WW2GI and the saving private ryan TC for duke nukem 3D: a level-by-level breakdown

EPISODE 1: D-DAY

the first half of the game starts off with a bang as you're dropped right into it with the omaha beach landings; from there you'll go on through the hedgerows and villages of normandy, killing nazis left and right and dying... again... and again... and again. according to the credits, we can thank tuoma "tuco" korva and lado "icebreaker" crnologar for the level design, but i've no way of telling you who did which.

E1L1: d-day what's more iconic in united states military history during WW2 than omaha beach? this recreation of the bloody battle might not be as lethal as the real thing, but it sure is nearly as nightmarish. the game throws you in deep real fast and you're forced to learn, through trial and error, the basics of the game, all the while random explosions and bullets out of nowhere will cut your gameplay short. you'd think they'd at least give us some basic training... even medal of honor frontline was more forgiving.

E1L2: atlantic wall omaha beach, part 2. you're alone for this one, you and several dozen enemy troops as you work your way through a complex of shattered bunkers and rail lines. not much sense to the layout on this one, though cool carnage as a row of parked trucks are annihilated in an artillery explosion -- along with all the nazi goons hiding behind them.

E1L3: defend you meet up with some friendlies just in time for a panicked radio message -- a squad is pinned down under enemy fire and need help. working your way through a flooded village and a forest infested with nazis, you eventually come upon the squad, hiding in some foxholes as a couple dozen enemy mysteriously teleport in by a hedgerow on the far end of the field. aside from some extra ammo, you also get access to an artillery strike via radio and a mortar launcher. hold out long enough and a gate will open with reinforcements behind, and the exit beyond.

E1L4: hunt for the 88s jesus christ. if you managed to get through the d-day map without getting too frustrated you may wind up throwing in the towel on this one, an extremely dark night mission in the woods where the enemy can see you but you can't see them, and they always have insanely good aim. the one thing it has going for it is a pretty cool scripted sequence where you and a squad of guys traverse a bit of forest, exchanging some bad banter -- very cool for the build engine! and then they all die in an ambush, leaving you to play audie murphy -- again.

E1L5: finding private mccurkee first of all, lol. second of all, this mission is actually almost fun. a ruined little town teeming with enemy, you'll have an opportunity to use a rifle to pop enemies from a distance, which will be useful as there's plenty of snipers. a mortar team will make your life hell near the end. it's fun working your way through the ruined buildings and finding ways to climb up into otherwise inaccessible rooms.

E1L6: saving private mccurkee did you like e1l5? how would you like to do it again, only this time in reverse, in the dark, and with an NPC in tow that you have to babysit -- assuming he doesn't get his dumb ass stuck in the foxhole right at the beginning of the level and then you don't notice he's done it so you save your game like a dumbass and now you have to noclip through the gate at the end because the idiot doesn't know how to climb?

yeah. i didn't like e1l6.

E1L7: mop up the final mission of the d-day episode is a mercifully daytime shootout across a semi-detatched military complex in which you shoot a bunch of nazis, blow up some tanks, dodge some artillery fire and, in the end, lay waste to a small, fenced-in compound guarded by SS, who distinguish themselves from regular grunts by their distinctive black uniforms and red nazi armbands. just hanging around them lowers your morale; ignoring the fact that the morale system makes no sense, this does amusingly give rise to the idea that the SS are so evil that they can sap you on a psychic level.

i mean, that's true of nazis today.

final thoughts: not a good first half. maybe three or four of the levels are salvageable; the rest are unmitigated shit, especially e1l4. while this is very likely the first-ever WW2 FPS to feature the omaha beach landings and the normandy invasion at large, it's a novelty at best, an exercise in frustration that shows the limits both of the engine and the designers' talents.

EPISODE 2: FRANCE

not sure what exactly distinguishes this episode from the previous, except that it's perhaps a continuation of the battle of normandy? who knows. regardless, it's another 7 levels of this shit, because they couldn't see what they did in episode 1 and think "we've done enough damage."

E2L1: hell from above a much more sensible first level, this is essentially a sweep-and-clear mission as you work your way (alone, of course) through a cute little village along a river. lots of wide open space means little cover for you, but it also makes combat a bit of a turkey shoot (especially with auto-aim on.) oddly you get tons of MP40 ammo -- even maxing it out -- before you ever actually get the MP40.

E2L2: seaside sweep a quick jaunt through a seaport. lots of nazis, and lots of BAR ammo to perforate them with. would actually be a decent level if not for an issue i ran into -- i don't know if it's endemic to the game or if it's a bug introduced by eduke32 -- that placed two very large wall texture sprites in the map that blocked my view of the final building, forcing me to god mode just to be able to approach the place.

E2L3: under fire similar to "defend" from the first episode, the first half of this mission involves you facing off against endlessly respawning waves of germans until such time that you're called to retreat through the village, which is swarming with germans. clear your way through it and you're treated to a grisly scene of SS troops forming a firing squad to execute captured allied prisoners. definitely feels like a precursor to the early call of duty levels. it's not *too* bad a level i guess.

E2L4: paperwork it's time to attack an SS-occupied chateau in this quick little mission. it starts off surprisingly easy with a short, linear path that takes you through some countryside. a heavily fortified bridge serves as the main defense of the chateau and every window bristles with guns. get inside the chateau walls and it's wall-to-wall SS, draining your morale with every burst of their MP40s and having the infuriating tendency to have your shots (especially your BAR) go right through them.

E2L5: railroad typhoon you've been tasked with rescuing a bunch of captured allied troops who've been put on a train, which means storming a trainyard. it's mostly wide open spaces here, though there is a cool part in a connecting tunnel where you're checking train cars. the trainyard itself is comparatively vast, and enemy fire comes from all directions. relatively fun map.

E2L6: a game of bridge like the name suggests, the key feature of this level is a bridge, currently occupied by a tank and a large contingent of nazis. to get there you'll have to fight your way through the town; across the river are rows of windows from which the enemy shoots at you (a common feature in this episode that i'm starting to suspect may be a favorite feature of one of the mappers.)

E2L7: urban rush the finale of WW2GI involves fighting your way through a massive urban area to rescue a captured general. this is probably the largest level in the episode; with an enemy around every corner. while it's otherwise an interesting, intense level (a small legion of semi-invincible SS notwithstanding) there's a frustrating bit where you must go through a no-man's-land of sorts that's constantly being bombarded by artillery.

final thoughts: a significantly better second half, but the problem is, that's not saying much. it still suffers from issues endemic to the game, like the insane reaction times of the enemy, the massive damage they do to you, and so on. however, the gameplay is much more straightforward for the most part, with no NPCs to babysit, no weird trial-and-error "wtf do i do next" issues, just pure nazi slaughter. now if only the game didn't suck.

PLATOON LEADER

platoon leader is a free expansion for WW2GI that adds three more levels to the game and several additional features. two of these, inexplicably, are set during the vietnam war, a throwback to TNT team's earlier outing NAM (which itself was a sequel to their earlier free mod for duke nukem 3D 'platoon,' based on the movie of the same name.) the remaining level, however, is set in the pacific theater of world war 2. the result is that the armory is a mix of WW2 and vietnam war-era weaponry, with the level design such that you won't receive weapons that don't belong in the era you're playing. speaking of level design, no clue who did this one, but i want to punch them.

PLT_E1L1: hill 41 eeeuuugh. you start at the base of a hill. while you have a radio that can call in both a tank assault as well as an air strike, your main strategy is going to be charging up a hill swarming with IJA troops. while the hill is actually rather realistically constructed, with varying slopes and flat planes, this is about the only interesting facet of the level design as the entire hill is covered in invisible land mines and enemy shooting at you. making matters worse is that the game seemingly arbitrarily will declare the mission a failure and cover the screen with a failure notice, forcing you to restart. i even god-moded my way up to the top, killed everything i could, blew up the tunnel entrance, and still failed. this level sucks.

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN TC* FOR DUKE NUKEM 3D

"saving private ryan" is a landmark war film that changed how war movies were made and inflamed the imaginations of game designers everywhere. imagine storming omaha beach from the comfort of your own home; imagine fighting through the hedgerows. while the commercial game "WW2GI" was the very first world war II-themed FPS that wasn't wolfenstein with its abstract mazes and mad science, "saving private ryan TC," released a few months after WW2GI (and using some stolen assets from it), was an attempt by a small group of duke 3d fans to recreate their favorite war movie. in this mod for duke nukem 3D are five levels, each one representing a key scene from the film. an archived version of the mod's website lists two people as level designers: jeff (using the name eXtreme-Rush) and jody (using the name kissle.) i couldn't tell you who did which maps, not that it terribly matters.

* note: TC stands for total conversion, an older term for what we'd now simply call a mod

SPRL1: ohmaha beach yes, that's how it's spelled. basically a worse version of ww2gi's d-day map, it can be done in a matter of seconds. once you blow the shingle and get up onto the ridge it's just nazi city in the trenches beyond, and ammo is scarce -- you're better off just running towards the crater with the movie poster in it.

SPRL2: vierville very short little jaunt through a war-torn village, with a squad of useless soldiers following you. the ruined applecart from the movie is here, as is the half-blown out house; a lone enemy up in a tower is easily dispatched, but figuring out how to get past the invisible wall blocking your further progress is tougher.

SPRL3: bunker another short level, a charge up a hill with the enemy already firing at you. the bunker itself with the radar is cool-looking, at least.

SPRL4: the fields basically "bunker" but with tall, semi-transparent grass sprites everywhere. kill all the nazis and then go talk to the US soldiers hiding near the burning halftrack, and you're on to the finale.

SPRL5: last battle probably the closest this thing gets to a real level, and it sucks ass. you'll not hurt for ammo, and health items actually show up here, but the place is teeming with enemy and cover is light. get across the bridge and you're done.

final thoughts: whoof. while it's true they recreated the setpieces, it comes at the expense of gameplay. the levels are, in a word, ugly and simple, with little in the way of anything distinctive. the whole thing can be gotten through in about 10-15 minutes; wouldn't it have been more fun to simply mix the movie's story beats into a broader game that more closely resembles WW2GI? sometimes i wonder what happened to the mod team; it's clear they were young when they made this (weren't we all, back then...) i guess in the end i admire what they were trying to do, and i appreciate that they were young and didn't really think this through. but it just doesn't work.

SPEAR OF DESTINY: A LEVEL-BY-LEVEL BREAKDOWN

(note: due to the extreme simplicity of wolfenstein’s design ethos, i will be forgoing screenshots, with one exception. you’ve seen one wolf3d screenshot, you’ve seen them all. if you would like to see the game in action, i recommend this LP.)

spear of destiny

with the smash success of the original wolfenstein 3D, it was perhaps inevitable that there would be a followup -- and this time, it was to be a retail release, meant to be put in a box and sold in stores by formgen. developed over the course of two months as john carmack worked on what would form the basis of the doom engine, "spear of destiny" is an "expandalone" of sorts in that it's shorter than the main game by far (only 21 levels) but did not require the main game to play. it stands as a prequel to the "nocturnal missions" (which were themselves prequels to the original episode trilogy. unlike the main game, where the hint manual gave indirect attribution to most of the maps, it's unclear who at id was responsible for which map. the only thing we can say for certain is that the level design is a massive improvement on the original game, generally eschewing the more abstract design ethos as embodied by the likes of episode six for a more realistic setting.

tunnels 1: entrance to the tunnels short and sweet intro to the mapset. opens up similar to the first level of wolf3d ep 2, with BJ infiltrating the castle through a tunnel entrance in the castle's lower levels. no mutants to be found here, though, just regular goons. it's more or less a straight shot to the exit, but there's no harm in poking around.

tunnels 2: corridors of confusion awesome music in this level. in the tunnels deep beneath the castle, this is a confusing maze that loops in on itself repeatedly. mostly staffed by low-level guards and SS goons, this level won't make you sweat much.

tunnels 3: cave-in! another quickie, this one's defined by a long hallway with multiple rooms along it, some of them seeming to be torture chambers. the hallway has been bisected by a cave-in (very cutely done by simply placing a couple of stony-looking wall blocks in the middle of the passage) so you'll need to navigate some tunnels to get around the blockage. very low-key action.

tunnels 4: fortune and glory the castle's treasure vault is a sprawling underground complex. the western half of the map is quasi-realistic castle-style architecture, but get into the secret areas and watch the path turn into spaghetti. it's worth it though -- 1-ups at the end of one secret area, the secret level at the end of the other.

tunnels secret going a bit old-school here, this is a sprawling map made up of different sections, each annoying in their own way. despite being a prequel, mutants make their first chronological appearance in this level, and several sections are designed to take advantage of their utter silence and breathtaking firing speed.

tunnels 5: guardian of the dungeon door unlike the original wolfenstein which was split into six episodes of 10 levels with a boss at the end of each, the 21 levels of spear of destiny are split into much smaller contiguous episodes. the "tunnels" chapter thus comes to an end with this level, an absolute shitshow of guards and SS coming after you from all sides. clear out the bullshit and you'll have to deal with trans grosse ("beyond big" in german) -- a relative of the grosse family by the looks of it. he's enormous, he's got two chainguns, and he goes down like a sack of dead chimps with enough concentrated fire. but with all the goons he's got in his boss arena, your first priority should be clearing out a safe area in which to deal with him.

dungeons 1: dungeon depths pretty standard level. the first area is a blue-stoned dungeon; beyond the dungeon exit is a labyrinthine network of tunnels and hallways in red brick. it's a maze down there and all too easy for enemies to get behind you. otherwise, nothing of note.

dungeons 2: winding dungeons like the last level, this is a bog-standard wolfenstein map split between a blue dungeon area and a separate area, in this case mossy stone. though the dungeon area is large, resistance isn't too fierce. that changes when you get into the lower half of the map, when nazi goons start coming at you from all directions.

dungeons 3: guard post i get the feeling john romero did this one. it's an enormous maze of mostly blue dungeon walls, filled to the brim with enemies. one shot and they all congregate on you, leading to a frantic firefight that requires constantly moving forward to not get overwhelmed. find the key to the locked door and you'll find yourself in a long corridor that surrounds the entire maze, equally heavily guarded as you work your way around to the other side of the map to reach the elevator. great map.

dungeons 4: main dungeon this level can actually be mostly bypassed if you know the secret paths. so you can effectively dodge a room full of SS and officers guarding the key by simply sneaking in past them, and then taking another secret passage that leads directly to the exit. it's a neat little trick that suggests tom hall's involvement. if you choose to do this the hard way, it's a bog-standard map split into three areas with little in the way of resistance, so a bit of a breather after the massacre that was the previous level.

dungeons 5: barnacle wil the jailer similar to the tunnels boss level, this is a map featuring an arena with some heavily guarded antechambers. find your way into the boss room and you'll face barnacle wilhelm, who carries a chaingun and a missile launcher, but he's hardly a threat. the bigger issue are the officers and other losers who attend him, who lie in wait until they see you, meaning it's unwise to move about too much in the boss arena until wilhelm is down.

castle 1: castle entrance the back half of spear of destiny shows some more of the quasi-realistic philosophy behind the level design. the bulk of the level is a confusing maze of rooms that serve no real purpose, but they're surrounded not only by a wall hollowed out by a secret passageway, but an outer wall that serves as the main defense of the castle, complete with two trucks parked in the gateway, the outside world visible beyond. it's a neat touch that adds a bit of a realistic vibe to an otherwise abstract level.

castle 2: barreling through the castle fuck you for this pun, id. (and fuck you for doing it again with doom 2's "barrels o' fun.") the early part of the map is full of ambushes in which barrels are used as barricades, with nazis firing at you from cover and no way for you to recover their ammo. past that bullshit is another standard maze of rooms and halls, with mutants occupying a wing in the southeast.

castle secret: pushwall panic! if there's proof that sometimes secret levels just aren't worth it, it's this one. as the name suggests, the core conceit of this level is pushwalls, pushwalls everywhere. it's a massive, confusing nightmare maze made up of different sections, all of them hidden behind pushwalls. if you're not attempting this with a map like the one in the hint guide, you'll probably go mad.

castle 3: castle hassle resuming the castle shape of "castle entrance," this opens in a broad, cavernous loop around a lower level of the castle. entrance into the castle proper is through the four corners. the level is mostly populated by mutants and a few handlers, so quick reaction times are a must. the interior of the castle is another abstract maze sectioned off into four different areas you must access from one of the corners.

castle 4: militant mutants oh god. mutants are everywhere on this level, especially in the cave section to the northwest. it's honestly a real shitshow. the tension is palpable, but id do reward you with a great fakeout -- throw the switch of the first elevator you see and the wall moves back, revealing health and ammo and a 1-up.

