Have you ever written a critique about something, then come back to it years later to see if it still holds up? I have that feeling with a lot of things I’ve played. Since I try to improve myself as a person, sometimes I have to reassess my opinions on something or if I’ve changed. With how games change from day one to day 365 thanks to the wonders of patches and Early Access, it has me occasionally revisiting stuff to see if it’s gotten better. And in this case, it’s going back roughly 4 ½ years ago… when the boomer shooter craze wasn’t at a fever pitch. I’m gonna look back at WRATH: Aeon of Ruin.
Developed between small indie studio KillPixel Games and slightly larger studio Slipgate Ironworks, and published by 3D Realms – the new one ran by Fredrik Schrieber, not the old one that gave us Duke Nukem Forever – the game initially came out in Steam early access in November 2019, the game went through a dormant dry spell before finally being released in February of 2024, nearly five years later.
A friend had gifted me the game back during that early access period, and I was… pretty darn harsh on the game. To quote my now out of date Steam review from that time:
This game, on the other hand, has problems. Lots of questionable design decisions that don’t make sense. Enemies that take too much damage, on arenas where circlestrafing is not an option. An unwieldy inventory system which is counter-intuitive to the style of gameplay this wants to emulate. And whoever thought that reviving the “save gem” concept from Daikatana was a good idea needs to be smacked in the head with a baseball bat […] I cannot recommend the game in the current state it’s in. It needs some balancing adjustments to be mentioned in the same breath as the aforementioned retro FPS throwbacks.
This game definitely didn’t have it’s balance set correctly in 2019. (Taken from the Early Access period.)
Basically I lauded the look and style of the game, while also feeling the gameplay needed some improvement. By 2019, the concept of a retro FPS/boomer shooter requires a type of finesse to make it stand out from the others. A lot of New Blood’s work, like DUSK or Amid Evil, is a good example of this. This is more important 2024, when we’re in peak Boomer Shooter Heaven, where everybody’s getting in on the craze. So let’s see how KillPixel and Slipgate Ironworks did to improve from their early access version.
I feel like I’m crossing the River Styx.
A quick story primer: You play as the Outlander, an unknown figure who meets with The Shepherd of Wayward Souls, where one must find the sigils of an area before fighting a big boss at the end of three episodes. The Outlander transports to levels and defeats any monsters in their way to get the sigil at the end. Basically a little bit HeXen, a little bit Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, with a pinch of Blood and Quake for flavor. (Fitting, since WRATH is made on DarkPlaces, a source port of Quake’s engine.)
Sharp. Pointy. Zoomy.
Much like other boomer shooters, the Outlander has a myriad of weapons at their disposal. First is the Blade of Ruination, a good go-to melee that also has an alternate fire where you lunge forward, which is great for getting past gaps and doing massive damage to certain foes. Then there’s your usual FPS arsenal of a handgun, a double-barrel shotgun, a “Fang Spitter,” which amounts to the game’s rapid-fire automatic weapon, an acid-spitting launcher and even a railgun equivalent. There’s other weapons too, but most of these are in those early episodes. All the weapons have an alternate fire that can be useful in sticky situations.
A few months back, to celebrate its 25th anniversary, Bethesda re-released the id Software classic Quakeon modern systems and the PC. Ported to the versatile KEX Engine by Nightdive Studios, it added the base game, the two official Mission Packs, the MachineGames developed Dimension of the Past made for the 20th anniversary in 2016, and a newly made expansion, Dimension of the Machine, also by MachineGames.
Going back through Quake was a nice nostalgia trip, and while I had already played through the game countless times in the past – most recently in June to test out the fan-made Copper rebalance mod – It felt good going through the tech bases and castles with nailguns and the Thunderbolt once again.
The official port has licensed mod support, similar to the Unity-powered Doom remasters on these same platforms from a year or two back, with Midway’s port of Quake to the Nintendo 64 being the first supported mod. Though it does also support some older Quake mods if they were just simple levels and not involving complex scripting from recent source ports, which means stuff like the oft-praised Arcane Dimensions don’t work in the remaster yet.
Colored lighting on Quake 64, at the cost of more boxier level geometry. A fair trade, honestly.
It made me think of many old custom levels from the early days of modding, and one that I thought of was during that wild west period, when map makers would offer to make stuff based on licensed properties as free promotion. One of which was based on a TV show that most of you probably don’t remember.
