You Found a Secret Area!

Tag: First-Person Shooter

Budget Shooter Theater #5: Serious Sam: The Second Encounter.

“Best played co-operatively.” It’s something that’s fairly obvious for some games: Left 4 Dead, Payday 2, Killing Floor, the works. These are the kind of games that are built from the ground up to be played co-op with friends or random players, but can also be played by yourself if you want to. To me, the term also applies to games that have a single player campaign, but is infinitely more fun with a few friends. Like Sven Co-op is for Half-Life. That describes Serious Sam, the chaotic shooter series, to a T.

I wanna know who thought to give Sam this 50s chiseled-guy-in-a-pulp-comic look.

After realizing the “Decision Wheel” I made was leading to my own picks rather than unique or random ones, I abandoned the idea and replaced it with a simple queue system where friends and viewers could request games to be played on future streams. As I was asking for requests, my friend Cambertian on Twitter suggested this one for me to try, and it was quite the interesting pick.

I’ve played Serious Sam games in the past, where I tried to play through the classic games solo through the HD remasters, but I never got very far in them. I was more successful playing through them co-operatively with a few friends, where I played through The First Encounter HD, Serious Sam 2 and even part of Serious Sam 3: BFE. Sadly the group I had to play Serious Sam 2 and 3 were from separate communities, and we had a hard time matching our schedules enough so we could finish 3, since one of them was from the UK whereas the rest of us, including friend of the site Bobinator, were based in the US. One of these days I might replay 3: BFE solo, but we’re here to talk about the original games.

Even for a 15-year-old game, it still looks pretty.

The Second Encounter is basically an expansion pack to 2001’s The First Encounter. It adds a few new enemies to its bestiary such as a pumpkinhead looking monster with a chainsaw, an Reptiloid Demon that throws homing fireballs, and even alien variants of the simpler headless foes of First Encounter. There’s a few new weapons in addition to the common arsenal of shotgun, tommy gun and rocket launchers, including the valuable sniper rifle – devastating against middle tier enemies – and the Serious Bomb, the game’s answer to the BFG.

There’s a few new locales like the jungle, some temples, even a snowy land, each area defining a certain episode of the game. These are much different than the aztec temples that are prevalent in First Encounter, and it brings a nice look to things.

A common sight in Serious Sam: Lots and lots of enemies.

Serious Sam is part of a genre I’d call “slaughter FPSes,” as they relate to the Doom community’s “slaughter map” design of straightforward levels and lots and enemies to kill. Many of the rooms in The Second Encounter throw loads of enemies in fairly open spaces, which isn’t particularly hard.

However, once I got partway into the second episode, the game starts ramping up the difficulty in an unfair way. They loved putting loads of Kleers – the skeleton monsters – in very cramped corridors, making it difficult to push through without getting stuck and repeatedly taking damage. The flamethrower was my best friend a lot in that section, as it killed them pretty fast.

(more…)

July 5, 2017
Budget Shooter Theater #4: Christopher Brookmyre’s Bedlam: The Game

The internet is a fascinating thing. It’s really easy to somehow stumble upon something you didn’t know existed, and then get enamored into giving it a try. That’s probably the best way for me to describe my experience with playing this game, which was the fourth game featured on Budget Shooter Theater. It’s probably the most obscure, as well.

Christopher Brookmyre’s Bedlam: The Game is a game based on a novel by Christopher Brookmyre (natch), a noted British author, whom sadly I was not aware of since I live in the United States.

I hadn’t really heard of this until I was watching Achievement Hunter-turned-Twitch streamer Ray “BrownMan” Narvaez, Jr. play this game, doing a blind run of this on Xbox One probably just to get achievements for it, something from his Achievement Hunter days that he still does. It seemed like an interesting little game, so I ended up looking for it on Steam and sure enough, there it was.

This was the third (and final) game I requested myself that I put on the “Decision Wheel,” just so I had a queue of games to play for this Budget Shooter Theater idea. The other two games were ones I had already played: The Ultimate Doom and the then-recent remaster of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. Ultimate Doom needs no introduction. Turok was something I wanted to try to see if it held up or was strictly a nostalgia grab.

Bedlam, on the other hand, was strictly unknown to me until I watched that stream. I was going in mostly blind, and I wanted to see if it was as good as it looked when Ray played it. Turns out, it’s surprisingly better than I expected.

Ahh, the days when games looked sharper before ugly OpenGL texture filtering…

The story involves Heather Quinn, who signed up for a new virtual reality machine that simulates video games. Little did she know, she was sucked into the world of video games instead. With the help of various people she meets in the various game worlds, she must fight her way out of Bedlam.

