, and it’s trying to reboot as a standard WWII shooter.

Wolf created FPS – indomitable hero cuts through baddies, puts down bosses, reaches finale. This is supposed to be Wolf not a distant relative and it becomes just another shooter without the castle – yes, the original left the Castle too but tonally it was all the same whereas here a screengrab could be mistaken for Medal of Honor; there’s nothing Wolf about it really.

We do get some fantasy-based baddies once we face Deathshead’s lot, legless ‘Lopers’ which leap about, and the stalwart of genetic modification, Super-Soldiers; armoured behemoths with mini-guns and rocket launchers. But again, we’re fighting them through bleak labs and boring bases. Had this all happened in a dark, gothic castle filled with secret passages, outcroppings, spires and old brick and cobwebs, it would be something much more pressured and intense, and we’d feel more progression as we cut our way through. I’m not pining for a gothic shooter, just the old-school only-way-out-is-through attitude of Wolf3D. Jumping from cut-scene to new mission doesn’t have the same building intensity or overwhelming odds that the original tried to present. A mission where we skulk around a village assassinating key generals is not Wolf or BJ’s style. It’s just a war game, with BJ doing little missions to slow the Nazi war machine.

With Deathhead’s Uber-soldier defeated he fecks off for the rest of the game (to become the main villain in the other-other reboot) and we return to Castle Wolfenstein finally. Well, the castle grounds mostly to stop Himmler’s high priestess from summoning Heinrich – for some reason she needs to do this in a bikini.

RtCW is a good shooter, but it’s not Wolf. I didn’t expect this to rewrite the FPS genre, but I also didn’t expect it to ignore its namesake. There’s Wolf references; Hitler posters reveal secrets, there’s gold and objects to collect and we can eat dinner off tables for health bumps, but it’s just fan-service rather than part of its DNA. When it’s not trying to be a CoD game it’s juvenile and misjudged – besides the leather-clad Nazis and bikini’ed Priestess, there’s a NOLF-like moment towards the end where we watch an extended argument between a guard who has orders from a General not to let any vehicles through, and a driver ordered to bring the General some cheese. The random and inane chats of HARM Henchmen I can giggle at, Nazis, not so much. Playing it now I can see why I completely forgot it; the foes, the weapons, and the levels are so early CoD I just merged it into that period. Now I understand why busty, leather-clad Nazis were the only thing I remembered.

Really, RtCW’s legacy is stepping up multiplayer; so much so that Enemy Territory, a planned RtCW add-on sequel was abandoned due to lack of interest but it’s multiplayer levels released for free – and was so successful, it was remade into Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

Wolf has been rebooted three times, yet none of them stick to the the one thing that made Wolf Wolfenstein. I want the close-quarter intensity of the original, the desperate fight through a castle like a medieval die hard. Had it rebooted that, become a claustrophobic, intense fire-fight just trying to escape the Castle that built FPS it would be great. In RtCW there’s not much to return to.

2001 | Developer, Gray Matter Interactive | Publisher Activision

Platforms; Win | Xbox | PS2

Crysis Warhead

A BLAST FROM THE PAST REVIEW

FBT dons the Nanosuit and a cockney accent. You muppet.

The Past

Having replayed Crysis, I was curious about this add-on. I remember playing it, but I don’t remember it being any different, other than we played Psycho instead of the might-as-well-be-silent hero Nomad. Given Warhead doesn’t have any notable changes from the original and is set parallel to those events, can it be headed anywhere but the same place? We see Psycho at the end of Crysis so I know he makes it. Not exactly setting us up for a one-way mission is it. He does do a disappearing act for the final third of Crysis, but it’s that third where Crysis ran out of steam once everything turns to ice. Let’s go see if Psycho can warm things up a bit.

Still a Blast?

Opening after Nomad assaults the Harbour in the original Crysis, Psycho is on the other side of the island. It’s the same look, but even now, some ten years later the detail packed into this game is insane. I get tempted to go for a swim, wandered the jungle and get a Pina Colada at the beach bar. Why am I here?

There’s no great change to the process, style or gameplay of the original. This time though, we’re in the shit from the get-go; whereas Nomad’s game was, for the first half anyway, a slow and steady stealth-based mission as we tried to extract the research team, Psycho’s story picks up at that mid-way point where the US invade and the Koreans fight back and the Squiddys get involved. I should stop crouching then and get stuck in. The Nanosuit’s cloak, speed and strength settings are all very fancy but the island has turned into a war zone so a lot of the suit’s capabilities seem redundant other than armour.

Psycho’s missions are largely supporting the Military, taking down detachments, clearing paths for our boys and generally repeating the same beats of the original. Often I forget I’m playing as Psycho and keep thinking I’m still in the original. An early assault on a beach café the Koreans are dug into is great fun, but nothing unique. Eventually though, Warhead distinguishes itself by giving you sequences that make the Nanosuit redundant – we drive an armoured RV protecting a downed pilot, and later we pilot a hover craft – those Koreans brought everything. Warhead is more of a military, set-piece driven actioner as opposed to the original’s more subtle, tactical approach, it’s so firefight-friendly I keep forgetting to use the suit but rather than start grumbling this is a Call of Duty knock off, I realise that does make sense; the war is in full swing, we know there’s Squiddys in the mountain and the Koreans are up for a fight; no point repeating the original’s slow burn and after-all, we’re playing as a guy called Psycho – not going for subtle here. Warhead is a lot more scripted but it does pick up the pace and becomes very focused, no small task for a non-linear game, and although there’s an air of Modern Warfare about it, the suit (once you remember to use it) comes into its own and Warhead shapes up to become a really good shooter. And then the Squiddys break lose. Thanks Nomad.

