Blood

“Now that I’ve played Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior, there’s only one of the Big Three build engine games left to try.”

“Hmm… I’ve finished D3D and SW on hard, so I’d better put this on the ‘Well Done’ difficulty.”

TEN MINUTES LATER…

Blood is kicking my ass.

The difficulties were made with co-op in mind. If you’re an FPS veteran, play it on the middle skill. If you’re a little less sure, play it on one of the two skills at the top. No shame. Blood on medium and higher is brutally hard, but it’s also one of the greatest FPS games ever made.

Everything about it is masterfully done. There’s so many barely-noticeable bits of ‘game feel’ that make the combat fluid and satisfying. Highly recommended.

STRAFE: Millennium Edition

I knew how Strafe was going to turn out. I read the dev updates. I saw it coming. Strafe was more or less unplayable on my laptop but even then I knew I didn’t miss anything. What a waste.

The devs have since given it a massive much needed overhaul called ‘Millennium Edition’ and I gave it a go.

What is new? New room layouts (especially for the first zone, which is the blandest and worst designed environment in the game), loads of new monsters, new gun sounds, and performance optimization.

I had fun.

This might be because I’ve been cleaning black mold from a dank cellar all day.

There’s still balance issues. The AI still doesn’t feel quite right. The shotgun’s grenade upgrade is still a straight downgrade. Loot still feels too expensive. Armour is far too expensive for what you get. The jellyfish vents are still shit. It takes too long to get back into the game after dying.

I played it for half an hour, which is longer than I could stand to play the original. I enjoyed it and I’m going to play it again. I like the new layouts, monsters and weapon tweaks. If you’ve already bought Strafe you should try it.

I can’t recommend it to new players though. Maybe after the next overhaul.

FRAG Update

I’m still writing a miniatures game. In fact all of the actual rules are in place, I just need to finalize the vehicle rules and the stuff that’s going in the ‘expansion pack’. Everything after that is balance tweaks and points cost adjustments.
FRAG is a tabletop battle game that adapts 90s FPS games into a nominally 28mm (actually scale neutral) mass combat system where armies of combatants clash in huge engagements.

Let’s have a look at how the factions of FRAG have turned out:

The Lost Battalion – An army of dimension jumping bad asses founded by the damned survivors of a Hellish incursion. Elite troops, very mobile, devastating heavy weapons.

Hell – The baddies from Doom. More demons inspired by other sources will appear in the expansion. Large hordes, strong characters, lots of spells. Character have a lot of options with bionics, spells, and hellish upgrades.

The Sidhe – A non-human race of mystical adventurers and knightly orders, dedicated to fighting demons. Hard to pin down in melee and able to use a variety of sneaky gadgets (including a Tome of Power analogue).

The New Order – Regular humans that fight alongside super-science and necromancy. They come from an alternate reality where European fascists made a pact with “the endless dark”. Weak regular troops but powerful special options.Nazi zombies are DLC only, sorry.

Earth Defense Force – Earth is backwards and repressive compared to the newly independent colonies, but it outnumbers them millions to one. The EDF are the people in charge of keeping it safe. They need to carefully deploy heavy weapon teams to get the most out of their firepower.

SHAMAN – A rogue AI turned bio-mechanical horror. Mixture of System Shock / Quake 2 influence. Most SHAMAN troops have a chance to self-resurrect. Can take special packs of screaming Kamikaze.

Personalities – Various ‘hero’ characters for use with certain armies.
Various characters based on popular mods like High Noon Drifter and Project MSX, also Shadow Warrior, Duke Nukem 3D, DUSK, Chasm: The Rift, the Doom movie, Doom 4 and Id Software’s D&D campaign.

Currently working on
 – Vehicle Rules
 – Better scenario rules (optional rolling for mission types, not just extermination missions)
 – More equipment (weird rocket weapons for the New Order, better artillery and air strike rules for the EDF)
– More Personalities
– Indoors skirmish system (working prototype)

Stuff being considered
  – Whether to add more elite units to the Sidhe and SHAMAN lists
  – Mini-Factions and sub-factions like Kage Corp (corporate samurai!), the Church of the Old Blood (cultists!), the Colonial Union (the high tech space humans), and a skeleton themed Hell faction
 – Balance issues
 – Rules readability

Shadow Warrior (1997) Review

Who wants some Wang?
Over the summer I played through Shadow Warrior and all of its’ expansions using the Shadow Warrior Redux port available on Steam. It’s finally time to write about that experience.

Shadow Warrior was 3D Realms’ successor to Duke Nukem 3D. While Duke was a Hollywood badass, Shadow Warrior’s hero is an over-the-top Asian badass with callbacks to Hong Kong action films and Japanese ninja shows.

