FBT survived Doom and Hailed the Build engine, baby. With Quake first on the list, is FBT’s quest to find the Doom Killer at an end? (Clue; there’s a part four)

Part Three: and I don’t love Jesus

It’s 1996, and- shut up, TFI Friday’s on. I can’t hear it over all your zigazig-ha’ing. And doesn’t Tony Blair seem nice? When we weren’t distracted by Loaded Magazine or giggling at Viz, we were cheering Cocker ruining Michael Jackson’s Earth Song at the BRITs and watching Oasis make history at Knebworth. Twice. We fell in love with the Spice Girls (well, their Say You’ll Be There video) and cried when Gabby left Big Breakfast. And cried again as mums kept buying Robson & Jerome singles. Just get back on Solider Solider. Or was it London’s Burning? We had Trainspotting, The Girlie Show, Dennis Pennis, Katie Puckrik in Pyjama party, Bizarre magazine, Kate Moss was Heroin Chic and amidst all this creativity and change the only Clone was Dolly the sheep?! Who, weirdly, has a twitter account (@dollyat20) and we still hadn’t had a Doom Killer, now three years old. The only FPS game to gain any momentum wasn’t found in your local Our Price, it was at the bottom of cereal packets. id had gone on a licensing frenzy, milking the Doom engine before it became obsolete and Chex Quest turned the best game of the decade into a commercial for a breakfast cereal and copies are still traded today.

Finally, in June 1996 we had something that kept us up so late we missed breakfast. I disliked Quake intensely on release – all the technological achievements were lost on me; I didn’t care about polygons and 3D, I wanted – expected, demanded – the shock and awe of Doom. Only id could do that, reclaim the FPS mantle after so many clones but to me, their return felt clinical and clean – It might have been a giant leap for game engines but it was small step for shooters; Quake was half the game Doom was.

When I restart Quake with a massive clip on my shoulder, I realise it is a thing of beauty. After all those minimal pixels, the similar environments, Quake is incredible, nothing short of genius at work. You can’t exist in this world and go back to Doom and think it’s better. But then, after a few hours play … I was right the first time. Quake is so polished, so perfect, so boring. You never feel like you won a level, that you pulled off a fast-one, a lucky streak, dragged a bloodied Doomguy to the exit hoping the next level has health at the start.

There’s four different worlds to fight through, but that’s not as refreshing as it might seem. It creates a disconnect – Doom had no real plot but you descended deeper into hell as you went, whereas four different worlds feels like starting over and over, relearning the world. It’s four mini-games not one epic gun-fest. The creatures move in realistic ways, the weapons are more varied and the world is full of stuff but you’re never really there. Quake feels at arms-length; Doom reached through the monitor and grabbed you by the scruff.

A key element to Doom was that feeling you were outnumbered, that you weren’t going to survive this; Quake may not have been able to replicate that original experience but it could easily have bettered the against-the-odds, breathless victory you got after beating a Cyberdemon. Quake is Blink-182 to Doom’s The Pistols; I don’t see how it’s considered one of the most influential games of all time. The Quake engine yes, but not the experience. Yet again I find new appreciation for what Doom did.

Quake didn’t kill Doom, it killed the single player. Quake’s multiplayer was an undeniable quantum leap – towards Single Player missions being little more than a five-hour tutorial for the online experience. There’s nothing wrong with Multiplayer – clearly that’s what id thought, given Quake III was MP only and it was done right in Quake – but Single Player was compromised. This is where the rot set in.

Meanwhile, genres other than FPS were stepping up their games. The Elder Scrolls proved they weren’t just a dungeon crawler with Daggerfall while Tomb Raider kicked off in October of ’96. If Doom was the King then the Queen was Lara Croft, easily the most iconic image of 90s gaming – but it didn’t change things in the way it should; we didn’t see a sudden shift to female leads, women treated any more equally or non-sexually in games. For all of Tomb Raider’s advancements it was Lara’s pixelated adolescent dream-figure that everyone remembered. 1996 also saw the beginning of the Resident Evil series and some company called Valve. It was a hell of a digital year, and what was FPS up to? Chasing a pig called Bessie. What, you too nervous about Y2K to build games?