I never liked the Squiddys. They just weren’t fun to tangle with. Once you get spotted they rush you like a floating bull, all horns and hooves. When Nomad sets them free and the island freezes I’m all set to get grumpy, but Warhead cuts them down to size and makes it much more interesting to fight them. There’s open space, easier routes and more opportunities to take them down. It’s still a bind and keeping the shotgun loaded is your best route – just wait for them to get in range – but they tend to appear in nice, well designed areas you can at least have some fun tackling them in, rather than the original’s tendency to just put them in the way, and now they have more room to move, they take on a more sinister, alive feel – putting on Cloak and just watching them mooching around is quite scary. Especially when the suit battery gets low. The game also mixes them up with the Koreans who survived the ice blast, making it less of a Squiddy slog and it’s fun to watch them slug it out while you sneak past. Of course, the Koreans are sneaky too.

Although we occasionally tangled with them in the original, this time the Nanosuited-Koreans (Nanoreans?) are all over the shop. Arguably tougher than the Squiddys, Nanoreans are on an even level with Psycho and go invisible, leap and lob stuff about and have much more powerful weaponry than the grunts – they also work as teams, flanking and distracting you. Facing them means you’ve lost the superiority so it’s all down to your battle smarts. Great. They also have e-grenades that knock out your suit giving them a serious edge – thankfully we get them too, leading to both sides lobbing grenades willy-nilly like some snowball fight. They’re tough but it’s not one-sided, which is a mark of a good shooter; it’s only as unfair as you are incapable.

Eventually we discover the Koreans have captured Squiddys and are trying to get them off the island – we’d already seen torn up containers in the original and Psycho reappeared in that game with a new pet, so we know where we headed, but to get there Warhead takes some unexpected turns. Having secured a Squiddy Container, Psycho draws the attention of both it’s buddies and the Koreans, leading to a standout moment battling on a moving train and seeing how Psycho got his name; he’s more emotional than the name suggests – it’s a great character moment you rarely see in shooters, let alone a second-tier add-on. Nomad was a boy-scout but Psycho is a much more rounded, interesting arm to play.

If Warhead has it’s flaws, they’re mostly inherited from the original – the suit’s battery is frustratingly under-powered, often ruining plans – which are much more critical in this hot-zone, and being powerless and surrounded by Squiddys means you’re dead quick, while Psycho can only manage two main weapons which is a real hindrance in this scrambling to survive environment; just stretching to three would have really opened things up – it’s one thing to never know what’s around the corner, but it’s a real frustration to dump a sniper for a shotgun then one cutscene later find yourself with no need for a shotgun and no way to return for the rifle. The Squiddys are still simple on or off threats and the iced-up island is flat-looking, but Warhead explores this event much more successfully and there’s areas untouched by the freeze, giving us a nice reprieve from the relentless bright ice. There’s also a whole subplot with the pilot, who is pissy with Psycho because he washed him out of the Nanosuit selection process. By the end they settle their differences and fight the Squiddys together but it feels undefined. I’m sure the Crysis sequels will treat Psycho with respect.

I half-expected Warhead to be a rage quit once the Squiddys arrive, but it’s a good scrap and thankfully avoids getting itself involved in the original’s ridiculous ending, instead going for an almighty firefight with the Squiddys before the Koreans turn up and we get an awesome movie-style ending that reminds you of how convenient the Nanosuits are. The island is a lot better planned out too, it has a more rugged feel which reflects the aggressive, pressured feel. Psycho, for all his cockney-geezer bants is a great lead and much more interesting than Nomad. It’s rare that a sequel surpasses the original, but although it’s shorter, Warhead is a better game and one of the better shooters out there, a stealth-tactical experience in a full-scale war setting and a thinking-man’s shooter. Warhead is criminally underrated and shows what an Add-On can do instead of modern DLC reheat cash-in’s; this is a treat rather than a retread. Have a go, you muppet.

2008 | Developer, Crytek | Publisher, Electronic Arts

Platforms; Win/Steam/Origin

Crysis

Most games, you’ve either played or haven’t but this was one you either played or couldn’t.

The Past

Crysis set the bar for non-linear shooters, itself a relatively new sub-set of FPS at the time, popularised by Crytek’s previous effort Far Cry. That game showed non-linear shooters could work but Crysis, it’s ‘spiritual successor’ showed how they should work. If you could make it work; Crysis’ specs were so high, it melted even the most high-spec PCs. No one played it on Highest Settings and four years after release, the only way to make it even run on Consoles was to hugely reduce the spec and dumb-down the AI (ideal for console players). But all that OTT tech was up there on screen; it looked and felt real – you believed you were on an island to stop a renegade Korean army intent on claiming some powerful discovery. Which turned out to be the squiddys from Matrix and after that it went downhill faster than the Matrix sequels (while the Crysis sequels were as well-received as The Wachowskis’ subsequent films). Still, the Nanosuit was a game-changer – it was thrilling to cloak and get this close to the enemy; and that was if you played as a coward; you could also be an armoured tank, a zippy shock-trooper – the Nanosuit was the character choice menu rolled into one. The AI, the open environment, the boats and Humvees to barrel around in; Crysis was a huge leap for FPS – after this, linear was suffocating.