The moment I started playing, I was thrown into a game world not unlike Quake II. Though it goes by a generic name – Starfire – it clearly has the style and look of that mid-’90s era of PC gaming, which I thought was neat. Through my travels, I went through a WWII FPS not unlike Medal of Honor, a futuristic open arena similar to Halo or PlanetSide, a medieval world similar to games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, even an area that resembled Pac-Man. This is Bedlam‘s world in a nutshell.

Yet, oddly, the game also name drops notable locations like Black Mesa from Half-Life, and even mentions Call of Duty, despite all the games depicted in-game being fictional. Presumably it’s okay to reference those games without having to pay legal fees, but this might all be references that are still in the book, which I haven’t read. (more…)

February 26, 2017
Budget Shooter Theater #3: Turok: Dinosaur Hunter: The 2015 Remaster

Budget Shooter Theater was not going well. After playing the amazing Doom, I tried to play through the dreadful PC version of James Bond 007: Nightfire. That did not go well. In the only time I ever bothered to, I rage-quitted and moved onto the next game. The Decision Wheel gave me Turok: Dinosaur Hunter.

As opposed to other games on that list — which include future entries like Serious Sam and and Christopher Brookmyre’s Bedlam, this was one chosen by me because I wanted to pad the Wheel with options until there were enough people requesting stuff that it wasn’t necessary. I also was itching to try this game for a while, so now felt like a good time as any.

The version I played is the recent remaster on Steam, co-developed and published by Nightdive Studios. Nightdive’s been hard at work re-releasing older DOS and Windows 95-era games and making them work in modern machines (or at least putting a DOSBox wrapper with it). Most notably is reviving the long-dormant System Shock franchise, and even trying their best to bring No One Lives Forever back from the dead, among other notable revivals. Naturally it makes sense to bring back Turok.

Of course there would be a literal maze in a game like this…

The Turok game franchise is mostly known as a console series, where the main games were on Nintendo 64. However, the first Turok as well as its sequel Seeds of Evil did get PC releases, but rather than reverse engineer the game to work on modern machines like System Shock 2 or Aliens vs. Predator Classic 2000, the game’s assets — models, maps, sounds, and music — were ported to a proprietary engine known as the “KEX” engine. The engine is the same engine that handled the Doom 64 source port known as Doom 64 EX and would basically be the engine framework for Nightdive’s games going forward. As a result, this remaster is a mix of old and new: It’s like the console game, but not an exact port of the PC game. This might piss off some purists, but not me.

(more…)

January 19, 2017
Wolfram: A Wolfenstein 3D remake actually in 3D.

id software’s amazing run of first-person shooters in the ‘90s are in some of my top games of all time: Doom, Quake, even Quake III Arena was pretty good in spite of Unreal Tournament’s more fun, absurd nature. But one game I had a fondness for was Wolfenstein 3D.

For a long time, I tended to look at the more community side of these games, looking towards the mods and user-created levels people made. Even for something like Wolfenstein 3D, which is nothing but 90 degree angled floors, there was some charm and enjoyment from them. Hell, I even found some amount of enjoyment in the third-party Spear of Destiny mission packs that FormGen put out.

Wolfenstein 3D is a fairly simplistic shooter by modern standards, but it started laying the groundwork for what made their games tick: Exploring areas, defeating enemies quickly, and strafing around arenas in a quick pace. It’s operatic ballet but with guns and nazis. What happens when you try to make it work in an actual 3D engine and try to shoehorn in awkward mechanics that just don’t fit? You get Wolfram.

Already we’re off to a great start with this menu…

I have to give a shout out to the Video Game Music Preservation Foundation, which for some reason has an article dedicated to this game. Being a fan of the Wolfenstein games, I had to see if this was the remake of Wolf3D that would be better than the original, like how Black Mesa to Half-Life. Sadly, I was in for a world of disappointment.
(more…)

October 13, 2016
Let’s go to the target range with NRA Gun Club!

The National Rifle Association, better known as the NRA. A wonderful organization based in the United States that helps gun manufacturers with guns and trying to advocate gun safety… while blaming things like Mortal Kombat and American Psycho (?!) for causing violent shootings instead of the guns themselves.

I don’t get super-political on this blog, but you can probably tell my absolute disgust for the NRA. Gun regulation is a big problem here in the United States, what with lots of gun homicides and mass shootings happening almost regularly. The NRA often use scapegoats to distract from the real issues about guns in this country. Lots of countries in the world have already figured out gun laws, and yet we sit here with them blaming everything but the product itself.

