Super Gaming: first person shooter

Showing posts with label first person shooter. Show all posts

Showing posts with label first person shooter. Show all posts

Fallout 4 (PC)

Developer:

Bethesda

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Release Date:

2015

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Systems:

Win, PS4, Xbox One

This ~~week~~ month on Super Adventures I'm spoiling the first couple of hours of Fallout 4!

You might be wondering why I'm writing about a complicated modern RPG again when I should know better by now. There's already a hundred reviews, streams and YouTube videos out there about it, so it seems a bit redundant. I have a good reason though: I already played all the others (aside from Fallout Shelter and Brotherhood of Steel) and it seemed wrong to leave it out.

Plus it means I get to mention the drama going on in late 2013 when there were competing teaser sites like thesurvivor2299.com and thepropheteer.com all appearing to be revealing the game's existence, and people were trying to figure out which of them was legit and which were fake (they were all fake).

Thankfully the game actually was being developed in secret, because that's typically what you do when your last game was a huge hit (unless you're Valve). Though it seems weird to me that after all this time this was only Bethesda's second attempt at a Fallout RPG. Obsidian were the ones that made Fallout: New Vegas and I'm curious to see if Bethesda decided to take anything from it. Or take anything away from their last game.

I'll be playing it without any mods, by the way, because I'm not really keen on tweaking my game. I feel like opening the box like that lets some of the magic escape (plus I'd be too tempted to give myself an infinite ammo rocket launcher and fly around on a fire-breathing unicorn or something). Also this means I get to ignore the Creation Club entirely and all of the bullshit that goes along with that!

(Click the screenshots if you want to make them very slightly bigger.)

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Unreal II: The Awakening (PC)

Developer:

Legend Entertainment

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Release Date:

2003

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Systems:

Windows, Xbox

Today on Super Adventures I thought I'd do something wild and play a video game for once. Unreal II: The Awakening to be specific, a first person shooter from the Xbox era, when PC games often came on multiple CDs stacked up on the same spindle to maximise the chances of one of them getting scratched. That's what my copy's like anyway, so I hope it still works.

Actually I'm not sure it ever really worked properly for me, as all I can remember about the game is that I stopped playing it early on when it crashed to desktop a couple of times. But I get the feeling I probably could've gotten further in it if I'd wanted to, and now that I'm writing about it I'll endeavour to be more persistent (whether I like the game or not).

The original Unreal was co-developed by Epic and Digital Extremes, but they were busy with the Unreal Tournament side of the franchise, so Unreal II: Unnecessary Subtitle was developed by the folks who made the Return to Na Pali expansion pack instead, Legend Entertainment. This was Legend's last ever game before being shut down by their owners, but they'd been around a while and were mostly known for making adventure games. So there's a non-zero chance that the writing might be better than the first person shooting here. I'm not getting my hopes too high for either though to be honest.

(Clicking the pictures will make them bigger, but not much bigger.)
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Doom (PC)

Developer:

id Software

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Release Date:

2016

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Systems:

Windows, Xbox One, PS4

This week on Super Adventures I'm spending an hour or so playing last year's Doom! I know it's a new game and there's already a million reviews out there to read, but I played the other three so it seemed cruel to leave this one out.

Plus this gives me a chance to go on a rant about them pulling a 'Tomb Raider' with the title, meaning that we have to call the first game 'the original Doom' from now on to avoid confusion. This problem generally wears off over time for movies (no one can even remember that they remade RoboCop or Total Recall) but the trouble with games is that the reboots are often good and you have to acknowledge they exist.

There was actually a Doom 4 in development, which was to take place during the demonic invasion of Earth, but it was cancelled on account of it being soulless, heavily scripted and more like the Call of Duty games than Doom. That was in development from 2007 to 2011, then this game sprang from its ashes in 2016. So henceforth it shall be known as Doom 2016.

I'm very familiar with the earlier Doom games, but all I've seen of this one so far is the demo. I've been deliberately avoiding reading too much about it just in case it had an actual plot to spoil. Hey if Wolfenstein: The New Order of all sequels can have an emotional thought-provoking story then there's hope for every game series!

(Click the pictures to view screenshots at a slightly less pitiful 1280x720 resolution).
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Serious Sam: The First Encounter (PC)

Developer:

Croteam

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Release Date:

2001

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Systems:

PC, Xbox

This week on Super Adventures I'm taking a quick look at a classic first person shooter from the dawn of the 21st century: Serious Sam: The First Encounter! I always assumed that 'The First Encounter' was something they slapped on after The Second Encounter came out, but I just checked and nope it was there on my box cover all along. So I've learned something today.