But for all my fond memories, I never actually finished it; my PC fell at the final battle, dropping to a frame-rate slower than a PowerPoint slideshow. As much as I loved playing it, when you know you’ll not win, you give up – it’s been years since I had a Crysis but now I have a better PC. I hope. Time to don the Nanosuit and save the day. On Highest Settings.

Still a Blast?

Opening on a group of soldiers so cliched they should be in a CoD game, we launch ourselves over an island where a research group uncovered something – I know what it is; disappointment. I never got on with the aliens once they were out, partly because everything that happens before was so good. Let’s get to the good stuff.

Before I can though, I have to go through a ‘systems check’ which I can’t take seriously because it reminds me of the ‘tutorial’ at the start of Blood Dragon. I’m Nomad, one of Raptor Team, the best of the best of the best who are outfitted in Nanosuits, the latest in military tech armour. Basically the Batsuit, it can make you run faster, jump higher, go more invisible than ever before. The only flaw is the suit is fitted with an iPhone battery; you have just long enough to get going before the battery is at 1% and you have to wait for it to recharge. If you sprint, Nomad turns into a gazelle with asthma; a quick dash and he’s wheezing to a stop. Invisibility is great – if you’re one of those street-performers who stand perfectly still; move and it’s gone in seconds. Strength allows you to leap higher and throw/punch at far greater levels. But only once. Armour deflects gunfire – but moving while armoured means Nomad gets over-taken by the tortoises that meander around the island. The suit does recharge quickly but when it’s down you’re also unarmoured and exposed. For all its apps, the iSuit isn’t best suited to close-quarter fighting. I remembered it a lot differently but you do start to think tactically. Should I circle around using Speed, then Stealth up behind and use Strength to hurl this tortoise at him … or just shoot him straight away?

Unfortunately, it seems none of this tech works in the cutscenes. Something is stalking the Raptor team and we’re dropping like flies. At least one Raptor would have survived if he just turned on his invisibility. After we lose Prophet, our CO, it’s down to me and some bloke off EastEnders as we continue to push forward.

Actually, we can push in any direction we want. Crytek have made everything an option. I can clamber up cliff-faces, get into thicker bush, go into the water, circle around for miles, squirrel through placements unseen – there’s no game-dictated barriers, no corralling, no ‘you’re leaving the mission area’ within reason. It’s a very realistic setting within a believable island – there’s even wildlife. Thankfully nothing dangerous like the later Far Cry games (didn’t you just love lying in wait, sniper trained on a distant camp’s look-out only to hear a growl and while you desperately try to swap for the shotgun to see off the tiger, the shots attract the nearby soldiers costing you the ‘no alarms’ bonus and one of them is the Molotov guy and he burns the place down and you lose the bulletproof vest running from fire and your entire plan is ruined?) Where was I?

Oh yeah, no nasties on the island but it is teaming with life. The tortoises, fish, chickens, wader birds; I was once terrified by a frog that leapt at my scope as I was lying in wait, sniper trained on a distan – anyway, Crysis provides an amazing environment and gives you the freedom to solve the problems within it.

Although your missions never get beyond ‘reach this dot’, it never feels repetitive; you’re working out routes, choosing approaches and being as Ninja or Michael Bay about it as we like. We start on a beach using Humvees and boats (or not) then the terrain subtly changes as we push further inland through rivers and forests. Those give way to valleys and lush grasslands, mangrove-style swamps eerily covered in fog and abandoned townships surrounded by wide-open paddy fields, before a harbour being used as the Koreans’ staging ground. They are heavily dug-in on the island, and its surprisingly tense engaging them.

Out in the woodland you can never be sure you’re alone. Sometimes you catch the glint of their scopes, hear them chatting or see a flashlight but other times I’ve just stumbled into squads not realising they’re there. I had a soldier trip over me as I was prone, looking at frogs. If they see you cloak they panic fire, but they’re aggressive and smart, circling, kicking the bushes and flushing you out. I’m not sure modern games know how to do this kind of thing anymore, it’s all scripted and planned but in Crysis it all happens naturally – well, usually because you’re dicking about.

Eventually though, once the scale of the Korean invasion is realised, the US Navy decides to invade too and the game shifts focus. Soon our missions change from black-ops to charging AA Guns and assisting in the US deployment and it escalates into shooter silliness; I was enjoying the at-my-own-pace style and subtle build but now, for no good reason, the million-dollar suit wearing infiltration specialist is the only one around who can operate a tank. But, no sooner have I grumbled about this mission being out of character when I somehow manage to flip my tank – and Crysis anticipated this contingency/my idiocy; the ground troops conveniently have RPGs so I can bolt around taking out the Korean tanks on foot. Not easy, but Crysis is one of those rare games to really consider how you’ll play instead of forcing you to play their way. Eventually we reach the mountain where the Research team are. And the Squiddys. Think I’d rather stick with the tank vs foot fight.

Inside we discover the research team were actually CIA who’d uncovered an ancient hibernating alien race and decided the best thing to do would be to wake them up. The only way out is through the Squiddys ship. Or the exit menu.