It doesn’t surprise me that they would be absolute hypocrites when they blame video games, yet made their own game. Well, rather, they gave endorsement for a video game.

Look at all those gradients!

This is NRA Gun Club. A first-person shooter published by Crave and developed by our good friends at Jarhead Games. I’ve covered Jarhead’s stuff in the past, with such thrilling hits as CTU Marine Sharpshooter, which I wrote about here, as well as Navy SEALs: Weapons of Mass Destruction. As far as I know, this game would be their swan song, not living long enough to make it to the 360 generation. This would also be the sole game they made on the PlayStation 2, and it shows.

This game runs on the Gamebryo engine. Gamebryo must be proud to know the same engine that powered Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion also ran this wonderful game.

Or at least his first name, this game has a six character name limit.

After being introduced to the bland title screen, I am asked to make a profile name. Since this is based on the NRA, I’d thought it’d be nice to name my profile after Wayne LaPierre, the NRA executive vice president and mirror-universe Stephen King. He’s probably the most notable personality of the organization next to like, Charlton Heston.

The only mode with any sort of progression is Certification Mode. Here, there are four courses, each one unlocked after completing the previous one, with certain requirements needed to pass. There’s Plinking, Bullseye, Trap/Skeet and “Practical Shooting.” I’ll describe each one the best that I can.

This is probably one of the few games that you could genuinely say “looks like a PS1 game.”

The “Plinking” challenge involves rapid-fire scoring for points. Choose a weapon, shoot at targets, score points, repeat until time runs out. Most of the targets award 5 points, but some target like the cans award 10. Each of these are done in “Strings,” where the range is reset each time, with the final score averaged out of the best runs. If the average meets the minimum required score, it’s considered a passing grade.

The challenges are split between pistols, long range rifles and shotguns. Once you qualify in each challenge, it ends with a “Multi” course that combines all three weapons. Successfully pass that, and the Plinking challenge is complete.
(more…)

June 9, 2016
Rage and the Art of Reloading.

Alright folks, time for me to get a bit “technical,” as it were. This is one of these posts where I’m gonna talk briefly about a game mechanic and how it actually benefits the player subtly. I know most of my content is a bit more fluff, but hear me out on this one.

I recently beat id Software’s Rage, a solid first-person shooter/driving game hybrid. I was looking to play something after trying to beat Modern Combat 5, and this seemed like a prime candidate.

I seemed to go through a phase where I was playing a bunch of older id Software games to see their career trajectory, as earlier in the year I had ran through Doom 3 — the original, not through the somewhat inferior BFG Edition — just to see if it was bad as I remembered it. It actually wasn’t awful, and is a pretty good game. Hasn’t aged gracefully in the graphics department, but what has?

One of the more entertaining parts of the whole game. A shame it’s too short.

Which brought me onto playing Rage. As time has gone on, this game has been mostly forgotten by hardcore shooter fans, shoved off into the “oh right, that was a game” category that other id games like Quake 4, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and that 2009 Wolfenstein game have been victim to.

It was also a changing of the guard, being one of the last major games John Carmack worked on at the company before he left for Oculus, and with most of the original people who made some of id’s classics gone, it just seemed like id was in a weird career limbo where they had no idea where to go next. Basically, they went from being the pioneers of video gaming to attempting to be in with the modern shooter crowd, and failing in the process.

But enough about id software’s midlife crisis. I wanna talk about something this game does that people take for granted. Rage has two minor mechanics that while aren’t explicitly mentioned, but really help out the player. It involves the simple concept of reloading your weapons.

In most first-person shooters, when you reload, you can’t cancel out of the reload until it finishes, leaving you vulnerable to attack. Secondly, the reload animation has to play out fully before you can fire again. In a fast-paced shooter, it can be frustrating to have to wait for your dude to slowly tap a magazine into their assault rifle and pull the charging handle before being able to shoot again.

Rage doesn’t do that. If you start reloading mid-magazine and hold down the fire button, the reload is immediately canceled, letting you expend the rest of the magazine. Secondly, if you’re reloading from an empty magazine, you can hold down the fire button before the player pulls the charging handle, letting you skip the rest of the reload and get back to shooting quickly.

You can see this in the video I shot from one of the bonus Sewer levels, but there’s a better demonstration if you skip ahead to 1:53.

It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a huge help. Rage has you fighting between the quick and melee-heavy mutants, common grunts, and big boss monsters. The last thing you want is to have to watch a painstaking long reload sequence while having enemies take pot shots at you.