castle 5: gauntlet guards the mutant mayhem continues with this abstract spaghetti of a map partially bisected by two parallel hallways. the opening of the map is very cruel, a gauntlet of thin hallways you must wind your way through while being fired upon by mutants. get past that and the rest isn't too bad provided you know where to go.

castle 6: king of the mutants chriiiist. this boss level is even worse than the tunnel boss level. jammed absolutely full of nazis, ammo is scarce and often behind the very enemies you need the ammo for. the main room has a central area from which dozens of guards can fire at you with relative impunity from behind columns. if you can work your way through the swarm of assholes that dominate the side hallways you'll get the key that lets you into the inner chamber. the big metal box that dominates the room contains the ubermutant, a giant, four-armed mutant on steroids. fortunately, unlike his regular-sized brethren, he isn't nearly as quick on the draw, meaning you have a little time to dive for cover before he opens fire.

ramparts 1: the ramparts top floor. this is most emphatically not a large level -- in fact, it's literally just the castle walls, with a small chapel to hitler of sorts at the center. id software have cleverly managed to make it look like an outdoor section, with the outer walls resembling rampart walls with a sky the color of the dark cyan ceiling this game commonly uses. however, despite the small size, it's wall to wall nazis, without a lot of health or ammo.

ramparts 2: guardian of the spear as boss levels go, compared to the ubermutant level this one is much more forgiving... provided you can get past the death knight, a massive fascist in power armor who takes a hell of a beating and can dish it out just as good. and he's not alone, with an army of officers and their mutant pets. luckily, there is an *assload* of health and ammo on either side of the level, so keeping yourself well stocked should be easy. when the dust settles, you can unlock the chamber holding the spear of destiny, and take it for yourself...

the death dimension WELCOME TO HELL. in what had to have been foreshadowing for what would eventually become doom, grabbing the spear sends you to a nightmarish dimension that very much looks like hell as envisioned in doom's third episode, a cavernous maze filled with skulls on poles, blood and skeletons everywhere, the souls of the damned zooming in on you, and the so-called angel of death, a massive demon who throws green fireballs at you. it's a frightening, unexpected climax to the game, and by far one of the best curveballs a game has ever thrown. even if the boss himself isn't a great challenge -- though watch out for the ghosts flying around, as they can only be put down for a few seconds.

final thoughts: in an era of shareware and games being spread across an episodic structure, a game that just gives you a single adventure across a series of levels was a bit unusual, particularly from id software. 21 levels of nazi murder without a break, split across five different themes, with five bosses to keep you amused. it's a bit of a mixed bag, however. the early tunnel levels are light and easy, letting you dip your toes in. the dungeon levels are more standard wolfenstein, akin to something we'd see out of, say, wolfenstein 3D's second episode. the castle chapter mostly just kind of... sucks. the final two levels are brutal, though not as bad as the ubermutant level immediately preceding. if you can survive the ramparts, the game drops a great surprise finale. overall i'd say that the level design is *generally* better than wolf 3D, but there are some missteps, namely that second secret level. i do like the attempt at creating some semblance of a real-world castle, but in general it seems to be the case that they simply use the basic outline of a castle to construct a more abstract maze within, and even then they don’t do that consistently. still, it’s a nice early attempt at realism in an FPS.

wolfenstein 3D: a level-by-level breakdown

(note: due to the extreme simplicity of wolfenstein’s design ethos, i will be forgoing screenshots, with a few exceptions. you’ve seen one wolf3d screenshot, you’ve seen them all. if you would like to see the game in action, i recommend this LP.)

EPISODE ONE: ESCAPE FROM WOLFENSTEIN

the iconic shareware episode, and the only one available for free -- thus often the only one many people played. like many others, i'd only ever played the shareware episode, but it's still just as captivating as it once was all those years ago. in terms of design aesthetic, wolfenstein 3D may be somewhat primitive and abstract by today's standards, though it's worth mentioning that there are occasional attempts at realistic touches such as the dog kennel in E1L1. the basic premise is identical to that of the original classic: you've been taken captive in the dungeons of the nazi-occupied castle wolfenstein, and it's up to you to get out.

E1L1 the classic first level. we begin in medias res, with you already having been captured and now attempting your escape. there's a dead guard in front of you, and you're armed with a knife, and the guard's luger, 8 rounds in the magazine, and a pumping soundtrack to get you primed for nazi murder. a somewhat linear affair save for a quick side trip into the kennels. savvy players who know their secrets can find the elevator to the secret level behind not one, but two secrets at the very end of the map.

E1 SECRET if you're brave enough to try this secret level, the difficulty takes a major leap upwards as MP40-toting SS guards join the regular grunts in defending this huge maze, which seems like an underground cave system, perhaps beneath the bottom levels of the castle proper. creepy music serenades you as you navigate the tunnels, and it seems like every corridor has at least one secret to be found. cool fakeout ambush if you choose the wrong exit door at the end.

E1L2 whether or not you did the secret level, SS goons are here as well. not the biggest maze in the world, but a huge chunk of it is entirely optional. aside from a big kitchen area, kennels and a prison there's a pair of big torture chambers too, full of the skeletons adrian carmack drew to get a rise out of the suits at formgen who were nervous about the violence.

E1L3 another maze of torture rooms, prison cells and officer's quarters. an optional series of boxy rooms is largely featureless but if you know where to look you can find a secret treasure vault.

E1L4 while mostly still a fairly featureless series of rooms, this does feature a few points of interest, for example the wood-carved swastika that dominates a room on the southern end of the map, as well as one of the rare secrets that actually gives itself away by the puddle of water before it, suggesting a leak of some kind.

E1L5 the heat turns up quite a bit for this one, with enemies around every corner, especially on higher difficulties. you'll have more than one chance to just unload with the chaingun until everyone's dead. it also features an enormous secret area -- probably the biggest in the episode -- that's full of treasure, ammo -- and guards.

E1L6 not the longest or most complex level, but there's plenty of nazis to murder in this nearly entirely red-brick complex of mostly straight hallways and round rooms. you'll have to go one way for the key, then another for the exit. a cute little barracks with plenty of treasure is the standout landmark here. watch out for the SS ambush right by the exit.

E1L7 one of the few levels in this episode we can conclusively attribute to one of the designers, tom hall in this case, thanks to a comment he'd made that was published in the hint manual. in it he describes the central landmark of the map, a long hallway lined with gaps in the walls, the gaps filled with impassable columns. behind them are large rooms filled with guards, and traversing the hallway is basically a gauntlet as a small army of troops fire upon you from behind the columns. reaching them is a matter of following the hallways around to the rooms they're in, but once they're alert they'll start spreading out, making tracking them down difficult. it's a cool idea and an early example of the kind of creative level design that we would later see in doom.

E1L8 another all-brick affair, save for a little bit of wood paneling and a grey stone barracks area in the northwest corner. a very short level all told, surprisingly light on resistance for so late in the episode. features the first appearance of what i've in recent years taken to calling the "trash eagle."

E1L9 the end of the episode is just as iconic as its beginning, a massive entrance hall devoid of enemies... save one. hans grosse, an enormous teutonic bastard in full body armor, greets you with a cursory "GUTEN TAG" before unloading on you with two chainguns. dealing with him requires ducking for cover when he's firing and dumping your ammo on him when he's not. after what seems like almost all of your ammo he'll go down like a sack of hammers, giving you the key to the exit, and the iconic escape cutscene. if you need ammo or health, there's a secret along the western wall full of both.

final thoughts:

an iconic episode, right up there with "knee deep in the dead" or "dimension of the doomed" in terms of its recognizability. sure, the texture usage is rather limited and the level design, cute attempts at imitating real-world spaces aside, is as abstract as any in those days, but for a lot of people, the first level alone could probably be done in their sleep. while there's only three kinds of enemies through the entire episode, they're often cleverly placed to keep you on your toes. this is just a taste of what's to come.

EPISODE TWO: OPERATION EISENFAUST

after the limited offering of the shareware episode, the full game promises a bigger experience, with more textures, more enemies, more music, more of everything that made wolf3D so great. the level design gets more complex as now you'll often have to find two keys instead of just one. now that you're free from wolfenstein, it's time to resume your mission, infiltrating castle hollehammer where the evil dr. schabbs' laboratory is supposed to be, and find out what he's been doing in there. episode two thus starts off by introducing you to the mutant, a reanimated soldier carrying cleavers in both hands and a gun in his chest. absolutely silent, he's an inhumanly fast shot and if you're not careful he'll get the drop on you, ending your mission prematurely.

E2L1 the origins of the horror theme that has been a part of the franchise all these years starts here with another level by tom hall, as you infiltrate the castle via some kind of sewer entrance. the first few rooms are empty, and you think maybe you've gotten in unnoticed... but open the wrong door and say hello to your first mutant. how well you do in this level depends on whether you find the MP40 and ammo cache across from the entrance -- or the hidden chaingun. nice touch with the starry background on the wall behind you at the start -- it gives a sense that this isn't just another bunch of random abstract hallways, but a real place with a real outside world. it's not fooling anyone, obviously, but it's a good touch of realism in a time when "realism" consisted of a square room with a table sprite in the middle.

E2 SECRET a very tiny level with a few mutants... or is it? push in the right place and the level opens up significantly, with a boatload of treasure to be found. the mutants didn't bother waiting for you and have killed some of their nazi handlers, as the corpses on the floor indicate.

E2L2 after a brief portion in the sewers, you find the exit -- marked by warning signs, presumably to keep people out of the sewers where the mutants'll get 'em. it's sealed off too, requiring you to push a wall to get out. the rest of the level is a fairly bog-standard level with three quarters of a swastika being the only distinguishing feature. i think tom hall did this one as he comments on being able to see out a window early on.

E2L3 it's not the sewers, but you wouldn't know it for all the slimy wall textures. the opening section is simple enough, but the level likes to play around with secrets. an entire secret area is visible beyond rows of columns, but to get there you have to take the long way around. there's more secret areas within the first one, each one getting better and better, until finally culminating in a mess of SS. and if that's not bad enough, the silver key is guarded by mutants, lying in wait. tom, you're an asshole.

E2L4 not a complex level from tom here, split mostly into two sections with a third, circular room in the middle. a lot of doors open immediately into dead ends; others have mutants behind them. a holding area for mutants quickly turns into a shitshow when killing the lone guard alerts the monsters hiding in their cells and they come out for blood.

E2L5 well, it's a nazi castle, i suppose it makes sense to have a level shaped like a swastika. each "arm" of the swastika is done up in a different theme, from the slimy rock walls we've seen a lot of this episode, to a red brick stronghold of sorts, to blue stone dungeon, to wood-paneling. you can basically skip most of this episode by going to three rooms max, but you miss out on a lot of nazi murder and items to find.

E2L6 opening up in a cave-like area very similar to the secret level from the first episode, only this one is full of mutants. the big maze in the southeast can be navigated by following the bloodstains -- a neat touch that seems like something tom hall would do. the elevator doors at the end present an interesting dillemma -- which one is the exit, and which one is the mutant ambush?

E2L7 an odd level. it's just a few rooms and the exit elevator... unless you find the secret that opens up the entire rest of the map. it's still not the biggest map you'll ever play, but it's a respectable 5 minutes or so of nazi slaughter... until you get to the mutant cave in the southwest corner, where the nazis have already been slaughtered.

E2L8 another odd level, this one is infamous for being half made up of a large maze of 2x2 rooms and pushwalls. push your way through and you can find 1-ups, hans grosse clones (or maybe they're his brothers), treasure, or a sign saying CALL APOGEE, SAY AARDWOLF. this sign was part of a contest, if you did what it instructed you would win a prize. however, thanks to cheat and mapping programs the sign was found almost immediately, and the contest was canceled. in some later versions, the sign is replaced by a 1-up and some garbage. the rest of the map isn't as memorable, though it does have a nice little barracks in the southeast.

E2L9 another boss arena, the laboratory of the evil dr. schabbs. metal walls and warning signs tell you this is a high-tech place (well, for the 1940s anyway) and every room is quite large. other than schabbs, mutants are the only other occupants, coming at you in a wave before the mad doctor himself attacks, throwing hypodermic needles full of his monster serum at you. if you die to schabb's flying needles, instead of the usual beat-up face, BJ's skin turns white, just like one of the mutants. killing schabbs triggers an instant replay of his death animation, which is funny.

final thoughts: the second episode turns up the heat significantly. the mutants prove themselves to be a serious threat, their silence and frightening firing speed making them incredibly dangerous. the horror theme is pretty strong at multiple points in the episode, which is impressive given how primitive the game is compared to even doom. clever use of enemy corpse sprites and blood-spattered textures offer some interesting environmental storytelling. schabbs himself embodies the worst aspects of the nazi regime, that of mad science and human experimentation -- so of course taking him down is satisfying, despite how easy he is. (letting his mutants do the work for him -- so typical!)

EPISODE THREE: DIE, FUHRER, DIE!

the third episode, and technically the final one of the early version of the game until the nocturnal missions were added. as the name suggests, your mission is to kill hitler. who doesn't wanna kill hitler? well, nazis probably. but fuck 'em. anyway rather than crumbling old castles, dank dungeons and evil labs, episode three is set in a massive bunker beneath the reichstag, akin to the plot of "beyond castle wolfenstein." don't expect adolf to calmly let you bomb his conference room this time, though...

E3L1 the entrance to hitler's bunker is a small set of rooms that offers light resistance -- a few guards and SS, plus the very first officer in the game, who moves fast and fires faster. he's not as much of a threat as the mutant, but he's still quick on the draw. poke around a bit and you'll find the secret dungeon complete with machine gun for the taking. the music is a bit of fun, a very simple tune that has a morse code message playing in the background:

TO BIG BAD WOLF DE LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD ELIMINATE HITLER IMPERATIVE COMPLETE MISSION WITHIN 24 HOURS OUT

E3L2 this is the first level that we can be pretty sure is john romero's if his commentary in the hint guide is anything to go by. it's a relatively tiny level, split off into two parts, with the exit very close to the start position but locked off. the key is in the southern area of the map, but the northern portion doesn't offer much and is completely optional -- a deliberate fakeout on romero's part.

E3L3 another short map by romero, this one opens with three doors to choose from. two eventually lead to the same place, while the third takes you to one of the keys you'll need. the other key is guarded in the northern part of the map. similar to romero's tendency to stick an enemy in the exit room in doom, an officer greets you on your way to the elevator.

E3L4 romero's short-form maps continue here (i wonder if these maps were made early in the game's development?) it also continues the trend of most of the episode 3 maps being largely white stone walls with the occasional brick, dungeon or wood to break up the monotony. finding the key isn't enough -- the door opens to a wall that turns out to be pushable.

E3L5 another short-and-sweet level, this one centering the action mostly around a red brick complex inside a large grey stone room. though this one does feature a long, twisty passage that ends in little more than a medkit and an SS goon.

E3L6 tom hall brings his personal brand of weirdness to episode three with this level that opens with a locked door immediately to your left. going forward is a repeat of his old favorite trick of putting enemies and items behind barriers where they can shoot you but you can't reach them, not without a little secret-searching anyway. there's also the enormous maze of reinforced steel to the north which offers little in the way of resistance but is incredibly confusing without a map. there's also another key that can be gotten on the sly by going around and entering the closet it's in via a pushwall in back.

E3L7 jesus christ, tom. "abstract" is the theme for this level, a mess of curving hallways, rooms in the shape of tom hall and john romero's initials, a secret that's easy to break before you even find it, a ludicrously large, featureless secret maze, and *another* secret at the end of said maze. the final secret is worth it though, as it takes you to the secret level...

E3 SECRET it's pacman. in first person. with some nazis thrown in. that is literally the entirety of the level. avoid the ghosts, get the treasure, find the exit. it's honestly an adorable tribute to such a classic game from a game that has since become nearly as much of a classic itself.

E3L8 the final level before hitler, and the nazis throw everything they've got to stop you. tom hall starts this level by putting you in an empty room; only pushing the right wall will take you into a large, swastika-shaped corridor. SS and officers are everywhere; side rooms will have enemies coming at you from all sides, and they've put up barricades that you'll have to work your way around. and just when you think you've cracked it, and you're at the end, you open the elevator door and there's an officer right there waiting for you -- which doesn't happen often.

E3L9 this is it: the final battle with hitler! aesthetically it's not terribly different from the rest of the episode, but it does introduce us to one of the best fakeouts in a video game. all that buildup and when we finally do meet hitler, he's dressed in robes and shooting fireballs at you -- could it be that the old monster is a magician? well, he's playing a trick on you alright: it's a mannequin with a flamethrower, and when shot down you can hear hitler's evil laugh in the distance. hitler himself is a fairly straightforward boss fight, first in a war mech, and then when that's destroyed he comes after you himself with a pair of chainguns. his death animation is even better than the one at the end of bionic commando.

final thoughts: for the third episode of the original trilogy, design-wise it's a bit disappointing. the texture use is quite monotonous, the levels are pretty short and simple. alone or in small groups, the officer isn't nearly as menacing an enemy as the mutant, which is absent from this episode. the pac-man secret level is an amusing diversion at least. the real value in this episode is the battle against hitler -- that death animation is a treat.