I’d forgotten about the zero-g level. Inside the alien ship thing, Nomad floats about while seeing the aliens wake. They rush at you shrieking and clawing or firing annoying ice darts. Tumbling around the alien spaceship is different after all the tactical stuff but it’s a shame Nomad didn’t retain the zero-g ability once back outside – if the squiddys can float about naturally in the real world why do they need zero-g in their spaceship? It would’ve been awesome to add ‘zero-G’ to the Nanosuit’s abilities. Later, Nomad flies a VTOL in another unnecessary CoD level so it’s possible. What really annoys me about the zero-G sequence is I know once I escape I’m in another game. The look, the enemies and most importantly, the game-play all changes up; yet Nomad is no better prepared.

I’d hoped that years of more brutal shooters would soften the squiddys but no, they’re worse than Borderlands’ Skags. We’re basically in a race to reach an evac area except it’s not a race, it’s a slog. The Squiddys are out in force and they take a lot of force to get past, reducing it to a shotgun game as they constantly charge like tentacled zombies. There’s no anticipating or tricking them to get an edge and the open spaces have changed to a tighter path. There are hair-raising moments but whereas getting spotted by the Koreans was just the beginning, now it’s just turn-on armour and hope you have enough shotgun shells.

There’s nothing wrong with refreshing a game, but everything that came before was still working. It feels unnecessary – we only ever saw one Squiddy before this and we took out the Koreans before entering, so you assume the zero-g moment is leading to a boss fight; it feels tacked on like a post-ending DLC. And because the squiddys prefer it cold, their ship snap-froze the island which is now bright white ice. It’s an interesting look, but has drained the deep, layered environment. The whole game has gotten flat. Then it gets daft.

Prophet survived somehow and now has an anti-Squiddy gun and some weird connection / understanding of them. He also needs to pause to recharge every two minutes, usually wherever Squiddys hang out. Now a babysitting mission? Why has Crysis gone from staggeringly original to hitting every shooter cliché? We reach the fleet which of course is overrun. We fight off a wave, then suit-boy is the only one who can fix a problem, then fight a wave, go fetch something. It’s turned into Half-Life.

And then the big daddy Squiddy appears for a monumentally cliched boss fight. I’d never seen this before, originally my PC died during the waves and it totally ruins what I thought was a subtle, intelligent game; it was all on you and how you read the situation but this is a scripted, bombastic mess. It’s as epic as unnecessary. Another thing I’d missed was the ending, which I won’t spoil. You’d never guess it – because Crysis 2 ignored it.

This has been a weird blast from the past. The first two thirds were even better than I remembered. The suit’s power is frustratingly short but then if I could have permanently cloaked I would have just enjoyed a stroll through paradise or sat on the beach having an invisible beer. I still struggle to figure out how a game that is essentially trudging and occasionally shooting can be so compelling – Crysis is as a much a work of art as it is a shooter; most of its attitude and style has been copied but it’s not been improved on; Crysis’ greatest strength is it builds a believable world and leaves you to work out how to get through it. It’s still one of the best thinking-man’s shooters I’ve played. But … I’ve also never played a game with such a disappointing final act. There’s nothing wrong with it, it just completely undermines everything leading up to it.

Crysis spawned two sequels and an add-on, focused on the Danny Dyer sidekick. While the add-on Warhead is hugely underrated and equal to the original – better in places, with great characterisation and a more even Squiddy experience but the sequels were a mixed bag; and by mixed bag I mean horrible; only the FEAR series tops Crysis for going so badly off the rails. But we’ll always have two thirds of the original. Quit at the spaceship and it’s one of the best non-linear shooters of all time.

2007 | Developer Crytek | Publisher Electronic Arts

Platforms; Win/Origin, PS3, X360

FBT

Star Wars Republic Commando

A Blast from the Past review

FBT goes back to a more civilised time

The Past

Funny how things come full circle. Dark Forces was Star Wars’ answer to Doom, and the most common complaint was it lacked Lightsabers and force powers. A decade on, Dark Forces’ Lightsaber and Force-heavy sequels had run their course. What followed was Republic Commando, a run n’ gun FPS aiming to join the ranks of Call of Duty and Medal of Honor.

There’s only two things I can remember about Republic Commando; Droids and those crappy Aphids from Attack of the Clones. I do remember it was interesting playing a Clonetrooper and then being disappointed when I realised it was pre-Order 66, so I was a good guy. But I do recall liking it. Time to get my Clone on.

Still a Blast?

The mid-noughties were a more elegant, civilised time. 2004 had been a watershed in gaming – Far Cry, GTA SA, World of Warcraft, Manhunt, Doom 3 and of course, Half-Life 2. They set a very high bar but 2005 met the challenge with FEAR, Gun, Battlefield 2, Quake 4, two Brothers in Arms and Call of Duty 2; I guess it’s easy to understand why I can barely remember anything about Republic Commando in amongst all that lot. But then again, it’s Star Wars, and it’s from LucasArts. You’d think some of it would stick. But I don’t really recall any of it.

Beginning on Geonosis at the start of the Clone Wars, I’m clone ‘1138’, aka Boss, assigned to command Delta group – ‘Scorch’, the wiseacre, ‘Fixer’ the quiet one and ‘Sev’, who loves his job a bit too much. This group, by virtue of their additional training, aren’t just mindless clones. They’re exceptional soldiers but also individuals, having personal opinions and unique markings on their uniforms (Sev has a bloody hand-print on his helmet, pre-dating Finn’s image at the start of Force Awakens). As the Boss, I can control Delta with the standard commands, but there’s also specialist elements like hacking, while actions like breaching doors can be done stealthily or explosively. I still don’t remember any of this. I didn’t get my memory wiped at the end to preserve hokey continuity did I?