I remember mucking about in Redneck Rampage (April 1997) and not really getting it; two brothers looking for their pig, stolen by aliens who have cloned their neighbours? Now I’m rescuing a pig? How far are those Doom Clones going to push their luck? Back then I found it too silly, sacked it off as undermining a genre that was just starting to get interesting. But after the deathly dullness of Quake, when I load up RR and hear a ‘yeehaw’ I think ‘Let’s do this’.

The opening level, where you cross a road while avoiding a car zipping around running over chickens, gives you an idea of what you’re up against and while I watch the car I get shotgunned by a Bubba in overalls screeching something in Redneck. I start again, trying to work out where the Redneck came from, and get run over. Man, being a redneck is hard.

Soon though, I get my eye in – which isn’t easy as RR is set at night and the blocky graphics of Build are grating after Quake’s smoothness, but there’s something to RR I hadn’t previously got wind of (not the fart-o-meter) – actual fun; we had Duke’s bluster, but otherwise FPS is a very serious affair; what we needed was pure nutso insanity and that’s what RR is; out of nowhere I discover a game I didn’t expect – a really good one. What in tarnation? I’m yeehawing like a good ol’boy.

There’s loads going on, to look at, to press and break, and instead of regular level layout we’re stumbling through farms, shacks, grain stores and trailers – it isn’t nonlinear but there’s a nice open world feel to it, something Duke also touched on and a further step from Doom’s corridors – later levels start to feel familiar once you’re in the towns but it maintains a quirky feel; a little unhinged level-design is refreshing and the enemies – classic rednecks alongside the aliens, including a dominatrix are great fun. Take heed RotT, this is how you do daft.

There’s the in-jokes too, and not all are aimed at the redneck caricature; while we’re somewhere between Deliverance and The Beverley Hillbillies, there’s a poster for a Troma movie, references to the artists on the soundtrack and typical alien tropes like crop circles and cows being mutilated – and tons of deep-south wisecracking from the heroes and the rednecks you gun down. The weapons are typical but there’s some homemade, jury-rigged backwoods style changes to the usual line-up, while a new trick is the burp and fart meters. Not exactly classy but they’re a fun way to add a penalty to using health powerups – drinking gets you drunk and impossible to control, eating makes you fart, giving you away. Redneck is really starting to stand out as something else; you can call it a hillbilly Duke but I’m having fun ya varmint – but not too much; it’s a subtly strong game, a lot more unforgiving than earlier FPS. Its psychobilly soundtrack (‘You Can’t Kill Me’ by Mojo Nixon is a standout as is Beat Farmers’ ‘Gettin’ Drunk’, proper psychobilly stuff not yer Cotton’Eye Joe, although now I have that stuck in my head) adds a new level too – instead of Doom’s dirge you merrily sing-along, to the point you don’t end a level ‘till the song’s finished. And you end levels by finding your dozy bro and clobbering him with a crowbar … it’s great to have a hero who instead of being heroic, complains ‘Ma head hurts, ma feet stank and I don’t love Jesus’.

You get the sense developers Xatrix had fun and it’s infectious – Saints Row and Borderlands owe RR a nod; it paved the way for the ridiculous to slip into shooters. It had sequels but RR was perhaps too silly to be remembered; I was equally guilty of dismissing it, but I missed out; open a can of whoopass and get ready to don’t love Jesus. It’s a great Doom-era shooter. Just remember those rednecks pack a punch; it’s not all banjo playing.

Redneck Rampage reminded me of another thing missing from modern games – extras. Games used to include entire Windows themes, screensavers, audio clips, pictures, all sorts. You just don’t get that kind of thing anymore, but I still have the ‘Cuss pack’ from RR; and now I have “I’m on you like flies on shee-it” as my ringtone.