EPISODE FOUR: A DARK SECRET

after the initial success of wolfenstein 3D, apogee software founder scott miller convinced id software to make another trilogy of episodes after finding out that a new level could be cranked out at a rate of one per day. smirkingly titled "the nocturnal missions," this prequel trilogy involves a plot to wage chemical warfare on the allies, and so episode four opens with BJ infiltrating a chemical weapons research facility. we can expect the usual castley goodness as envisioned mostly by tom hall, which promises a slightly more visually interesting experience than hitler's bunker.

E4L1 tom's crafted a cute little castle entrance with a big foyer and dining hall, and a little cavern of sorts in the southwest corner leading to the exit. not the most heartpounding of levels, but at this early stage you'll be ill-equipped to deal with the amount of SS and officers thrown at you, especially on higher difficulties. thus it's an early hint as to the focus on increased difficulty for the nocturnal missions.

E4L2 another tom hall joint, this one has a strong castle design, being ringed on all sides by a single long hallway with a number of rooms in the center. popping off a firearm here will alert enemies on the other side of the map, making exploration dangerous as you're likely to be snuck up on.

E4L3 the level starts off with a huge offering of health and ammo. normally when seeing a smorgasboard like this, it raises one's hackles as it signifies the arrival of a boss enemy. however, none is to be found -- but there *are* a big gaggle of enemies further down the corridor, up to 23 at once. it's quite the impressive ambush.

E4 SECRET sure, you *could* try to fight your way through the whopping seventy-five officers (on all difficulties!) who staff this level. the secret ammo stash at the start is the only thing that would make it even possible. but it's clear stealth was in mind when this puzzle map was designed, the idea being going behind the officers' backs. the official hint guide says that if you follow the path it designated you won't be seen, but this is unfortunately untrue as three will spot you either way, forcing you to hurry.

E4L4 tom gives us a relatively small level that, aside from a cave maze on the eastern side, also features an "art gallery" full of admiring officers. it's like the secret level in miniature, much more manageable with up to 14 officers waiting to run in front of your chaingun. there's also the choice between a secret room full of health, or a secret room full of ammo, and which one you get is dependant on which way you push a wall.

E4L5 tom hall has crafted a large cavern system that seems to be filled with officers. there's also a moment where a horde of guard dogs come at you en masse, and if you're not careful they can catch you in a pincer movement. there's multiple elevators as well, but all but one are inaccessible.

E4L6 tom hall's predilection for mimicking real-world spaces in doom (as in episode two of that game as well as parts of doom 2) can be seen in wolfenstein 3D as well. this level's example of that is the multiple elevators from the previous stage can be seen here too. but perhaps the standout feature of this level is the strange series of thin hallways behind a long row of doors, most of them containing officers and items. it's a good example of the abstract weirdness that has long been a staple of early FPS level design.

E4L7 fairly standard level. a long central hallway divides the east and west sides; it's filled with enemies, and tom hall has exploited the enemy behavior of being able to open locked doors to create an opportunity for players to get through without needing the key -- though if it closes behind them, there's no turning back.

E4L8 another tom hall joint, this one has a lot of tricky encounters that make the standard guards actually dangerous for once. it's the same trick as the dogs in E4L6 -- a big winding maze that makes it easy for the enemy to get behind you. there's a similar area full of officers where it's possible to sneak past some of them -- or bypass them entirely, if you find the right secret.

E4L9 the boss level is a cruel twist on the usual method. all the health and ammo are behind locked doors in the boss room; the keys are guarded by a single grunt who will alert a small army of SS and officers in the next room. however, the final boss, otto giftmacher, is not a threat at all, firing a slow-moving missile that's easily dodged. if you came in already loaded for bear you don't even need to deal with his goons.

final thoughts: episode four is a good display of tom hall's somewhat mean-spirited level design, and i say that in a good way. it's clear he took the opportunity to up the difficulty for the expansion, and that includes throwing in officers by the boatload. in general, though, the level design has started to become increasingly abstract. otherwise, a good start for the nocturnal missions.

EPISODE FIVE: TRAIL OF THE MADMAN

the fifth episode introduces us to castle erlagen (though the hint guide seems to think that was the site of episode four -- maybe both are true) as we hunt for the plans to the nazis' chemical warfare campaign. most of these levels are from romero, who has a somewhat tighter, more abstract design ethos to tom hall's more freewheeling, quasi-realistic style -- something that would be evident later in doom as well.

E5L1 the dungeons of castle erlagen start you off light, mostly guards and a few SS. john romero has crafted a relatively short level, the majority of the action being in a series of rooms off a long hallway that separates the bottom half of the map from a few large rooms connected by narrow tunnels. the final room is a very romero-esque ambush.

E5L2 romero has a penchant for a very sectional level design and we can see an example of it here, where you're dropped in the middle of the map and it's split across four areas in four directions, forcing you to explore until you find the key and the exit. he's also put in a devious deathtrap to the west -- a gauntlet of SS guards for a handful of treasure that honestly is not worth it, which may be the point.

E5L3 another short and sweet romero level -- but heavily guarded. the exit is right behind the entrance, and a number of goons stand watch. if you're low on ammo, you may be running into problems -- but romero has thoughtfully made the secrets extremely obvious, and both will give you everything you could ever want.

E5L4 similar to E5L2, only incredibly symmetrical, this is a wheel-and-spoke design that plops you in the center and it's up to you to clear out a series of nine rooms connected by hallways. as is becoming a pattern, the path is filled with enemies, so it's up to you to be quick on the draw to mow them down the moment the door opens.

E5L5 romero's hub-style design again, only a bit more freewheeling. notable encounters include the "art gallery" in the southeast corner full of dogs, and a similar mini-maze in the northwest occupied by SS and officers. romero has a talent for making maps that seem larger than they really are. the secret exit, however, is well-hidden.

E5 SECRET more hub-style design, though with an evil twist. other than a few central rooms the entirety of the map is made up of long narrow corridors with nazis on patrol. this leads to a tense few minutes as you navigate these tunnels always knowing that if an enemy comes around the corner, you won't have any cover.

E5L6 a rare attempt from romero to make something that feels like a real-world space, the core of this map is a complex of rooms surrounded by a large cavern that encircles three-quarters of the map. the complex itself isn't particularly unusual or, well, complex, though interestingly one of the three doors leading to the room that itself leads to the exit is of a different lock from the others. you still need the silver key, though.

E5L7 back to the hub design. the enemy count is climbing ever higher, romero throws goons at you every step of the way. a major encounter is in the northwestern room where a row of doors all lead to the same room, with a swarm of officers and SS goons hiding just behind to come at you in a wave. the final room is an ornate hallway lined with SS guards, giving a sense that we're getting ever closer to our goal.

E5L8 the penultimate level of episode five is a quick-and-dirty map that splits off into three zones. the biggest heat of the level is probably in the southwest, a maze of corridors full of bad guys that can and will wind up wandering behind you unless you're careful. and when you get through that mess, there's an ambush in the key room. interestingly, you can see the exit door at the very beginning -- but it's behind a barricade, requiring you to find the key to get to the other side.

E5L9 the boss arena is pretty straightforward -- a huge room divided in three by rows of walls. gretel grosse, sister of hans, is your target for this mission, and she behaves exactly the same as hans. taking her out is a snap, but you'd better stock up before opening the door she guards, as the command room that's your final goal is filled with nazi goons. cute re-use of the "yeah!" animation.

final thoughts: episode five is romero at his best. it's a fast-paced little jaunt that offers plenty of nazis to mow down by the boatload, giving a hint of what doom would be like. though he overuses the hub-style level design, it at least gives a little bit of structure to an otherwise freewheeling, abstract mapping style.

EPISODE SIX: CONFRONTATION

the final episode of the game is a bit of a hodgepodge, featuring work from john romero, tom hall, and, surprisingly, robert prince, the man behind the music for most of apogee and id's output between 1991 and 1996, including, but not limited to: wolfenstein 3D (duh), rise of the triad, duke nukem II and 3D, and of course doom. the story goes, now that the allies know where the general behind the upcoming chemical warfare campaign is located, they send BJ into castle heidenheim. with three mappers contributing to this level we can expect a mixture of styles, and given that this is the very last episode of the game, resistance is likely to be fierce.

E6L1 jesus christ, tom. 95% of this map is extremely long hallways, lined with niches in which officers hide. it takes forever to advance and you're constantly getting caught on architecture. you start the episode with the exit right in front of you, and you have to make an insanely long detour just to get to it. awful map.

E6L2 robert prince makes his level design debut with this weird outing. it starts off similar to the previous level's endless hallways, but at least in this case gunfire will make most of the hiding enemies come after you. after that is a series of hallways that spiral in on themselves, at the center of which is the exit. it's like this episode was designed to annoy me.

E6L3 jesus christ, robert. it's a maze of swastikas. every room is a fucking swastika, and they interlink with each other. it's just... fucking madness. it blows my mind. this is what i'm talking about when it comes to how old FPS games seemed to just get by on pure abstraction. in that regard, duke nukem 3D should be considered a fucking revelation. this map is a pain to navigate too, though not as bad as the first two.

E6 SECRET romero and hall both did this level. it's a very romero-style level at its core -- a central hub with four separate areas, each with a different theme. tackling more than one is optional, because at the end of each one is another grosse brother holding a key to the exit in the central room. to the east is a nightmare zone of a vine-choked maze -- visibility is borderline zero and it's full of mutants(!) and officers. a better bet would be the more straightforward boss arena to the west, though the mazes to the north and south aren't too bad. though, work your way too deep into the pushwall maze and you'll run into a familiar ghost, because this map wasn't gimmicky enough.

E6L4 though the hint guide doesn't say one way or another save for tom hall making a completely random e. e. cummings reference, this has hall's style all over it. It's mostly a series of random rooms connected via one hallway or tunnel or another. Compared to the rest of the episode so far, this level's banality is honestly a blessing.

E6L5 i'm pretty sure tom hall did this one as well. the big setpiece is a long, wide hallway with enemies hidden in the niches in the wall -- something i was tired of before the end of the first level. there's also a couple of nearly-identical shootouts in big rooms for possession of the keys. pretty basic level all told.

E6L6 yeah, i can tell this is a romero map, even without the hint guide telling me. it's got two of his most defining features in his nocturnal missions level design: absolute fucking chaos, and a tight level design with a core conceit. on its surface it resembles the spiral maze from robert prince's first level, but this is much bigger, and *much* more packed with enemies, all of whom come after you from the first shot fired. actually quite fun.

E6L7 tom and his fucking mazes strike again. after a rough initiation (more of the hallway/hidden enemies business) and a big central chamber with officers shooting at you from side rooms, you're treated to a nightmare world of endless mazes. if you're brave enough, you can even venture into a secret vine maze, which, while not as dangerous as the one in the secret level, is still plenty annoying and not really worth the hassle.

E6L8 it's hard to say whose level this is, but i'm going to guess it's romero's. it's two underground complexes split by a single long cave tunnel that curls around and between them in a backwards S fashion, which would suggest tom hall, but the abundance of enemies and the relatively compact room arrangement says john romero. whoever did it, this is a pretty linear affair -- first you clear out the northern complex, room by room, then grab the key. then you take out the southern complex and reach the exit. simple.

E6L9 the final boss of the nocturnal missions, and the nazis throw everything they've got at you. i'm reasonably certain this is a romero level, because the evil general is guarded by a baying horde of fascists who come at you from all directions. it's as if they looked at how sparsely populated the previous boss levels were and decided this deserved a bit more of a finale. it makes for some cool carnage, but you'll likely run into trouble unless you're secret-savvy.

final thoughts: "mixed bag" is an understatement. this episode feels like where the dregs of the design team's ideas went. guest designer robert prince should have stuck to music. there are a few cool bits, but in general the sixth episode is a low note, and a bit of a disappointment after the ludicrously fun fifth episode.

cryptic passage: a level-by-level breakdown

CRYPTIC PASSAGE

the first official expansion pack, made by the legendary sunstorm interactive, and colloquially referred to as “episode 5.” as this was developed by a different studio from monolith, it has a distinctive style all its own, albeit one that's recognizable if you've played such classics as the duke nukem 3D expansion "duke it out in D.C." it's an eclectic mix of creepy european villages, dismal swamps and ancient ruins, offering a range of themes for you to shotgun cultists in. while a number of people had their hand in level design, the majority of it is by project director robert travis, who also had a big hand in designing the maps for the duke expansions. his style is immediately recognizable.

CP01: boat docks (michael beaulieu) the expansion starts off right with caleb fresh off the boat onto a dock. most of the level is a series of watery caverns, populated by ordinary trash mobs to start you off light. eventually you find a back way into a creepy fisherman's cabin, and from there, an old lighthouse. mostly linear, but you can sometimes open shortcuts to earlier parts of the level. fun encounter by the lighthouse.

CP02: old opera house ("WBB", who i'm going to guess is bill buchalter) given that duke nukem 3D's most famous level is an adult theater, it probably was inevitable that blood would have an opera house as a counterpart. after a short little path you come upon the town gates; beyond is a surprisingly well lit street, shops open for business. the opera house itself has seen better days, but it's currently being squatted by zombies and cultists. poking around in the auditorium uncovers a key to the back entrance down a long alley; from there you get to clear out the backstage areas, ultimately winding up in the cistern below with a surprise gillbeast in tight quarters. a little exploring and you'll find the lair of a certain phantom. one of my favorite levels in the expansion.

CP03: gothic library (robert travis & shawn swift) between this and "old opera house" you're not suffering for creepy urban locales, which outside of episode 3 were a bit rare. following directly on from the previous level, this is a small, yet fairly open layout that has you poking around in various wings of a 1920s-style library. lots of ambushes here behind every door, save one, behind which is a dark, foreboding mini-maze of bookshelves that has zombies lunge at you from the shadows when you grab the key within. great looking map that annoyingly has a couple of "find the button" puzzles blocking progress.

CP04: lost monastary (robert travis) true to blood tradition, we're running through a crumbling religious site, though this one is less "creepy ancient temple to a forgotten god" and more "defiled church." though it starts off linear, it soon begins to get sectioned off behind locked doors. a few good ambushes here, such as when you drop down a chimney to get ambushed by bloated butchers. lots of broad outdoor views too, especially in the back half of the map when you're forced on an extended river ride to get the eye key and back. fun hexen reference in the belltower.

CP05: steamboat (michael beaulieu) an unusual map for blood, seemingly more suited for redneck rampage, and yet it works. (amusingly, redneck rampage rides again has a riverboat level as well.) geographically it's quite small, but beaulieu has made great use of overlapping sectors to create a realistic-feeling vessel, with three decks on this tub to explore. lots of ambushes here, a few fun moments like a zombie climbing out of a toilet to come after you, a caged velociraptor(?) in the basement. just when you think you've won and you've opened the way to the exit, the boat repopulates, requiring you to clear it out again on your way out.

CP06: graveyard (tyler larsen) what's more of a blood staple than a spooky graveyard? this one's far larger than the iconic "cradle to grave" though. tyler larsen has crafted a sprawling collection of graves and monuments separated by hedges and walls and populated mostly by trash mobs. once you get the skull key and head into the mausoleum, the theme changes to a maze of tombs and catacombs with the occasional watery cave to keep things interesting. bloated butchers are out in force here, with a few hellhounds to keep you on your toes. cultists lurk around every corner, and the finale has you facing off against a mess of them, plus gargoyles, plus a hellhound, in tight quarters. at the very end you have a choice of going up some stairs to exit the tomb, or jump into a burning crematory chute to find the secret exit.

CPSL: boggy creek (robert travis) secret levels should be distinctive and memorable. while i don't know if this small, swampy map is distinctive compared to, say, "house of horrors" or "mall of the dead," it's certainly memorable, chiefly for the ruined house with its locked basement full of spiders, and the multi-gillbeast assault after you come back upstairs. similar to "crystal lake" in blood's 4th episode, wall textures looking like trees stand in for actual trees to define the boundaries of the map. charon ferries you around the swamp, but you'll need to find a key to your own boat to get to the ending, which leads you to the same spot the regular ending of CP06 would have taken you.

CP07: mountain pass (robert travis) reminiscent of some of the levels in blood's second episode, though with somewhat less snow. the cabal have set up some kind of bunker or another in and around some ruins set into the side of the mountains, and your task is to find and lower a series of obelisks (similar to what unlocked the boss levels in the main game) to gain access to keys. mostly fun except for an annoying bit where you have to wait for a stone platform that ferries you across a chasm.