I've also learned that it was the game's 15th anniversary on March 21st... last year. So I was just a little late on that one.

Serious Sam started life in the mid 90s as a game called In the Flesh, which would've had you fighting through nightmares and Hell and suchlike, but a couple of years into development they decided to switch to bright sunny open levels instead and rename it Serious Sam, after its protagonist. It worked for Duke Nukem after all, and it's possibly not a coincidence that two heroes shame the same dress sense. Sam's more of an affectionate clone than a parody, seeing as Duke's already a parody, but it's not like 3D Realms held the patent on smart-assed muscle-bound 80s action movie heroes in jeans, so whatever. They get to complain just as soon as they give Bruce Campbell his lines back.

The game was given a shiny Serious Engine 3 makeover back in 2009 and released for PC and Xbox 360 as Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter, but I'm playing the original right off the CD (with all appropriate patches). There's also an Xbox port which has smaller levels and lives, and even a version for PDAs running Palm OS. Except not really, as the PDA version is more like Wolfenstein 3D and looks like a 3DO game.

(Click the screenshots to view the original sized images).
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Coded Arms (PSP) - Guest Post

Today on Super Adventures, guest poster mecha-neko's back with another first person shooter for another Friday. But this time there's a shocking twist: it's on the PSP!

Hey, get a load of this!

Coded Arms Title Screen PSP

Developer:

Konami

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Release Date:

2005

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Systems:

PlayStation Portable

It's Coded Arms, the first Sony PlayStation Portable game on the site! It's a PSP exclusive and it's the very first first person shooter on the system or so I'm told.

I found it for just a buck, all boxed and nice, so I'm going to share it with you!
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Consortium (PC)

Developer:

Interdimensional Games

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Release Date:

2014

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Systems:

Windows

This week on Super Adventures I'm celebrating Star Trek's 50th anniversary by playing games with some connection to the series. Today I'm sharing screenshots from the first few hours of CONSORTIUM, a game that likes to SHOUT its name all over its Steam page. What does this have to do with 'Star Trek'? Well... I've read a few people say it's a bit like 'Star Trek: The Next Generation', except on a plane. And that's pretty much the only link.

Consortium's one of those Kickstarter success stories, though they didn't quite bring in millions. Or even hundreds of thousands. But what they got was apparently enough to finish an ambitious first person, guns and chats, RPG type of game, which is cool because that's one of my favourite genres.

This is a heavily story based game so I'm inevitably going to be spoiling a lot of things you might not want spoiled here. Though its description claims that "the story unfolds based largely on your actions," so if that's true I'm only spoiling one possible outcome! I won't give away the answer to the game's big mystery though, assuming I even manage to solve it.

(You can make screenshots moderately more visible by clicking on them.)
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S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (PC) - Guest Post

Today on Super Adventures, I dragged my old friend mecha-neko back and made him write another guest post for you! We used to get a first person shooter a month out of him, now we get one every two years. It's fine though, he added more words to make up for it.

'sup.

Developer:

GSC Game World

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Release Date:

2007

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Systems:

Windows

I'm guest poster mecha-neko and today I'm going to tell you all about a game I'm not too familiar with called S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. I played it once, a hundred years ago, but my memories are hazy. It's the perfect time for me to stalk once again!

(Since I've got a brand new GeForce 9600 GT! graphics card, these images are presented in super high-res. Click to make 'em big.)
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BioShock (PC)

Developer:

2K Boston & 2K Australia

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Release Date:

2007

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Systems:

PC, Xbox 360, PS3, OS X, iOS

This week on Super Adventures I'm playing Irrational Games' System Shock successor BioShock! Well okay they were called 2K Boston (and 2K Australia) at the time, but they changed back right afterwards. Speaking of names, you'd think that if they were going to play around capitalising the S in the middle like that, they'd put some clue in the logo so people would know about it. 'BIOSHOCK', there you go, I even kept it upper case.

I actually had something else written for this paragraph, but then 2K suddenly announced that the first two BioShocks are getting an shiny new release with new models, better textures and directors commentary, and PC owners get the upgrade for free! It's like they waited for the exact moment I started to replay the game so they could ruin all my plans. I was tempted to delay writing this until September and take the next few months off, but then I realised that I'm more curious about whether the original experience still holds up. I'm also curious to learn whether I'm still sick of the game, or if it's been long enough now that I can find the fun again.