Now, who want-a som Wang?

I recall Lo-Wang and Duke as buddies, equal in their abilities, including getting girls to show them their boobies. I’ve been looking forward to Shadow Warrior (May 1997) as I think I preferred Lo-Wang to Duke; he was a bit more mischievous, less Jock more Mock. SW was a straight-faced comedy, like a game based on some 1980s Ninja flick from Cannon Films. An Asian character – the kind created by a bunch of people who are not Asian – Lo-Wang revels in the innuendo of his name and doesn’t take anything seriously. Even when his old boss, Zilla, sends hordes of underworld forces to stop him, LW still treats it all like shit and giggles.

Much like Duke, Lo-Wang inhabits a world that’s fast leaving Doomguy’s behind – Build’s interactivity is at the fore in SW; LW can find repair kits to chug around in tanks, forklifts and boats, there’s puzzles and secrets that require some figuring out and he can muck about with little RC cars – we’re in the world more than ever before. It’s interesting that Quake far exceeds Build in terms of capability and environment, but SW just feels alive, immersive. The art design, which is Japanese influenced is detailed and like DN3D there’s loads going on. But Shadow Warrior starts to wear thin and one of the most important parts, one I previously loved, is to blame – Lo-Wang. Once he gets tiring, the game does. When he’s not making groan-worthy jokes about his name/manhood, he’s commenting on everything – ‘ohhh sticky bomb likes you’, ‘You are tiny grasshopper’, ‘You move like-a pregnant yak’ – he just goes on and on; an Eraser-inspired railgun is ruined by LW saying ‘you got Erased’ Every. Single. Time. And when he’s not commentating, he’s making Bruce Lee noises or giggling to himself. Super-health comes in the form of Chinese fortune cookies, which are puns like ‘man who farts in church sits in his own pew’. Okay I sniggered too and after nothing but ‘Ger, gah, uuugh’ sounds from my heroes, I should be happy to have a Chatty-Cathy for company but Lo-Wang is sidekick elevated to annoying hero.

Shadow Warrior is a case of diminishing returns – this is from 3DR again and like Duke, level design isn’t their forte. There’s a lot in it but it doesn’t go anywhere; it’s too reliant on the novelties but whereas Duke saved DN3D, once Lo-Wang grates some misgivings start to creep in. 3DR just cloned Duke thinking that would be enough, amping up his juvenile antics but Lo-Wang perpetuates the Asian stereotype with his ‘Engrish’ accent, Fu-Manchu moustache and kung-fu bants, and his Duke-lite persona falls into misogyny; Lo-Wang just accosts random girls – ‘Lo Wang drop soap,’ he says to a girl he corners in a shower, ‘you bend over and get it’ or telling a girl mechanic ‘chicky, you tighten my nuts’ – Plus, the girls all seem to love his attention, including one he interrupts on the toilet. In one secret area he comes across Sailor Moon on a bed – and asks ‘peaches’ if she’d consider Mooning him. Dick. Duke had an old spice swagger that justified his ladykiller ways and, politically correct or not, he paid strippers for a flash in a strip club; he didn’t sleaze.

I haven’t been this disappointed since my Tamagotchi died. I’m saddened Lo-Wang turned out to be Lo-rent, but it really is the weakest of the ‘Big Four’ Build games; and it’s 3DR’s fault again. They should have just licensed the Build engine and left the design to those who knew what they were doing. It bleeds the Build engine dry, making SW the most interactive, touchy-feely (Sailor’s Moon aside) game so far. But the only one really enjoying himself is Lo-Wang.

Stand back ladies and gents, we’re about to play the game that, if asked, I would have accused of killing Doom. Blood (May 1997) was the last notable game on the Build engine. Because nothing could top it, obviously. Blood’s Caleb was the Snake Plisskin of the gaming world; pissed-off, dangerous and with a singular purpose. He was awesome – the bleaker, darker anti-hero of the era who sounded a bit unhinged, muttering Evil Dead references and singing Frank Sinatra as he killed indiscriminately. I’ve been looking forward to this. Don’t let me down Caleb.