Shadow Warrior was less successful than Duke 3D, probably due to releasing so close to Quake which made it appear dated by comparison.

The Introduction
I first purchased Shadow Warrior Redux last year, but I struggled to get into it. Duke Nukem is eminently accessible. Hardcore, but accessible. I’m going to spoil things now and say that I ended up loving Shadow Warrior. It’s Duke Nukem dialed up. Less accessible, more hardcore, and in the end satisfying as hell.

My first attempt at Shadow Warrior left a mixed impression. The standard shuriken weapon felt under-powered, it was hard to melee the enemies. I stuck with it; learning to use the basic weapons, find new weapons, and how beat the elite ninja with the instant death attack. The game made me git gud and after that things started to get pretty damn enjoyable.

But after that I got stuck looking for a switch. So the first impression was a mixed bag. I stopped playing and took a long break from it.

As I wrote earlier, I finished Shadow Warrior and every expansion over the summer. After a few months hiatus I started a new game, stuck with it and had a blast. It takes longer to get into then Duke or Doom but it is great.

The Levels
Shadow Warrior has a lot of content to get through. Levels are themed around Asian city streets, rural valleys, mountain tops, temples, and isolated bases. Most levels are highly complex and key hunting is a major feature. Duke Nukem’s abstract realism is kicked up a notch, giving the sprawling levels a strange and almost dream-like quality to progression. The juxtaposition between urban realism, abstract countryside, ancient temples, high tech bases, and mystical weirdness works to create the feeling of a pleasantly bizarre adventure. It’s like stumbling through a shifting dreamworld. Sometimes levels appear to be linked with a strong connecting storyline, and other times you’ll find yourself catapulted into a bizarre new environment with no idea how you got there. Again, a strange but pleasant experience.

The levels are complex and lots of fun, but you need to keep your eyes open. There were perhaps three or four moments in the game where I felt completely lost and play ground to halt for five to ten minutes.

Gameplay
I mentioned the shuriken felt under-powered earlier. That’s because the shuriken is not Shadow Warrior’s iconic weapon. High level play depends on the rocket launcher and grenade launcher. Both are satisfying and dangerous. The grenade launcher has a massive blast radius that you’ll need to get used to, and is used for clearing out rooms. The rocket launcher is for dealing large amounts of damage to single enemies.

Perhaps appropriately, Shadow Warrior will put you into a kind of zen state where you end up leaping across the level blazing away with machine guns and bombs, clearing out unexplored chambers with high powered grenade launchers, blowing up tankier monsters with rockets, and finishing off the stragglers with shotguns and railgun blasts.

Generally the weapons are a lot of fun to use and when you’re in that zen state you’re in one of the best shooting experiences in FPS gaming.

Story and World
Shadow Warrior (1997) rides the early 80s to mid-90s wave of badly dubbed kung fu parodies and ninja shows, which were the only thing most westerners knew about China and Japan at the time. It was accused of racism when it came out and it can be hard to argue against that; but despite the puerile parodies Shadow Warriors’ approach to Asian culture at least seems to come from a place of love, even if not one of respect. The developers were clearly fans of anime and Asian action cinema, they just weren’t interested in making a serious or sensitive story line. Nor does Shadow Warrior need a serious storyline or a deep look into a new culture – it’s pure gameplay with a paper thin plot and a massive amount of penis jokes. Everyone’s mileage may vary, but I’d advise any shooter fan not to miss out on Shadow Warrior because they don’t like the faux Asian styling.

The plot is simple: you are Lo Wang, kung fu badass and former bodyguard to of the head of Zilla Corporation. Lo Wang is betrayed by Zilla. Lo Wang embarks on a quest for vengeance. Body parts fly and anime babes who don’t fit the art style respond to Lo Wang’s clumsy pick-up lines with automatic gunfire.

Sometimes Shadow Warrior slips from silliness into cringey childishness, but it’s mostly silly fun. Lo Wang is a dumb character but he’s also a really distinct character. It’s like the game as a whole.

There’s something oddly mischievous about him. He giggles with glee when the explosions start. He’s a complete wise-ass who’s having so much fun that in the end I found it hard not to get attached to him. As downright stupid as Shadow Warrior is sometimes, I couldn’t help crack a smile when using a phone caused Lo Wang to make a silly prank call.

Hello, is Big Bottom there? First name Iva. Iva Big Bottom? Heeeheeeheee!

Conclusion
Shadow Warrior is an ultra-violent, grossly offensive and ridiculous load of nonsense – and I loved it.