It’s odd I wouldn’t have a better memory of RC, simply via repetitive training. Spanning three deployments, each is a never-changing environment and Delta trudging along a strictly linear path; mindless it becomes. There’s no great game-changer or thrill, no standouts or changes in approach; it’s purely clear the same room, complete an objective, loading screen, repeat and the only thing between you and those objectives is endless Geonosians and those grasshopper-looking droids from the prequels. It’s hard to take them seriously as combatants and you’re only in danger because of their huge numbers, not threat – completely un-intimidating, the droids mutter in that high-pitched gabble, run around after their heads have been shot off or just do the robot before exploding, while the Geonosians are annoying bugs flapping about. The larger Battle droids get a look in (referencing their behaviour in Phantom Menace, shoving aside the wimpy droids to get a better shot) and those roller-droids, but you just whittle them down, and when you combine the forgettable firefights with the same location, look and level design it’s no wonder the game starts to slip your mind. Even while you’re playing it. I’ve not had to remind myself of mission objectives this often since Skyrim.

Your camaraderie with the Deltas is minimal too so they don’t even stand out; their AI is passable although it’s not uncommon to see one staring at a wall, miles away as a dozen droids run around behind him; guess he forgot why he’s here too – Although once I caught Sev teabagging a Droid. Although you can direct them you rarely do because it’s so linear there’s nowhere to send them apart from highlighted cover spots which they use automatically anyway. You do have to wonder what they think of Boss; they all sensibly take up defendable positions and I run in blindly into everything. The good thing is if Boss or another clone dies they can be revived, which keeps the pressure on rather than a checkpoint system (although I did get caught in an infinite loop of me and Sev reviving each other then getting killed by the same Battle Droid over and over) and for once, having replacements drop in would underline the disposable nature of the clones. If you can’t be reached it’s reload time though and there were a few times where I watched each Clone try to revive me only to go down before I could get up, until all four of us were lying in a heap.

In later levels there’s equally annoying, chubby little slavers to deal with and Bossk’s species the Trandoshans, but they don’t last – soon you’re literally fighting vending machines as they spit out those bloody droids until you shut them down. In the final mission, we’re on Chewie’s homeworld of Kashyyk; aside from a few amusing Wookie moments, it’s the same environment and the same fights again; Trandoshans, Slavers and droids – Most shooters stick to two or three adversaries to be fair, but this was prime military/tactical FPS era, which RC is trying to emulate, where a combo of clever AI scripting and inspired level design kept you on edge and in the game no matter how many times you seemed to shoot the same bad guy – RC doesn’t have either, and it exposes how plain a shooter can be without some flair; it’s literally and figuratively flat and just isn’t up there with the heavy hitters – it’s more 1995 than 2005. When you consider something like FEAR or Max Payne and how they kept the same environment/baddies interesting, RC really starts to drag.

The biggest problem though is the universe it’s set in; no matter how many hands get cut off, Star Wars just isn’t brutal; there’s some attempts – blood splatters on your visor trigger a great little laser window-wiper across your screen, Boss is indifferent to the deaths of standard Clones betraying his completely compliant nature, and the Deltas all have cool little finishing moves but it’s still a Star Wars game and by not replicating the realism, the harshness that other military shooters dealt out, it feels a little like a kid’s game. Especially with those clown droids for opponents. Even the Trandoshans are a bit boo-hiss panto, only the Wookies show any characterisation; when a sidekick has more personality than your lead, it’s a worry.

For a while I thought the reason I forgot RC wasn’t bigger, better shooters, but bigger, better Star Wars games – Knights of the Old Republic II was released Dec 2004 and Battlefront II in Dec 2005; maybe it was just too much Star Wars for one year. But really, it’s just not a very memorable game. And of course, there’s Order 66; or rather, no Order 66 – throughout, we get our orders from a bland clonetrooper via a hologram – if instead we’d been a detachment assigned to a Jedi on the ground, worked with them, built up a relationship with them (as the TV series explored), then one Order 66 later RC might have become something – or maybe Boss didn’t turn on them, depending on moral choices; a key element in Star Wars as a whole. Imagine choosing to disobey and being turned on by the Deltas, whom you’d grown fond of as pals. Boss becomes part of the Rebellion! Becomes a tragic character, or just a straight baddie, it could have gone so many ways. Without anything to set it apart, RC is just a clone. Amongst the many Easter Eggs, Boss finds a Lightsaber and it’s a nice, ominous reference that should have been the coda to the entire game, not an in-joke – I am the bad guy, I just don’t know it yet. That would have been memorable.

2005 Developer LucasArts | Publisher LucasArts/Activison

Platforms; Win | Xbox

The 11th Hour

A Blast from the Past review

Little FBT visits uncle Stauf’s mansion, and has a tantrum.

