|
PROfessional Member
Joined: 08 Jan 2004
Posts: 3674
Location: Atlanta, GA
|
| unknowndarknessx wrote: |
Seriously I don't think I've every seen or heard of those two games. When did they come out? I think I might have played them from a 100 game cd or something better never knew what they were called.
PS, I do not know most of the odies since I go in to gaming when a got my xbox a few years ago. |
I forgot unknown that you said you havent played the earlier games. Here is a list with some info for better understanding. Wolfenstein & Doom was the beginning of the shootem up age for games. It really started with Wolfenstein & Doom. After Doom was the next best thing and that was Duke Nukem etc...
Hope this stuff helps you understand the past man...very important! 
First Person Shooters
"These games are why we have what we do today!" - Mike
Wolfenstein 3D
World War II. Special Agent B.J. Blackowicz is locked away deep in the dungeons of the Nazi castle Wolfenstein. That is, until he somehow discovers a knife. The knife discovers the gut of the cell block guard, and Blackowicz discovers his way out of the castle through an army of grunts, S.S., Gestapo, pit bulls, sorcerers, and mutant zombies. He also discovers lots of ballistic ammunition.
Wolfenstein 3D, the gaming industry's first successful "first person shooter" (FPS), was released in 1992, Texas-based id Software's remake of the several-years-elder PC game, "Escape from Castle Wolfenstein". The original Escape (and its sequel, "Beyond Castle Wolfenstein") was a top-down maze-style game where the player had to collect keys to get around, either avoiding guards who would cry warning with a scratchy synthesized voice, or otherwise shooting them and divesting their corpses of useful goods.
Wolfenstein 3D was a complete departure from its predecessor, similar only in name and theme. As the title suggests, the player must navigate through a "3D" world (which was essentially not 3D, as the player could only move through two dimensions -- forward/back and left/right) and make it to the end of each level. The strategy/quest element of its namesake was removed as well, with protective bulletproof vests and Hitler's Diary replaced with machineguns, ammunition, more machineguns, and more ammunition. What remained was a high-speed race to mow down as many Nazis as possible.
Not surprisingly, the game was banned in Germany.
Doom
The year is some time in the not-too-far future. Mars-moon-based military defense contractor "UAC" accidentally opens a gateway to Hell in the middle of a military installation. Carnage ensues. You, the lone surviving member of your platoon, decide that those responsible deserve a few pellets upside the head. More carnage ensues.
Doom was released as shareware in 1993 by id Software as the literal and figurative successor to their ground-breaking hit Wolfenstein 3D. It was a technological improvement over Wolfenstein in that its 3D engine, while still ultimately 2D, created the illusion of height, and enabled non 90-degree wall corners, allowing for more complex level geometry. It also allowed for better looking graphics -- the demonic imps actually resembled demonic imps, rather than the brown pixelated Roraschach blots that Wolfenstein's Nazi soldiers resembled. Being influenced by the film "Army of Darkness, Doom also featured a new, more modern arsenal, including chainsaws, shotguns, rocket launchers, plasma guns, and the obscenely powerful -- and obscenely named -- "BFG" (the first and last letters stand for "Big" and "Gun"). One defining characteristic of the game, which to date is arguably yet to be duplicated, was Doom's propensity to throw the player against hopelessly large numbers of enemies. In any of the later levels the player could find himself facing up to 20 enemies all at once.
Another first through Doom was the advent of "mods". Licenses were obtainable for the use of the Doom engine in the creation of new commercial products. But the fans, bored with demons and shotguns, found themselves able to create all new graphics and design new maps for the game on their own through the use of user-made hacking tools. Among the more popular Doom mods include one based on the popular James Cameron film, "Aliens", and another which replaced the enemies with characters from "The Simpsons".
Finally, Doom legitimimized shareware as a viable distribution means; registrations for the full version came in by the hundreds of thousands, and id eventually released a retail version, Doom II. The success of the Doom series would spawn an entire army of clones -- ultimately making way for the FPS subgenre -- all trying to cash in id's success by emulating the 3D engine and gameplay. With the notable exception of 3D Realms' "Duke Nukem 3D", no other company would come closer to surpassing Doom's success than id Software's next release, "Quake".
