Obscure Sprite-Based FPS Games

[jute]

I doubt I'm the only one here with an interest in these. Let's talk about them. Here's a brief listing of quite a few that are rarely discussed.

Alpha Storm

Angst: Rahz's Revenge

Cybermage: Darklight Awakening

CyClones

Eradicator

In Extremis

The Hidden Below

Mortal Coil: Adrenalin Intelligence

Quiver

Rebel Moon

Rebel Moon Rising

Rex Blade: The Apocalypse

Skaphander: Der Auftrag

Last Rites

The Terminator: Rampage

Terminator: SkyNET

XS

[Sharessa]

There's some game I had a long time ago where you were going into the mines of some planet killing a bunch of rebels or something who had taken a bunch of hostages. You could rescue the hostages and such. There was also guys with flamethrowers and IIRC it was the first FPS I'd ever seen with flamethrowers.

Another game, the name of which which is on the tip of my tongue, took place in an office building and you were killing terrorists or ninjas or something. All the weapons seemed to be machine guns. Also, you could destroy glass which I thought was awesome. Oh yeah, just remembered the name - Body Count. [EDIT: Operation Body Count, actually. Body Count is an entirely different game.]

A third one I remember (forgot the name for this one as well) is one where you're some guy trapped in a mansion fighting all kinds of generic horror monsters. I seem to remember the guy getting paler or something instead of bleeding when health was low.

Then of course there was Ken's Labyrinth. Lots of neat effects in that which I had never seen before, though the sprites, sounds, and music were terrible. Good thing 3d Realms got a hold of him and had them write an engine for them so they could get some real game designers in there.

And I think I played Terminator: Rampage before as well.

[pavera]

I have a CD copy of Eradicator. It's actually a really good game, you can choose between 3 playable characters who follow different paths through the game. It had a cool picture-in-picture system where you could control missiles in one frame on the screen, and move your character around in the main screen. It also came with a full fledged level editor, which I assume was kinda similar to the Build editor (though I never tried it out).

I always found it kinda unfortunate how unnoticed the game went...

Also did anyone ever play ZPC? That sure was a strange game.

[david_a]

Danarchy said:

There's some game I had a long time ago where you were going into the mines of some planet killing a bunch of rebels or something who had taken a bunch of hostages. You could rescue the hostages and such. There was also guys with flamethrowers and IIRC it was the first FPS I'd ever seen with flamethrowers.

Depth Dwellers. I distinctly remember fantasizing about the blurry screenshot of a flamethrower in one of those old shareware mail-order magazines.

I played the demo of ZPC, mainly to see the artwork of Brute (he does all the KMFDM covers). Unfortunately I couldn't tell what the hell I was doing or where I was going due to the artwork. Definitely form over function, I think.

I also remember drooling over the review of Cybermage: Darklight Awakening in PC Gamer. It looked like the most radical game ever, but of course since it was an Origin game the system requirements were sky-high.

I am ashamed to say that I don't recognize quite a few of the games that jute listed. Of course, since nearly all of the Doom clones sucked I don't know if I'm missing much. Anyone remember trash like In Pursuit of Greed or William Shatner's TekWar?

[wildweasel]

I love ZAR.

[Gez]

jute said:

CyClones:
pic

Funny how you can identify it's a vintage Raven Software game just by the look of the textures. They're really reminiscent of Shadowcaster's, yet they aren't the same.

jute said:

In Extremis:
pic

I was trying to remember that one's name the other day. It was kinda cool, and had funky colored lighting, quirky enemy design and when you killed the aliens you got blood splatters on your helmet. Fun!

[jute]

I have a copy of Eradicator but haven't touched it in years. I should fire it up again. I remember enjoying it as a kid.

Honestly I'm surprised that more of these games haven't been raided for resources by this community. The weapons in Last Rites look really cool.

Gez said:

Funny how you can identify it's a vintage Raven Software game just by the look of the textures. They're really reminiscent of Shadowcaster's, yet they aren't the same.

Not to mention the same "fighter" sprite that appeared in modified forms in CyClones, Hexen, and Necrodome!

[geekmarine]

Heh, I find it funny that I instantly recognized the enemy in the CyClones pic as being from Hexen, and I've never even really played Hexen all that much.

[Snarboo]

jute said:

Honestly I'm surprised that more of these games haven't been raided for resources by this community. The weapons in Last Rites look really cool.

The biggest reason for that is because almost all of those games lack proper tools to extract the resources with. I'm not a programmer, either, otherwise I'd try to reverse engineer the data files.

That said, I have managed to rip all the weapon graphics from Cybermage and nearly all of the weapons from Eradicator. They're on my desktop PC, but I should upload them sometime.

[Gez]

geekmarine said:

Heh, I find it funny that I instantly recognized the enemy in the CyClones pic as being from Hexen, and I've never even really played Hexen all that much.

It's not actually from Hexen, if you compare it to the Hexen fighter. It just looks alot the same because, hey, that was the same artist.

[Nomad]

There's a couple I remember from back then... Nitemare3d (HORRIBLE HORRIBLE GAME). Also Operation Bodycount, and Corridor 7. But those were both official Wolf3D engine licensed games so I guess weren't all that obscure.

Also, I would probably consider Marathon to be obscure because they only people that really know anything about it are anyone who actually used a Mac in the stone age, or Bungiefags

[jute]

Snarboo said:

The biggest reason for that is because almost all of those games lack proper tools to extract the resources with. I'm not a programmer, either, otherwise I'd try to reverse engineer the data files.

That said, I have managed to rip all the weapon graphics from Cybermage and nearly all of the weapons from Eradicator. They're on my desktop PC, but I should upload them sometime.

Please do!