The Past

What I remember best about The 11th Hour was that it stomped on everything that made The 7Th Guest awesome – none of the classic horror tone or style, it was a mini-movie with puzzles, set in present-day melodrama instead of goth camp. It was smutty, sleazy and a bit unpleasant – it had more in common with the other infamous FMV game from the nineties, Night Trap instead of The 7th Guest’s classic House on Haunted Hill groove – that drew from the best of horror literature and film; tragedy, regret and ghosties. The 11th Hour is prime Tommy Wiseau.

When T11H was released, it was long overdue and past it’s prime. Gaming had already moved on and the dodgy plotting, am-dram movie and bizarre ending turned T11H into a curiosity rather than classic. Briefly though, developers Trilobyte were the intellectual id; they helped PC gaming shift from Floppy Disks to CD-Rom, popularised FMV and the interactive movie genre. T11H can’t be as bad as I remember. I loved The 7th Guest. I can love The 11th Hour.

Still a Blast?

It’s now the 90s, and unlike The 7th Guest, we know who we’re playing – TV Presenter, Idiot and Bad Actor Carl Denning, who hosts an unexplained mysteries tv show.

Robin, his producer and lover, loses both jobs when Carl decides on an unexplained whim to dump her. Robin, seeing something in Carl that we can’t, decides to prove both her love and professional worth by solving the biggest unexplained case yet; Stauf Mansion. And promptly disappears. Carl moodily moods about until her PDA turns up containing a video of Robin begging for help, trapped in the Mansion. Oh-ho. Carl moods some more then moodily rocks up to the mansion and becomes trapped inside, forced to solve puzzles to unlock the secret of Robin’s fate and what Stauf’s been up to in the intervening years.

At first, the old mansion is a welcoming sight. It’s the same layout but past it’s prime, decrepit and falling apart. As we wander, there’s various nods to the original’s puzzles and moments and that old 7th Guest magic starts to creep in. And then creeps back out, apologising for what’s about to happen.

T11H is shockingly bad. Worse than I remembered. First, the house has lost that subtle eerie charm in favour of a dark, dank, rotten look; that could be good, but it’s so dingy and dull it’s no fun to click around and while T7G kept the interaction to a minimum, in T11H almost everything can be clicked on which reveals nothing but a chance for Stauf to make some terrible joke. Here we go.

In T7G Stauf was always a test of the gamer’s patience, but at least he had a good line in black humour. This time, Stauf is just an end-of-the-pier comedian. Zingers like ‘I took a picture of your brain … but it hasn’t developed yet’ might be good but it’s not exactly a creepy, disembodied voice drawing you to your doom – It’s like being followed about by the ghost of Groucho Marx. It stops you clicking on anything because the game freezes, like it’s pausing for laughter, while you listen to his stupid puns. It’s not scary and this is supposed to be scary, right? He’s evil isn’t he? It just gets worse and worse, and he repeats them endlessly, ruining the moment until … You know the film Clue, where Madeline Khan attempts to explain why she murdered someone but is so frustrated she can’t properly express the rage; “I hated her so much, it … flames, flames, on the sides of my face, breathing … breathless, heaping …” that’s how I feel about Stauf. I just can’t properly explain how much it annoys me, how ruinous it is, how moment spoiling, aggravating … Flames, flames at the side of my face.

But, much of Stauf’s idiocy is drowned out by our old friend, the score. The Fatman’s music is fine in moderation but it’s relentless and becomes a trainers-on-gym-floor, fork-across-plate, nails-down-blackboard, screaming-baby, Go-Compare, pro-Brexit-argument in synth form. It’s so insistent you can’t block it out, refusing to let you concentrate as it fights for space with Stauf; shut up, just shut up the both of you and let me enjoy the atmosphere.

Except there is no atmosphere. The house is lit mostly by Carl’s torch and very little happens as you explore, it’s as scary as fumbling around the attic looking for the Christmas decorations. T7G didn’t demand you hunt around, but you did anyway because you wanted to find cutscenes that explored the history, you wanted to find the ghostly moments and new puzzles. That house was bright but oddly silent like the Marie Celeste; food and drinks, cigars still lit. Creepy. I have to remind myself T11H is creepy. There’s nothing scary about it and when we do find a puzzle, while they’re suitability macabre and gothy (and insanely difficult) they’re made insufferable by the Cannon & Ball jokes of Stauf (who comments after every move and taunts after every mistake) and The Fatman’s infuriating Richard Stilgoe impression.

T11H can’t let us have nice things, and it even mucks up the satisfaction of beating a puzzle. Carl solves a puzzle, but that then provides a riddle. Solve that, then go looking for the relevant object and that unlocks a cutscene. That means dragging Carl around the house looking for the object, and each click triggers a Stauf joke you’ve heard a million times, and you can’t start another puzzle until it’s found. The entire game is padding, nothing happens in the house, you’re just unlocking cutscenes but rather than have them appear as ghostly shapes like in T7G, you go to the PDA and watch a mini-movie from Robin’s investigation. And then things get really bad.

The cutscenes reveal the backstory that led us here; Starting with Robin investigating two girls who were raped by Stauf when they ventured into the house. Nice. One had her hand ripped off while escaping for no reason other than gore, and because two girls being raped isn’t enough horror, one girl gave birth and the child grew into a murderer – or so Robin thinks. We’re basically watching a terrible soap opera trying to be Twin Peaks as Robin uncovers the town’s secrets, and at over an hour long, it’s a slog to sit through something this cheap and cheesy, especially when it could have been wrapped up in a single cutscene like T7G’s original opener. A criticism of T7G was we do puzzles to unlock a story we have no involvement in, but that’s turned all the way up to 12 in The 11th Hour ruining the horror-coolness of the puzzles and most of it takes place outside the house in brightly lit locations; it’s completely removed from the house.