Blood has something all the others didn’t – a reason. This is where FPS actually got a story, a motive to maim your way to the end; The CGI opening sets the scene in a horribly morbid and cool way; Caleb, a brutal wild-west killer-for-hire was initiated into a dark cabal by his wife. Inexplicably, their dark god punishes them for some slight, and Caleb is buried alive after witnessing his beloved maimed by a demon. Escaping, Caleb goes on a rampage in the most imaginative levels we’ve blasted through so far.

One minute you’re in Camp Crystal Lake, the next fighting through a moving train, the mazes of the overlooked hotel, a fairground-circus, a remake of Dawn of the Dead; each level is a world we recognise from our VHS collection not Doom – Every other FPS you’d struggle to recognise one level from another if they were in a line-up; But Blood’s levels are all unique and fantastic to maim through. You never get bored in Blood – the story, level design, references, there’s so much going on yet it isn’t a distraction from some killer action; Blood is relentless, and the boss-fights for the first time are not OTT arena fights – they take some strategic foot-work and weapon-picking. The weapons too are nicely macabre – voodoo dolls, tommy-guns, his melee weapon is a pitchfork. When he lobbed dynamite with bloody results, Caleb cackles maniacally. Now that’s a hero sound, not Lo-Wang’s ehehehehe kid-being-tickled gurgle. Elsewhere Caleb’s rasping voice quotes everything from The Crow to a Harrison Ford The Fugitive/Air Force One mash-up … and he’s got sarcastic putdowns; upon finding a dead Duke Nukem, he double zings with ‘looks like I got time to play with you’ followed by ‘shake it baby’. If Shadow Warrior was an ill-conceived nod to Big Trouble in Little China, then this is John Carpenter’s The Thing with a nice sideline in They Live.

What is interesting though, is Blood’s story; something we’d not needed or wanted before. But Caleb had his reasons, and each episode ended with his avenging his wife and friends, headed towards a finale -with a god no less- only to leave empty-but-bloody-handed.

Of all the Build developers, Monolith is the one to really make the engine sing; sitting perfectly between SW’s novelty distractions and Duke’s outrageous set-pieces, Blood is brilliant and should be played just see how a shooter should work. Mindless killing and a mindful plot, it’s a perfectly balanced FPS and one of the best shooters of all time.

Blood didn’t kill Doom, the story-driver concept only really exists in the cutscenes and it still owes a debt to Doom but it provided that little edge as the endless blasting of FPS starts to get a little tiring. Blood is the first to seriously wound Doom.

There were Build games after Blood; TNT Team released Nam in July 1998, a reskin/mod of Duke with RotT-style scanned photos and flat environments. It did have some nice touches, like picking up orders from NCPs and having followers. Oddly, I didn’t see a heads-up display. But it had a semi-sequel in ’99, WWII GI. There was also Extreme Paintbrawl in 1998; let’s not talk about that. One thing to talk about though, is the argument that Build weakened the sincerity of FPS; that as soon as we were able to ask strippers to shake it baby, it became a battle of novelties and distractions; the visceral experience got watered down. I don’t think Build is to blame for that, indeed Blood’s bare-bones plotting makes it the best of the bunch – but 3DR were to blame; they just weren’t natural level designers like Romero – instead of using Build to enrich the Doom experience, they made theme parks; Romero raised level design to an art form, able to imagine not just the world, but you in it and then make it exciting to fight your way out. 3DR settled for boobs.

And that was it for Build, which really disappoints me; besides the technical marvels, Build games made you feel like anyone Kurt Russell played in the 80s; they were filled with refs to Evil Dead, John Carpenter, Sly & Arnie’s best 80s characters, even Elvira; so much was threaded through Build’s games that you felt as if the developers were mates; they were into what we were into – this was back when being a gamer was looked down on by Jocks and their new extreme sports like surfing on snow – Build let us know we weren’t alone. Build let us be heroes.