CP08: abysmal mine (shawn swift) more cues from episode two, this is a relatively short little jaunt that starts you off underwater and makes you climb ashore right into an ambush. you'll be heading back and forth as each key seems to go somewhere else on the map. fun little scare when you break through a wall right into a phantasm-haunted tomb. the finale is a bit abrupt.

CP09: castle (jeff cleveland) your final destination is this gloomy castle in jeff cleveland's sole contribution to the mapset. compared to the relative ease of the rest of this mapset, cleveland really turns up the heat, throwing hordes of enemies at you, plus multiple boss enemies including a nest of stone gargoyles. starting off relatively linear, it branches out once you reach the castle proper; a trip to the dungeons prefaces a slaughter in the living quarters. after you clear out the big badasses and step into a portal you'll face off against TWO cerberuses (cerberi?) who serve as the final boss in a strange, otherworldly, vaguely egyptian-themed temple. after that, you're done!

final thoughts: quite the varied little adventure, though mostly thematically appropriate for a jaunt through the carpathians. difficulty generally starts off fairly light and doesn't ramp up much as you progress, but the final level will have you frantic. the design aesthetic is overall tighter and somewhat more realistic than the base game. it's clear that sunstorm has learned a lot from their duke nukem expansions, which were also great. though it's worth pointing out that many of the levels are surprisingly quite short. overall, though, while this won't bring anything new to the base formula, it's an entertaining romp with some original ideas.

blood: a level-by-level breakdown

episode 1: the way of all flesh

the first episode, and the one included in the shareware version. like a lot of shareware episodes, it's generally a sort of mishmash of themes and ideas to provide a reasonable cross section of what a potential buyer could expect from the full game, introducing a small selection of enemies (zombies, the basic cultist and his tommygun counterpart, gargoyles, as well as minor menaces such as rats, the zombie fish, bats and a single grasping hand) as well as about half of the arsenal (up to and including the napalm launcher.) the name is a euphemism (actually a mistranslation from hebrew) for dying.

E1M1: cradle to grave (james wilson) almost every classic FPS game's first level is iconic and the subject of many remakes in other games. let's face it, there's few things a mapper covets more than the E1M1 slot. so here we are with caleb RISING FROM HIS GRAVE. the level is a cemetary and associated funeral home, rather short compared to the immediate next level, but twisting nicely in on itself. the opening room is surprisingly non-descript, just a simple, small crypt. duke nukem 3D in contrast might have dumped you on a fairly blank rooftop but it was a much more dynamic introduction to the game.

after a short couple of encounters in a cemetary you enter the funeral home proper. the chapel is where you get your first taste of the game's tendency to have enemies ambush you from above. up the stairs, past the organ, and through the mortuary, eventually winding up in a small crypt behind the building that leads to the exit. short and simple, but introducing some of the basics -- combat, enemies, secrets, while also showcasing a bit of the game's blackly morbid humor. by 1997 standards it's a gorgeously realized opener, with excellent use of texturing to create a gloomy, creepy setting to shoot zombies in.

E1M2: wrong side of the tracks (craig hubbard) this is where the game really starts to pick up. flowing smartly from the first level -- you start in the same spot you ended the last level, only now the way you came in is sealed off -- you start the level working your way down some train tracks; zombies and cultists stand in your way, and they've been offloading barrels with corpses in them, visible through the glass pane in the side (a reference to the classic zombie film "return of the living dead.") eventually you wind your way around to the front of 'miskatonic station' (heh) and it's lousy with tchernobog troops. they're not just gunning for you either, the zombies are swarming the nameless sadsack innocents that the cult has enslaved.

shoot your way through the station to the incoherent sound of announcements over the PA speaker, answer obscene calls on the public phones, check out pickman's bookshop and stop in for a bit at cask of amontillado. some really good moments here, such as the swarm of zombies breaking through the walls in the foreman's office and the bats flying out of the access tunnel leading off the tracks. it's also one of the best examples of the build engine era's attempts at creating realistic, every-day places to shoot things in.

E1M3: phantom express (james wilson) you've boarded a train and now you have to find a way to get into the engine car. a great opener as the train runs over some hapless folk stuck on the tracks. while the level is literally linear by necessity, it's still a rip-roaring good time as you clear out the cars one by one, culminating in an all-out shootout in the dining car in the back. for 1997 this level was extremely technically impressive; using a conveyor belt effect, they've created the impressive illusion that you're on a fast-moving train across the country. if you fall off, you die, so don't fall off. the conclusion of the level is quite dynamic, as you overload the engine and it explodes, ending the level.

E1M4: dark carnival (kevin kilstrom with revisions by james wilson) blood's pitch black sense of humor is on full display here. after the train derails you pick your way through the ruins until you reach a dark carnival full of wonders. a ghastly ticket collector sics zombies on you after you jump the line, and more zombies and cultists (and mimes) crowd the carnival from end to end. the midway has games of chance -- a shooting gallery, or the opportunity to field goal some severed heads for a prize. in the big tent is the tightrope over a pit of snakes, the big act of everyone's favorite circus freak, jojo the idiot boy. this is also where you meet your first gargoyles, when the carousel comes to life -- a good scare, there. on the way out, you have your options of where to go, even though the bridge collapsed: take a dive and swim to the exit, or cross the remains of the bridge to the secret level, provided you've found and remember the passcode. also: a delightfully vicious secret duke nukem cameo.

E1M8: house of horrors (james wilson) in case you weren't done with the carnival theme, E1M8 provides you with the ultimate carnival ride. the opener is pretty great, with a big horrible clown mouth you have to climb through; the walls are fleshy and gross, giving you the sense that maybe this might be more than just a carnival ride... it's an extremely linear affair as the water ride ferries you down a long winding tunnel, complete with ambushes and a few hilariously ineffectual jumpscares. the finale has you jumping out a window into a back lot for a big showdown before finding your way back to the regular ending of E1M4.

E1M5: hallowed grounds (nick newhard, craig hubbard, terry hamel) a major thematic change, one taking more after doom or quake than the usual "duke nukem for goths" that this game is. on rare occasion (well, half of episode four does it) the game decides music isn't necessary and turns it off for a level. deep, gutteral chanting, wind and thunder are your only soundtrack as you blast your way through a creepy temple. the cult's armies are out in full force here, lurking around every corner and coming at you in packs, with lots of ambushes from above and below. it's a long, winding nightmare that repeatedly loops in on itself. there are a few hints on how to complete the level, and you'd better heed them, because choosing the wrong door at the finale means fiery death. it's all burning torches and glowing candles, making this level a dark, moody affair, and one of the best-looking in the game.

E1M6: the great temple (terry hamel with revisions by james wilson) the climax of the episode is a big quake-style temple in the mountain, initially a linear affair as you work your way through some caverns up into the temple proper, only to switch back on itself several times. zombies, cultists and gargoyles are absolutely freaking everywhere. the level is highly reminiscent of quake in both layout and aesthetic, though as you near the upper areas and get a good look at just how high up you are it takes on a different vibe. plenty of traps, indiana jones style; plenty of firefights too, the best one being a huge shitshow in a room with a ramp that lines the walls, every inch of it covered in assholes to blow up -- and there's a dual akimbo powerup right there for you to grab.

E1M7: altar of stone (james wilson) the grand finale is just a simple boss level, though it'd make a good bloodbath level with its round shape, height variations and small dimensions. other than a couple of trash mobs nothing much happens until you step onto the central platform, at which point the biggest enemy you've seen yet, the huge stone gargoyle cheogh, comes after you. he doesn't have much in the way of attacks -- mostly just flies around and shoots electric blasts out of his eyes -- but he takes an enormous amount of punishment, shrugging off even your napalm launcher. upon prevailing, you're treated to a CGI cutscene that's far darker than its goofy early-90s models give it credit for.

final thoughts: for a shareware episode this is a fairly eclectic offering. the cemetary level sets the tone for the rest of the episode, but it's the train station that most ties in with the game's roots as a horror-themed response to duke3D. the train level is a technical marvel by 1997 standards, but it's probably the carnival levels (which are a clear reference to "something wicked this way comes") that give the episode its most iconic images, as carnival themes keep popping up. the back half of the episode with its sprawling temples really drive home the gothic horror vibe that the game goes for, as well as showcasing some of the more creative level design. if you're in 1997 and you're trying to decide if this game is right for you, this grab bag of a shareware episode should give you a good idea of what you're in for.

episode two: even death may die

while E1M1 is iconic, the entirety of episode 2 is equally so. set in the frigid north, with whole-level references to some of the most iconic horror tales ever written ("frankenstein," "the shining,") it's a departure from the first episode in that the theming is consistent throughout. even the haunted house level is surrounded by snow and cold. it also introduces several new enemies: the bloated zombie, the giant fish monsters, spiders, and most notably, the phantasm, a terrifying ghost that's only able to be hurt when it's about to attack you. the arsenal gets filled out a bit as well -- you now can use the special dynamite types as well as the ever-popular aerosol can flamethrower, plus the voodoo doll.

E2M1: shipwrecked (craig hubbard) the frozen north theme hits you like cold wind in the face, starting you out on a tiny boat heading towards a big wooden ship, locked in the ice (and named the HMS victor, in keeping with the obvious frankenstein ref.) while there's a few treats in the water, most of the level is spent exploring the relatively small ship, moving from fore to aft and back again as you collect keys and open up new rooms. your first encounter with gillbeasts will probably be in the small, flooded room at the fore, a nasty place to meet such a dangerous enemy. the finale is nonsensical, but kinda cool, and a quick swim later you're at the entrance to the next level.

E2M2: the lumber mill (craig hubbard) a quick little romp around a lumber mill, as the title suggests. mostly a small compound of small buildings, you'll be working your way around and through them, visiting each one in turn and clearing them out. first introduction of "bloated butchers" -- fat zombies with toxic puke and big cleavers that they throw at you. these guys can take a hell of a beating before going down. fun, short little level that exemplifies the exploratory focus a lot of these older FPS games had. good bit of humor to be had by the outhouses.

E2M3: rest for the wicked (kevin kilstrom and craig hubbard) it took me a long time to figure out what the hell this was supposed to be. essentially it's a prelude to the next level, a small hedge maze and resort complete with pool, hot tub, and the like -- all frozen over, of course. it's very restful with between 43 to 105 enemies running around. the hedge maze makes up most of the first part of the level, before switching over to the resort area, and then looping back around, finally sending you back to the start of the level, where you unlock a gate that leads to the exit. looming in the distance is a big old house, with one light on upstairs, and something in the window watching you...

E2M4: the overlooked hotel (kevin kilstrom with revisions by craig hubbard) zero points for guessing what this level is a reference to -- especially with that frozen guy in the hedge maze. the hedges aren't all that interesting otherwise, but once you get into the hotel proper the level really opens up, with an extremely non-linear layout for you to explore. not only that, but a series of very obvious secret passages basically connect the entire hotel, making it possible to duck in and out of rooms at will. this is also another example of the game making secret exits require a little bit of thought -- you need to find five tomes hidden around the hotel to unlock a portal. some good scares and creepy moments in this level, mostly based on "the shining," but my favorite is the library, the stacks illuminated by suspended lanterns, except for one in the far back, the chain swinging uselessly, with phantasms lurking in the shadow.

E2M9: thin ice (james wilson) if you liked the frozen sea from E2M1, you'll like this level, a big twisting network of caverns and cliffs overlooking a frozen lake. not much in the way of civilization here, but plenty of goons to shoot through. not a very visually interesting level, but it's fun to throw a dynamite plunger and watch chunks of ice break off and float to the other side of the lake. towards the end things get treacherous as you have to make some daring jumps from one jagged ice peak to the next.

E2M5: the haunting (james wilson and kevin kilstrom) while blood is primarily an action game, the developers did not at all forget that this is a loving pastiche of the horror genre, and as such have crafted one of the creepiest levels in the game, and my personal favorite of this episode. a sprawling old manor with a detached guest house, the enemy count is surprisingly low for the most part, allowing for a slow buildup of tension as you first work your way through a creepy hedgemaze, past the guest house (the same house you saw at the end of E2M3 in fact) and eventually into the mansion proper. it's all dark tunnels and cobwebs everywhere, most of the windows boarded up. phantasms lurk about upstairs, you can hear what sounds like hundreds of rats in the walls of the basement, and when you finally access that mysterious guest house...

if there's a level that most exemplifies what a creative mapper can do to scare people with the limited technology of the mid-90s, this is it.

E2M6: the cold rush (james wilson) after the open-ended nightmare that was E2M5, E2M6's little mining compound nestled in the cliffs is a refreshingly short little jaunt that's somewhat reminiscent of E2M9. at first the camp building (the sole structure) is inaccessible, requiring an extended detour of hopping from ledge to ledge around some perilously steep cliffs, eventually finding the key in a cave, which allows you to access the building proper. lots of gargoyles flying about to irritate you, along with the usual zombie/cultist trash. fun little surprise flamethrower trap when you go to look in a mirror, complete with crawling hands coming out of the walls to choke the life out of you. opening up the locked gate to the mine proper offers a real sense of forboding for such a simple effect -- but we're nearing the end, now.

E2M7: bowels of the earth (james wilson) the penultimate level of the episode is appropriately epic in scope: a long, mostly linear journey through a dark, seemingly abandoned mine that's already partially collapsed. while abandoned mining equipment has been left lying around here and there, for the most part this is a generally featureless series of tunnels and chambers, though towards the end it starts taking on a more concrete identity with a big underground waterfall as a major setpiece and some long-abandoned temple ruins. trash mobs are everywhere, including a great ambush early on where the tunnel collapses and zombies break out of the walls to surround you. at the end of your journey you're rewarded with what looks like a huge temple, with a swarm of spiders (and a stone gargoyle) crawling out of the darkened entryway. the lair of shial is near...

E2M8: the lair of shial (james wilson) like E1M7, the final level of the episode is just a small arena, though in this case it's a much more convoluted knot of twisting tunnels and chambers, with a huge spider nest in a small chamber that overlooks the bigger starting room. in that nest is shial, mother of spiders, and your boss for this episode. compared to cheogh she's much easier to deal with -- she moves slower and mostly sends swarms of spiders after you. and unlike cheogh, it's much easier to send her bouncing around with napalm launcher fire, thanks to her much smaller size. once she's been squashed, you're treated to another CGI cutscene, caleb cracking wise with an andrew dice clay reference of all things.

final thoughts: episode 2 is probably my favorite of the four original episodes. it's a gorgeously realized trek through varied settings that fit very well into the far north/winter theme. while craig and kevin's early levels are all great, it's james' later levels where the episode truly shines. hinting at the guest house of E2M5 as far back as E2M3 with two, if not three levels in between, was a great touch, and the way it teases you throughout E2M5 until you finally find the house key adds a little bit of power to a scene that otherwise might have been just another grisly moment in a game full of them.

episode 3: farewell to arms

episode 2 might have been cold and dark, but episode 3, in contrast, is positively explosive. this is probably where the game comes closest to its roots as a horror take on duke nukem 3D. set predominantly in a town somewhere in france, you'll spend a lot of time fighting in and around the streets, working your way through commercial businesses and other things you would expect to find in a small city. the cabal have come for war, and with them they've brought a dangerous new enemy: hellhounds, whose flaming breath can sap your health in seconds. fortunately, you also get to use the tesla cannon for the first time, and it puts them down right quick.

E3M1: ghost town (james wilson) right off the bat you know this isn't the typical blood level. you're dumped unceremoniously in a small section of the city, with a number of the shirtless innocents running away from you in the distance. tall buildings surround you, and the streets seem clear of cabal. this all changes once you start poking around in buildings, as cultists and zombies start coming out of the woodwork and stuff starts blowing up. in true duke3D style, after surviving a shootout in a small office room, you get to watch from the window as the building across the street is reduced to rubble in an impressive explosion. the biggest challenge, however, is clearing the hotel lobby, which is just lousy with armed cultists, who've put up couches as barricades. if you're savvy and quick, a reflecting shots powerup will make this encounter a breeze. some other neat moments are the elevator that collapses with a super secret at the top of the shaft if you can climb to it, and the secret room modeled after the sloth murder scene from the film se7en, complete with air fresheners.

E3M2: the seige (craig hubbard with additional work by terry hamel) craig hubbard has pulled out all the stops for what's one of the most creative and brilliant levels ever devised. judging by the development notes, craig really enjoyed himself with this level, and it shows. right off the bat you get to watch as literal actual airplanes bomb the streets below (using some cool design tricks to make it look good,) followed by room-to-room fighting, shooting your way through the city as air raid sirens scream non-stop and explosions and gunfire ring out in the distance. it's a brilliant piece of work, atmospheric as hell and fitting right in with blood's overall theme as caleb's all-out war on the cabal escalates into full-scale mayhem. probably my single favorite level in the whole game.

