A fresh perspective on 90's FPSs (see what I did there? fps is first person shooter...and that's a type of perspective!!...i'll get my power armour...)

 

 

The mid to late 90's was a great time for first person shooters, following on from the ground breaking shooters doom and quake, the next generation of FPSs now included dynamic lighting, 5.1 surround sound and higher texture details than ever before.

 

Among the great titles that were released I went back to my two favourites today to see how they stood up 20 or so years later.

 

 

 

Quake 2

In 2007 Quake 2, the follow-up to the 1996 smash PC and Mac game was released. developed by id Software and published by Activision this amazing sequel took the great features  from quake 1 and added loads of new stuff such as a great sound track by Rob Zombie, brilliant sound effects and destructible environments with breakable glass, exploding barrels and breakable walls.

 

So I dug out my old copy of Q2 and installed it on my modern PC. Now anyone who has tried to install an older game on windows 7 will know the frustration of getting anything pre T2K on a modern PC (shadowman, my fav activision title still remains unplayed due to compatibility issues).

After several attempts I finally got it to run in windowed mode and with a little tinkering I got it to run full screen.

 

The first thing you get is the demo mode running a section of the games first level behind the options menu, this really helps as you can adjust the graphics and sound options and se and hear the results in real time- being an older game I ran it in default GL mode to avoid driver issues.

The textures are fairly basic 8 bit ones over low polygon models, however the actual lighting and particle effects look quite good, and the models for the enemies are quite well done and have some truly disturbing death animations, some go down quietly while others fall to their knees bit take a couple of pot shots at you before they bite it, the larger grunts with chain guns for arms get their heads blown off and actually spray off a couple of hundred rounds into the wall and ceiling before kicking the final bucket.

 

Another thing that I really love about this game is the feeling of weight and heft to the hardware, shotguns bark with loud lead spewing coughs, the machine gun kicks and fights in your hands as you try to keep from wasting a whole clip just trying to keep the damn thing level, but the best is the first gun you get your paws on, its the blaster- its weak and small but it spits out hot death and you can see the rounds fizzing through the air towards whichever poor sod you have just unloaded on, plus whenever the grunts open up on you with the blaster you get a taste of your own white hot medicine as gun blasts crackle past your ears as they miss by mere inches- this is where the 5.1 audio comes into play as you hear the shot leave the gun, whistle just past your melon and impact into the wall behind you.

 

You don't get a recharging health bar or a shield that will replenish if you hide behind a box, as with the first game, Q2 is hard as nails and will kill you without mercy on anything higher than normal mode, I always feel the halo and killzones we get today let you off easy as if they are too scared you will stop playing if they kill you, where as the 90's shooters will happily leave you in a pile of your own gibs for not being quick enough on the trigger.

 

So Quake 2 remains one of my favourite FPS games of all time, yes its old and the graphics creak a bit, but it runs so damn fast and has such a great look and soundtrack that I can forgive it for a low poly count and low textures- its just pure blood drenched bullet spitting joy. 

 

Unreal

In 1998, just one year after quake 2 blew our minds, Epic mega games and Digital extremes took the FPS to even greater heights. With visuals that made you drool, character and weapon design that was out of this world and even a story of sorts about how you may or may not be the messiah that the local alien life forms prophesied to fall from the heavens and save them from the sky demons ( this is all told in found diary entries and crew logs scattered over the game environment.

So once again I found my copy of the game (it has an amazing box design from back when PC games came in proper boxes (I've posted my feelings about this before- see big box blues).
After patching it, uninstalling it, reinstalling it and finally installing it on my win xp machine I keep expressly for playing old PC games that windows refuses to touch (I'm looking at you soul reaver).

Booting it up gives you what I feel is the best in game intro to a game ever, a looped flyby of a castle with some suitably awesome theme music to go along with it.

Now I had forgotten just how atmospheric this games first level is. You are a prisoner who has just escaped a prison ship after it crashes on an unknown planet, you have no gun, no friends and absolutely know idea where you are- add to this that your entire escape is dogged by glimpses of a half seen alien killing machine that leave torn torsos, blood puddles and general mayhem in its wake, all this achieved with the clever use of steam vents, fire walls and flickering lighting that leave you terrified that it will turn on you next.

Once outside the landscapes are awesome to behold- this game uses the first unreal engine (this is now the go to engine for dozens of fps, adventure and action games and has had multiple versions and updates over the last two decades) and the visuals were like nothing else we had seen before- looking at them now they seem a little blocky and the environments feel allot  more enclosed that they did back in 98, however the lighting and textures still stand up relatively well and the set pieces still work beautifully- a great example is your first proper encounter with an alien react that the locals call the sky demons. You in a tunnel lit by flood lights, as you reach the end you are faced with a locked door, turning round to go back the way you came you see the lights snapping off one by one with darkness spreading up the tunnel towards you- seconds latter you are in pitch blackness only to hear a bestial growl rumble out of the dark- nerve jangling stuff even now.

There is a constant feeling that unreal really wants to one up quake at its own game- in Q2 if you kill an NPC you get little black pixels buzzing around the bodies after a few moments of death- these are supposed to be fly and were a nice touch- however in unreal, you kill an NPC and you get fully animated insects buzz around the corpse instead of Q2s single black pixels.
Where Quake want for Rob Zombie and nine inch nails, unreal had a full orchestral score. and where quake had sky boxes and the spaceship that flew over head, unreal had whole flocks of lizard birds and architecture that towered above the player into the vividly coloured alien heavens.

The verity of environments in unreal is huge, one moment your in a crashed prison barge fighting for you life, the next your climbing a gothic sun spire or raiding a crashed alien bounty hunter ship that seems to have suffered the same fate as your vessel.

Once again, no shield recharge here, just messy spine snapping, neck breaking full body exposition death, and a lot of it.

Summing up.

So, 90's fps games still have allot to offer.
Yes they are ugly by todays standards, they lack the refinement, story lines (Kevin spacey as Irons in AW is possibly the most realised character yet seen in a FPS) and bombast of 2014 shooters. However the speed, single mindedness and determination to actually kill you over and over with no hand holding, screen blurring recovery time or shields and the pure unadulterated fun they offer makes these two games well worth going back to- if you can ever get them to run!

And remember, in the words of the king of the FPS Duke Nukem "power armour is for pussies!"