It’s a shame 3DR decided to spend all of their cash and good-will on the twelve-year development of Duke Nukem Forever; to piss away Duke Nukem was one (upsetting) thing, but to ignore what they’d achieved with Ken Silverman was unforgivable; just imagine what could have come next. Instead, Silverman stepped away from the gaming industry and became “CTO of Ardfry Imaging, responsible for the PNG Compression tool PNGOUT” which doesn’t sound like something Duke or Caleb would say. But I’m sure it’s had an effect on my digital life. He only made one engine, yet Silverman’s contribution was massive and it entertained and impacted beyond the games it powered; All hail the real king, baby.

So, Build was a shot across the bow, but no Doom-killing cigar. Onward. Maybe Elexis Sinclair has something to do with it. I’d better frisk her.

In Part Four of this increasingly indulgent look at the classic FPS era, FBT trades in his Portable CD player for a MP3, invents conspiracy theories to explain Doom’s death and spends most if the review trying to get in an Anna Nicole Smith reference.

In the second part of Previous Weapon’s FPS retrospective, FBT makes like David Suchet and questions the clones about the identity of the Doom Killer.

Part Two: All hail the King, baby

Doom was out, and everything had changed. Even over at Apple. Bungie’s Marathon kept them going instead of Doom. It was a shooter with a storyline – a what? We don’t have time for that, Netscape Navigator was out and that meant 0.5% of us had access to the WWW – when we weren’t watching a Ford Bronco drive down the freeway that is. But the biggest news of ‘94 was still 93’s Doom. No one had touched it; well, there had been some inappropriate touching – a Doom Community sprung up thanks to the web, trading their own levels and mods; id’s decision to let gamers mess with Doom’s level design was another innovation and it turned kids into level designers and FPS into a multi-faceted hobby; playing, building and deathmatching. Doom also popularised web-chat, file-sharing and encouraged the uptake of the net; the world was changing, for us anyway. While our parents watched Blind Date and Beadle’s About, we had Terry Christian egging someone on to eat a sandwich of toenail clippings, were frothing to go on Nemesis at Alton Towers, whispered “UVAVU” while watching Geri and Kylie snog and the 11.30 Diet Coke break advert. The nineties were in full swing.

Released in December 1994, Heretic was the first Doom Clone but it wasn’t a cash-in; created by Raven, built on the Doom engine and exec-produced by Romero, it was less a clone and more a companion. You charged around locations taken over by a Saruman type, using magical weapons (a bow standing in for the shotgun, a claw that fired spells is your chaingun) while taking out Fantasy versions of Doom’s hell creatures. Okay, Heretic must have seemed a bit twee back then, a bit D&D; who wants to be in Dad’s Lord of the Rings when we had our Doom?

While Heretic is Doom reskinned, the art design is great and it’s learnt a lot about pacing and level design – It doesn’t have Doom’s aggression, you’re an elf waving a magical staff around medieval villages so not as cool as being a squad member from the Sulaco like Doomguy, but it’s good to have an alternative to Doom’s military setting which was replicated by most of the other clones.

Once I’ve got my eye past the minimal pixels and basic movement, I realise Heretic is really good; it has a great ambient feel – we hear groans and grumbles, chains rattling and whispers, the art design is really nice and it’s not stuffed with creatures; there’s areas and secrets to explore rather than just blast through, and it features an inventory (including a spell that turns creatures into chickens) – it gives Heretic an adventurer feel as we stalk through cathedrals and Mordor-like locations. When we do meet the bad guys though, they’re top notch; glamorous, chanting Wizards, giant skulls and the screeching little imps. It’s a lot further from Doom than I remembered, and while it’s possible they just got to work before Doom clone fever really gripped, maybe Raven are really good devs – they did go onto Star Trek Elite Force and Jedi Knight Outcast. Heretic doesn’t immediately call Doom to memory surprisingly enough, it stands up well despite its age and it’s got its own personality; I’m enjoying it for what it is rather than running on memories; it’s a great shooter and worth a replay. Heretic is memorable for another reason – It’s retail disk included DWANGO, the first programme to let you dial-up n’ deathmatch with folks further away than an LAN cable could reach. Online gaming was here.