E3M3: raw sewage (james wilson) obligatory sewer level. seems like almost every early FPS game had to have one, going at least as far back as doom 2's second level in 1994. in any case, this is a fairly linear but twisting shootout through a rather modern sewer system. the usual trash mobs are here, including plenty of zombies, but little in the way of higher-level enemies save a few bloated butchers and a poorly placed mother spider. not a lot to really write home about, though some neat build engine tricks like opening the machine that protects the eye key provide some nice visuals to an otherwise non-descript series of tunnels.

E3M4: the sick ward (craig hubbard and james wilson) probably the very first use of a hospital in an FPS game (or second, if you count system shock's medical deck) and it continues with episode 3's rip-roaring urban warfare setting. it's a sprawling, thoroughly modern (and anachronistic) medical facility, filled with the usual goons and ghouls for you to gun down. most encounters aren't too tough, though a surprise pair of hellhounds can catch you off guard as you round a corner. some good laughs with the "assisted suicide ward" being a torture room and some good creepy moments with zombies rising from their beds to come after you, among others. eagle-eyed players (or just anyone who played duke nukem 3D) can spot the button in the chapel that opens up the secret exit. all in all, a solid, well-rounded level that offers a decent challenge and takes a setting that's already kind of creepy and ramps it up.

E3M8: catacombs (james wilson and craig hubbard) normally you would expect a secret level to have some kind of gimmick or whatever, but unfortunately E3M8 offers very little of interest save for a few cool encounters (mostly tons of zombies crowding some of the back corridors, and a prominently-placed guns akimbo powerup to mow them down with.) it doesn't even really look like much of a catacomb, just a series of poorly-lit, underground corridors filled with enemies to mow down. feeling more like a doom level, it's the kind of abstract nowhere that games like duke 3D were intended to move away from with their focus on realism. a fairly weak outing, all the more annoying that it's a secret level. the end has some neat rotating sector tricks to lead into the far more industrial E3M5.

E3M5: spare parts (james wilson and craig hubbard) and now for something completely different. wilson and hubbard have crafted a convincing industrial nightmare here, some sort of foundry perhaps -- it's hard to tell as it seems to be generally a series of big rooms full of molten material, and most of your time will be spent traversing the catwalks and side passages surrounding it. good use of textures enforces a consistent theme, and there's a subtle style to the architectural detailing that makes it more than just a series of boxes. some fun encounters here, especially the security scanner which detects you as an intruder and first sets flamethrowers on you, then some zombies.

E3M6: monster bait (james wilson and terry hamel) continuing in the industrial theme of E3M5 we have a sprawling dam complex reminiscent of duke 3D's water treatment plant level. it's a little anachronistic, but it works within the context of the episode. like E3M3 and E3M5 it's a mostly linear affair with you blasting your way through a horde of trash mobs (including a ton of cultists) and the occasional hellhound or butcher. the turbine room isn't the most intense encounter, but it's certainly the most visually arresting. though you do get a cool vista from the dam.

E3M7: the pit of cerberus (james wilson and craig hubbard) it's fitting that an episode so focused on fire and explosions should end in an underground temple crumbling under lava flows. it's a bit less interesting, design-wise, than shial's lair; first you have to find four switches to start the battle against cerberus, who announces his arrival with cool collapsing walls and explosions. cerby is dangerous when his AI works, spitting fireballs at you that do incredible damage (and set you on fire.) when he gets stuck on architecture is when he's most vulnerable. other than that, it's a pretty straightforward fight, especially since he's relatively slow, so it's easy to lure him down one of the side paths for a breather.

final thoughts: episode three is, if nothing else, a showcase for the build engine. all kinds of little tricks are at work here to give the episode its look and feel; take a look at how the airstrike in E3M2 works sometime. while it's a bit more varied in its theming -- moving from urban warfare to industrial carnage, with a decidedly out-of-place secret level -- it's still a generally coherent trip, moving away from the grotesqueries of the first episode and the frigid nightmares of the second towards a modernist city setting. with a little creativity one could run with this theme for some interesting horror-noir stuff, but the all-out action we get for this outing is perfectly fine too.

episode 4: dead reckoning

the final episode of the original retail version, "dead reckoning" is like episode 1 in that it's a bit of a grab bag of themes, feeling overall like where the leftover levels and dregs of the design team's ideas went. the first half is a weird mix of mad science and a few whole-level references to classic slasher flicks, only to switch to a hellish setting out of doom for the back half. the hellstaff makes its appearance at last in this episode, proving itself a devastating top-tier weapon.

E4M1: butchery loves company (james wilson) starting episode 4 off right with a classic frankenstein-style mad scientist's castle. based on development notes this was one of the very earliest maps to be created, and it shows, as it's very small and doesn't really come up to the standards of, say, E2M5. at best we can see a few sights like what might be frankenstein's main lab, brain storage (no zombies allowed), a ritual and/or book club meeting in the front hall, and a lot of timing-based secrets that reveal themselves without the player even trying. despite its short length, you'll have to manage your ammo carefully, as the level is a bit stingy with weaponry while throwing a few high-level enemies at you like hellhounds. eventually you find your way into a back room and the exit, all too soon.

E4M2: breeding grounds (james wilson, craig hubbard, terry hamel) but wait! there's more! apparently not satisfied with the tiny mad scientist level, wilson et al. went on to create a much larger level that, thanks to the level transition, is very clearly part of the castle proper, despite its much more modern look. oriented around a pair of huge flooded fish tanks full of angry gillbeasts and bone eels, the level is a mostly linear affair that loops in on itself, with locked gates and doors eventually being reached from the other side. it's a visually striking level at times, with scenes such as the curved observation hallway with a view into the big round tank, or the forboding gate to the spider habitat that you must clear. combat is a steady drip with occasional hellhound encounters as well as a mother spider and stone gargoyle to block your way.

E4M3: charnel house (craig hubbard and james wilson) of course, if you're running an evil mad scientist lab and you're going through a lot of bodies you're going to need a place to deal with the leftover cadavers, right? the actual corpse-disposal facility is but a small part of the overall level, and much of your time is spent blasting your way through the tunnels and corridors of an aqueduct system the charnel house sits atop. fairly low-key for the most part, save for a few intense moments where gillbeasts come after you when you're in the water, though there is a moment where part of the map is repopulated by a troop of zombies. a decent little maze but nothing to write home about.

E4M4: crystal lake (kevin kilstrom and james wilson) ki ki ki ma ma ma

i mean, what else do you want me to say about an obvious friday the 13th reference? you can even find jason's mask and knife in a barn. in any case, this is one of those build-cute type levels that's mostly a series of tunnels and corridors where all the walls are plastered with a forest texture to give the impression that you're in an actual forest, punctuated by a disjointed collection of buildings to give the impression of camp grounds. it's largely very linear, your path through the woods eventually terminating at an outhouse, beneath which is a flooded tunnel that leads to the exit as well as to the infamous crystal lake, which is home to a school of gillbeasts. the lake itself has very little to distinguish itself from any big water-filled hole, though there's a hellstaff on a raft if you need it. also, though the secret exits of the first two episodes required a little thinking to work out, in this case they don't even make you look for a button. you basically have to know exactly what wall to blow up, because the classic cracked-wall sprite that indicates a destructable wall is almost invisible against the cave texture it's on, and the chamber is dark anyway. it's worth it, though...

E4M9: mall of the dead (craig hubbard) craig's solo act returns for a level that's easily as memorable as E3M2, if only for that goofy-ass mall music. no prize for guessing what movie *this* is based on... though there's curiously not as many zombies as you'd expect. it's not super huge, but there's some good encounters (including a twofer stone gargoyle bout in the fountain room) and there's a few laughs with the store names. a sudden swarm of zombies as you turn a corner reminds you of this level's inspiration, and to escape the mall you climb up onto the roof. it's anachronistic, but who cares?

E4M5: fire and brimstone (james wilson) the back half of the episode begins in earnest with james wilson offering a taste of hell in this jarring thematic departure from the early levels. (there's a possibility the regular ending of E4M4 naturally leads to this level, but it's not the cleanest transition.) essentially a big volcanic pit honeycombed by cavern tunnels and ancient ruins, your path winds through the caves, hopping over lava flows, through the upper rooms of a central tower and finally on to an underground temple of sorts. pretty steady drip of combat, though lots of hellhounds and an inordinate amount of gargoyles to blow up. not a long level, nor particularly intense, but thematically stands out a bit from the other ancient ruins of evil this game features.

E4M6: the ganglion depths (james wilson and terry hamel) while it's not the penultimate level before the final boss, it very much feels like one, reminiscent of E1M6 with its mostly linear traversal, high-above-the-clouds setting and sinister ancient ruins set into steep cliffs. lots of tough encounters here, including several spider mommas (notably a twofer in a tomb) and a nasty fight right at the start with gargoyles (including a stone one) and some goons with only a bridge and some ledges to fight on. lots of generic evil chambers as sinister chanting fills the air, but some creative encounters and setpieces help salvage what's largely a lot of narrow corridors.

E4M7: in the flesh (craig hubbard and james wilson) the penultimate level is by far the weirdest one, thematically. no ancient temples, no crumbling cities. just a huge cavern of flesh, filled with the sound of slow breathing. a shockingly low enemy count for the final non-boss level, but devoid of the usual trash mobs, instead throwing gargoyles and gillbeasts and hellhounds at you. a few distinct areas evoke actual internal organs, such as the heart, lungs, and, amusingly enough, the stomach. combat is either trivial or a pain, the latter especially when dealing with the stone gargoyle in the stomach area.

E4M8: the hall of the epiphany (kevin kilstrom) the game's finale, and the place you've been trying to get back to since E1M1. after a brief cutscene, you're treated to a tiny map that opens up in sections as you first have to fight another stone gargoyle, another mother spider, and another cerberus, in order, before finally confronting tchernobog himself. the battle is not as straightforward as you'd expect; aside from a hitscan attack that sets you on fire, he also shoots out devastating fireballs akin to a cyberdemon rocket in doom. it's largely down to who kills who first, though utilizing the high-level weaponry such as the hellstaff will help. a bit of a disappointing fight altogether.

final thoughts: for what's essentially the finale of the game, episode four is dissapointingly the weakest part of the game. while the final few levels have a coherent theme and transition among them, the first half feels like the design team had too many ideas they really wanted to put into the game and had nowhere else to put them. it's not to say they're bad, but E4M1 especially feels like a wasted opportunity and probably deserved to have been cut, or at the very least merged with E4M2. the mall level is truly great, though. the final boss was also disappointing, with a poorly-designed arena making matters worse. as a whole it's simply not as memorable as the rest of the game.

h/t to the blood wiki for the screenscreamshots

wolfenstein series, 1981-2015

days before doom, 1992-1993

doom was a watershed moment in gaming culture. it changed everything; it rocketed id software from stardom into super-stardom, making them one of the most well-known names in the western games industry. it redefined the discussion on video game violence, climaxing in the shitstorm that surrounded the 1999 columbine shooting. and it put the first person shooter firmly on the map for good, looming large over developers, serving as the chief example of what happens when you push the envelope just that extra bit. it’s impossible to overstate just how important doom is. but the key thing about watershed moments is that there is a status before them as well as after them. in the years immediately preceding doom, the first person shooter genre was starting to grow in size, and a variety of approaches to design were prevalent. here, then, are three of doom’s immediate predecessors.

wolfenstein 3D

the early years of modern PC gaming were a strange time; the burgeoning field of home PCs (at the time called IBM-compatibles) were replacing the multitude of home computers that ran with proprietary hardware and software, with increasing parity between brands when it came to internals and a slow gravitation towards plain beige boxes (not counting some of the more experimental models.) PC game development was something of a wild west, a career for hobbyists and isolated-but-brilliant coders. id software were no different, a motley four-man crew consisting of programmers, designers and an artist, who liked heavy metal and super mario, who met working in the games department for the computer magazine softdisk but chafed under softdisk's office culture. after proving that side-scrolling games could be done on then-underpowered PCs using a technique john carmack devised, they formed id software and began "borrowing" softdisk's computers over the weekend to design their own games, to be sold independently. after getting busted by the management, they left softdisk with no criminal charges under the stipulation that they write one game every two months for softdisk for a period of time, but without any direction from softdisk.

id software were now free to pursue their own avenues of game design, with john carmack's programming genius at the helm. alongside the now-classic platformer series commander keen, carmack's experiments in writing a first person engine had resulted in early landmark titles hovertank 3D and catacomb 3D. while catacomb 3D had been the result of carmack's assertion that he could write a faster texture renderer than the fully-textured ultima underworld, which he'd seen at a CES demo in 1990, wolfenstein 3D was intended to be the next step up -- faster, more action-packed, and -- most importantly -- violent.

similar to how catacomb 3D was a first-person followup to john carmack's softdisk title catacomb, the wolfenstein franchise goes back before its “3D” entry. the series began life in 1981 under the auspices of industry legend silas warner, whose apple II classic castle wolfenstein was a vastly different sort of game. a top-down shooter, castle wolfenstein is by all accounts the first stealth game, in which the player must hide from patrolling nazis, using stealth and subterfuge to complete their objective and escape from the castle. ammunition was scarce and the player was sometimes better off holding up guards and stealing their equipment, rendering them harmless. the game was a smash hit, with a followup coming three years later.

the idea to utilize the wolfenstein name was john romero's, but they ran through a number of alternate titles beforehand, among them "hard cell," "luger me now," and "how do you duseldorf?" after meeting with silas warner himself and getting his blessing, id software went ahead with the wolfenstein name and the rest is history.

on a technical level, wolfenstein 3D was the next step up from catacomb 3D. while the basics of the engine were unchanged (textured walls, but no floors or ceilings) there were several notable updates under the hood. the most visible difference is the switch from the EGA display standard, which allowed for up to 16 colors (out of a palette of 64) to VGA, which could display up to 256 colors. that this switch was done mid-development is made plain in the somewhat limited palette in the art assets, with an abundance of shades of blue, turqouise or purple, all of which were common colors in EGA programs and games.

the second big difference was speed; players could move at an almost inhuman rate around the mazes of the game, and the focus was on action over the more sedate tactical espionage of castle wolfenstein. the emphasis on speed figured into the game design; plans for features like dragging bodies out of sight of patrolling guards were scrapped for the sake of keeping up the breakneck pace.

perhaps the standout element, of course, was the violence. sex and violence in video games and other media was an increasingly hot topic; the 80s had been marked by controversies surrounding games like custer's revenge and splatterhouse, and the legacy of 1976's death race 2000 cast a bit of a shadow as well. but nothing could have prepared the industry for what was to come in the 90s. wolfenstein 3D managed to slip in ahead of the shitstorm that id's next game, doom would get embroiled in alongside mortal kombat, but even still it drew concern from id's retail publisher at the time, formgen. artist adrian carmack (no relation to john) had long been a fan of gory themes in his work; doing the art for the relatively kid-friendly commander keen had chafed him, and he relished the opportunity to do something grotesque. hovertank 3D had been a good start, but wolfenstein 3D gave him the opportunity to really cut loose, and in response to formgen raising its concerns, he added much more violence to the art assets, the levels being dotted with skeletons and corpses, and tom hall and john romero recorded themselves screaming almost random phrases in broken german to give voice to the enemy forces. the original three episodes of the game culminated in a final battle with hitler, resulting in one of the goriest deaths ever seen on a screen at the time. (it's worth noting that this isn't the first time hitler's been exploded in a video game...)

like doom, wolfenstein 3D saw a number of ports over the years; a mac version had updated graphics, but the one that most people remember is probably the SNES version, which is infamous for its censorship. gone were the nazis (hell, the bad guys didn’t even speak german anymore!) gone was the blood (it was sweat instead) and hitler himself was replaced by the generic “staatmeister.” the development of the SNES version is a particularly sore memory for id software, in part due to this censorship and in part due to the initial contractor (rebecca heineman) assigned to the porting project going AWOL.

wolfenstein 3D has a long legacy. the serious tone of castle wolfenstein had given way to a grindhouse vibe, stripping away complexity to leave one of the first pure action FPS games, where you go from point A to point B while killing everything in your way and occasionally using keys to progress. while its design was primitive compared to later games, with strictly orthogonal walls and an unchanging height, it proved the potential of the 3D engine for creating realistic environments. while the franchise has seen a couple of revivals, most recently in the utterly brilliant wolfenstein: the new order, it's wolfenstein 3D that laid the groundwork for the future, making the first person shooter popular and proving that shareware distribution was, for the time, a viable method of publishing games.

and besides, everybody loves dead nazis.

pathways into darkness

speaking of dead nazis...

if id software were once the rock gods of PC gaming, bungie were the jazz masters of mac gaming. formed by a pair of college students in the early 90s, they got their start assembling and shipping copies of minotaur: the labyrinths of crete by hand, which is a seriously humble origin given the legendary status bungie holds today as the creator of halo and destiny. their early focus on mac development was largely due to jason jones, who grew up on apple computers, but also because the field was a lot more open in mac development at the time.

