Duke Nukem 3D (Atomic Edition)

To be honest, until mid-way through the dawn of first-person shooters, I had never heard of the Duke Nukem series. My understanding is that they're relatively low-rent platform shooters, sending up B-movies and 80's action cliches. It really went nuclear, so to speak, in the mid-to-late nineties, when the gang at Apogee/3D Realms decided to cash in on the FPS craze, with the third game. And the result was a wild, intense, clever, raunchy, and surprisingly controversial landmark in action game history.

After defeating the bad guys, in Duke Nukem II, our titular hero (and before anyone asks, I have no idea what his day job is) is flying back to Earth, when his ship is suddenly shot down. It turns out that another alien invasion beat him back to Earth, killing, enslaving and mutating everyone in its path. So he has to fight through cities, prisons, bases, and space stations, to stop the ETs from breeding us into extinction.

The graphics and gameplay have their similarities to Doom, but in a lot of subtle ways they definitely take it further in DN3D. At the very least, you can actually tilt your head, jump, and crouch. I'm not 100% sure if this was the first FPS to have these now common features, but it was a rather silly omission from Doom. Some of the weapons are also imaginative, in that they aren't all just plain shooting weapons -- there are laser trip mines (that you attach to walls), pipe bombs (that you throw and detonate), shrink rays (that make you step on enemies you've reduced to the size of apples), and a freeze gun (that makes you go in for a kick). Similarly, the graphics across the board are crisper and more colourful than Doom. It's not the quantum leap between Doom and, for instance, Quake III, but it does make for a much less grim experience.

That doesn't mean, though, that your heart won't still pound -- some of these enemies are sneaky and tough enough that they scare the bejesus out of me! lol

My favourite element, though, is the level design. For one thing, there's a ton of interactivity -- lots of things in each room that you can destroy or play around with in some ways (especially with Duke's sardonic one-liners). Also, you can have a surprising amount of fun just riding subways and trains. A lot of the time, the levels AREN'T just drab factories, spaceports, and hell locales... they're realistic Earth-bound places. We all know what hotels, office buildings, bars, etc. look like... and they are uncannily replicated in this game. In the expanded Atomic Edition, this is taken even further... with a Mission: Impossible send up, a fast-food joint, a police station, a post office, and a tanker ship. Many of which, have you getting struck by lightening, or getting perpetually crushed by collapsing rooms -- I don't get that in many shooters, even ones newer than this!

A lot of flak has been raised, about this game supposedly promoting the murder of scantily clad women. I'm not going to pretend that just about every woman you see in this game, wears almost nothing, and is sexualized in some way... but you never HAVE to kill any of them. In fact, very often shooting them sicks multiple enemies on you -- so you can easily argue you're PUNISHED for killing them. So please, spare the moral outrage for something like Manhunt.

Anyway, whether it's on Steam or in abandonware, PLEASE give this a shot. It's a ton of fun.

Doom II: Hell on Earth

So when Doom became the gargantuan hit that it was, of course the folks at id Software quickly came out with a sequel... or, a continuation, anyway (more on that in a bit). 

At the end of the original game, your character returns to Earth, having beaten the demonic hordes... only to find a city in flames. It turns out that, while you were off fighting the monsters on Phobos, some of them had portaled their way onto Earth, and the whole planet is under siege. 

The military has drafted you to infiltrate a city and shut down a forcefield that is keeping humanity from being evacuated to outer space, and along the way you discover that the enemy's entry point is a portal DIRECTLY TO HELL. And you can only seal it from the other side.

Fun.

The reason that I -- and many others -- are sketchy about calling Doom II a sequel, is because unlike most game sequels, there isn't a lot that is changed between this game and the previous one. Aside from some new monsters, a few new textures, a new weapon, and a handful of under-the-hood changes that the average person would never notice... it looks and plays EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE ORIGINAL DOOM. These days, with the game in abandonware and in classic game packages, it's not too big of a deal. However, I would have been a bit ticked, back in the day, to have paid $30 or $40 bucks for a brand new game, that is basically an expansion on an earlier one.

That being said, the new material is really good. I love the new weapon, the awesome super shotgun. It's more powerful than the standard shotgun, makes a satisfying sound, and is as close as this game gets -- aside from the notorious BFG 9000 -- to having a fire-and-forget weapon. Every time I go back to the earlier game, I sincerely miss the super shotgun. While many of the new monsters are modifications of existing ones -- the most obvious examples being the Hell Knights, basically being lighter and more fragile versions of Barons of Hell -- there are some original monsters that are quite imaginatively designed. Truth be told, the Arch-Vile still scares the shit out of me!