I really liked Heretic. It’s one from this era that didn’t get a remaster and that’s a massive shame. Reboots you can keep but a refined Heretic would be awesome. One from this era that did get a reboot was Rise of the Triad (Feb 1995) and I have no idea why.

It starts off well enough; we’re the HUNT team on the, erm, hunt for bad guys who are on an island. Let’s go get those bad gu – wait, why are there trampolines in their secret lair? And why is everywhere filled with spinning coins like a Mario game, and platforms to reach them dotted around the castle? My god, RotT is awful. I thought we’d left this arcade kiddie nonsense behind. RotT came from 3DRealms and id co-founder Tom Hall; they knew intimately what Doom was and this isn’t it. Maybe that’s the point, but there’s different and then there’s daft.

I might have liked it at the time, back then you’d take anything you could get once you’d rinsed Doom but jeez this is annoying. There’s some progress here, you could dual -wield pistols and machine guns and had an assortment of explosive weapons rather than tons of oddities, there’s auto-aim too but it’s all buried under the silliness and digitised elements that don’t work; we’re being attacked by cardboard cut-outs – the sprites of Doom were 2D but they animated and moved in semi-convincing ways while those screengrabs look like a stiff breeze would blow them over. The weapons too look like photos which seem less believable. And there’s crushers, revolving walls, traps and spikes everywhere for no reason; one thing about Doom, it played by its rules – an invading force that you were repelling, but this gang’s gaff is a gauntlet the bad guys run as well. Half the time the traps kill the bad-guys for me. RotT is part Looney Tunes, Wolf-clone, arcade, platformer and forgets the FPS part. It’s so cheap looking you’d think it’s a quickie knock-off called Doomed. It’s not a Doom clone, it’s a first person Manic Miner. An Uwe Bol adaption of Doom.

Happy New Year, 1995. The year we all got to enjoy Toy Story, and Tommy Lee and Pammy’s honeymoon. The biggest clone of 1995 was a game we’d already played – not just in Doom mods but with our own toys; Star Wars Dark Forces (Feb 1995). Released by Lucasarts, a company that could punt out instant classics like Last Crusade and Monkey Island for breakfast, for them bettering Doom must be as easy as pulling an X-Wing out of a swamp. But always with Doom it cannot be done; while SWDF provided major advancements within the world and game play, this is just Doom with a John Williams score. There’s text explaining non-cannon events to tie it in but SWDF is the best example of a Doom clone yet. It’s not a bad game and playing Star Wars is always going to carry you some of the way, but it’s lacking Doom’s dangerous quality and fatally, keeps reminding you of it. It’s just a reproduction, not an innovation. Plus, the Stormtroopers can actually hit you, how unrealistic is that? It’s Doom on the Death Star and that’s not as cool to play as it sounds – Doom is still one in a million, kid. Sad to say but the Star Doom mods were better. Leave it back in a more civilized age, when Han shot first.

Dark Forces’ biggest contribution to the gaming world was its sequels – Freed of the beat Doom mentality, the first sequel Jedi Knight was a rocking Star Wars shooter with an add-on (remember those) called Mysteries of the Sith. The second sequel, Jedi Outcast got it right; it’s a fantastic SW game and FPS in its own right, and the final sequel, Jedi Academy is a solid game that got lightsabers so spot on they turned into John Woo-level ballet. Dark Forces started as a Clone but it forged its own path to become a classic series with a better legacy than Doom.