Duke Nukem 3D
Quake wouldn't be seen until a couple years after Doom. Apogee software, shareware distributors and publisher of Wolfenstein 3D (with Doom, id had turned to GT Interactive to handle publishing), took advantage of this downtime and assembled their own team of developers to fill the gap. In mid-1995, 3D Realms released "Duke Nukem 3D".
Like Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem was a resurrection of an old PC game franchise, this time of the old side-scrolling action game "Duke Nukem". Duke's testoserone driven rampage against alien invaders was brought into 2.5-D living VGA color, as the player, as Duke Nukem, traveled through porn houses and strip clubs (complete with strippers who will accept a tip) blasting away womanizing monsters and police-uniform-wearing warthogs (an unsubtle jab at the L.A.P.D.), all the while issuing cultured commentary like, "It's time to kick a** and chew bubble gum... and I'm all out of gum."
Quake
Another militaray installation. Another blunder with teleportation technology. A mysterious otherworldly enemy named Quake who ends up not even appearing in the game. Armed with only an axe and a shotgun, you, The Unnamed Hero, must battle through over 25 levels of varying degrees of brown-hued purgatory to... destroy a giant tree.
If Doom was a technological step up from Wolfenstein, Quake was a pole vault above Doom. Quake featured the first full 3D graphics and physics engine; players existed in a three-dimensional space and could move (jump) up and down as well as move forward and back. Ingame characters were three-dimensional models existing in that three-dimensional space. A realistic physics model meant that falling from heights would hurt the player, and grenades hitting a wall would bounce off and roll back.
In addition to its single-player campaign, Quake also featured a popular network "deathmatch" game, where players could compete in shootouts against other players on the same LAN, and eventually over the internet. Competition grew so wide and fierce that gaming leagues were formed, with the tournament winners being awarded sizable sums of money -- enough for some to decide to pursue gaming professionally.
Quake would go on to engender a pair of sequels, creatively titled "Quake 2" and "Quake III". As with the Doom engine before it, the Quake technology would be licensed out to commercial developers, leading to the creation of games like the the gratuitously profane "Kingpin: Life of Crime", and the controversial, super-realistic, ultra-violent "Soldier of Fortune".
Kingpin: Life of Crime
Crime runs rampant in a near future wrought by urban decay and perpetually poor weather. After being beaten to a pulp by goons of Nicky, the local crime boss, you grab your trusty lead pipe and decide to bury Nicky and muscle in on the Kingpin's criminal empire.
In addition to the street-level violence one would expect from an urban crime-based FPS, Kingpin set a new precedent in creative (or not) use of language in a video game. When not shooting characters on the screen, the player had the option of communicating with a character by conveying either a positive or negative demeanor, generating an exchange of dialogue between the two. Approaching certain characters in the right manner would sometimes yield hints or help. Regardless of how the player decided to speak, virtually every line of speech would contain at least one profanity.
Soldier of Fortune
John Mullins was a former army ranger. Now he is a "professional consultant", doing covert work for the U.S. Government for a paycheck. A Soldier of Fortune.
The situation is made up, but the names are real; John Mullins was in fact a former army ranger, but instead he was a consultant on Raven Games' Soldier of Fortune. The plot came straight from a bad action movie as John Mullins, the character in the game, traveled around the world through various political and military hot spots including Kosovo, Iraq, and the New York City Subway, in search of terrorists who had stolen four nuclear warheads from the former Soviet Union.
The inanity of the plot was compensated for by the design and technology of the game itself. The player was offered a variety of real-world weapons with which to inflict harm upon his enemies, including a .44 Magnum, M-75 heavy machine gun, and B-42 combat shotgun. The true selling point of the game, however, was the engine's "GHOUL" technology, which among other things, offered 26 "gore zones" on each character model. The gore zones are different areas on a player model which when hit by different weapons fire, will result in a different reaction, adding to the "realism" of the game. Shoot a player in the head, and his face will implode. Shoot him in the leg and he'll hop around in pain. Shoot him in the shoulder and his arm will come off. Shoot him in the crotch...
Like Kingpin, Soldier of Fortune boasted a very well deserved "Mature" rating on the box, when it arrived in stores in late 1999. Even though Raven allegedly produced a less-violent alternate edition, Wal-Mart still refused to carry the game due to its content.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
yeah right 