When Carl does find an in-house cutscene, he’s often there too, ruining it by pulling gurning reaction faces to events he clearly can’t see or imagine; T7G worked well by keeping the in-game cutscenes POV and voyeuristic – adding Carl into the set for them to react to ruins the mood, especially when he just blunders about asking ghosts if they’ve seen Robin.

Eventually, Carl runs out of puzzles and Stauf pops up to end this. It’s as distasteful as it is disjointed; We know that Stauf’s power is his Faustian promise to provide your greatest desire – I should be worried; Robin’s desire was Carl and here we are, trapped – are we part of Stauf’s biggest puzzle yet? Naa not even close. That would have been something but instead we get that ending.

The 7th Guest featured babies being sacrificed, children’s souls trapped in dolls and murders all over the place and it still worked – it took Shirley Jackson as inspiration but T11H aspires to nothing and it’s deeply misogynistic – it’s rape (and mutilation) recalls the worst of exploitation films, as does the uneasy idea that the product of rape grows to be a murderer – The other victim suffers a backstreet abortion that leaves her wheelchair-bound. But the ending tops all that by having Carl choose which woman he saves; ex-lover, murderess or victim, based on what Carl’s learned from the cutscenes, but he’s learnt nothing so it’s largely pot-luck; only one ending is the ‘good’ ending which makes no sense at all, and we don’t even get to avenge the girls or punish Stauf at all. There’s no resolution, just a one in three chance Carl survives as if he’s all that matters. The 11th Hour’s ending always appears on those ‘top ten weirdest endings’ lists, but it’s not weird it’s unforgivably offensive and crass.

The puzzles are great looking and mind-crackingly difficult, but they’re ruined by Stauf’s dad-jokes and the game’s slow pauses to trigger them. It’s like form of torture. If I hadn’t finished it out of some sort of sadomasochistic fury, I would have Rage Quit T11H but I wanted to see how far it would go. It went there. I hoped my rediscovered love for T7G would carry into T11H and allow me to forgive its eccentricities. But it’s not eccentric it’s despicable. Flames, flames at the side of my face.

1995 | Developer Trilobyte | Publisher Virgin Interactive Entertainment / Night Dive

platforms; PC, iOS/Android

The 7th Guest

A Blast from the Past review

FBT revisits Stauf’s mansion and relives his greatest fear – game music you can’t turn off.

The Past

I intensely disliked Myst. It was a vacant slideshow of a game. But Myst had an evil twin; The 7th Guest – it was weird, messed up, with a disembodied villain who taunted you, soul-sucking dolls and dead children all within a house straight out of The Haunting filled with insane puzzles made out of gravestone-decorated cakes, skulls, blood and spiders, while you got to the bottom of a disturbing story that nicked it’s subplot from House on Haunted Hill before going batshit crazy at the end – Who was Tad, what are all those folks up to, where are they now, why am I here? I’m still not sure, but T7G was a macabre, goth-great.

T7G was also watershed moment in gaming; besides being set in a realistic, pre-rendered 3D world, it was one of the first to be released on CD-Rom (a what?) and one of the few games of 1993 not be eclipsed by Doom. It’s the polar opposite of Doom; slow, considered, out of your control. But to me it was a perfect companion – just as dark and innovative, and filled with adult content as its plots unfolded through awesomely cheesy FMV drama while we figured out the kind of puzzles critics like to call ‘fiendish’.

I played it loads but only finished it once. Those puzzles were murder, especially that goddamn microscope. But I just enjoyed being in the house, soaking up the atmosphere and style of it – There was no other game that so perfectly captured the old Hollywood horror feel. It should have been in B&W and narrated by Vincent Price. I’m looking forward to playing T7G again, especially as it’s my retro fave in my bio. I hope it stays there, given my shocking lack of patience and complete idiocy when it comes to even the most basic puzzles – this Blast from the Past may become a Rage Quit…

Still a Blast?

Man that cutscene was long. A drifter called Stauf sees a vision of a doll and is compelled to carve it. He gains a reputation as a toymaker and continues to make his visions, eventually becoming rich and famous until the kids who begged for a Stauf Toy start to get ill and die.

Years later, various folks get invitations to his home and told the puzzles he’s left will lead one of them to their greatest desire.

While it was retro-great to watch, less great to listen to; the music by renowned game composer The Fatman plays consistently through the game, and just hearing it brings back conflicted memories. I suddenly remember staring at puzzles for hours while it played repeatedly, slowly wearing me down like the Barney theme being played endlessly to break terrorists. I still have my original T7G disc and the entire soundtrack is on it.

