Deer Hunter

Name:Deer Hunter
Number:126
Year:1997
Publisher:WizardWorks
Developer:Sunstorm Interactive
Genre:Hunting
Difficulty:3/5
Time:1 hour

Let's try something a little bit different. In the '90s, back when FPS titles first took off, many companies made semi-official and unofficial add-ons to the more popular ones. These ranged from CDs with a thousand levels slapped on from the internet to actual expansions. WizardWorks was the most notable of these publishers, and Sunstorm was the company who developed all their Build Engine expansions. These were successful enough that some of the employees had enough spare time to work on a side project; Deer Hunter, a side project that would end up being a really big thing around the turn of the century. Not bad for a company that most people couldn't name today.

Now, I don't quite remember what the earliest hunting game I've played before was, but I have played something this early. If you're unaware, in the early days hunting games were static, no tracking down animals or anything. Just sit down, and wait for deer. I'm not actually sure what went on, but I distinctly remember not taking out any animals.
I should point out that this is surprisingly easy to get working in WINE, but it isn't exactly plug and play. You need to play it in a window, and you need to play it in Windows 98 compatibility. Then it just works. I'm playing the game with both of the add-ons, for as little as that will change

The map screen, if there's something in the right box that supposedly means there's deer nearby

Once the game is running its less than 30 seconds before selecting your equipment and then entering the game. The game has a small selection of weapons, all generic, a rifle, shotgun, bow and black powder rifle. The final added with the expansion. And then whether or not to use a blind or scents. Choices that later titles in this genre would change into items or pre-place them on the map.

What 95% of this game is about

Starting with the first map, set in autumnal Arkansas, I can freely navigate across a map. This is what constitutes movement in this game. Give them credit, they were usually working with games where the AI was hardly complex enough to not get stuck on walls. Moving from that into an effective form of stealth is tricky. You can switch to a screen where you can actually see everything by pressing hunt, which takes you to a screen where you can see and shoot everything around you, but no moving around. Like a turret or a shooting gallery.

The rifle is the only weapon that allows you to zoom in on targets, everything else functions with weird iron sights

Although, that said, I kill my first deer quite easily with the generic rifle. Huh. The trophy screen just shows black, but I can go back to the main menu by pressing the esc key. Guess I should try the shotgun? Well, it takes a trip to the range and a stroke of luck, but once I figure out where to aim the damn thing I take another one down. This is where the game's difficulty becomes...weird.

A lucky encounter with a deer

Actually hunting animals seems to be a crapshoot. The first few animals just appeared, and then I just couldn't find a single animal. This leads into the big problem the game has, on a fundamental level, the actual hunting is a finicky thing. This isn't an actual hunting game where you can track animals carefully and even find ones you already hit once. No, once an animal is gone, its gone. The manual claims you can follow one, but that didn't work out for me at any time. You can't track animals on the overmap, it just tells you if there's poo or a deer den there, which implies that they should be there. What seems to be the most rewarding method of movement is by taking incremental steps until you see an animal. Its this lack of a proper tracking mechanic that truly breaks this game.

You have to take into account the distance, unfortunately, the iron sights are no help

That's not to say the rest of the game is flawless, but the game having an awkward control scheme is less important than not being able to play the game. I could talk about how looking around is kind of crap and you should have your weapon raised whenever you do so, simply because that way it works well, but discussing the specifics of it seems pointless when there isn't a solid gameplay loop to the game. Or how there are only deer and the weapons don't really feel different. Its one of those games where all the small flaws are unimportant because there's one massive flaw overwhelming everything else.

Weapons:
The four different weapons work out as a subtle method of difficulty. Each lower tier weapon is harder and harder to use effectively. 2/10

Enemies:
Just deer. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
There are six of them, and they seem different. Even if I tried playing this as serious as possible, they don't really feel that different. And if for some reason you couldn't get enough of this, there's a map editor. 1/10

Player Agency:
Everything is done via the mouse, which works, but there are a bunch of little issues. Because everything is on the mouse, you can't do two things at once, like turning and doing a deer call. Turning requires putting one's mouse cursor at the edges of the screen, unless one is wielding a gun, which apparently causes you to have a worse chance of hitting the longer you have it up. 3/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
Despite the overall cheap nature of the game, this feels a lot more like being out in the wilderness than most games would accomplish, though it does feel more limiting compared to those titles. 4/10

Graphics:
Despite the trees being very obvious bitmaps, everything looks decent. Not great, but it does its job well enough. 3/10

Story:
None, like a hunting game should have.

Sound/Music:
Some stock sound effects, the protagonist is voiced, telling us if we hit or if there aren't any deer. The real prize effective background noise. Does a good job of sounding like the a hunting ground. 4/10

That's 18. Very much so a game that aged poorly, though you could easily fix this by implementing a decent tracking system and adding some hotkeys for every function.

Pharaoh's Accent

Pharaoh's Ascent is a straight-forward puzzle game. If it was released on Flash websites just a few years later, this would have been a beloved classic. Of course, like all Flash classics, its not the best thing ever.

