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.

Last Week's Games: Fallout 4, Putty Squad and Legacy of Dorn: Herald of Oblivion

I spent most of last week playing games that, for me at least, were new…

Fallout 4 had been talked up by the various pundits I follow on YouTube, and I’ve always enjoyed the Fallout games to a certain extent though I’ve only seen one of them through to the end (Fallout 3, if you want to know,) so I bought it last year and have just got around to playing it! I’m enjoying it so far, the settlements bring something new to the series and I also like how the VATs system doesn’t stop the game completely, forcing you to make snap decisions as to where to call your shots. The plot is interesting, starting before the nuclear war and showing a time where everything was all sweetness and light, though it gets dark very quickly. I don’t know that I’ll be able to suspend my disbelief that, on a quest to find your son, you quickly get side-tracked in to doing quests for Non-Player Characters, but heading straight to the place I was told he was resulted in me getting killed as it was too high-level for my character, forcing you to “game” it and build up your skills and hit points.

Screenshot taken from a version I don't have.

I’m also not sure about levelling up; as with previous games, you level up and pick a perk, except that in Fallout 4 all the perks are shown from the beginning along with the characteristic it relates to. You can also choose to increase a statistic. This doesn’t restrict you too much to begin with but later the perks become tied up in your abilities being at a certain level. I find this to be a double-edged sword: on one hand it stops you choosing perks that it wouldn’t make sense for your character to be able to do; on the other hand, with all the perks mapped out it’s hard to justify aiming for them either, which I find a little more restrictive. But I’ll keep going and see what we get.

Bright and colourful, like every game should be.

I bought Putty Squad on the PS4 completely blind; I had no idea what it was or whether it was any good. My motivation for buying is that I wanted something I could play when my three-year-old daughter was around. Most games I play have mature themes, and while I don’t necessarily buy into the idea that video games cause children to be disturbed or violent, I want her to enjoy them as well – which she’s not going to do if I’m trudging through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, as she can’t relate to that in any meaningful way! So I had a go with Putty Squad. My first impression was that it was a PS1 game, given the graphics, frame rates and game-play which must at least have come from a time prior to controls being standardised! I wasn’t far off; the original game was released on the Super Nintendo. It’s interesting; you play as a blob of putty who is trying to rescue his putty friends. It’s a platforming game with a lot to do and an unconventional control system, but I couldn’t help but wonder what it was doing as a physical release on the PlayStation 4!

Lictors...

A while ago I bought Legacy of Dorn: Herald of Oblivion. I played it this week; if you could imagine Space Hulk as a choose your own adventure book, it’s basically that. It’s presented well, and has you initially searching for your squad on the space hulk. There’s a basic combat system that has more in common with things like Phantasy Star than anything else, and an odd Purity system where certain choices are restricted depending on how you’ve conducted yourself in the plot. However, as the former resulted in a cheap death (if your combat system relies on random number generation, don’t put a turn limit on the battles!) I didn’t remain engaged for long.

I carried on with Wolfenstein 3D too; I’m not far from the end of the game now. I’ve not got much more to say about it so I’m going to try to beat it and leave any future remarks for a review, but I’m glad I’m still enjoying it!

Last Week's Games: Wolfenstein 3D, Open TTD, Kingpin and Chaos Gate

I’ve been playing several different games over the last couple of weeks, so if this blog seems a little longer it is because these notes cover two weeks rather than one!

They’ve mainly been on my laptop. I played a bit of Wolfenstein 3D, killing Hitler at the end of the third chapter and playing through the prequel campaigns; I’m about half way through them now. It’s an odd experience; I’ve been playing WWII-related games for many years now, and this is the first time I’ve killed Hitler!

I’ve found that because the game requires a certain amount of timing and skill to complete, this isn’t the sort of game where you can play it for ten hours and beat the whole thing. After about an hour and a half, my concentration drops, and I make silly mistakes that get me killed; at that point I find it’s best to drop the game for a little while and come back to it another day. But it’s nice to have that option!

Not exactly historically accurate, but fun nonetheless!

I’ve also found that with a few exceptions, the level design of the game is generally very good. The graphics must have been impressive for the time but were hardly the photo-realistic polygons we’ve come to expect now, the sound was tinny and distorted, and while the presentation was thematic and did the job, it’s basic. The design team at ID software were aware of this and had to really concentrate on making the game playable – which they have, without a doubt. They might only have one level of view and and three guns to play with, but they designed the levels and challenges to really get the most out of their limited resources. So apart from a couple of clangers (one of the levels require you to find a secret in order to find the key, which when the secret areas are not telegraphed very well is a significant challenge, that you’ll only really achieve by luck rather than judgement. Or read a guide, like I did. It’s not fun to press the activate button on every wall on a huge stage on the off chance you’ll get the right one!) the game is designed very well.