BioShock's part of an exclusive club, as it's a game I actually finished once, though I can assure you that you'll be getting no spoilers from me. Well except for the first few hours of the game, I'll be spoiling all of that like crazy, but I'm not even going to hint at any twists it may or may not have. Because I hate it when people do that.

(You can click screenshots to view them in super 720p-o-vision, which was a fairly impressive resolution back in 1960.)
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SiN (PC)

Sin title screen

Developer:

Ritual

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Release Date:

1998

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Systems:

Win, Mac, Linux

This week on Super Adventures I'm taking a look at SiN, the first actual game by Ritual Entertainment. Or 'sin' according to the box, title screen, menu, intro etc. (the manual just calls it Sin).

I used to play a lot of first person shooters back in the 90s (and every other decade), so if I haven't seen the full version of something, chances are I've at least played the demo. But SiN apparently slipped right by me. All I know about it is that it starts in a bank, I don't even know if it's 3D like Half-Life or 2.5D like Doom (though in my head I'm imagining it looking like Duke Nukem 3D).

Part of the reason I never got around to it might be that when the game came out it wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders. The game was full of bugs, it took minutes to load levels and save games, and a lot of people didn't even get sound. But now it's full patched up and it even runs on modern PCs! I hope!

(Click the screenshots to view the images at 800x600 res! I was playing in fake 3dfx mode so it's the best I could get.)
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Prey (PC)

Developer:

Human Head

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Release Date:

2006

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Systems:

Windows, Mac, Linux, Xbox 360

This week on Super Adventures, I'm having a go at Prey! I've already played Doom 3 and Quake 4, so I figured it was about time to give the third id Tech 4 game a go.

Prey was going to be 3D Realms' cutting edge graphical showcase, a game designed from the ground up to require a 3D card! It was originally intended to come out in 1998 you see, as a competitor to games like Unreal, Half-Life, Turok... Daikatana and Duke Nukem Forever.

The advanced 3D game engine was going to support things like area sourced coloured lighting, reflections, dynamic shadows, and dynamic portals. This portal technology was actually a clever way to divide the levels up into smaller areas of geometry so the processor only had to think about one room at a time, meaning higher polygon counts at faster framerates. Though by 1998 the developers were also showing off proper Portal-style placeable tears in reality, and there was much hype.

But then 3D Realms went and pulled a '3D Realms', scrapping all the work they'd done so far due to issues with the technology and starting over with a different engine. The project fell dormant until Human Head took over in 2001, and in 2002 they licensed the shiny new id Tech 4 engine (with its working portal tech) and spent four years putting together an entirely different Prey with it. Which was then completely overshadowed by Portal the following year. Alas.

TECHNICAL BOX

Before starting it up, I created an autoexec.cfg file and typed in a couple of lines to hopefully turn off the mouse acceleration and smoothing:

seta m_accel "0"
seta m_smooth "0"

(Click images for slightly bigger screenshots).
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Hexen II (PC)

Developer:

Raven

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Release Date:

1997

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Systems:

Windows, Mac

This week on Super Adventures I've finally gotten around to replaying some of Hexen's slightly more three dimensional successor, Hexen II! It's been ages since I've played this one so I should be coming into it reasonably clueless. Plus it's a Hexen game so I likely didn't get anywhere in it the first time around anyway.

Hexen II is the last of the 'Serpent Riders' trilogy, following on from Heretic and Hexen, so there's apparently a story here to resolve and this game finishes it off. But just to make things confusing, Heretic actually branches off to another sequel, Heretic II, which tells the tale of the original game's protagonist returning home and fighting a plague. Plus there's the expansion packs like Deathkings of the Dark Citadel and Portal of Praevus which slot in somewhere.

But this is definitely absolutely the final Hexen... until Raven Software gets bored of making multiplayer modes for Call of Duty games and decides it's time for Hex3n: Beyond Heretic II.
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Painkiller: Black Edition (PC)

Developer:

People Can Fly

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Release Date:

2004

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Systems:

Windows, Xbox, Android, iOS

This week on Super Adventures, I'm finally taking a look at Painkiller, a first person shooter made by Gears of War: Judgment developer Epic Games Poland back when they were still called People Can Fly. Oh hang on, they're back to being People Can Fly again now... and they still have the Bulletstorm license! They'd better be working on making me a sequel right now, I don't care how much the game bombed.

There's about a million different editions of Painkiller and just as many expansions, but as I understand it Black Edition is as close as you can get to the definitive version. It's the original 2004 Painkiller game plus the one expansion developed by People Can Fly, with a 'making of' video thrown in. The game later got a remake/sequel called Painkiller: Hell and Damnation (HD, get it?) but judging by the reviews I've read, seems Black Edition's the one to go for.

