Having recently discovered the garden of wonders that is GOG.com, I've decided to fill out some of the blank spots in my classic gaming knowledge, namely the retro first-person shooters I missed out on as a kid growing up without a PC. To that end, I picked up both Monolith Productions' horror-themed shooter Blood and 3D Realms' racist Asian sterotype-themed shooter Shadow Warrior, often considered to be two parts of the holy trinity of Build engine classics, with the third being Duke Nukem 3D. Now, FPS games from the good old days tend to get a fair bit of condescension from gamers and critics alike. The word“mindless” is thrown out liberally, and when people think of games like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, they recall wading through waves of pixelated cannon fodder, mowing down enemies with gigantic weapons of mass destruction with no regard for technicalities like cover or the Geneva Convention. Ours is considered to be an enlightened time, where modern first-person shooters are more tactical and cerebral than their knuckle-dragging ancestors from the mid-nineties.
After my experience withBlood and Shadow Warrior, I am happy to report that this is all a bunch of crap, and anyone who remembers these games as mindless or lacking in depth are clearly remembering them with God Mode enabled. I booted up Blood first, expecting a breezy, cathartic murder spree to unwind from all the gritty cover-based shooters I've been playing lately. It was a surprise, then – almost a shock, really – when I emerged from Caleb's tomb and was promptly killed by a zombie with a fire axe. He was the very first enemy in the game. I expected my oversized pitchfork to instantly wreck his day, but after two more tries (I barely survived the second attempt, and my gamer pride forced me to do it again properly) I made a startling discovery: zombies in Blooddo just as much melee damage to you as you do to them. No insta-kills, no canned animations. Your pitchfork has a slight knockback effect, though, and with some fancy footwork, you can get in enough jabs to kill them without being touched. Feeling unusually pleased with myself for figuring out how to kill the first enemy in an FPS, I moved on, acquired the flare gun, and then died in the next encounter, whereupon I was forced to restart the game because I hadn't expected to die again so soon after mastering the pitchfork shuffle and I hadn't saved.
This cycle of death and overconfidence continued for about the first two levels, until I realized that these games demand your complete attention and test your abilities like no FPS does in our post-Halo world. First-person shooters from the days of the Build engine were anything but mindless, and rather than stomping monster skulls as an invincible he-man with an endless supply of ammo, I found myself playing a tense game of guerrilla warfare, darting between cover, taking potshots, and watching my supplies carefully as hordes of vicious and devilishly creative monsters closed in around me. Even as these games emphasized the macho badassery of their protagonists, FPS gamers of the 90's were up against basic enemies who could murder them in seconds, and bosses who could do it even faster. Modern luxuries like recharging health, automatic checkpoints, and AI sidekicks were nowhere to be seen. Ammunition, medkits, and special gear were key to survival, and scarce enough to make me plan out my moves carefully in order to avoid wasting any precious supplies. I would replay a tough firefight over and over, learning the layout of the level, picking my targets and weapon choices carefully in order to come out on the other side with as much health and ammo as possible.
This is a scenario that you just don't have in modern games. Nowadays, you can keep throwing yourself into a battle over and over until you happen to get through it, and if you do, your health is automatically replenished and you can just pick up new guns from your fallen enemies to rinse and repeat the process at the next checkpoint. There are no consequences for your mistakes, and no rewards for skill, except perhaps fewer reloaded saves. This is clearly a byproduct of the industry's move toward casual gamers, as the modern FPS seems more content to be an interactive movie rather than a test of will and twitch reflexes. Developers today are so eager to move gamers along to the next million-dollar setpiece that they dare not throw something at gamers that might require them to stop and think, like exploring a level for precious items or, worse yet, planning ahead.
Which is not to say that these old FPS games are constantly tense, grueling affairs akin to wilderness survival or dinner with the in-laws. What they have is a genuine difficulty curve, rather than the mostly flat difficulty plain of the modern FPS. So while most of the game is a struggle, you will occasionally find yourself with an amazing powerup or weapon that tips the odds in your favor for a change and is incredibly satisfying to use. In Blood, this is the Guns Akimbo powerup, which allows you to dual-wield your weapons for a short time and absolutely tear up everything in your path. In Shadow Warrior, this takes the form of the tactical nuke, which you can occasionally find and launch from your upturned vacuum cleaner – I mean missile launcher.
Of course, even when these games try to give you a leg up, they're ready to slap you back down if you abuse your newfound power. Guns Akimbo will drain your ammo supply faster than you can say “holy crap I have double napalm launchers,” and you're just as likely to blow yourself up with the tactical nuke as you are your enemies. What this showed me is that every aspect of the gameplay is carefully balanced and weighed with pros and cons. The enemies, the map design, the weaponry – it all fits together beautifully, providing just enough challenge to test your skills and give you a rush of accomplishment when you complete a tough section without unfairly punishing you for failure. It's pure gameplay at a perfect pitch, and it's something of a lost art in the modern game industry (and not just among shooters).