I carried on with my game of Open TTD and I’ve realised some of the problems you can run in to when running a transport network consisting mainly of road vehicles – they get old and need replacing. I’m playing on a large map and I have a lot of road vehicles; it takes time and it is a massive faff. It’s part of the game, I suppose, and it gives you the option to replace those vehicles with improved versions, but I wish there was some way to automate the replacement! I’ve also reached a point in the game where some of the supplying businesses start to close; I’ve noticed it mainly with oil: there comes a point where the primary business doesn’t operate anymore, and a lot of the transport designed around it becomes redundant. Rerouting your entire network to compensate is a challenge!

Of course, as Kingpin was released in 1999, the
character models are absolutely hideous.

There were some other games as well. A while ago I bought Kingpin: Life of Crime, plus a couple of older Games Workshop games, Final Liberation and Chaos Gate. I’ll go in to specifics in a minute but for now let me say that as I downloaded these games from GOG, all three of them required fiddling around with the game files to run. This involved looking for advice from the community, finding out what patches I need, and making sure they were in the game files. Kingpin wouldn’t boot at all until I’d installed a patch, and Chaos Gate wouldn’t proceed past the point where I’d launched the mission because apparently it can’t handle particularly long file paths, so I had to make a new directory for it. Final Liberation was a little easier to fix; for some reason it doesn’t want to play the videos, so I had to go into the configuration file to disable them. This is a little sad as some of those videos were brilliant; not technically wonderful but the actors and producers were clearly in to what they were doing! I got them all working eventually but this is not something I expect to have to do with a product I’ve bought from a game distributor on the understanding that it will work.

I wasn’t too impressed with Kingpin, actually. From the marketing, I was expecting a kind of Grand Theft Auto without the cars, where you build up your criminal empire and take on the people who betrayed you. In fact, it’s a difficult shooter with some shopping and recruiting. I didn’t get far in to it; maybe it gets better at some point but starting a game like this with no weapons and being surrounded by enemies who are at least on par with you and often much tougher made the game frustratingly difficult.

The rest of the squad are in the Thunderhawk...

Chaos Gate was a lot of fun, though. It’s a Warhammer 40K squad-based tactics game, and I’m a lot better at them now than I was when I originally bought the game in 1999 so I set it on the middle difficulty rather than the easy mode I would usually look for back then! The graphics look a bit “Second Edition,”[1] and while the weapons make the right noises, I’m not sure how I feel about firing the rocket launcher and seeing the impact of it with absolutely nothing in between, but the game itself is pretty good if a little clunky. It must be one of the first games I played with a Permadeath function; if your squad members get killed, there’s no replacing them at all in the campaign. It even has an Iron Man mode, which I haven’t touched yet. I’ve got to the second mission, but I can’t seem to get through it without at least one squad member dying; I’ll keep trying though!

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[1] If you know, you know.

Last Week's Games: Wolfenstein, Epic Mickey, Open TTD

I started this week with my run through Wolfenstein 3D. In my previous blog post I may have given the impression that I wasn’t fond of the game. While I stand by the remarks that none of the environments are particularly memorable, it is a competently-designed game and I am enjoying it. The levels are designed in such a way that you almost always must clear most of the level to get to the end. There are no skipping tough sections; if one part is too hard, you need to figure out a way to deal with it. Bottle-necking enemies in doorways usually works, but you also need to remember where in the level the health pick-ups and ammo packs are. Your character doesn’t pick them up straight away if he doesn’t need them but you’re likely to run in to a difficult section later that will tank both your health and ammo, and you’ll be glad that there are some pick-ups to run back to! The fact that there is no map (that I’ve been able to see!) doesn’t help but it adds to the challenge of memorising the levels.

They'll drop you in a couple of hits...

I also enjoy using the Chain Gun. This is the most powerful weapon in the game, but it has a problem with ammo conservation; it never uses less than two bullets and any amount of sustained fire will drain your ammo quickly. You’re therefore forced to fire in short bursts to take out the regular guards and save your ammo for taking down the harder opponents like the SS or Mutants. It’s a simple strategic element but is far more effective in making a challenging game than simply giving you the chain gun and letting you run wild!

We worked this bit out eventually.

Elsewhere, me and Kirsty played Epic Mickey 2 on the Xbox 360. This was a free download a few months ago, and we like Disney so we gave it a go to see what it was like. We wanted to like it, we really did, but it’s been a long time since I played a game in split-screen mode and it was very tough for all the wrong reasons. The solutions to the puzzles aren’t particularly intuitive, and the split screen restricts your field of view. We got stuck at a point where you must use one character to throw the other over a gap in the environment, and we weren’t very clear on what we had to do; it sucked all the fun out of the game, and we called it a night.