Kinda hard to watch this show nowadays, but okay.
Soldier of Fortune, Inc. for Quake is not what you think it is. It has nothing to do with the later 2000 game by Raven Software. Rather, this three-level pack existed as a promotion for a television show, back in those days when people could just make custom levels and have them officially sponsored by those companies, akin to stuff like Chronic for Quake III Arena made to promote The Marshall Mathers LP.
But what is Soldier of Fortune, Inc.? SOF was a TV series created by Dan Gordon, an ex-Israel Defense Force soldier turned screenwriter, produced by Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Productions and Rysher Entertainment. Named after the magazine of the same name, SOF was an action series involving a rag-tag group of soldiers trying to stop various people doing the bad things. In essence, it was a modern-day Mission: Impossible. It often aired in late-evening time slots alongside shows like Baywatch, which meant it was made to be one of those shows that tried to capture some of the Baywatch audience by also being an action-packed romp.
The show did get renamed for the second season, losing the Soldier of Fortune branding. Now called SOF: Special Ops Force, the show had a few notable cast changes, including basketball player Dennis Rodman playing a supporting character and Peter Graves doing an introductory narration, further leaning into the Mission: Impossible trappings. The show ended in 1999 after that second season, being mostly forgotten by the general populace.
I was reminded of this show’s existence thanks to a podcast. It Was a Thing on TV – a TV obscurities podcast hosted by a few of my game show colleagues – had recently done an episode on Thunder in Paradise, another short-lived action show starring Hulk Hogan and Chris Lemmon stopping evil villains on beachfronts. Much like Soldier of Fortune, Inc., Thunder in Paradise was trying to capture the Baywatch crowd, but wasn’t successful at it either, only having one sole 22-episode season.
Thunder in Paradise would get a video game adaptation for the Philips CD-i and DOS that was during the peak of full motion video, using an episode from the TV series but with more footage shot for the game. It made me think of similar action shows from the ’90s that got video game adaptations, and suddenly I started thinking about how a similar action show somehow got a custom level pack for Quake, back when that was a thing that could happen. Nowadays those same entertainment companies just cut a check to Activision to put John Rambo in Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War for $25, complete with low-quality sound bites from the movies.
If there’s one thing I need to improve on in my life, it’s to write something in the moment. I’ve bought plenty of games, played a bevy of mods, grabbed other assorted things for potential blog fodder…
Then I do nothing with it. This has happened more often than not, but only because I get the problem of being an ideas person and rarely act upon them. I’ve been slowly improving on this front, at least more than I was years ago.
Which brings me to this post about a game mod. I played this on a whim back in 2018, and thought it was pretty neat. While I’m currently wrapped in a few other things right now, I thought I’d write something quick for this month.
A few years back, I wrote an article praising the wonders of Red Book CD audio. CD audio tracks that would play in certain games, fromPC classics like Half-Life, to even Sega CD games like Sonic CD. Unfortunately, modern technology is not too kind to the concept, as it often struggles to work properly on modern devices. In some cases, digital re-releases of games like Starsiege: Tribes didn’t even come with the CD music, removing part of the ambience.
There have been solutions thanks to source ports and game updates. For instance, playing Half-Life on Steam has all its music files as MP3s, so if the game (or a related mod) calls for that CD track, it’ll play it without needing the CD.
Looks just as good as it did in ’96.
Which brings me to a classic in Red Book audio: Quake. One of the earliest PC games to use it, popping in the CD would fill your ears with weird ambient music by Trent Reznor and his band Nine Inch Nails. Modern source ports such as Quakespasm actually support playable CD tracks in MP3/OGG formats, which means one can rip the soundtrack from their copy of Quake – or just find it on the internet, I doubt id and Zenimax care these days – and play it easily, proper looping and all.
There’s a handful of Quake map packs that come with custom soundtracks tailor-made for the level pack, such as Travail. Others outright replace the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack with different ambient tracks, like EpiQuake or Quake Epsilon. But what if I told you someone replaced Nine Inch Nails music with Nine Inch Nails music?
Ha! Now I won’t be burned by hot slag. Take that! (Oh wait, now I can’t get out…)
“Ghosts I-IV for Quake” is an interesting mod. Replacing the original 1996 soundtrack with the entirety of Ghosts I-IV, an album by Nine Inch Nails with nothing but ambient instrumentals seems like a good fit. In a sense, Ghosts I-IV is a spiritual successor to the original Quake soundtrack, even if there’s little similarities in style.