There is a price to pay for gameplay bliss, though. Some retro games have aged well, and their minimalistic appearances give them a certain charm, as they don't actually detract from the gameplay. The nineties FPS hasn't been so lucky, with graphics so bad they'll burn their muddy textures into your retinas. Not to mention the mixture of sprites on 3D terrain has never looked good, and has only gotten worse with the now-common knowledge that you can have three-dimensional character models in a video game. Once, while playing Blood, I found a specific corner that, for some reason, the sprites couldn't turn around in, and thus the cultists rushing me all turned into slivers the moment they ran by, since I was now looking at their sprites from the side. This would have been a great strategy if their hitboxes had been two dimensional as well, but they reacted to my double-barreled shotgun just as poorly as any forward-facing cultist. While this was more amusing than detracting, the fact that you can't look up or down in any of these Build engine games without horribly distorting the screen is a huge problem, especially when you're trying to deal with tiny crawling enemies or lofty snipers.
These games compensate for aiming issues like this by providing a (by today's standards) absurdly generous auto-aim, which will typically hit the nearest enemy if you happen to be pointing the crosshairs anywhere within a ten foot radius of its body. This is a pretty good quick fix, and it allows you to focus on running and bunny hopping out of danger rather than aiming, but it's not perfect, as you don't get much say in what your gun decides to shoot at. If you're trying to hit, I don't know, an explosive barrel surrounded by enemies, you're more likely to shoot all the enemies to death by the time the game auto-targets the barrel than you are to hit the barrel first and catch them in a screen-shaking two-dimensional explosion.
Still, any player willing to take on the challenge that these old games provide will certainly be able to adapt to weird little quirks like this. After a session or two, I no longer noticed how terrible the textures were (although now I see everything in brownish, blocky pixels, so there's a bit of a trade-off). I even got used to the overzealous auto-aim. So why do these games get such a bad rap? What's so mindless about them?
Well, the story, for one thing. I meant story, not stories, because there is only one story. In Blood, you are a cult member named Caleb out to get revenge on the dark god who betrayed you. In Shadow Warrior, you are a Chinese bodyguard named Lo Wang (get it? The game has about five hundred other “wang” puns for you just in case you didn't) out to get revenge on the wealthy businessman who betrayed you. Both characters spout one-liners and crude jokes like they're making a demo reel for the part of Duke Nukem, and nobody told them Jon St. John already beat them to it. Each level is just a random location with no significance beyond fulfilling the gameplay's fairly basic needs. These games clearly didn't put much effort into their plot, and aside from a few cutscenes in Blood, the narrative exists almost entirely in the instruction manual and has absolutely no bearing on the gameplay. This is perhaps the biggest disconnect between old school and new school, as even the most pathetic FPS storyline today has to be tied into the gameplay at least a little bit or they'll be laughed out of class. If this is the scale by which we determine whether a shooter is mindless or not, then yes, these games are as mindless as any of the 80's action movies their protagonists imitate.
Then there are the cheats. I wasn't kidding when I said people probably remembered these games with God Mode enabled. Back in the day, games were much less ashamed of their cheats, and rather than penalizing players for using them or making cheat code entry a chore, these games practically paraded their infinite ammo and super jump cheats around with easy-to-remember codes that could be found in the back of most video game magazines. As kids, our motor skills and attention spans were too stunted to handle these games on their true difficulty, so we turned to cheats for some truly mindless viscera-encrusted fun. Just for kicks, I turned on a few cheats inShadow Warrior to remind myself what it was like to burn through one of these games with infinite ammo and invincibility.
Unsurprisingly, the fun didn't last long. With all items and invincibility, I cleared two levels in about five minutes, and I promptly lost interest. Cheats seem like a great idea, especially to a kid who can't hack it on Duke Nukem 3D's easiest difficulty, but they take away the sweet, sweet balance that adult me can appreciate far more than gibbing every dude in sight with no fear of reprisal. If you, like me, used to play these old FPS games with all the cheats on, I recommend taking another look. Do it for real this time. You're older and wiser. You know there's more to this hobby than blood and guts and blowing up scary monsters. Stroll on over to GOG.com or dust off your old CD-ROMs. Any one of the Build engine's holy trinity will do, although of the two that I played recently, I prefer Blood. Or, y'know, you can pick up all three. You'll be surprised at how much you have to think while playing one of these mindless shooters.
But what about the horrible graphics? What about the dodgy controls? Maybe you want mid-90's style without all the baggage. If only there were some alternative, some kind of FPS that combines the big action and thrilling challenge of the older generation while embracing modern innovations like polygonal character models and precise aiming. If only you could explore vast, mazelike levels crammed with secrets and lay waste to huge, diverse hordes of vicious monsters with a creative, over-the-top arsenal of weaponry without getting your eyeballs sodomized in the process. A game like that would probably arrive on store shelves accompanied by a choir of angelic voices and demonic guitar riffs. A game like that could change the world. If only such a game existed.