after the moderate success of minotaur, they set about working on a first person shooter, inspired by wolfenstein 3D. minotaur and bungie's earlier game operation: desert storm were quirky in an intellectual kind of way; operation: desert storm came with a glossary of military terms and trivia, and authentic maps of the kuwaiti theater of operations during the gulf war. pathways into darkness was no different, which set it apart from the mindless fun of wolfenstein 3D. initially intended to be a first person version of minotaur, they chose to write an original story instead, a lengthy tale of a secret special forces mission to stop the awakening of a dreaming cosmic monster deep beneath a pyramid in the yucatan peninsula. along the way one can speak to the dead that litter the pyramid's corridors, ranging from the player character's special forces comrades to a lost nazi expedition that had entered the pyramid in the late 1930s looking for a potential superweapon.

in terms of technical stuff, the engine isn't a purely orthogonal game like wolfenstein 3D is. instead, walls are quite narrow, with beveled ends; while the underlying map design does seem to be grid-based, the grid squares appear to be much smaller than the massive blocks of wolfenstein 3D, which allows for narrow columns built out of in-game architecture rather than having to use sprites. lighting is not universal, either, and visibility fades into black off in the distance, though a flashlight pushes the darkness back a little. the initial version of the game used gradients for the walls and floors; the powerPC version finally texture maps these.

at times, the game comes off feeling more like a cross between a survival horror and an adventure game with dungeon crawler elements; a text parser requires some specific keywords for talking to the dead, and some of the puzzles are obtuse as hell, and it's entirely possible to play yourself into a corner without realizing it for hours. meanwhile, time actually passes as you play, and you only have five in-game days to complete your task. a weight limit determines how much you can carry, and healing options are limited to rare blue potions and sleeping, the latter of which uses up time. ammo is scarce until you find a certain magical item that lets you create duplicates of anything you put into it, and enemies respawn, furthering the constant threat. saving the game can only be done at save points, which are far and few between.

in spite of its difficulty (or perhaps because of it) pathways into darkness was a smash hit; it was the first native first person shooter for the mac (not counting the colony) and launched bungie into stardom, enabling them to expand their operations.

unfortunately, accessibility to this fantastic game is quite limited. mac owners will be pleased to know that it's available for free on the app store; for everyone else, there's basilisk II (or sheepshaver for the powerPC version) but setting up can be quite the chore.

in addition, art game genius brendon chung has devised his own spin on the early hours of the game in the form of doom 3 mod pathways redux.

ultima underworld: the stygian abyss

ultima and its major competitor wizardry are probably the two greatest influences on RPGs, east and west. a lot of the things we take for granted in RPGs now were invented and codified by these two series. for most of the early 80s they dominated sales, but by the early 90s they'd lost their grip on the market as their successors began to take over, especially final fantasy and other japanese series. ultima VI had shown the franchise still had the chops, but wizardry was fading fast, and by the 1990s only a cult following in japan really still cared about it. as the cRPG scene began to go dormant in the face of the rising wave of jRPGs, the bigger names began to experiment, tossing out a few spinoffs in an attempt to remain relevant. most of them weren’t successful -- the worlds of ultima series seem to have gone forgotten -- but there was at least one runaway hit.

ultima underworld: the stygian abyss began as the brainchild of paul neurath, who worked at origin systems, the company richard garriot founded to aid in publishing his ultima series, and which had grown into a huge company by the 1990s. neurath was dissatisfied with the simplistic graphics of earlier dungeon crawler games like wizardry, and wanted to create something that built on suspension of disbelief. he founded blue sky productions (not to be confused with bluesky software, creators of vectorman) with the intent of developing this game. the famous demo shown at CES 1990 came out of the early work; origin was so impressed that they offered a publishing agreement and suggested the game be rewritten as an ultima spinoff.

i've written a lot in this space about immersive sims; one of the more invisible aspects of immersive sims, particularly the "traditional" ones like thief and deus ex, is a development process that is perhaps more organic than that of other studios. ultima underworld was developed in such an environment, and is often described as the first immersive sim -- and indeed, it would seem to fit by most any standards, including mine. stepping away from the grid-based movement of classic dungeon crawlers like dungeon master or, yes, wizardry, realtime movement combined with more tactile world interaction pushed ultima underworld out of the hoary old dungeon crawler genre and into something a little more interesting. there's actually a surprising amount of things to see and do, and the entirety of the dungeon is open to you. in a very real sense, ultima underworld laid the groundwork for everything from deus ex to skyrim to dark souls, on top of being leagues ahead of the competition in terms of technology, with fully-textured everything, curved walls, sloped ceilings and floors, and some early 3D models. it's also singlehandedly responsible for launching the career of warren spector, whose previous production work had been wing commander II and one of the worlds of ultima spinoff games. spector would go on to produce system shock, which was in a very real sense the sci-fi counterpart to ultima underworld, and the rest is history.

of course, a game with ultima underworld’s cult popularity can’t go without a sequel. by september 1992 origin was forced by money issues to sell to electronic arts (a shocking move given garriot's long-running hatred of EA founder trip hawkins.) blue sky ended up merging with lerner research, a small outfit that mostly did flight sims, to form looking glass technologies, and it was under these auspices that ultima underworld II: labyrinth of worlds was created in 1993, with much stronger ties to the ultima franchise than its predecessor. years later, arkane studios (they of dishonored fame) would create a spiritual sequel called arx fatalis. and just as the ultima series lives on in garriot's upcoming shroud of the avatar, so too will ultima underworld, in underworld ascendant.

i'm on record as saying i strongly dislike ultima as a series, finding them to be mostly unplayable and difficult to take seriously, and i think garriot is a hack resistant to change, even positive change that would make his games more accessible to people other than crazy assholes who speak in faux-old english in their daily life. i find ultima underworld's controls to be clunky and its historical slowness on DOSbox has long precluded me from being able to get into it. but even i must admit that ultima underworld, and ultima as a whole, are among the most influential games ever made, which is why whenever some gaming site talks about gaming history and ignores the franchise and its influence on everything from final fantasy to bioshock, i have to wonder just how lazy they really are.

this article is a complete rewrite of an earlier entry.

history of FPS masterpost

so i’m playing blood 2: the chosen

i never really got a chance to play blood 2 very much; initially it ran like shit on my PC, and in later years i simply couldn’t get it to work properly. but the bits and pieces i played, i’m coming to realize, were at least a little influential on me -- the semi-futuristic setting (in that inimical 90s style) with its gloomy blues and greens mixed with almost random gore and dumb jokes everywhere is such a bonkers juxtaposition i can’t help but wonder if my imagined version of it was more influential on me than the actual game ever was.

it’s working fine for me btw, at least so far

return of the immersive sim, 2007-2008

bioshock

system shock 2 is one of those seminal games, a cornerstone for future games, something to emulate. quite a few games -- mostly sci-horror -- have drawn from it; aliens vs predator 2, doom 3, and later alien: isolation all take cues from it, which makes its relative obscurity all the sadder. a big part of that, however, is due to the fact that for many years the system shock license -- and indeed the separate licenses for both games -- has been a gigantic fucking mess.

irrational games, the developer of system shock 2 under the auspices of looking glass studios, wanted to do a sequel; however, electronic arts nixed the idea, and irrational, after deciding not to rehash the cyberpunk theme again anyway, decided to make a spiritual sequel instead.

the first couple of drafts were particularly strange -- with themes of cult deprogramming and abandoned nazi bunkers. the main thing left behind from the nazi bunker idea was the concept of genetic manipulation.

the end result, of course, was quite different from the early drafts. an art deco orgy of tremendous opulence, the game attempted to meaningfully tackle concepts like laissez-faire capitalism and objectivism, using a plot centered around genetic manipulation to drive conflict. a pretty ambitious idea, all told, though ken levine is nothing if not ham-fisted, and the game presented a disconnect between what the story seemed to advocate and what the game expected you to do. 

there were other problems with the game. first, the game had been marketed to two separate groups in two separate ways. to old-school PC gamers who remembered 1999′s system shock 2, it’d been touted as a spiritual successor. to everyone else, it’d been marketed as a story about hubris and objectivism with an art deco, 1950s-style setting. it succeeded in the latter -- but the former proved unsatisfactory to the majority of PC gamers -- a wretched, entitled lot if there ever was one.

oh, the flaws were endless! gone was the inventory management (thank fuck.) gone was having to pay money to use the resurrection chambers (which resulted in a ludicrous argument where someone posited that because theoretically you could just charge a big daddy with a wrench and die over and over with no resource loss the game had no challenge. i shit you not, someone actually said that.) gone was the RPG-style character development where you had to put points towards one skill or other with limited points to use (which i honestly thought was kind of silly anyway.) gone was the luck-based hacking, replaced by a pipe dream knockoff -- which could be pretty annoying, but system shock 2′s hacking is utter garbage.

there were other changes but those were the ones that drew the most ire. i won’t lie -- i spent a few years being angry at bioshock for not being system shock 2. then i realized wait no that’s fucking stupid and learned to enjoy bioshock as its own game, and though it’s a little dated now it certainly maintains its own value as a game.

(note: this was written before the remastered version came out, which i have not yet had a chance to play.)

fallout 3

to hear old-school fallout fans tell it, nobody's been more hard done by than them. depending on how puritanical they are, some even consider fallout 2 a slap in the face of the franchise, with its over-reliance on humor and pop culture references. then interplay did its best to drive the franchise into the ground; fallout tactics was an okay squad tactics game in the vein of jagged alliance, but the console-only fallout: brotherhood of steel was like if gauntlet was dropped on its head as a baby and exposed to too much nu-metal, and a planned official third main game, known to fandom by its development name, "van buren" was never finished when interplay shut down 2003 after having attempted to stave off bankruptcy for years. due to years of poor management and struggling to compete, the company had been hemorrhaging money and talent since the 90s -- fargo himself bailed in 2001 to form inXile, leaving caen in charge. under caen, several studios had been closed and projects canceled, and he tried to leverage the company's most popular titles to bring more money in. it failed.

interplay was effectively dead, and so was fallout. the legal proceedings that followed would take years. in an effort to pay off creditors, interplay licensed the fallout IP to bethesda for three games, then sold it entirely a few years later. there's actually a somewhat complex -- and nasty -- legal case surrounding this; the fallout wiki breaks it down rather well.

the fallout fandom immediately lost its shit.

see, bethesda were a bad company. they made bad games. morrowind was kinda okay, but oblivion was consolitis-infected casual shit for babies and not a TRUE RPG because reasons. bethesda would ruin fallout! OBLIVION WITH GUNS!

bethesda ignored the hysteria and had been working on a new fallout game since originally licensing the IP in 2004, released the game in late summer 2008. the first numbered fallout game in 10 years, it was a drastic change in gameplay. where fallout 1 and 2 had been more comparable to the middle ultima games -- isometric RPGs with a point and click interface -- fallout 3 was, essentially, well, oblivion with guns.

there's more to it than that, obviously, but that's about the gist of it: it was a first person (or third person at the touch of a button) action RPG in an open-world sandbox that had far more granularity to it than even fallout 2's sprawling mess of locations.

it had some flaws. for one, the shooting never really felt completely right; a lack of iron-sights was part of it, but there was no sense of "oomph" to it. this is mitigated in part by VATS; in an attempt to recreate the turn-based combat of fallout classic, pressing the appropriate key or button (default V on keyboard) would pause the game and zoom in on an enemy, allowing the player the chance to pick their shots, with a percent chance to miss. for the RPG player this was a somewhat satisfactory confession; the action gamer might find it stifling to be forced to use it to get around the clunky combat.

the engine, of course, was borrowed from oblivion; by this point it was starting to look a little dated. some people complained about the green tint over everything -- an odd artistic choice to be sure, especially when the “real is brown” trend was in full backlash at the time, but in hindsight, it gives a bit of visual character to the game that has persisted. the famous “fellout” mod lays bare the real problem with the game -- a very muted palette in all its texture choices.

probably the chief complaint, common with bethesda games, is the writing; depending on the quest, it was quite spotty at times, and the main quest especially was underwhelming. part of the problem was everything centered around the player, which is a typical problem for bethesda. worse is the player dialogue had an air of stiffness to it -- it didn't seem natural. (though of course there's a difference between speaking naturally and saying "tag-teamed by giant fuckbots.") there's plenty of other criticisms, but this isn't the space for that.

what fallout 3 did have was a game that had far more to explore than its predecessors, or indeed oblivion; an oppressive atmosphere (one that not even a mod to remove the green tint could erase!) and a few genuinely good quests. it also had some decent DLC; point lookout in particular was a moody, atmospheric piece that drew players away from the wasteland surrounding washington DC into the the swamps to the south, and the culmination of the main quest in the pitt gave an early hint at the kind of dillemmas one might expect from new vegas. 

while those of certain temperament would deny it, the influence of deus ex on fallout 3 is blatantly obvious -- and lead designer emil pagliarulo has gone on record saying as such. and it's easy to see where deus ex fits in; depending on how you've built your character, you have multiple methods for dealing with a given situation. skill development is important, and most skills are useful in some fashion. this multifaceted approach is classic deus ex -- hell, it's classic immersive sim, period.

fallout 3 didn’t get everything right, nor did it get everything wrong. but what it did do was introduce fallout to the world; fallout 1 and 2 had been consigned to the mists of 90s PC gaming, clunky by modern standards on top of being difficult to obtain legally (at least until they were released on gog.com -- and then removed due to legal issues, and then put up for sale again... hopefully for good this time!) fallout: brotherhood of steel wound up in landfills where it belongs. fallout 3 was a blockbuster, a multiplatform hit from a company that had scored big on bringing the elder scrolls to console with morrowind. fallout might’ve been doomed to obscurity if not for bethesda’s rescue of the franchise. and whatever your feelings might be on fallout 3, without fallout 3 there never would have been a new vegas.

then again, some people might have preferred that...

metal gear solid 4: guns of the patriots

for pretty much most of the last 30 years, every time hideo kojima released a new metal gear game he would declare it to be the last one. as we all know, that didn't work out. metal gear solid 4 marks no less than the 5th time kojima would go back on his word to revisit the franchise -- and there's been a couple more since! (then again, with his exit from konami, he might have to keep his word this time if only by default!)

in a lot of ways, however, MGS4 feels like a conclusive end to the story that started way back in '87; it's a farewell letter to fans, allowing them to look back on the franchise up to this point and see the long, winding trail that solid snake has travelled, while also exploring new forms of gameplay as well as a further exploration of the links between player, console, and game -- in this case, the console being the playstation 4, the series' first 7th-generation release. in a sense, all this reflects in snake himself, who is rapidly aging, and he's tired, and is keeping on through sheer force of will and new technology to help him.

unlike previous games, the game is divided into several parts; while MGS2 had two separate sections, the first one was far shorter than the latter and served as a prologue more than anything else. MGS4 goes whole hog and just splits the game up into multiple missions, 5 in all, each with their own conceit. on top of this, a few fundamental changes to controls had been made; the legacy of resident evil 4 can be seen when holding down the aim button, as the camera shifts behind snake's shoulder. the camo system that first appeared in MGS3 was expanded upon; snake's sneaking suit now acts like a chameleon, changing its appearance to hide snake provided he stays still. aided by a small helper robot, reminiscent of the tiny metal gear that helped gillian seed in the sega CD adventure classic snatcher, snake hunts for clues to track down revolver ocelot, who has now completely been subsumed by the liquid snake personality, and is at war with the mysterious patriots, who have engineered a global economy based on warfare.

while the first two parts of the game seem to be reminiscent of previous games (and perhaps a bit of call of duty 4, as well), it's the third section where the gameplay really seems to shine. set in a gloomy european city reminiscent of prague at night, it's no less than thief 2's famous "trace the courier" mission writ large. the fourth section sees snake returning to shadow moses island, the setting of metal gear solid 1; it's fallen into disuse and is empty and abandoned, but returning to the place brings back a lot of memories for snake and the player. you're even given a pixellated MGS1 snake mask!

perhaps the single greatest complaint about the game is the heavy use of cutscenes; where MGS3 had toned down extensive cutscene use following criticisms about the end of MGS2, MGS4 returned to it in full force with roughly 8 hours of cutscene time -- the final cutscene alone holding the guinness world record at a whopping 71 minutes. of course, proportionally it's on par with MGS2, with about 12 hours of gameplay, while MGS2 tends to average out at 8 hours gameplay and 6 hours of cutscenes. (and who says games are getting shorter?) it's also important to remember that the game was intended to be a conclusion to a story that was 6 entries long at the time (7 if you include portable ops) so some lengthy wrap-up is to be expected, especially in a franchise as story-heavy as this one.

i'll never actually understand the cutscene complaint. the series has always been experimental, and by MGS1 had become something of an auteur work, weaving multiple disparate thematic elements together to analyze and critique everything from nuclear proliferation to the way gamers idolize and outright fetishize iconic characters. the long cutscenes are part of that, and by this point anyone getting into the franchise knows, or ought to know, what they're signing up for. kojima himself always wanted to make movies anyway; when the playstation 1 gave him the technology to do the next best thing, he took the opportunity and the rest is history.

as a game it's superb, cutscenes and all. as a work of artistic expression it's an incredibly emotional farewell (until peace walker, anyway) for one of the most popular and yet divisive series of all time, and serves as a highwater mark for the playstation 3's library.