The album itself is interesting: Frustrated by their record label, Trent Reznor severs his contract with Interscope Records and decides to go independent – for a while anyway – and released this under a Creative Commons license. This license is how the mod exists without lawyers getting involved, as it’s a free mod for a commercial video game.
Shooting switches with the power of magic pellets!
There is one other feature of this mod: There’s no monsters or weapons. Now there’s mostly empty levels with switches, lifts and other assorted things, but nothing to shoot. With god mode turned on. In a sense, this changes the perspective of the game entirely. No longer a straight explosive romp, it’s strictly an exploration-based affair.
“Direct from the Internet.” Kinda rude to take those without permission, you know?
PC gaming in the ’90s was a real wild west affair. When games like Doom took off, everybody started making shovelware compilations of anywhere from hundreds to thousands of levels. Most of them were downloaded off BBSes without crediting people, which is pretty scummy in itself. But if you had no internet connection, this was a way to get levels with ease.
After a few years of this, companies like WizardWorks started making their own unofficial expansions for games like Quake, Descent and Warcraft II. While this was an improvement – level designers could actually license their stuff for commercial use – the internet was really starting to bloom in the late ’90s, making these unofficial “expansions” obsolete.
Today, I’m gonna look at one of these unofficial expansions for a little game called Quake…
This looks like something I’d see on some pick up artist’s vlog channel.
Forgiving the groan-worthy punny title, Aftershock for Quake is one of several expansions made to capitalize on Quake‘s success. Published by Head Games, this featured “advanced levels”, adding three episodes and a bevy of deathmatch maps.
Unlike the official expansions – Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity – these have no new monsters, powerups or weapons. These are vanilla Quake levels, designed to run with a registered copy of the original Quake. The episodes are drastically shorter than vanilla Quake, only having five levels for each episode.
Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t get the installer to work on my PC running Windows 7 64-bit since it’s a 16-bit application. Thankfully, all I had to do was to copy the /AS/ folder from the CD into my Quake folder and I was off to the races.
The blood on the logo looks rather ominous.
There isn’t much of a story to these maps. Considering Quake‘s story was already bare-bones to begin with, this is relatively par for the course. With the exception of episode three, there aren’t any credits to who made this. It’s unfortunate, because I was hoping to see someone who would go on to later claims to fame in game development, as a “before they were stars” moment. Kinda like how Viktor Antonov worked on the infamous Redneck Rampage as an art designer before crafting out the styles of Half-Life 2 and Dishonored.
By the way, there’s no new music in this. All of it is recycled from Quake, with the exception of one level having no music whatsoever. It would’ve been nice for them to go all out, but I’m glad they even bothered to even assign music tracks. Makes me want to put in a music CD to get a different feel to it, like when I wrote about Red Book CD Audio a couple years back.
Wonder why they put both a knight and an ogre as if they’re equal threats? One has a grenade launcher, for chrissakes.
Episode 1 has some interesting design. E1M1 starts you with an ogre, a knight, and a pool with armor in it as a secret. A later level has you hit a hard to see switch to move a boat across to grab the gold key, otherwise you die in hot slag.
Better get that quick save key ready. I shudder to imagine trying to do this with keyboard only.
A lot of the level design for Aftershock feels very amateur. Lots of precarious platforming over death pits, unclear instructions, and rather plain-looking level design. A lot of the levels are simple, poorly lit, boxy, and have no sense of balance. One level starts you near a rocket launcher, but then drops you into a trap room with two shamblers, a few fiends, and a couple of pentagrams and megahealth to aid your fight. A lot of these levels have several “kill all the enemies to progress” rooms, and it’s a bit frustrating.
I dub this image “myfirstquakemap.map.”
Granted, this was around 1996-97, and people were still trying to figure out this fancy new 3D engine, but if you’re selling this level set for money, you gotta make sure it can hang with the big boys of the official product and its expansions. And the first episode gives a rather less-than-stellar impression.
On the bright side, the makers of the mod didn’t seem to know how to strip the player of their weapons upon completing an episode, so if you’re playing the episodes in order, the later episodes can be a breeze because of a full arsenal.