[Fletcher`]

Snarboo said:

The biggest reason for that is because almost all of those games lack proper tools to extract the resources with. I'm not a programmer, either, otherwise I'd try to reverse engineer the data files.

That said, I have managed to rip all the weapon graphics from Cybermage and nearly all of the weapons from Eradicator. They're on my desktop PC, but I should upload them sometime.

Awesome; I tell you what would be neat, if someone ripped the weapons from Terminator: Skynet (other than those two laser rifles we already have.)

[Gez]

Snarboo said:

The biggest reason for that is because almost all of those games lack proper tools to extract the resources with. I'm not a programmer, either, otherwise I'd try to reverse engineer the data files.

I'm still waiting for DaniJ's Shadowcaster resource extraction tool. :(

[Use]

I definitely enjoy vintage FPS games, so this is a treat, there's many here I'd not heard of. ZPC in particular looks awesome.

[jute]

rf` said:

Awesome; I tell you what would be neat, if someone ripped the weapons from Terminator: Skynet (other than those two laser rifles we already have.)

Someone posted this on the ZDoom forums: http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/9263/tftgun3.png

( http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?p=452168#p452168 )

[Ninjalah]

Zero Tolerance, anyone?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Tolerance_(video_game)

First FPS I had, then i went to Goldeneye.

[Aliotroph?]

K, linking to a single jpg when you have a perfectly good page to link is annoying and not fair to the site hosting it.

That said, the only one that comes to mind and isn't already mentioned here is Willian Shatner's TekWar. I remember the demo from somewhere. It sucked.

[Nomad]

If we're counting consoles, Epidemic was awful. Never heard of anyone else who has played it. I couldn't figure it out, and it was the first game I had that I sold.

[Bucket]

Aliotroph? said:

That said, the only one that comes to mind and isn't already mentioned here is Willian Shatner's TekWar. I remember the demo from somewhere. It sucked.

Huh. I actually liked the demo, even though I couldn't figure out what to do or how not to die.

[jute]

Aliotroph? said:

K, linking to a single jpg when you have a perfectly good page to link is annoying and not fair to the site hosting it.

You're right. I've removed the images and added MobyGames links.

[The Ultimate DooMer]

jute said:

XS

heh, I played this back in the day. The only thing that annoyed me (apart from the slow speeds) was the lack of a random draw system for the tournament mode and the inability to choose map 20 for the skirmish mode...so I had to make the draw myself from pools of characters (based on where they appeared in the fixed draws) and play skirmishes up to the last map (at which point I used a save).

Take another peek at the last few maps of Fragport too...

[Creaphis]

Danarchy said:

A third one I remember (forgot the name for this one as well) is one where you're some guy trapped in a mansion fighting all kinds of generic horror monsters. I seem to remember the guy getting paler or something instead of bleeding when health was low.

Sounds like Nitemare 3D to me! Now, I wouldn't have been able to name it either if Nomad hadn't linked linked to it.

I've seen almost none of these games, but I had a demo disk once that somehow had the full version of Corridor 7, which I played through a few times. I also tried Ken's Labyrinth when I was young and was not impressed.

[myk]

Bucket said:
Huh. I actually liked the demo, even though I couldn't figure out what to do or how not to die.

I remember trying to play the shareware version and eventually hating it because it made me nauseous. Probably because it had Wolf3D-like rendering but more detail and relatively bright textures.

[Belial]

I can highly recommend Cybermage: Darklight Awakening. IMO it's a lost gem of Strife proportions.

I'm surprised the list doesn't include Lethal Tender and Terminal Terror.

[Enjay]

jute said:

list

Interesting. I hadn't even heard of most of them and I thought that I was fairly well up on old FPS games. The only ones that I definitely knew about were CyClones (I have a copy), the Terminator games and XS.

Last Rites looks interesting.

Like others, these days, the biggest interest to me would be if their resources were rippable though. I'm not that interested in playing games that old with ye-olde clunky interfaces etc unless it's a game that I am already very happy with.

Do Necrodome, Amulets and Armor and Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance (which has some FP sections) count?

http://www.mobygames.com/game/necrodome
http://www.mobygames.com/game/amulets-and-armor
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/birthright-the-gorgons-alliance

The Blake Stone games (Aliens of Gold and Planet Strike) are probably unknown enough for a mention here and JonoF has a good section with details on all the Build games on his site, a few of which are quite obscure.

http://www.jonof.id.au/build.games

Also, what about even older kind-of FP block-step games like Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder and Lands of Lore?

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dungeon-master
http://www.mobygames.com/game/eye-of-the-beholder
http://www.mobygames.com/game/lands-of-lore-the-throne-of-chaos

[jute]

Enjay said:

Like others, these days, the biggest interest to me would be if their resources were rippable though.

Definitely with you on this. I'm looking forward to Snarboo's Cybermage and Eradicator rips. I like to think of the post-Doom.exe era as leading modders towards the creation of a sort of omni-90's-FPS. This is sometimes very close to literally true with mods like Aeons of Death or Earthbound Doom.

[pavera]

Aliens of Gold is one of my childhood favorites. I actually used to prefer it to Wolf3d cause it was basically the same idea except better level design and more weapons. It had that awesome exploding orb launcher thing (that's about as much as I remember about it) which I always loved launching in a circle around me.

And while we're on the topic of Build games, I remember playing a demo of Powerslave that came with this 1001 great games CD I bought from a bargain bin. I was always interested in it, but I've only ever played that demo. It had a strange atmosphere from what I can remember though.

[Nomad]

Shall we count Ultima Underworld, though not really a shooter? I loved that game though it was a pain in the ass to control. Not to mention I ragequit more than once after taking a nap in-game and waking up to find myself having been killed.

[leileilol]

Belial said:

I'm surprised the list doesn't include Lethal Tender and Terminal Terror.

This list doesn't have the room for the 3DGCS trash.