Backlog Beatdown: Stoning Wolves (I think) with Wolfenstein 3D

Over the last few months I’ve re-discovered GOG.com, which promotes and sells older games as well as some newer titles. I’ve found a lot of games on there that I enjoyed when I was younger and are for the most part a pleasure to go back and play now. One game that I had been aware of and had never played was Wolfenstein 3D, and when it came up as part of a special offer, I thought I would try it.

These Blue guys were the SS, and took a lot of
shooting to drop - they also had automatic weapons.

Wolfenstein 3D is fondly regarded as the Grandfather of First Person Shooter games, and with good reason. First Person games existed before it was released in 1992, but this was the first time it had featured fast-paced action and thrills. It was a piece of innovation by id Software, who were at the top of their game in terms of pushing design, hardware and conceptions. Set in the era of the Second World War, you play as B.J. Blazkowicz, an Allied spy who has been captured in the titular Castle Wolfenstein, and your mission is to run and gun your way through the castle and complete crucial missions against the Nazis.

What this amounted to was running through the levels and shooting all the enemies; there were nine levels to each episode and each episode had a boss. The version of the game I downloaded had six episodes in total, the latter three being prequels, so there was plenty of content. But with a game this old, the question must be: Does it still hold up?

Zombie mutants packed a
surprising punch...

And the answer is this: Yes it does, but you have to consider what was going on at the time it was developed and released. Military shooters are ten-a-penny now, and even at the time it didn’t take long for this craze in game development to begin flooding the market with what were (perhaps derogatively) called Doom clones, but in 1992, nothing like this had been done before. Five different enemy types, three different weapons and levels designed on a flat grid might not seem like much these days, but at the time, exploring these things in a 3D environment was something new, exciting and fresh. Also, using Nazis as your principle enemies might have seemed like a straightforward choice, but the addition of Nazi symbolism and propaganda throughout the game, not to mention the opportunity to kill Hitler himself, was a hitherto unexplored and controversial design decision.

Who wouldn't want to kill Hitler?

Perhaps even more impressive, and why I feel it remains a good game, was the way the development team – which was only about four or five people – managed to make it work within their limitations. Yes, you only had three weapons, but if you found the Chain Gun, (the best of the three,) you had to be very careful with managing your resources as the rapid rate of fire would drain your ammo very quickly. There were only five enemy types (not counting the bosses,) but each enemy presented its own challenge and needed strategic thinking in order to defeat, especially when they started appearing in significant numbers. Finally, while the levels could only be designed on a flat grid, there was a massive amount of thought put in to their design, and except for a couple of clangers, the layout of each level was bang on point. Secrets areas with ammo, health and treasure were your reward for exploration; the rest of it was claustrophobic and challenging on usually the right level.

Wolfenstein 3D doesn’t look particularly good these days, and while the gun sound effects were meaty enough, the voices were tinny and distorted (more to do with the hardware limitations of the time than anything else.) But – and I’ve said it before – all the bells, whistles and graphics in the world can’t replace good level design and a solid core gameplay loop. It runs fine in DOSbox, and I didn’t run in to any compatibility issues. With that in mind, if you like first-person action games, you could do far worse than try Wolfenstein 3D to experience the core of this style of game – and make up your own mind as to how little or far video games have come since 1992.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

No Game New Year: Final Fantasy VII. Great game, shame about the disc.

Final Fantasy VII is about as close as I’ve come to breaking No Game New Year. I found a copy of it at MCM Comic Con in London, and without thinking, bought it. I only realised a few minutes later that I probably shouldn’t have done it! Thankfully, Brian and the others were kind enough to accept that I’d bought the game to replace a game I’d lost years ago, I suspect to a thief. That being said, if I’m going to tread on this thin ice, I’d better make this a damn good play-through…

And what a pleasure it was to play the game again! As I said in the Kingdom Hearts write-up, there was certain innocence to Squaresoft before they became Square Enix. FFVII was the biggest game ever made for a console up to that point (1997) but somehow they got away with blowing it all out of proportion. It had great characters, a contrived but compelling plot and the game was a joy to play through if you had enough time for Japanese role-playing games.

The graphics are blockier than I remember them, but there are three things conducive to this:

1.  I originally played the game on the PC; while the game functioned more or less identically to the PlayStation version there was a difference in the graphics originally designed for TV, not PC monitors,
2. I’m playing the game on the PS2; PS1 games never look as good on the PS2,
3. Graphics originally designed for old-style tube TVs look horrible on the flat screen I’m playing them on now.

I remember back when I used to play this years ago being hugely invested in the plot of the game and the characters that made it. Contrast it with the games we have now and you would be forgiven for wondering why; there was very little voice acting and the characters barely had facial expressions. The answer is, of course, that the developers worked around the limitations of the hardware they had available. For a start, the characters for the most part are in ‘Hero Scale,’ with their heads, arms and weapons exaggerated in size. Expression was mostly done with the character movements, which were over-done for the context but you always knew exactly what the character was thinking. For the same reason, if the character was speaking, you always knew how they were saying it. Or you could make up your own mind about their expression and intentions. It’s much easier to play your own game when it is left to your imagination.

The other contributing factor to this is the incredible soundtrack. This isn’t quite CD-quality audio – the technology was there but the space on the CDs certainly wasn’t. In fact, the music only sounded slightly better than the previous generation’s Super Nintendo. But again, the composer used what was available to his advantage, which in this case was an enormous talent for creating compelling music. Few things inspire a sense of wonder like the opening sequence of the game. The track playing when they attack the Mako Reactor sounds urgent and aggressive, the Wall Market theme is dirty and sleazy but oddly welcoming, and I still tear up at Aeris’ theme when Elmyra is explaining her past – especially when you know what’s coming later. An incredible effort, and it pays off.

You don't bloody work either...

Sadly the game has something horribly wrong with it, which I would imagine is to do with the condition of the disk I’m playing it on: some of it won’t load. The area around Mt Corel takes absolutely forever to load, something like 3-4 minutes just to load an area. The only reason I know it’s doing it is because the music usually kicks in first, but this happens not only after every time you load it but after every random battle as well. And, this being Final Fantasy, there is absolutely no way to avoid random battles. I’ll try and sit it out as long as I can but if it carries on too long after that, I may have to admit defeat. (As I write this, the game is trying and failing to load a battle screen…)