The story is that you're a pharaoh, now you're dead, and Set has captured your soul. This is no Fool's Errand. Its not even Pandora's Box. Its just your average puzzle game. Now the gameplay aspect is a simple use of arrow keys, jumping and shooting. Shooting enemies is fairly useless, but its used for other things. Its worth pointing out the default keyset is the numpad without numlock on. This is important, as you can't win without shooting diagonally. There are three types of blocks, completely destructible, slightly destructible, indestructible. You can only destroy the first ones with shots, the rest are moved...assuming you hit them correctly. The objective is to get a boulder into another boulder. One of them moves, the other does not.

This revolves around manipulating these blocks in order to get one boulder to a hole in the wall. Like every good puzzle game, this is simpler than it sounds.

The puzzles are usually simple enough in concept, and start off simple too. But after the first row of puzzles the difficulty sharply increases. One second you're boppin' along, the next, a brick wall. These levels can be divided into three categories, tedious bull, already solved it, and how the hell do I do that? The tedious bull being puzzles that the solution is forthcoming, but requires a annoying amount of effort.

Tedious bull, the level Death Spiral. It is, as can be surmised, a spiral. Like everything else, it is a block puzzle, one where a single wrong move is death. Except instead of one big puzzle, its a bunch of really tiny ones. You have to climb through everything. This is not very fun.

Here's more bull, look at that screenshot. Its not really a secret what you have to do on this level. Shoot the light blocks until they're gone, then they knock over the ankh block. Only, the tornado here cheats. Well, not really, they have no set pattern. They'll walk right up to the ledge, then say, nah, screw that bud. Tedium, random nature, fun.

Already solved it, levels where the solution can be pretty easily figured out, but how you actually get there isn't. These were the most fun, probably because I had something to work toward, rather than a solid brick wall that suddenly collapses. Well, that too, but it wasn't a problem.

How the hell do I do that, levels that defy understanding. Far too many of these were around, and they usually had too much tedium in them. These pushed the very limits of the physics in-game, and there was far too little balance between the two. There's also the levels that are more actiony, but the physics doesn't work very well.

Now this is only partially a problem, the game has a level skip function, but you have to wait so long, and not a do something else kind of waiting. Stay on the game and wait. Play it. For around fifteen minutes. That gives you the first half of the solution. Then play it another...I don't know how long. I never got that. You have to stay on it for a while and I rarely have the patience to stick on one level that long.
The music is some epic piece I don't remember the name of, something that doesn't have any volume for the levels, and sounds that didn't play. Just think early Windows stuff and you have hit gold. I just listened to metal music from the '90s. As long as it had a keyboard, same vibe basically.
Do I recommend this? Do you like puzzles? More specifically, do you like puzzles that make you think you're wasting your time, then discover that you're on the first group of puzzles?

Mod 2: Wolfenstein: The Original Missions

Name:Wolfenstein: The Original Missions
Number:2
Year:1997?
Mod for:Doom
Modder:Las Rojas
Genre:FPS
Difficulty:3/5
Time:1 hour and 30 minutes (unfinished)

I don't know what I can lay the blame on here. Myself? Eh. I guess. This ended up being a mission in torture. At the end of my Wolfenstein 3D review, I am hopeful. Meanwhile, here at just the fourth Wolfenstein related game, I'm exhausted. What good have I missed? I've got nothing much to say about it. Its Wolfenstein, with Doom game logic. That works in places and others...not so much.

Weapons:
The same as Wolfenstein. 2/10

Enemies:
The same as Wolfenstein. 4/10.

Levels:
I realize there were only minor changes, but some of the changes are not good changes. I should not have to deal with elevators in a game that doesn't deal with them. While LZWolf is putting in-level elevator support, its the quick kind. Also, those secret levels. 2/10

Atmosphere:
There's kind of a charming atmosphere to this despite the quality issues. Which I guess is code for it's better than the sum of its parts. Something made me want to complete the entire game, again, for the fourth time. There's something charming about a colorful game about killing nazis. 0/10

Graphics:
With Doom's lighting engine the game feels wrong. Unnecessary. Plus the odd graphical improvements from the original artwork looks weird. 4/10

Sound/Music:
A mismatch of sounds that were taken from random other games, but I'm sure in actuality were taken from Wolfenstein Mac. Music is going to be bad depending on your soundfont. 3/10

A 15 out of 60. I think I'll fudge the math on that to a 14. That makes it the best mod so far. Which isn't shocking because the other competition is Barneystein.

What's this? Nocturnal Missions is next on my mod list? Eh....I guess I should see the secret...no, that's how...ah. Who knows what's next. Besides not Wolfenstein. Maybe...maybe something anime-related.