Shadow Warrior doesn’t give a damn what you think about it. It is what it is; a hardcore experience designed by a team of weirdos with a lot of experience making FPS games. It was made in 1997 for experienced first-person shooter fans, mixing late 90s architecture with early 90s design sensibilities.

I felt genuinely sad when I finished it and all the expansions. Someday I’ll return to Shadow Warrior and re-join Lo Wang the giggling idiot ninja.

I recommend Shadow Warrior.

EDIT: I did encounter a rare but recurring bug in Shadow Warrior Redux where the mouse stopped responding. The first expansion pack also has some glitchy sky textures near the end (although this might not be the port’s fault). Neither were deal breakers.

Conan the Barbarian (2d20)

“Long ago in a distant land, between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas, an unspeakable evil was unleashed onto the land! But a mighty thew’d Cimmerian warrior wearing the jeweled crown of Aquilonia stepped forth to oppose it. Before the final blow was struck, the wizard Thoth-Amon summoned a creature from the Outer Dark, where the Great Old Ones’ evil is law. Now the king wishes to return to the glories of the past, and undo the future that is the 2011 Conan reboot.“
– Akiro the Wizard, circa 10,000BC

Hey so guess what arrived today.

Modiphius’ Conan RPG uses the 2d20 system, which is also used in my current tabletop group’s campaign, Mutant Chronicles 3rd Edition. There are, however, isome small but important differences. Generally it is clearer, with small changes made because of extensive playtesting since the release of Mutant Chronicles; other changes are due to genre (from schlocky science-fantasy to Weird Tales pulp fantasy).Changes include an overhauled character creation, abstract damage systems (you take temporary ‘stress’ damage and can take up to five levels of ‘harm’ damage, instead of tracking hit points), and a surprisingly elaborate number of special “Displays” which attack enemy morale. I also feel that some re-wordings of the skill success system put the default emphasis on players making up cool details instead of just buffing their attack (which was the case in Mutant Chronicles).

2d20 is a weird beast; compared to D&D, it’s more narrative driven with some interesting unique concepts like Fortune (points that let the players do good stuff), Doom (that let the GM do all sorts of nasty stuff) and Momentum (spend your skill test successes on fun stuff). Conan does a better job of explaining these than Mutant Chronicles. I’m looking forward to trying it.

There’s clearly a lot of love for Conan among the writing staff, but I’ve only just gotten this so I can’t judge it in-depth yet.

Doom: Halloween.wad

WIP of Halloween level. Ignore the default sky texture, something else is going there eventually. The valley and crypt is the beginning area before the player drops into a deep cavern that becomes a black and orange metallic hell.

I started to get the hang of decorative mid-textures after looking at how Skillsaw uses them. Study other authors’ levels to work out how they pull stuff off.

Doom Mapping Advice

“Any advice for beginner Doom Mappers with no ideas for the full picture?”

I can vouch for the tried-and-true method of just jumping in and teaching oneself everything about Doom mapping, since it is a very accessible medium of creation – seriously, drawing simple lines and shapes is really all it takes… well, okay, maybe not.

However the community itself is rich in resources to help you get off the ground. There are editing tutorials all over the place:

Of course there’s a lot beyond this – and you might want to make maps, and be able to, but be quite stuck for actual ideas. Again, the community is there to help.

  • There are name generators and theme generators out there. Of course some of these are ineffably silly, but hey, sometimes a silly idea might stimulate you creatively in ways you’d not previously considered.
  • OBLIGE is a level generator that can help you gain a general idea of how a Doom map layout can work. It is generally frowned upon to use these layouts “out of the box” though, so use them for inspiration, but don’t go generating a bunch of maps and then releasing them. 😛
  • The Doomwiki is a great resource regarding specifics of the engine.
  • There are innumerable community projects ongoing at any one time, especially on Doomworld, with specific restrictions like using a certain size of playable area, or specific enemy placement. Limitations breed creativity, so hopefully you’ll find one that stimulates and challenges you!
  • Just doodle! Find some blank paper, whether it has lines/squares or not, and get sketching. Interesting things are bound to arise.
  • Play a lot of Doom. Seriously. The maps the community makes are invaluable sources of inspiration. We’re a stupidly creative bunch.

Klukva Miniatures

Look what finally arrived from Russia!

I was surprised by the quality of it. The package came in a sealed padded envelope and is a sturdy MDF box. It took two and a half months to arrive, but it was dispatched fairly promptly so that’s not the sellers fault. The miniature is resin and the detail is extremely crisp. I had the option of giving Doomguy (sorry, “Hell Crusader”) a pistol or have him flip off his opponent. I choose the latter option.

Klukva Miniatures sell him for 9 euros, they also do some not!Overwatch miniatures.

Giant demon lord and Minotaur Queen are not included.