HISTORY OF FPS MASTERPOST

id tech 3, 2001-2005

return to castle wolfenstein

id software were in something of a transitionary period at the close of the 20th century. the late 90s had proven to be successful, if tumultous, for the renegade studio. quake had redefined a genre; its immediate sequel, while not as groundbreaking, was a solid shooter rounded out with with some rudimentary experiential storytelling. quake 3 had gone back to basics as what's probably the greatest pure deathmatch game ever made. but the office culture at id had become toxic; its payroll had gone from about 8 people to a few dozen. john romero had left under a cloud; sandy petersen, perhaps the single greatest creative force behind quake 1, left in 1997 to join with ensemble (they of the age of empires series); and american mcgee's employment did not last past the release of quake II -- for very similar reasons of creative differences as tom hall and john romero before.

what's more, while quake 3's engine was quite advanced for its time, it was clear that there had to be more in store. john carmack, ever the workaholic, was ready to begin research on something new -- and so what started off as a complete rewrite of the engine used for quake 3, cleverly titled id tech 3, turned into a far greater project that we now know as id tech 4 -- and doom 3 to showcase it.

of course, this was an undertaking that would take years. in the meantime, id needed something to keep the lights on. enter gray matter interactive, formerly known as xatrix interactive (they of redneck rampage and kingpin: life of crime infamy.) renamed and reorganized by activision software, they were teamed up with nerve software (founded by ex-id employee brandon james and staffed mostly by ex-rogue entertainment employees) for the express purpose of making a sequel to wolfenstein 3D.

the quake 3 engine was quite versatile; with a better color depth than its predecessors, and certainly more technical and graphical features, it was the ideal choice for resurrecting the venerable wolf3D. but how to capture the vibe of the original game while bringing it into the 21st century? how to make it seem fresh and new, while still maintaining the sense of old-school danger and adventure? the obvious answer, of course, was to crib heavily from existing -- and influential -- games.

goldeneye 64 exerts a clear influence, even aside from the addition of an objectives checklist; and why not? classic spy action, particularly of the bond variety, is heavily rooted in the espionage work -- and attendant glamourous films -- of world war II. and indeed the hints of it lie in wolfenstein's history: after all, wolfenstein 3D was based on silas warner's mid-80s classics castle wolfenstein and beyond castle wolfenstein, complete with escaping from nazi imprisonment. while the 3D entry was a decidedly more arcade-style shooter, warner's games were altogether a different beast: a top-down viewpoint, having to rifle through enemy corpses for items (ammo, keys,) using nazi uniforms to fool guards, and using stealth to avoid confrontation. return to castle wolfenstein, both in name and in deed, was truly a return to silas warner's vision: rather than a pure action game, return had elements of stealth, with a couple of entire levels being built around the concept. and indeed it was often favorable to maintain stealth even when being caught didn't result in a failure state; better to catch enemies off guard than have to deal with an angry cadre of nazis coming after you.

while the gameplay borrowed from goldeneye, there was no denying the influence of half-life; unlike previous wolfenstein entries, return actually had a story, told through cutscenes, NPCs, and written papers littering the environs. BJ blazkowicz, lantern-jawed hero of wolfenstein 3D, would return, but like gordon freeman, he's a silent protagonist, preferring to let NPCs do the talking. the levels, rather than being largely abstract, downright labyrinthine mazes like wolfenstein 3D, were altogether more carefully crafted. FPS games in the post-half-life era had become a bit more linear and cinematic than their predecessors, and return was no different; however, there was plenty of room to maneuver in most cases, and while you often had a goal of moving from point A to point B there were plenty of places you could poke around, and sometimes even find alternate routes. levels often twisted around themselves as well, making good use of vertical space. and there were some surprises, such as being able to bypass a level almost entirely by hitching a ride on machinery that would carry you, unnoticed, through a missile base.

perhaps the least-likely influence could be found in the thief series, at the time a mere two entries in; thief is the obvious inspiration for the village of paderborn, one of two mandatory-stealth missions. the village itself is quite medieval in affect, making it an obvious parallel for thief's fantasy steampunk setting, and of course the requirement of stealth brings to mind thief as well. but the thief influence stretches a bit further than that, going into straight up horror, with crypts full of rotting corpses, often armed with shield and sword, rising up to assault the living -- and they take no sides in the war. with this in mind, a clear line can be drawn from the "tomb of the blind dead"-esque former saxons to the RPG-rooted shuffling corpses and laughing undead warriors of thief.

while the early wolfenstein games were pretty plainly influenced by the derring-do of allied agents, wolfenstein 3D took things in a bit of a weird-science direction with the introduction of dr. schabbs and the mutant army that is the focus of the second episode. return to castle wolfenstein, of course, would play up this element, with much of the plot centering around the creation of supersoldiers and the introduction of what would become the most identifiable arch-villain of the entire modern wolfenstein series, dr. wilhelm strasse -- a classic nazi supervillain if there ever was one. red skull would be proud.

however, it was the standalone expansion pack, spear of destiny, that introduced an element of the occult into wolfenstein, being centered around the mythical lance of longinus, the spear that according to legend pierced the side of christ on the cross. while the nazis' preoccupation with the occult had long been a source of speculation (as well as a popular theme in entertainment -- for example raiders of the lost ark) the study of nazi links to occultism had never been taken seriously in academic circles until nathaniel goodrick-clarke's seminal book "the occult roots of nazism." so while there is still an element of pulp fiction to nazi occultism as a theme, there is at least evidence that it's grounded in reality. much of the game's plot is a successful marriage of nazi occultism, the classic whacky nazi weird science that comic books and films have made money on, and of course good old fashioned wartime spycraft. the hunt for the truth behind the nazis' dark secrets would lead blazkowicz across multiple locations, starting of course in the infamous castle and threading throughout axis territory (including norway) before culminating in a return to castle wolfenstein for the final battle, where the paranormal division of the SS, with the aid of one madam blavatsky (!), attempt to resurrect heinrich I, a legendary anglo-saxon warlord and founder of medieval germany. it goes about as well as you'd expect.

return to castle wolfenstein was by all means a success. a big part of this was because of the multiplayer, developed by nerve software; the WW2 FPS craze was just getting into full swing, and return's multiplayer came at just the right time, and when wolfenstein: enemy territory expanded upon it it sealed this era of wolfenstein in history as a major player in the online competitive play scene at the turn of the century. what's more, return to castle wolfenstein proved, for the second time in the franchise, that there was value in revisiting a once-popular, but dormant, IP, and reintroducing it to a modern audience, paving the way for doom 3 just a scant three years later. and of course, the engine would go on to live forever in the call of duty franchise.

american mcgee's alice

it's hard not to feel bad for american mcgee; first, his mom named him that. then his tenure at id software lasted but a few short years, right when the office culture was at its most toxic, though he certainly made his mark -- id's association with nine inch nails had NIN superfan american mcgee all over it. and in 2006 he was responsible for the atrociously awful bad day LA, his own personal daikatana.

but somewhere between his ignominous firing and bad day LA he joined up with rogue entertainment and stamped his name on a starkly disturbing little number called american mcgee's alice. (it's not that he wanted his name on it -- electronic arts insisted, since his association with doom and quake would drive sales.) disney's alice in wonderland this most certainly wasn't: AMA was decidedly darker in tone, a towering monument to the early 2000s goth zeitgeist, with themes of mental illness, violence and despair in a twisted, tim burton-esque take on wonderland. anyone familiar with the 1951 animated classic, or indeed the original lewis carroll book, would likely be taken aback by the sorry state wonderland and its denizens are in. it could be fairly claimed that the disney film had a psychedelic quality, and indeed it seems to be a popular film with those who partake in recreational drug use. in that particular sense, american mcgee's alice is one hell of a bad trip, and it'll only get worse before it's over.

the quake 3 engine might not have been the most obvious choice for the game. rather than a first person shooter, as mcgee was accustomed to making, the game was third person action, a few short months before max payne would make its debut. but the engine proved versatile enough for the job; after all, anachronox was a third person game in the quake 2 engine AND it managed to not look like shit in the process. it helped that ritual entertainment's heavy metal FAKK2, while awful, had added a number of improvements to the engine, and it was this particular version of id tech 3 that rogue would license. as a result, the game played well, it looked great, and its sinister take on a popular children's story made it a cult classic. chris vrenna, formerly of nine inch nails (and a frequent contributer to sound design for id-related games in the early to mid-00s) would compose the soundtrack, creating a nightmarish soundscape built on childrens' music boxes and the like. level design was brilliant, often mindbending; in some places, level architecture would assemble itself before the player as they walked. many levels had a unique conceit to it, giving it an adventure game vibe. all in all, it was really quite a stunning game, which is why it's a shame that it's almost forgotten now. part of that almost certainly has to do with the fact that in 2000 it had to compete with the likes of quake 3, unreal tournament, deus ex, system shock 2, and diablo; with no multiplayer to be had, the cancellation of the PS2 port, and with a far stranger theme than its contemporaries, perhaps it was fated to be consigned to the cult classic bin.

american mcgee's alice is probably a game that you can't really make twice. while a sequel was released in 2011 to some acclaim, there's a certain charm to the original that seems hard to recapture. the turn of the century was a weird goddamn time to be alive, an era of JNCO jeans, purple ketchup, and CD cases; south park was huge, and so was invader zim, and everyone had seen the matrix. AMA seemed to fit nicely into all this, particularly with its themes of mental illness -- these days mental illness seems to be handled altogether differently, though some might say for the better.

in spite of its relative obscurity in the shadow of screaming matches over the morality of grand theft auto 3 and other media unpopular with moral guardians, it still managed to be the source of ~computer game controversy~ (albeit really indirectly.) in 2003 mcfarlane toys launched a new line based on the wizard of oz -- like american's take on alice, it was a twisted spin on a classic children's story. in light of that, and american having pitched an alice-style game also based on the wizard of oz, penny arcade decided to run a strip parodying american mcgee and todd mcfarlane. the impetus for this seemed to be gabe/mike krahulik's disdain for american mcgee and his oz proposal:

you might be familiar with the parody, of course -- as it was the cause of some legal issues for penny arcade. by choosing to include strawberry shortcake, they drew the ire of american greetings (i.e. who you buy cards from if you don't like hallmark.) apparently, they OWN strawberry shortcake, and PA were issued a cease and desist order. rather than enter into what might be a protracted legal battle over fair use and parody, they chose to take the strip down and replace it with an explanation, including the email of the lawyer who sent the order. (now that's passive-aggressive!)

unfortunately, american mcgee's alice doesn't seem to exist on digital distribution platforms. while an updated version was included with preorders of the console version of alice: madness returns, there doesn't seem to be any chance of the game proper coming to modern audiences any time soon.

call of duty 2

time was, world war 2 was the go-to theme for FPS action. it seemed like a logical enough choice. medal of honor, return to castle wolfenstein and battlefield 1942 had made the setting cool. nazi germany made for easy, guilt-free villains, the combat was more close-quarters and grittier than today's long-range warfare, it easily sidestepped the issue of capitalizing on modern conflict in a post-9/11 world, and after nearly a decade of watching saving private ryan in high school history class, everyone wanted to storm normandy for themselves.

by 2005, though, market saturation had become a problem. with no fewer than 7 medal of honor games, not counting spinoffs, plus battlefield 1942, day of defeat, close combat: first to fight, wolfenstein: enemy territory, as well as call of duty 1 and its expansion, the WW2 FPS seemed to be absolutely friggin' everywhere. it was inescapable, and some of these games were quite bad to boot. into this arena came call of duty 2.

infinity ward's first entry into the battlezone, call of duty, stood out amidst a field of imitators for being a particularly high-quality title. infinity ward was made up of former electronic arts employees, responsible for the critically acclaimed medal of honor: allied assault; call of duty seemed like the logical next step from MOHAA, and it outshone even its primary competitors -- not hard given how bad some of the MoH titles were. infinity ward had made a name for themselves, and there was room for a sequel. something even better, even louder.

by this time, however, the quake 3 engine was starting to show its age. the last game to use it had been, well, call of duty 1, and that had come out in 2003. engines are difficult to make, however, and expensive to license; infinity ward thusly made the decision to revamp the engine. an entirely redone renderer was put into place, allowing for normal mapping, more realistic shadows, and other features that brought the engine a little further into the modern age (well, modern for 2005.) it lacked ragdoll physics, which were becoming increasingly common, but otherwise looked pretty good. infinity ward had gone out of their way to do a better job at creating more open battlespaces, improving the AI, and making combat more dynamic. captain price would return, cementing his place as a franchise mascot. the player's NPC fellow soldiers were improved on, with expanded battle chatter that made the game feel more realistic while also aiding the player in small but essential ways in hectic combat. perhaps the biggest change, however, was the removal of health packs; instead, regenerating health was introduced to keep players in the fight. just seek cover for a few seconds and you’re good to go. this was a controversial move, seen as ripping off halo, and has often been a target of criticism for the last 11 years.

it's worth noting that the improved renderer was just the beginning of the repeated frankensteining of the quake 3 engine. call of duty 2's iteration of the engine was dubbed IW 2.0; by call of duty: ghosts, that number would reach 6.0. it's hardly a linear progression, either; as the series has been split across two, then three separate studios, the engine would find itself forked repeatedly. the resulting mess is that while infinity ward continues to create new iterations to its engine, the most recent game, by treyarch, is operating on a heavily modified version of IW 3.0 -- the world at war engine from 2008. advanced warfare is, to date, the first game in the franchise since call of duty 2 to use an engine built almost entirely from the ground up -- only a few elements dating back to IW 2.0 remain.

call of duty 2 was, appropriately enough, a launch title for the xbox 360. bungie had failed to produce a new halo in time for the console's release; call of duty 2 provided an excellent stand-in for a launch lineup that was anemic at best (mostly sports games and a port of quake 4 that was hot garbage.) as a popular XBL multi title, it was enough to tide players over for the couple years until halo 3. call of duty 3, meanwhile, was a console only port that was poorly received -- but it gave infinity ward the time to work on the game that blew a kneecap off the world: call of duty 4.

