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Tag: Epic Games

  • Unreal: One epic mega game.

    Unreal: One epic mega game.

    In the several years I’ve been writing about retro FPSes on this blog, I’ve covered some of the biggest. Doom WADs. Quake mods. Half-Life mods. But there’s one particular game franchise that I haven’t really tackled in written form. One that was an absolute technical marvel when it was released in May 1998. One that would spawn a franchise, an engine, and cement the legacy of two game companies. I’m gonna talk about Unreal.

    Developed by Digital Extremes and Epic Games – then known as the superior-sounding Epic MegaGames – Unreal would end up being a critical darling, commercially successful, and a good incentive to get a 3D graphics accelerator card for your computer, just when those were starting to take off.

    You can’t deny, this opening sequence can get one hyped.

    The two companies had worked together on the popular Epic Pinball, and wanted to make a shooter that could shun the term “Doom clone” to utter irrelevance. It went through several years of development, at one point intending to be released in late 1997 to compete against id Software’s Quake II, but eventually released in May 1998: After the Q2 zeitgeist, but before the freight train that was Half-Life would change things in the FPS space forever. Even then, Unreal ended up leaving a massive impact on the gaming world.

    For this article, I played the OldUnreal patched version of Unreal Gold, a re-release of the game in 2000 which comes with the original game as well as the Return to Na Pali expansion pack. There might be slight differences between original Unreal and Unreal Gold, but I imagine they’re merely cosmetic.

    Honestly amazed I’m still standing after all this.

    You play as a nameless soldier, Prisoner 849, captured on a Skaarj alien ship called the Vortex Rikers. Suddenly the ship crashes, and you’re all alone as you escape the wreckage of the Vortex Rikers, which then opens to the world of Na Pali, a tranquil place invaded by the Skaarj. Through logs strewn about the area, the player must figure out how to stop the Skaarj’s control from Na Pali and be the savior of the imprisoned Nali race.

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  • Duty Calls: A silly Call of Duty parody.

    Duty Calls: A silly Call of Duty parody.

    The year is 2011. We’re nearing the home stretch of the 360 and PS3 console generation. We’re seeing really cool games that push the power of their hardware, while also being fun as hell to play.

    One day, while browsing on Twitter like I usually do, someone I followed retweeted this gem by one Clifford Bleszinski:

    (Note: This is a loose recreation of the tweet from various sources. In the years that followed, he since deleted the original tweet.)

    Naturally, being the curious guy I am, I checked out the website and found out there was a free game there. I download the 700MB installer, not knowing what to expect.

    Making something sound so generic is quite impressive.
    Making something sound so generic is quite impressive.

    Duty Calls: The Calm Before the Storm is a parody game that makes fun of the long-standing Call of Duty franchise. This is very apparent by the logo that makes fun of the old Call of Duty logo, to even that important disclaimer that Activision had nothing to do with it. Because the last thing they needed were lawsuits.

    Parodying games in other games is a fickle thing. Sometimes you can be right on point and make it funny, otherwise you end up just making half-baked references that fall flat and seem incredibly dated, like Duke Nukem Forever rejecting Master Chief’s power armor, saying it’s “for pussies.”

    With a parody like this, it can only go up from there, so let’s give it a try.

    Must be very boring for the army today...
    Must be a very boring day for the army…

    Our adventure begins with an introductory cutscene learning about some secret base, complete with a Call of Duty-style talking about how war has changed, and yet war never changes. It oddly reminded me of that song from Idle Thumbs about the wizard.

    After that, our intrepid shooterguy drops in with an M4 assault rifle and a secret base to find by some random commander dude. So let’s jump into the fray and fight the big bad.

    I could do a play-by-play, much like I did with my last article on CTU Marine Sharpshooter, but this game is short. I beat it in 10 minutes. Not only that, this game relies on such silly gags like the one below, thus if I showed you every gag you wouldn’t wanna play it, so here’s a sampling instead.

    Imagine this scene said by bored voice actors proclaiming you can’t stop this enemy. Then the game goes into slow motion so you can stop this enemy. It does that sort of stuff.

    Duty Calls throws a lot of jabs at Call of Duty, usually referencing its fairly linear nature, its over-emphasis on slow motion action scenes, even making fun of the silly rank progression of COD‘s multiplayer. The only thing it doesn’t make fun of is being penalized for going out of bounds. Oh well, can’t have everything, I guess.

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