(more…)

March 20, 2016
Diving into the Windows 10 Marketplace with Modern Combat 5: Blackout.

For a while, I wasn’t going to upgrade to Windows 10. But then a friend convinced me of a few cool features, and I decided to finally take the plunge since it’s free as of this writing. Since my current PC was on Windows 7, I missed out on all the cool apps that came out during the Windows 8 era. After perusing the store, I found a few interesting games. Boy, I wasn’t expecting this…

It’s time for STERN MILITARY SOLDIER POSE

Modern Combat 5: Blackout is probably the most generic title for a game ever. This is the product of Gameloft, a French-based development studio known famously for their mobile phone and handheld games. Naturally, this is a “port” from iOS/Android devices, supporting cumbersome touch screen controls.

While I haven’t played the previous entries in the Modern Combat franchise, I am familiar with it. One of the games, Modern Combat: Domination, made it to consoles and I remember Giant Bomb covering it once. At the time, it looked like a mish-mash of Call of Duty 4 with a pinch of Counter-Strike‘s elements. By default, I go into any new game I play with mild skepticism and low expectations just so I don’t hype myself up for disappointment, so I wasn’t expecting much here.

This is a hell of a way to start a game…

You play as Phoenix, a mercenary for works for some corporation. With the help of a bald marine named Bull, you two storm through San Marco, escaping from evil terrorists, and eventually escaping a helicopter in a boat chase sequence. Pretty exciting for the beginning of a Call of Duty clone.

Is this some spirit animal allegory I’m not aware of?

Afterwards, Phoenix wakes up in Japan, taken over by raiders during some terrorist attack or something. I’ll admit, I barely remember the story of this game, and that’s coming from a guy who played through Battlefield 3 and 4, which had really unremarkable generic campaigns. But from what I gleaned from a wiki for the series, it’s basically double-crossing between various factions, and a surprise plot twist that the CEO of the Gilman corporation is also a mercenary soldier who caused the double-crossing. Hardly oscar-caliber story writing, but I got what I paid for. (Nothing.)

Something I noticed while playing was that a lot of the voice actors for this game are familiar to me. They’ve voiced characters in the Pokemon anime, mostly as minor characters. However, there is one voice I was surprised to hear: Jason Griffith, once the voice of a certain blue hedgehog, voices a minor character in this game. How the mighty have fallen, I guess.

One of the many classes you can choose from. You get Recon to start, and the rest require you to either grind levels or pay up to unlock.

Modern Combat 5 has a leveling system and unlockables. There’s a create-a-class option, weapons can be upgraded by using them in the game to unlock attachments and better weapons, and each class has special skills that are upgraded using SP. SP is gained between some missions, leveling up, and between events Gameloft put up. One thing I liked is how the rankings persist between both single player and multiplayer, which I wish more games did.

There are seven tiers of each weapon. While all the weapons are based of real guns, somebody at Gameloft thought that Tier 7 should be future-looking versions of old guns. The SMGs get a futuristic Thompson called the “Bromson,” Sniper rifles get a modernized Lee-Enfield called the “BSW 77,” and the pistol gets a future space Luger called the “Mrager.” I am not making this up. This is so ridiculous that I had to get screenshots of them:

Here’s the FUTURE SPACE THOMPSON!

and the FUTURE SPACE LUGER!

Multiplayer is typical military FPS in a post-Call of Duty 4 world: You have perks, you have a powerup you can use, there’s killstreaks like recon drones and EMP strikes, and you get XP for kills. There’s the common FPS gamemodes: Free-for-All, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, and an unusual TDM variant called VIP where the VIP is always visible on the minimap and killing them rewards more points than killing other players. Fun, but a VIP kill is 5 points and the scorelimit is 50, making the matches go by faster than expected.

My dad once said that combat drones will be the future of combat. I guess he was right.

(more…)

March 10, 2016
The Spear of Destiny Mission Packs: The Lost Wolfenstein games.

I have a certain fondness for Wolfenstein 3D. Back in the early 2000s when I was just a middling teenager, I was playing a bunch of cool level packs for Wolfenstein. Hell, the first online blog post I ever made was talking about an old Wolfenstein 3D mods website that I thought was cool. Yeah, it’s kinda plain compared to Doom and Quake, but damn it, I still had fun going through mazes killing things.

I’ve played practically every major Wolfenstein game barring the Muse Software prequels and the most recent The New Order. I was even a hardcore Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory player back in the day. But I didn’t know that there was a Wolfenstein game I missed.