WolfenDoom: The Original Missions: E1

Well, its been about a month since my last Wolfenstein-related entry, and seeing as my current choice of next FPS game, Terminator, is too short to do anything but one entry on and too long to complete in one afternoon. Time for WolfenDoom: The Original Missions. Not to be confused with WolfenDoom (for Wolfenstein) or anything else. Originally released sometime in the '90s. I say sometime, because, well, I don't know exactly when this particular WAD was released. Whole bunch of these Wolfenstein for Doom games were released on a particular day in 1997, at least on IDgames archives. However, because I am a lazy human being, or more precisely, one with someone who prefers not to waste his time setting up another Doom port when I still haven't gotten a working Mac emulator, I will be doing NightFright's ZDoom port. Which in of itself is an update of C.J. Mullen's version. Like all good projects with a mixture of internet handles and real names, I'm sure this will go smoothly.

As I start up the game, I am greeted by a strange version of the Wolfenstein theme. Curious. Is it the fault of the midis? Or is it a choice of soundfont that greatly clashes with what the game was intended to sound like? I don't know, but this is the first time I've had a game suffer in this department.

E1M1:
Well, it goes into the game proper. Someone forgot to turn on the lights. What's with this ceiling? The control scheme feels...wrong. The sounds...wrong. The weapons...wrong. The sound effects feel like they've been taken from Jedi Knight. One was from Quake. There's also enemy stepping sounds now. I imagine most of this stuff was taken from the Mac version. I can imagine both a professional or a non-professional looking at the pistol sprite they have and okaying that. That looks very wrong. Armor instead shows you how much treasure you have on that level. Clever. Other than that, its the first level of Wolfenstein. Nothing to complain about yet.

E1M10:
Get this, instead of a strange purple wall, there's just a brown/grey one. Now, I don't know if its Doom or if I just know my way around now, but I didn't think this was so bad this time around. Its still the strange, self-entangled, weirdly placed door level. I also noticed I was an efficent killing machine. That's Doom, in Wolfenstein every encounter could mean my death. Still couldn't get all the treasure and enemies, apparently I missed some of them. Despite there being nowhere for me left to go.

E1M2:
There's a weird bell in the music for this one. Actually the whole track is weird. This level tries to be some kind of chateau instead of the dungeon I presume the original was. Some kind of outside area that wasn't there. Not a bad attempt. When moved to Doom, Wolfenstein maps feel a lot more emptier and bigger. Despite being a fast boy, Doomguy feels slower than BJ.

E1M3:
Adding elevators to the original Wolfenstein levels. Not just elevators, but an elevator in front of a long secret corridor. Now, having an outside can be a bit ambiguous, but elevators? In-level elevators? I mean, if you want to do that for an original level, that's fine, but Wolfenstein is supposed to be a series of floors! I'm also starting to question if I should use turbo or not.

E1M4:
Didn't notice it before, but there are a lot of cross hallways in this level. If this were a video LP this level would consist of five minutes of backtracking compared to 3 minutes of action. I've got a lot of health but I'm struggling to keep above 20 in ammo, I think this is due to the way the games calculate damage. In Wolfenstein, anyone can be killed at any time and enemies are quick on the draw. In Doom, its much less extreme in terms of damage output. Also, most secrets, after being activated, don't cleanly disappear into the ceiling.

E1M5:
While in general the first three episodes are better than the later ones in terms of design, I can't help but feel there are still issues. Several rooms basically exist for there to be enemies in for no apparent reason. Almost every room feels like a torture chamber, an office, or a storage room. Maybe a few dog kennels or prison cells. Given my opinion on how every level feels the same, is it any wonder I don't like replaying this?

E1M6:
Just a bunch of jewels in a barracks for some reason. Another level with an outdoor view. Doesn't seem any higher. That about sums up this mod, doesn't it? Another frelling elevator too. I realize I bring this up in some way almost every level, but Wolfenstein always feels weird in the level design department. Too abstracted to be realistic but not abstracted enough to fill in information yourself. Space is folding in on itself in this mod and I don't like that at all. Going by the last level, this area should be the last level. I just...hugh.

E1M7:
So...its a garden on the upper level. That works. Not the strangest thing I've seen. This is a mess of wooden hallways I checked out of mentally pretty quickly. Probably was a mistake to do this so soon after the proceeding game. There's an interesting gauntlet in the center of the map where you're trapped between two groups of guards behind walls and pillars, but only if you really wanted to do that.

E1M8:
11 secrets, but more than half the treasure is in a single unsecret room. Most of those secrets are in the form of a series of rooms. I don't remember how I felt at the time, but now they feel lame. That's what happens when it just looks like you're pushing walls up, I guess. Another fountain outside. Getting less workable now with this stuff.

E1M9:
What, no windows outside? You know, its weird seeing this level without a massive ceiling. Hans is...surprisingly, just as lethal as in Wolfenstein. Maybe less lethal. And somehow my time is only an hour. What. The boss theme sounds really...screwy.

And the outro music sounds like complete garbage now. Apparently a minor change in how the horn sections sound is enough to make an okay soundtrack sound terrible. That's not going to be annoying at all.