(Click the pictures to bring up a higher resolution image. It's not going to make them any more widescreen though I'm afraid.)
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Chasm: The Rift (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Action Forms

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Release Date:

1997

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Systems:

PC

Today on Super Adventures, I'm putting a few hours into Chasm: The Rift, a game in which you don't play as a zombie lizard jester with a circular power-saw hand. This isn't even the title screen, the game has no time for crap like that. It just dumps you straight to a typical 90s first person shooter menu screen floating above a typical 90s first person shooter gameplay demo.

Oh, I should mention that this is a typical 90s first person shooter. It's kind of an obscure one too, which is exactly what my site's been missing lately. I haven't had a DOS FPS on Super Adventures since Wolfenstein 3D back in March, and that's just terrible. The game I mean, not my FPS negligence (thought that's pretty bad too).

Anyway I had Chasm on a demo disc back in the olden days and remember thinking it had a surprisingly decent looking homemade 3D engine, but not much else. I pretty much forgot the demo entirely for a decade or two after the game disappeared off the face of the Earth. Or I assumed it'd disappeared anyway; turns out the game had actually been released the year after Quake and Duke Nukem 3D and I just hadn't heard about it. It wasn't exactly the next big thing, but it's the next thing on my site so I'm going to go into it with my best attempt at enthusiasm and see if I can get some fun out of it.
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Far Cry (PC)

Developer:

Crytek

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Release Date:

2004

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Systems:

Windows

Today on Super Adventures I'm going to immerse myself in the ultimate next generation FPS, Far Cry! That's how they describe it on the box anyway. It's also clearly labelled FAR_CRY, you can see the logo right there, but it's always written out as "Far Cry" in text so that's what I'll be calling it.

2004 wasn't a bad year for first person shooters, with people finally getting their hands on massively hyped sequels like Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and Halo 2. Far Cry on the other hand was a new IP from a unknown developer and it came out of nowhere. I never saw it coming anyway, which is ironic really considering how damn flashy it was. But it's been a decade now and I'm curious to see how it holds up as a game now that it can't coast on its visuals any more.

TECHNICAL BOX

The latest patch released for the game brings it up to version 1.4, but I'm not going to be installing that for two equally good reasons:

I've heard that v1.4 is mostly a multiplayer upgrade and it screws up the single player game to the point where enemies can see and shoot you through walls. Not sure if that's true, but it kind of puts me off.
There's an alternative v1.32 AMD64 patch I can install instead that improves performance on 64-bit systems, works on Intel processors too, comes with an optional Extra Content Pack to enhance the visuals, and even makes the game DRM free.

Apparently the Steam version comes with both patches already installed, with the v1.32 64-bit executable hiding in the game's Bin64 folder, but I only own the DVD version so I can't test that. Feel free to let me know if I'm wrong.

(Click screenshots to make them bigger! If you want to.)
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The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (PC) - Part 1

Chronicles of Riddick Escape from Butcher Bay title

Developer:

Starbreeze

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Release Date:

2004

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Systems:

Xbox, Windows

Today on Super Adventures I'll be taking a brief look at the first few hours of sci-fi movie spin-off The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay - Developer's Cut. I've played through the game before and I remember liking it well enough back then, but then I remember liking a lot of things and my fuzzy memories don't always match up to the truth.

The game was originally released for the Xbox (and later PC) back in 2004, but it received one of those HD makeover type of things three years later to port it across to the shiny new Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. They enhanced the visuals, tweaked the AI, added multiplayer, included a sequel campaign, and called it Assault on Dark Athena. But I'm not playing that one.

The Dark Athena version may have the big advantage of having way more content and actually being sold online, but it seems to be built on the Xbox original, skipping the PC port's improvements like quicksaves and developer's commentary. Which is a bit of a deal breaker for me as I happen to like quicksaves and developer's commentary!

The original version does have one problem though and that's that it flat out refuses to start up on my PC. Well, it didn't until PC Gaming Wiki saved me yet again. It turns out that Nvidia owners can fix the game by "downloading Nvidia Inspector and setting the Extension Limit to 0x00001B58". This also reactivates Shader Mode 2.0++, so I can pretend I've got a GeForce 6800 Ultra in my case and push the graphics to max.

(Click the screenshots to view them at their original 1280x720 resolution.)
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The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (PC) - Part 2

The chronicle of my epic prison break concludes!