They don’t make game covers like these anymore…

Mission Pack 2: Return to Danger and Mission Pack 3: Ultimate Challenge are unofficial third party expansions to Spear of Destiny, developed internally at FormGen and released in 1994. If you were craving more Wolfenstein and weren’t playing Doom for some reason, this was one of the many way to fulfill your digital nazi killing urges. That, combined with the Wolfenstein map generator mentioned on the box, and you now had seemingly endless opportunities to expand your Wolfenstein 3D experience.

Both episodes have the same story: Hitler recovered the Spear of Destiny from B.J. Blazkowicz, and it’s up to B.J. to fight Hitler’s Nazi regime once again and recover the Spear before he brings hell demons to Earth. It’s corny stuff, but to quote John Carmack from the book Masters of Doom, “Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”

Well, I hope you like blue, because there’s a lot of it here.

So what’s different in these Mission Packs compared to vanilla Spear of Destiny? Surprisingly there are a bunch of changes in this game. New levels (natch), new sprites, new textures, even the enemies look and sound different. So already this is looking promising, right? Oh, if only.
(more…)

June 19, 2015
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.

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 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.

(more…)

January 24, 2015
Marine Sharpshooter: One Budget FPS, One Mediocre Game.

I’m convinced no one wants to be the sniper in a video game. Yeah, there’s parts where they show that being a sniper is cool, but most of it involves walking around silently and shooting people at a distance with a bolt-action rifle. The only time I’ve ever really seen it work is something like Call of Duty 4‘s “All Ghillied Up” mission, and even that’s more of a stealth level than a sniping level.

I’ve played several games where sniping is the primary focus, such as Sniper Elite V2 or Sniper: Ghost Warrior, and most of the time it ends up being a fairly basic shooter with needlessly elaborate sniping mechanics. I don’t know why people keep making games based on this exactly, but much like they kept making sequels to the Sniper movies, there must be an audience for this stuff.

Today, I’m gonna look at one of those sniping games, and this time, it’s a bargain bin shooter, which tells me we’re in for some old-fashioned budget jank.

Not endorsed by Jack Bauer

Marine Sharpshooter is a budget FPS where sniping is the base mechanic. Despite having the “CTU” logo on top, you don’t play as Jack Bauer from the hit series 24, but instead a generic soldier dropped into certain exotic locales where you assassinate enemies, usually with sniper rifles.

The developer of this game was Jarhead Games, a master of making budget military FPSes, such as Navy SEALs: Weapons of Mass Destruction and Army Ranger: Mogadishu. The only other notable thing they made was NRA Gun Club, a target range game which is incredibly ironic considering the NRA was lambasting video games as an excuse for a mass shooter. I’ve played only one of Jarhead’s games before — the aforementioned Navy SEALs — and it wasn’t that interesting, so I don’t have high hopes for this one.

Wonder if I can get that skin for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive?

The game starts with a dramatic cutscene and our two heroes: A generic sniper and his spotter buddy, with an M4 assault rifle. They don’t give them names to start, so I’m gonna call them “John McSniperdude” and his teammate “David Spotterguy.” You play strictly as McSniperdude in this case, with Spotterguy being your wingman and occasional distraction.

What a good way to start your game, with a big load of nothing.

After a thrilling introduction where McSniperdude and Spotterguy arrive to Afghanistan by boat, our game begins. Compared to other Sniping-themed games I’ve palyed, sniping in this game is a bit unusual control-wise: You use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out of your scope. It takes a little getting used to, especially since I’m used to many other games allowing you to scope in with the right mouse button. I guess in the days before Call of Duty‘s ironsight modes got popular, this is an okay solution, but also probably difficult if your mouse doesn’t have a mouse wheel.

As you play, Spotterguy will tell you that there’s enemies in a certain direction, also highlighted on your radar above. In some cases, this is what you need to be able to even see enemies without getting shot a bunch. Since he’s your teammate, you have the ability to tell him to either attack only when shot upon, or just to attack anyone he sees. At some point, I just told my spotter to fire at will so I didn’t have to switch between weapons or no-scope enemies that surprise you at close range.

Our spotter is the master of blocking.

You can also have the spotter either hold a position or follow you around. I often played through the game having him follow me, but this lead to problems where he’d sometimes block a doorway, making it impossible for me to progress. Since he’s also your buddy, you have to protect him as well as complete your objective. If he dies, then McSniperdude commits suicide to mourn the loss of his buddy. At least that’s what it looked like, any time I failed the mission, my character just dies.
(more…)

January 11, 2015