Continuing the audio torture is our antagonist. Stauf, the now disembodied botherer, is constantly on at you as you explore the mansion. Goading, teasing, mumbling some dad joke every time you do something – anything. He only has one or two comments per puzzle or event so they lose their charm very quickly, and “We’ll all be dead by the time you solve this” every time you get a puzzle wrong becomes a wish not a threat. At first his ghostly voice gives the house an ominous personality but his constant jeering, commenting, cackling as you try to make sense of things gets infuriating. Meanwhile, you’ve got The Fatman going do-do-do, do-do-doddododo do … do do do do. This isn’t a puzzler it’s a test of my patience. I ended up, via some clever chap’s mod, managing to disable the music but Stauf just got louder. ‘feeeeeeeeeling lonelyyyyyyyyyyyyy?’ No, but I wish I was; even I won’t shut up, my character also has some glib comments on the state of play – it’s sometimes a hint but every time I or Stauf crack wise, I lose control until the quote is over – and some aren’t exactly pithy. I thought haunted houses were supposed to be silent and whispery, this is like an episode of Loose Women.

Audio mood spoilers aside, The 7th Guest looks really good – not just good for it’s age, it’s a great looking game, period. The CGI is 90s MTV but it’s solid and shadowy, and the mansion’s layout is great – it’s not a haunted house at the end of the pier, it’s just creepy, eerie and while there’s standard spider webs, blood and ghosts, it’s clear of scare-jumps and rug-pulls, relying instead on corner of the eye movement and interactions with warping pictures and things moving. It’s a classic ghost story as much in the tradition of Blithe Spirit or Dead of Night as The Haunting, almost a love poem to the classic era before CGI and jittery editors forced you to jump. But it’s not all warm and cuddly. You know the folks trapped here turned on each other, is that what’s in store for us? Are we alone? There’s one scene where a Guest picks up a doll and it starts crying for it’s mum … but not in that Chatty Cathy way, it’s a real girl’s voice, really crying for her mother. Shivers. This is a house filled with restless spirits and unease and it has an oppressiveness, you’re trapped there and being toyed with – the game doesn’t pull you out of the moment with a typical cut scene; instead, you wander into a Stone Tape style replay of some horror or event that the house never forgot; FMV fades in over the CGI room and while it’s not very well rendered, it’s effective and a great little story unfolds as each of Stauf’s guests fall victim to their desires and each other. It’s a little ham-acted but that just adds to the ghost-story charm.

While it’s easy to get lost in the game and the story, you’re rarely lost in the house; the layout isn’t maze-like (apart from a maze puzzle) and there’s a map, and unlike most puzzle games, there’s no inventory or random things that become critical later; you’re purely solving Stauf’s conundrums to unlock the secrets. It could be disconnecting, like you’re unlocking a straight-to-video movie, but you never know what’ll happen when the shot glides around and it feels like you’re being drawn further in and become part of it. As a puzzle game, it’s clean and effective; you’re not missing a tiny clue because your character is standing on it or stuck trying to get past a goat. The cursor changes to flag cinematics or puzzles which keeps you focused as you walk the corridors and discover previously locked doors now open … The mansion is split across two main floors for the most part, with a brief journey into the cellar before ascending to the attic for the finale, discovering your own connection to the house and who the 7th Guest is before it all goes FMV-meets-WTF crazy.

The 7th Guest is a real accomplishment; many critics complained it was either a puzzle game with cut-scene filler or a ghost story constantly interrupted by puzzles, but I see it as the puzzles -like Stauf’s toys- were possessed and as the guests played they became corrupted, and lost themselves to the games, so unlocking them revealed the character’s fate and in turn, revealed our own. One, the toy bricks in the playroom, reveals Stauf’s plan – I thought it worked perfectly then, and still do now. It feels aged but not old and just like Doom, playing it now, decades later you feel a sense of achievement, that this is something special – it’s not a flash in the pan or of its time, The 7th Guest is a classic and still packs a punch (to the ear).

For all of T7G’s innovations and progress, its inventors Trilobyte never capitalised. The sequel, 11th Hour was as overdue as it was bad, and they closed in 1999. Good old Night Dive helped Trilobyte resurrect Stauf and his bants though, including an iOS release – which is great and works even better than on PC; mostly because the microscope puzzle is missing – not even Apple could solve it.

Over the years various reboots and second sequels have been rumoured, but nothing’s come of them. It’s a shame but then, a modern-day 7th Guest wouldn’t have the original’s charm or invention. It would be like a crappy modern day shlock-scare, missing the class of a good old horror movie. Sure they’re old, a bit silly in places, but they’re great and The 7th Guest is the gamer’s equivalent. The end …

What? Oh yeah, the puzzles. Okay, I admit I might have, on occasion, used YouTube and The Book Of Secrets, a hint app released alongside the iOS version to beat the puzzles. But I had a lot of fun trying. The puzzles work well, you know they’re beatable if you could just concentrate and the Horror-Halloween design makes them interesting, as does the 3D CGI rendering. Once you figure them out they’re satisfying to beat, while others I just blundered into the solution and quickly saved before the game realised I’d got lucky. The cake puzzle, one of the first you encounter is a great warm-up brain-tickler, while others (the Coffins) nearly caused a rage quit. But I stuck with it. There is a cheat; in the sitting room a book will give hints and if used enough the puzzle will be solved although you’ll be denied the cut scene. I never knew what cut-scene happens after solving the Microscope puzzle, and I don’t care. No cutscene is worth that horror but overall I think I did myself proud. It’s a testament to the game that the puzzles rarely drag; infuriate yes (I’m looking at you, piano puzzle, like we needed more noise in this game) but they follow a logic and you know the answer’s there. Do-do-do, do-do-doddododo do … do do do damnit.

1993 | Developer Trilobyte | Publisher Virgin Interactive / Night Dive

platforms; PC | iOS/Android