Click this link to return to Riddick's cell: Part one.
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Star Wars: Jedi Knight II - Jedi Outcast (PC)

Developer:

Raven

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Release Date:

2002

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Systems:

Windows, Mac, Xbox, GameCube (but not PS2)

Today on Super Adventures I'm taking a look at Star Wars: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, the third in the Jedi Knight series. Poor Dark Forces: it was the one that started the games off in the first place but Jedi Knight was the name that stuck. Because it has 'Jedi' in it and every Star Wars fan wants to be a telekinetic space samurai.

I've played this before, but it's been so long now that all I remember about it is that the lightsaber combat is a step up from the last game and it probably does the shooting better. I mean you'd expect it have decent gunplay considering LucasArts passed the series on to FPS veterans Raven Software for this one, who were coming off Soldier of Fortune and Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force at the time. It seemed like Raven were getting around to all the big space sci-fi franchises in turn and giving them each a shooter, but instead they switched to making Marvel action RPGs weirdly, and now they make Call of Duty DLC.

The game has a 'mods' option right in the menu, which is cool, but I won't be touching any of them. I want the pure, unedited, non-Special Edition Jedi Outcast experience. Well, the single player experience anyway, I won't be showing multiplayer, and I won't be turning it off until I get to a proper Jedi duel.

Warning: This may contain spoilers for the earlier Jedi Knight games, including the fact that the hero becomes a Jedi Knight.

(Click images to expand them into bigger images.)
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Aliens: Colonial Marines (PC) - Part 2

Click the highlighted text to return to the horror of part one.
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Aliens: Colonial Marines (PC) - Part 1

Developer:

Gearbox, TimeGate, Nerve

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Release Date:

2013

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Systems:

Windows, PS3, Xbox 360

Last year on Super Adventures I decided that April 1st would be the perfect day to give a critically mauled Duke Nukem Forever a fighting chance to win me over. Because if I ended up liking it I could always pass my opinions off as being a joke and escape with my reputation intact. So today I’m going to pull the same trick with the hated Aliens: Colonial Marines and see if I can find the good in it too.

Like DNF, this is a first person shooter famous for taking ages to make and impressing absolutely no one by the time it finally came out, though it wasn't in the oven for quite as long before it got rushed out and served undercooked. It started late 2006 and finished early 2013, with folks saying that it spent 4 years at Gearbox, then around 18 months outsourced to TimeGate, and then 9 more months at Gearbox. Apparently huge chunks were reworked each time it swapped over, which left Sega agreeing to pay out $1.25 million to settle a class-action suit when people discovered to their dismay that the demos they'd been shown were demonstrating content and visuals that hadn't survived to the final product.

Anyway I'm playing the PC version here, which I've heard is the least crap of them. I usually only play games for an hour or two to get an impression of what kind of game they are, but this time I’m going to keep playing the single player campaign until either I start liking it or I really can’t take any more. I even watched both 'Alien' and 'Aliens' in preparation so I can nitpick about every tiny thing it gets wrong! I could end up spoiling elements of any of the films in the series though (plus a decent amount of this game, obviously), so if that's an issue you should get out now while you're still safe.

(Click screenshots to view them slightly bigger.)
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Wolfenstein: The New Order (PC)

Developer:

MachineGames

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Release Date:

2014

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Systems:

PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One

Today’s game on Super Adventures is recent first person shooter Wolfenstein: The New Order, which is the something like the seventh game in the series, and the fifth single player first person shooter. Who even knew there were so many of the things?

That's not even counting the original pair of Castle Wolfenstein stealth games by Muse software that inspired the id Software franchise. Not that The New Order was made by id, nope they haven’t developed a Wolfenstein game themselves since 1992’s Spear of Destiny. This is actually the debut release by MachineGames, formed in 2009 by seven key members of Escape from Butcher Bay developer Starbreeze. I try to come into games with an open mind, without studying reviews and bringing too many expectations, but I have to be honest with you here: I'm expecting to love the shit out of this one. A sequel to Return to Castle Wolfenstein by the people who made an actual good game out of Chronicles of Riddick? Fuck yeah, sign me up for that.

I'll be playing the PC version due to the system's convenient mouse and keyboard full of potential screenshot keys (and because it's the one I own), but it should work out well because I believe that all formats got pretty much the same game here. As usual I plan to stick with the game long enough to reach the regular gameplay and get a decent impression of how it plays, so be aware that I'll likely end up spoiling huge chunks of the first hour or so. No seriously, I get the impression that this actually has some kind of worthwhile plot to it.

(Click screenshots to view them slightly bigger, but not by much. Let's not go crazy here.)
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