HISTORY OF FPS MASTERPOST

immersive sim: an overlooked golden age, 2001-2004

metal gear solid 2: sons of liberty

metal gear solid was an absolute smash hit, at 7 million units becoming the 10th best-selling playstation 1 game of all time. it was good company, rubbing shoulders with the likes of two final fantasy games (7 and 8) and gran turismo. so it should be no surprise to anyone that there’d be a sequel; to further differentiate the series’ direction from its MSX/NES roots, the new game was to keep the “solid” in the title, tacking a 2 on it instead. it might just have been one of the most hotly anticipated games of all time: a new metal gear, on the new playstation 2! the hype was real. it was palpable. early trailers looked absolutely incredible, and the E3 2000 demo alone sold a lot of PS2s. by all accounts, the game looked and felt like an improvement over MGS1 in every way -- the graphical update alone was miles ahead of anything the playstation 1 could do, or even its contemporary competition the nintendo 64. it also seemed to greatly expand on the gameplay of MGS1, allowing the player to hide in lockers and make greater use of his environment. MGS2 is the reason i asked for -- no, demanded -- a playstation 2 for christmas in 2001.

after all, who didn’t want to continue the adventures of solid snake, action hero?

this, then, became the stage for which the fandom would explode, and kojima would reveal his master trolling skills, for the hero, solid snake, was only playable for the first few hours of the game, being replaced by a younger, altogether prettier protagonist, raiden, who at the time was the definition of bishōnen -- “pretty boy.” konami had gone to incredible lengths to hide this twist, even altering cutscenes in trailers to show snake instead of raiden. what’s more, the plot began to gradually morph from a straightforward action hero scenario -- something even MGS1 had been -- into an increasingly surreal examination of the information age, while also deconstructing action hero tropes and video game escapism. the entire game had been kojima’s master thesis on video games, their players and the expectations they have, and the rise of the digital age (remember that this game came out in 2001, right when the internet was starting to become the monstrosity it is today.)

so naturally the internet blew up.

oh, people were furious. they didn’t get the ending, found it to be a self-indulgent anti-establishment rant. they didn’t get the way the game poked with character relationships. they didn’t like raiden, called him “girly” (among other, nastier words.) they didn’t get the point of raiden, or why we were playing as him. they just didn’t get it.

which is pretty funny. it exposed gamers for what they were -- generally unsympathetic to anything that isn’t a straightforward action game, dismissive of deeper themes, and hostile to examinations of the relationship between game and player, on top of generally being immature and homophobic and deeply antagonistic to anything that might appeal to a female audience like raiden.

in spite of the backlash -- now considered to have been something of a tempest in a teapot -- the game has done quite well for itself (7 million copies sold according to wikipedia, and that’s not counting the substance re-release a few years later) and is now generally regarded among more level heads as a master class in post-modernism. in a very real way, MGS2 was the cyberpunk tale of the early 2000s, second only to the more traditional deus ex.

the elder scrolls III: morrowind | gog version

it’s probably not a secret to anyone who knows me that i don’t like this game very much. but, like with ultima, i must acknowledge its influence and popularity.

arena and its sequel daggerfall had been something of a sleeper hit among mid-90s cRPG enthusiasts, putting bethesda on the map. but it was morrowind that brought the series into the modern age, making use of a fully-3D engine (the once-venerable gamebryo) to create a more realistic, immersive setting, with hand-crafted environments to give it a personal touch rather than the randomly-generated locales of its predecessors, made all the prettier with some pretty advanced graphics for its time, such as pixel-shaded water. and while it’s much smaller in scope than the first two games, taking place wholly on a single large island, it’s comparatively much deeper in narrative breadth, with a more complicated plot.

it doesn’t have the interactivity of its contemporaries -- chief among them its main competition, arx fatalis (ironically both were major xbox releases.) but it did have a handful of memorable characters and a setting that was actually fairly unique for the fantasy genre, eschewing traditional medieval european stylings for a more eclectic mix of middle eastern and early japanese architecture. its cultures were altogether a bit more alien, as morrowind province is home to the dark elves (who, like their counterparts in other fantasy franchises, are pretty much the weird, kinda creepy cousins to more traditional elves.)

the game has some pretty severe flaws -- you can tell, because it’s a favorite among late 90s cRPG fans. the chief offender is the combat; despite the game being fully 3D, your combat skills operate more like they did in prior, sprite-based games, where your skill determines whether you hit or miss, rather than how much damage you do. this leads to some truly ludicrous situations where you can get right behind someone and backstab them 30 times, and it misses them completely. the much-vaunted writing isn’t perfect, either; the game isn’t completely voice acted, so most dialogue tends to be long diatribes from one faceless NPC or another with keywords for you to click on. the few characters that do matter tend to be either condescendingly didactic or a douchebag.

and then a cliff racer sticks it in your butt.

metal gear solid 3: snake eater

after MGS2 had, for good or ill, made its mark on gaming culture, the question naturally arose: when's the next one? what did kojima have planned? where could we possibly go from the post-modernist cyberpunk extravaganza that was MGS2 and especially its ending? the answer turned out to be back to the jungle.

it made sense. it was a jungle in which both versions of metal gear 1 took place, after all; in fact, it featured far more prominently in the NES version (complete with its own theme, unique to it.) pretty much everyone remotely familiar with the series knew this, and a lot of the pre-release hype played it up. but there was an added twist this time -- the game turned out to be a prequel. rather than play the solid snake we all knew and loved, we instead played his father, the two-time villain of the MSX metal gears. this was a new development; after all, he'd had very little real characterization. the most we got was a few lines at the end of metal gear 2, where he briefly laid out his intent to create a safe place for soldiers, not subject to the whims of government.

where metal gear solid 1 explored the post-cold war world of nuclear material proliferation, and metal gear solid 2 was a treatise on the dawn of the information age, metal gear solid 3 went back to the cold war itself, just after the assassination of president kennedy. nuclear tensions, betrayal, a bitter proxy war...

enter naked snake. (yeah, i know.) his mission? find and destroy the soviets' new superweapon, somewhere in the forest deep in southern USSR (around what might be considered the very northern edge of central asia,) rescue a defecting soviet scientist, and kill the boss, the united states' top special operative, snake's mentor, and a traitor.

of course, it's never as clear-cut as that...

as usual for a new metal gear game, the sheer amount of things you can do in the course of your tactical espionage action has increased in granularity, with an added wrinkle of an entirely new stealth mechanic. where previous games had relied solely on line of sight, you're outside for most of the game, and a big part of whether you're visible or not is your camouflage meter. using a combination of the right uniform pattern and camo makeup, you can make yourself nearly invisible to the soviet patrols. your tech is a little more primitve -- it IS the 60s, after all -- and so you can't rely on a radar anymore; instead, you have battery-powered active and passive radars that are a bit inscrutable to use. it's fine, though, because a lot of the game relies on first person view.

the other big change is a completely revamped health system. in previous games, health operated like most any other game (you lose health as you take damage, and regain health by powerups in the form of rations.) in MGS3, however, you have a stamina meter that is affected by a number of factors such as the weather and how hungry snake is. the fuller the stamina meter is, the faster the health meter refills. and how to keep the stamina meter up? the fastest way to do it: eat. and there's a lot of things to eat -- fruit, mushrooms, snakes...

in addition to major gameplay changes, MGS3 features a host of new ways to interact with the environment and even affect enemy encounters. it's entirely possible to find food or ammo stores and destroy them; doing so affects enemy troops' aim (as they're hungry and have the shakes) as well as how much ammo they can carry (they run out of ammo for their assault rifles faster, forcing them to rely on backup weapons.)

story-wise, it's not as crazy as MGS2, but it does have its fair share of twists and turns as befitting a 60s-style espionage tale, with a touch of apocalypse now for added grimness. in the 30 years the series has been around, MGS3 is probably kojima's greatest work, building on what made its predecessors great as well as laying the groundwork for how the series' gameplay conceits evolved from that point forward.

of course, it later saw a re-release under the added subtitle subsistence; in this are several major fixes (including to performance issues) and the addition of an adjustable third person camera, which can be switched to an overhead camera on the fly. this was one of the most requested features, not least because the expansive outdoor sections made keeping an eye on patrols difficult.

history of fps masterpost

jesus christ gearbox

suggestion for gearbox CEO randy pritchford: if you didn’t want to look like a dick, maybe not get into a twitter war with a libertarian socialist furry deliberately trying to start shit with you over a rights issue you have with someone else?

legacy of boris and arkady strugatsky’s roadside picnic, 1972-2010

immersive sim: a broader look back, 1994-1998

the elder scrolls I: arena

with a proper (re)definition of the term “immersive sim” as a design concept with a clear description of its characteristics, it behooves us to take a more critical eye and re-evaluate what games qualify, because when we actually get serious about defining the design ethos that shaped looking glass studios’ games and their influence it becomes clear that quite a few more games seem to follow along the same trends, coming at them independently.

it’s a generally accepted notion that the immersive sim has roots in ultima underworld, which itself is based on a franchise with roots in tabletop RPGs. quite a few people in western games development in the 80s and 90s were into D&D and other tabletop games; doom was conceived during one of id software’s regular play sessions. many developers had attempted to recreate D&D in video game format; the famous gold box series are one of the most well-known examples, but the elder scrolls is perhaps the most successful at not just bringing a campaign to the screen, but bringing an entire tabletop world to life. (i have a theory that this is literally the case, and the titular elder scrolls themselves, seldom seen, are actually parts of a real-world rulebook.)

this is actually quite ironic if you think about it, though, because arena didn’t start out that way. prior to working on arena bethesda had mostly made wayne gretzky hockey and terminator games; arena was their foray into an original IP, and was initially intended to be, of all things, a gladiator arena game. the player character and his team of fighters would travel from city to city fighting in arenas until they became champions in the imperial city. what started off as doing a few sidequests along the way turned into a drastically expanded game; before long, the game had turned into an RPG, focused on quests and dungeons, and the arena aspect was dropped altogether.

of course, being a 1994 game, and quite expansive for its time, arena, like all of its successors, is prone to bugginess and issues. the sheer size of the game (12 million square miles according to the manual) invariably means that much of the in-game content by necessity has to be randomly generated. this can lead to issues, especially if you exploit the random generation to get a more favorable dungeon condition, due to the game running out of memory. of course, on modern computers using DOSbox memory issues are much less common; however, other bugs remain. it’s kind of a constant with bethesda games, isn’t it?

while games such as legends of valour are cited as influences, a clear line can be drawn from ultima underworld to arena’s final state; both present a first person, free-movement RPG with a mix of dungeon-diving and conversation, letting you develop your own skills as you like, with a consistent world that obeys its own rules (except when the game breaks, of course.) and like ultima underworld it’s quite prototypical, but lays the groundwork for more influential, refined games in the future. this is the game that put bethesda on the map and made it a credible force in the cRPG business, which isn’t bad when you consider that the game sold almost entirely on word-of-mouth.

a word of note: arena and its sequel daggerfall are technically both free on the elder scrolls official website; however, if you buy morrowind on gog.com it comes with the first two games in a more immediately playable state.

king’s field

nowadays, japanese RPGs, particularly 90s ones, are assumed to be final fantasy or dragon quest clones; it’s a fair enough preconception, as they were at one time the dominant form of RPG on consoles for many years. but there was and is an underground fascination in japan with more traditional, first-person dungeon crawler games, dating all the way back to the 80s when ultima was king. wizardry was ultima’s big competition in 1985 and pretty much invented the most-imitated iteration of dungeon crawler that we see in the likes of dungeon master or legend of grimrock; its popularity in japan, along with several of its contemporaries, was immediate, and outlasted any sort of cultural cachet it had in north america, and the series has continued across the pacific long after wizardry 8 closed out the american development. its influence, of course, has persisted in the likes of etrian odyssey and of course shin megami tensei. i could go into detail about how important wizardry was to japanese RPGs but that’s a bit outside the scope of this post.

from software’s king’s field fits perfectly into this timeline; released in 1994, around the same time as the elder scrolls: arena, it hews very close to its dungeon crawler roots, and it shows. you’re alone in a haunted land with only a sword to protect you; the world you traverse is actually quite sprawling, and death lurks at every turn. (anyone remotely familiar with dark souls knows where this is going.) moody and oppressive, much of the game goes by with little fanfare. you have full freedom of where you want to go as long as you can find the necessary keys, but that doesn’t mean you’re not gonna get roflstomped if you take two steps in the wrong direction the minute you start.

the game feels a bit stodgy these days; combat is clunky, magic clunkier, and by today’s standards, its graphics are hideously ugly, but what do you expect? the game was a launch title for the original playstation -- in japan, years before the playstation even came out in the US. (really, though, how many consoles can you name that have a dungeon crawler as a launch title?) but it’s clear that from had a good thing going; three sequels plus a bunch of spinoffs, on top of their smash hit souls series.

it’s not a series for everybody; the 4th game is probably the most palatable, but they’re all quite rare. the first game was never localized in the US; in a classic case of final fantasy renaming, the 2nd game was sold as king’s field and the third game king’s field II. they didn’t even bother tacking a number on the US release of the 4th game. the playstation portable games never made it to the US at all, and the mobile games are almost certainly doomed to japanese obscurity. and none of these games are on the US PSN. a PS1 spinoff game, shadow tower made waves by actually getting a domestic PSN release, but the PS2 sequel, which again never came out in the US, is absent. so is eternal ring, by the way.

there is hope, however. in 2000, from released a game-making tool called sword of moonlight (amusingly titled after a recurring weapon that’s in basically all their games i think.) it’s essentially a development kit for the making of complete KF-style games. after a complete translation in 2009, an english-speaking community has sprung up around SoM and the series proper. it’s thanks to these people, and particularly sword of moonlight translator john osborne, that you can play english translations of KF1 and shadow tower 2, if you know where to look. the link for this game goes to the official community page, but any further digging is up to you. sword of moonlight boasts a remake of KF1, but i’m fairly certain you can find a translated playstation ISO (by osborne) as well. some knowledge of playstation emulation is required, of course.

metal gear solid

hideo kojima is something of a divisive figure in gaming circles. on the one hand he’s hailed as a visionary, known for pushing the envelope and using difficult, mature topics as central themes, such as nuclear warfare and genetic manipulation. on the other hand, he’s been described as a “diva” and difficult to work with, on top of some finding his approach to storytelling a bit much with far more attention to detail than is strictly necessary. and either way, he’s notorious for trolling players and fans.

in 1987, though, he was just a 20-something movie buff who’d decided a career in the video game industry would be more fun than film. his first year at konami was unsatisfying; relegated to the MSX division, he felt constrained by the hardware limitations and wished to work on NES/famicom games. when he was handed a struggling project and asked to make something of it, he quickly changed the project around to work within the constraints of the hardware. what had initially been intended to be a straight action game, the game couldn’t handle more than a few sprites and bullets on-screen at once. inspired by the film the great escape, he changed the game’s focus to stealth, placing it very early in the history of stealth games (sharing space with silas warner’s castle wolfenstein and mindscape’s infiltrator and that’s it) with a reduced focus on combat.

the game was a success, of course. the US version is considered a nintendo classic, despite major changes. it even spawned two separate sequels, both released in 1990. first came the US-only snake’s revenge, which wasn’t developed by kojima. by chance, the project lead happened to meet kojima on the train to work one morning and begged him to make a proper sequel; the result was metal gear 2: solid snake, which further refined the stealth elements and had greater detail both in graphics quality and story, but never saw life outside of japan for many years.

the series lay dormant for about 8 years; metal gear solid was kojima’s return to the series, after releasing policenauts and snatcher and several remakes of both. it was an instant smash hit, and with its success came kojima’s status as an international celebrity. alongside final fantasy 7 the year prior, solid presented an early glimpse of just how crazy video game fandom and anticipation can get. it’s not unusual, now, for blockbuster titles to be treated with the same level of anticipation as catholics waiting for a new pope, but back then video games were still very much a hobbyist pursuit in spite of a growing audience.

so how did a pretty-successful 8-bit stealth series turn into a mega-blockbuster playstation title almost overnight? by taking what by then was considered an established notion of how video game storytelling worked -- especially in the late 90s as full voice acting was becoming increasingly common -- and turning it all on its head. metal gear solid was as much a movie as it was a game; indeed, much of the game was spent either in radio calls, or in cutscenes. kojima’s earlier ambitions as a filmmaker showed through here; cutscenes were fully animated with the in-game engine, directed more like a movie than anything else. with an impressive cast of quirky characters and a deliberate attempt to tackle Serious Topics (as follows: mutually assurred destruction, the proliferation of stolen nuclear material, genetic manipulation, the role of soldiers, the glorification of war and how action movie tropes perpetuate it) with a surprising amount of attention to detail and use of documentary-style footage during cutscenes to emphasize a point, created a particularly unique cinematic vibe that is not often imitated.

the gameplay, however, remained true to the series’ top-down roots; in the normal course of playing, the camera remained top-down, following snake as he snuck about the gameworld, but would occasionally switch angles, either to highlight something, or to give a look of what might be waiting off-screen should snake lean up against a wall. the game also regularly played with the player; there was no fourth wall, with characters actually telling snake, i.e. you, how to use the controls. the game also made use of the playstation hardware in unusual ways. in one cutscene, a character who claimed to be psychic would attempt to read your mind; at this point the game would read what other games you had saves of on your playstation memory card and the character would comment on how many you had and even take special notice of konami-published ones; he would also, if you had the dual shock vibrating controller (which wasn’t standard playstation hardware at the time) make your controller vibrate with his telekinetic powers. it was a surreal scene that illustrated how kojima viewed the relationship between hardware, software and user.

it might seem odd to call metal gear solid an immersive sim. the series itself has been as divisive as its creator; some are turned off by the focus on cutscenes and long discussions on political and cultural issues (which is an interesting approach to take in what’s arguably supposed to be an action game!) it certainly meets the criteria in all the right ways, though. it has a level of interactive detail that allows for some interesting emergent gameplay, with a variety of approaches to most situations. kojima’s attention to detail is historically obsessive; it’s entirely possible, for example, to stick a brick of C4 on an enemy’s back without him noticing, and wait for him to get close to one of his buddies before setting it off. many of the items you come across have a number of different functions or states; your rations (which you use to restore health) can actually get frozen in the frigid climate of the alaskan archipelago. in general, however, in both execution and vibe, metal gear solid and its successors seem to share quite a bit with deus ex, particularly in terms of background detail and system interaction. certainly deus ex human revolution draws obvious visual and thematic influence from its sister series, so it’s not completely an insane idea. (they even share a voice actor, who voices characters that just so happen to be very similar to each other...)

PREVIOUS ENTRIES IN THIS SERIES:*

* this will be the last entry in this series to use this list; from here on out i will be linking to a masterpost that i will regularly update.