I’ve carried on with Horus Heresy: Legions; there’s a new event running now that requires you to fight a Titan. Most of the Imperial decks are Space Wolves, and I find them a lot easier to use than Custodes, and the Titan battles are easy enough, but the Player Versus Player modes are always a challenge.

Wha...? I can't even... no. No.

Finally, I came back to a game I hadn’t played in a while: Open TTD. If you don’t know, this is an open-source remake of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, one of the most memorable management games I think I’ve ever played, if only for its Jazz soundtrack! It’s a free download and I’d more than recommend giving it a go. The aim of the game is to build a transport network to supply passengers and various commodities to towns around the environment. There is also a competitive element to the game where you have other transport networks attempting the same. Now, I can build the routes, but I’m not great at micro-managing the train lines in order to get them to run efficiently, and no matter how well the signal system should work, I always end up getting one train or the other stuck. I doubt I’ll make enough money to win the game, but apparently the game ends after 100 years of game time so if I get that far, that will be an achievement!

Incidentally, it was my intention to record some footage of this to put on YouTube. Unfortunately, I can’t get my capture software to work with it, presumably because it doesn’t launch from either Steam or GOG. Still, we can always follow the blog to keep up!

Last Week's Games: Wolfenstein 3D, Beneath a Steel Sky, Super Castlevania IV, Torchlight, Horus Heresy: Legions

I’ve been playing quite a few games this week, many of which I’ve never played before; let’s hope I’ve got the space to write about them all:

As with the later Doom, the chaingun eats up
a lot of ammo...

The first one was Wolfenstein 3D on my laptop. This one is often regarded as the Grandfather of first-person shooters, and while it might have been the first game that kicked off a huge part of what mainstream video games eventually became, it hasn’t aged particularly well. You run through the halls and rooms of a grey castle, shooting Nazis and collecting treasure. It works, and it is fun. The level design has a certain “Dungeons and Dragons” sensibility to it, and it’s challenging enough on the right level. But when all the levels look the same with very little variety in what you’re doing, it’s hard to think of a part of the game I’ve played that I would classify as “memorable.”

Robert Foster and Joey.

I’ve also been playing Beneath a Steel Sky. This was a game that I got for free on my GOG account, for some reason, and had never touched it in that time. From the occasional coverage from Jim Sterling, I knew that it was a Point and Click adventure, but unsure as to whether I had the patience, I didn’t bother with it for the longest time. But I’m playing it now, and it’s a pretty good adventure; it was developed by Revolution who also did Broken Sword, so it was interesting to see the contextual mouse system being developed, even if it was in its infancy back then. It’s pretty good, amusing in the right places, but it has the same problem that most games of its time had – if you can’t work out the puzzle, the whole game grinds to a halt. This has happened to me at least once, where I had to use a guide to figure out what to do next, only to find I had to talk to a character I had no practical reason to talk to at that point. Nonetheless, I hope I get to the end of it!

Hands up who remembers THAT music...

On the WiiU, I’ve been playing Super Castlevania IV. This is a game I played a while ago, as my mate Matt had it on the Super Nintendo; it’s arguably as good as the Castlevania series ever achieved and certainly an entertaining game after all this time. A nice variety of enemies, tricky platforming sections, and bosses that you should never be able to beat makes for a fun time, marred only slightly by some cheap deaths and odd checkpoint placement. It works especially well with the WiiU’s internal saving system, and I’m enjoying playing through it again, if only to give myself some ideas on what I might develop in my own DnD campaigns in future!

Spiders. It had to be spiders, didn't it?

I also played Torchlight on the Xbox 360. This was a free download with Games with Gold, and while I’d already bought it on the PC I thought the Xbox would be a more convenient platform to give it a go. It’s a dungeon-basher, with a lot of things to loot, an interesting “Pet” mechanic and a linear and standard storyline. It’s been fun so far, but it hasn’t got the depth of many of the RPGs I play, and it doesn’t look like I’ll be doing much more than getting through to the end of the game. I’ll stick at it for a bit, but I don’t know, I might have wanted a bit more than this. Still, I didn’t pay for this version of it, so I guess it’s OK!

Custodes. A pain in the bum to run or fight.

Finally, I’ve been playing The Horus Heresy: Legions on my phone. It took me a while to get back in to it, but I got there in the end! I’ve joined a new lodge as well – emperors Finest. The reason for this was that my previous lodge, the Emperor’s Daggers, was full of dead accounts. I’d love to be able to win some points for the team in the events, but the Adeptus Custodes cards are very fiddly and I’m not sure yet how I can use them effectively.

Let’s see what next week brings, and whether I can finish some of these games!