Build, the engine that would go onto power Duke Nukem launched its first game in 1995, Witchaven, a Heretic-style goth shooter. It didn’t have much in the way of smart-arse heroes or the level of interaction that later Build Engine games did, but it had a charm to it. Like Wolf, it was a warm up for what Build could do – and what it did next was present someone so legendary, so grand and awesome it’s tough to believe a simple game could contain such an iconic hero – William Shatner. Who were you thinking of? 1995’s Tekwar brought his sci-fi novels to shooter-life and included a digitised Shat; that gives you some idea of how powerful Build was.

In September 1995, the gaming world was shaken again. Not by a game, but by a new way to play, station. Sony’s “Live in your world. Play in ours” campaign was aimed squarely at the Doom generation; aka the MTV Generation (PlayStation sponsored the 1995 MTV Music Awards to prove exactly who PS was aimed at – gaming is not for the kiddiewinks anymore) and the PS made gaming as cool as the Music and Movies of the era. We had our console, our games, we were Sorted for E’s n Wizz and wondering who is Keyser Söze? Perfect.

Meanwhile, briefly distracting us from Xena Warrior Princess was Hexen: Beyond Heretic (October) and this time we weren’t a silent hero. We were three of them. A Fighter who is melee mostly, a Mage who uses long-range magic and a Cleric who uses lower-powered versions of both. Hexen is pretty much Heretic, although not a re-heat; aside from character classes, you also transport back and forth between areas to progress (why I’m not sure, I don’t have the manual) and while the sounds and certain art is the same there’s additions like breakables, leaves falling off trees and more detailed levels. Hexen is fun to play; while it feels Doom-like, unlike Heretic, the character class is a refreshing change; RotT had characters but they made no real change to the experience, whereas in Hexen each character provides a different experience; first time FPS had replay value. I chose the fighter class and melee’ing about is a welcome change from guns again. If Heretic was Legolas prancing about then Hexen lets us play as John Rhys-Davis, and what’s wrong with that? The magnificent wizards are back too, although according to a Heretic Wiki they were ‘Disciples’. Whatever they were, they rule. But they’re not the king, baby.

Doom was loud. Apart from the gunfire and exploding barrels there was screaming, shouting, growling, howling, all underpinned by the constant industrial score yet one thing was largely quiet – Doomguy. 3DReams, already a part of the id family as their shareware distributors, called in Ken Silverman to step things up after Doom. He gave them the Build Engine and that gave us giggles alongside the guts, rock-stars instead of serious and silent. While Carmack would disagree, Build was a huge improvement on the Doom engine; for gamers anyway – it let us misbehave; if Doom was the Father of FPS then Build was the uncle who gave you sweets and let you stay up late, and in January 1996, Duke Nukem 3D gave shooters a voice – Duke was the spokesperson for FPS, it’s ambassador, the entire experience distilled into one badass with a big mouth and bigger guns. Duke was mightily pleased with himself, had every girl at his feet and paused for one-liners before doing battle. Everyone remembers when Duke told a mini-boss he was going to rip off his head and shit down his neck, and when the battle was won, promptly pulled down his trousers, took out the paper and sat on the corpse, whistling. I remember Duke more than DN3D, so to attend a reunion now is a worry; if I find out the school hero who dated the cheerleaders is now a regional manager for an insurance company and bald instead of bold I’m gonna be crushed.