I’m sorry but what the hell is this
Out of all three episodes, episode 3 is the one that feels more fleshed out. With more custom textures, and even proper credits — the whole episode’s made by one Greg MacMartin, who’s still in the biz today working on Consortium and the Homeworld games — this is the best of the stuff on display. Though he did have a fascination with putting the gold key in death trap areas…
This is rather cruel enemy placement for a key.
While I didn’t have any strange bugs while playing, I did experience a rare game crash. When I finished E3M5, Quakespasm, the source port I use, crashed with an unusual pushwall error. I was worried that this was an issue with the source port, but surprisingly I could not recreate the error after that. If there’s anyone reading who’s Quake-savvy who could explain what a pushwall error means, let me know in the comments.
That’s about it on the single player front. Aftershock for Quake also comes with about 13 deathmatch levels also made for the expansion, but most of them are simple box levels or have gimmicks, such as the two LAVABOX levels.
Since Quake multiplayer was in its infancy, a lot of these were likely made for 1v1 skirmishes. None of these maps are anywhere near levels of DM3, but when you just wanted to frag your buddies, you were happy to get whatever maps you could get your hands on.
Now who the heck would want a pool full of hot slag?
You think that’s it, right? There’s enough there to give you something to play around with. Remember when I said that these were made when shovelware compilations were extremely common? Hidden on the disc is a level creator, called Thred, and a bunch of levels that come with it separate from the main Aftershock campaign. Though, the back of the box calls it the “Aftershock 3D Level Editor,” which sounds like a fake program I’d hear on a TV show.
There isn’t anything outstanding in this collection – no Iikka Kiranen levels or anything cool like that – and some of these levels are merely tutorials for how to do things in the Quake engine. Most of these levels are freely available online through places like Quaddicted, but you’re probably not missing out.
Dare you walk down the ramps of death?
Aftershock for Quake is not an amazing expansion. Episode 3 and the various DM levels are the only reason to check this out, the rest of it is shovelware fodder that was prevalent during this time. I only spent a few bucks on this, so I don’t feel cheated out of this, but I got at least an hour or so of fun playing what Quake‘s community maps were like in 1996, so there’s that.
As far as I know, this is abandonware. Head Games no longer exists, and there’s probably no penalty for pirating an unofficial Quake expansion over twenty years after its original release. While not as outstanding as some of the other expansions, it’s a cool curiosity from years past. These kind of shovelware expansions should be documented more, there’s probably some interesting stuff about them we’re missing out on.
Demon Gate cover courtesy of Mobygames. Aftershock for Quake cover courtesy of the Quake Wiki.
Updated 8/1/2020 for paragraph changes and some updates.
When it comes to video games, CDs were a god damn revelation back in the day. Before then, people were developing games on cartridges that barely held a few megabytes. CDs, on the other hand, held up to a much bigger size of 700MB, and as a result, developers found out they could use that extra size for things they couldn’t have before on cartridges. This had the side effect of giving us a lot of crappy full motion video games around the mid-’90s, but they also brought us something amazing: CD quality audio.
So shiny, but holds a lot of stuff.
No longer were developers constrained by the YM2612 and SPC700 sound chips — the sound chips for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive and the Super Nintendo, respectively. Musicians could now make the music as it was intended to be heard: with live instrumentation (or a close approximation).
A fair share of CD-based systems like the Sega CD, the Turbografx-CD, the PlayStation, and Sega Saturn had CD audio support. While playing these games, the rich CD audio played through your television, giving you music that you’d never heard before in video games. This was known as the Red Book CD audio standard. Introduced in 1980, it set the standard for audio in video games throughout most of the 1990s.
I remember the PC version of Sonic CD being one of the earliest examples of this. It was pretty neat to listen to most of the game’s music outside of the game.
Not only could you hear the awesome music in game, you could listen to it outside of the game. In most cases, you could put the game CD in a CD player and start listening to the music without having to play the game itself. To me, this is what made CD audio awesome: Being able to listen to the soundtrack outside of the game.
Previously, if you wanted to listen to the game music, you had to hope for a soundtrack CD, or in the case of PC gaming, dig through files and play them on media players that could support MIDI or MOD Tracker files. The Red Book audio standard changed that to something more simple: putting in the CD in a CD-ROM drive and pressing play. Be careful though, since Red Book audio CDs are mixed mode CDs, you need to tune to track 2 to hear the game music, unless you want to hear a lot of unlistenable static that could damage your speakers or the disc itself.