Level design was always something nicely done, by these games, and this version is no exception. Not counting the new episode, in Ultimate Doom, this was much more visually rich and just more intricate than just about every level of the previous game. Even though some of the puzzles may frustrate you, I can guarantee that there will never be a point in this game, where you will be bored. Especially, when many levels will have you fighting off DOZENS of monsters at once -- no joke.

There really isn't much more, that I can add. It still looks great and plays better, the action is still fun as hell, though some more originality and ambition would have been nice. You will not be disappointed, by getting this game.

Doom

Well, it's been a long time, since I've reviewed a classic PC game, but this is a good one to come back on. This Sunday is Father's Day, and one of my most prominent memories of my adolescence is my dad and I playing a certain computer game. A game that single-handedly popularized both online gaming, and the first-person shooter genre. A game blamed for lost productivity, and -- less intelligently -- for violence among teenagers, including a spike in mass shootings. A game that is also celebrating its 20th anniversary, this year. I'm talking about DOOM.

One can be understood for thinking there's no story, to this game, as a handful of text screens are all that we get, in the game itself. According to the manual, though, this is the setup: it's the near-to-distant future, and you play an ex-Marine deposited on Mars, for assaulting a superior officer wanting to fire on unarmed civilians. While the outpost is normally boring in the extreme, that changes when the United Aerospace Corporation conducts teleportation experiments, on the moons... and something demonic manages to come through.

In the ensuing fury, the Phobos base is overrun, and Deimos seems to have completely vanished. When the fireteam sent to Phobos is wiped out, it falls upon you, to pick up where they left off.

The game's original version is divided into three episodes (the first being the shareware version), each one covering nine levels on Phobos, Deimos, and Hell (the updatedUltimate Doom adds a fourth episode, set on Earth). While you can play these episodes in any order that you like, they do get progressively harder in sequence. The gameplay is so simplistic that it has been satirized many times: go into spooky place, find monsters, kill them, repeat. While the sheer numbers and firepower exerted by the zombies, demons, and other assorted monsters can be diabolical, most of the time they can be handled. This is because -- due to the technology of the time -- the monsters themselves aren't all that bright.

What can make the game mildly deeper than a mere shoot and loot, is the ways in which you can toy with and exploit the monsters. Very often, the monsters aren't too choosy on who they try to eviscerate, so as long as you've stirred up monsters of differing species then you can simply get out of the way and let natural selection take its course. In a less sadistic way (arguably), you can take advantage of the fact that the monsters' tactics basically consist of spotting you, following you, and trying to kill you. So if you can get a lot of them bottlenecked in a corridor and put some distance between you...

In its main element -- action and horror -- Doom very much succeeds. Even after all this time, even with the horror and violence bars being raised to the Nth degree, by media and real life alike... it is still intense, shocking, unsettling, and just plain heart-pounding. I've played this game, its sequel, and various fan-made levels countless times, and it is still incredibly exciting. The graphics are a bit primitive, by today's standards, but they are very colourful and well-drawn. The monsters and levels are very creatively designed, the sounds just plain terrifying at times, and the weapons purely awesome. And the music may be MIDI tracks, but they beg to be played on the best available sound cards.

I've even had a bit of experience, with the Deathmatch and co-op multiplayer modes... frankly I can't imagine hunting down your buddies in some of the larger levels, given that you can only play with 4 people at the most, but if you've never done on-line shooters before this is a great way to wet your feet. And for the record, yes I do find Deathmatch a lot more fun -- even a dumb human is going to be much more challenging to "kill" than the toughest of these monsters.

I suppose I should put on my Bored on the Corner hat, for a moment, to address the so-called controversial content. The game features plenty of demonic and Satanic elements, which have been attacked relentlessly by the Christian Right... completely ignoring that these elements ARE FROM THE BAD GUYS. Honestly, that speaks for itself. As for the violence... yes, it's gory. In its time, Doom probably was the most violent game of its time. However, there have been many studies into this issue, and NONE of them has found a link between violent gaming tastes, and overly violent behaviour. I've said my own piece about how non-violent I am, despite having grown up with games like this, but I can take it even further: I know several people who have played these sort of games to some extent, and I only know two of them, who have handled guns in any way whatsoever.

And one of those people, hates first-person shooters, because they make her motion sick.

ANYWAY! Doom is one of those games that was not only very popular, but truly set a standard. Unreal, Halo, Call of Duty, and countless other games owe their existence to the mammoth success of this one. You can find it ANYWHERE on the web now -- from Abandonware pages, to the Xbox Marketplace, to Steam -- and fan-made levels and mods are still being made to this day. As long as you have the stomach for it, I highly recommend checking it out.