I start playing and he’s really not that bad. Phew. Sure, tipping strippers for a peek is juvenile and the pigs dressed as cops isn’t subtle, but DN3D is nowhere near as insulting as I expected it to be. Just shows how horrific Duke Nukem Forever was that it’s tainted Duke Nukem 3D as well. The earthbound locations he shoots through like Porn Theatres and strip-clubs are what they are and while girls in underwear dancing, the strippers, the women used as incubators and Duke being rewarded for his hard work with a three-way during the end credits are all tough to defend, Duke is a parody of those Bond-like heroes who seduced women through sheer masculinity. It is sexist but crucially it’s not misogynistic or mean-spirited like DNF – there’s no Boob-growths in the walls to slap, glory holes to stick little Duke through or incestuous twins dressed as schoolgirls who share Duke and joke about rape and abortions before dying as Duke comforts them with ‘looks like … you’re fucked’ – I’m not saying DN3D is acceptable because it’s not as appalling as DNF, but DN3D treaded that celebration vs parody line perfectly. Duke is still the voice of a genre and generation; Silent Heroes always felt a bit awkward, especially when they’re in cut-scenes. I wouldn’t want the quiet one saving the world, I want someone who’s going to be all out of gum. I feel like a Hollywood hero, shrugging off bullets and being the only guy for the job. Duke’s gabbing does dilute some of the tension and it’s hard to take it seriously, but it’s not supposed to be taken seriously; everything up to now has been bleak, against-the-odds stuff, but this is Cobra or Commando time. Duke enjoys the challenge. And so do I.

DN3D has some good opponents to battle against and Build gives them a fighting chance rather than id’s walk-this-way AI; in Doomworld monsters walked or floated toward you but Duke’s adversaries do both; they fly, leap, hover and hide, and they react to your attacks – we have to be a little more tactical but thankfully, Build has us covered – the pipe-bomb and mines lets us get sneaky. While Heretic had timed mines you dropped as you were chased by one of the splendid wizards and hoped it went off under his cloak, in DN3D we can set traps and lob controlled pipe-bombs; and Duke would reward your game-play with a one-liner worthy of Arnie. As is standard, DN3D has episode-ending mini-bosses but this being Duke’s world, mini means massive and besting them gets you a cutscene showing just how cool and heroic Duke is, as if there was any doubt. In order to combat such extreme monsters, Duke has the kind of arsenal only a super-hero could wield; aside from the standard there’s various explosive weapons and the freeze gun which lets you shatter opponents, and the shrinker – stomping on a now-tiny bad guy is a new one.

It’s not all Mr Bombastic though – it can be a slog to get through an episode and the first, set in downtown LA is largely the same design rejigged. The Lunar levels get dull very quickly and the third mission is a disappointing return to earth and the same look again; it gets very samey once you’re over the distractions. One reason I struggled to recall the gameplay of DN3D is how much it relies on the boss; this is Duke’s show. You can imagine Duke’s Superior yelling he’s caused more destruction than the bad guys, only to have Duke wink and walk off, taking the boss’s wife with him. There’s great fights, creatures and interactions but without the big man, DN3D would be a dull game – although Duke did get some cracking add-ons; Life’s A Beach had Duke holidaying with squirt guns and it’s worth a play just for the Pig Cops in Hawaiian shirts and the Octo-thingies in raybans.

There was another Build game in 1996, PowerSlave. Originally intended as a showcase for Build before Duke started to shape up, it was largely over-shadowed by its big brother, but remained popular enough for an unofficial remake.

DN3D is a huge improvement on what we’ve played so far, but the real show-stopper, the only thing to upstage Duke is the Build engine. Build provided a world to interact with, something we’d not had before. Doom was one thing only – serious about shooting. Besides the strippers, Duke could get distracted playing pool, staring at himself in mirrors, pinball games with him on the artwork (‘I haven’t got time to play with myself’), posters to look at, buttons to press, CCTV screens; we’re crawling through vents, sewers and diving under water, using powerups like holograms and the jetpack; I suspected DN3D would be where we leave Doom behind but while it’s the stuff that would make Don Simpson call Heidi Fleiss and celebrate, what DN3D did was diverge the FPS genre; from here the seeds of the more outlandish FPS game were sown. Down the pub, Doomguy is just Duke’s wingman but on the battlefield Doom still reigns. Case closed; Duke is innocent of killing Doom. Where is it? Man, finding Doom’s killer is hard. If she hadn’t been cancelled in 1996, I’d call Jessica Fletcher in on this. Maybe my Encarta CD has the answer.

In Part Three, FBT takes on the game convicted of killing Doom. But is Quake guilty as charged? And is all this just an excuse for FBT to play Blood again and google Dani Behr?