Friday Flashback: Shadow Warrior
Considering all the hype surrounding the surprise revelation at PAX that Duke Nukem Forever will be completed and published in 2011, and that Gearbox will be doing the deed, it's time we look at a certain FPS game. It's a game with an in-your face hero, who runs around different levels and uses tons of weapons to reduce his enemies to bloody chunks, all while making funny quips while he does it. It's a game where you can find naked or almost naked ladies in various places. It's a game made by 3D Realms.
That's right, I'm talking about Shadow Warrior.
Will GreenwaldFriday Flashback: Deja Vu
Nintendo was notorious for censoring potentially offensive or graphic content in its games, especially in the 8-bit and 16-bit days. That's one of the reasons why ICOM Simulations' 1990 release Deja Vu is so impressive. This first-person adventure game, in the same vein as Shadowgate, brings some genuinely gritty and dark storytelling to the NES (the game was released before then on the Amiga, Commodore 64, PC, Apple, and Atari ST).
Will GreenwaldFriday Flashback: Jazz Jackrabbit 2
In the 90's, all the game companies wanted to make their own Mario or Sonic. Usually this manifested in a handful of crappy cash-in side-scrollers featuring some generic fuzzy animal with attitude. That flood of forgettable critters, combined with the waning PC gaming market near the end of the last millennium, is probably why Epic Megagames' Jazz Jackrabbit 2 fell through the cracks and never got the attention it deserved. Which is a shame, because Jazz Jackrabbit 2 is awesome.
Jazz Jackrabbit 2 is a surprisingly entertaining shooter/platformer that combines both high-speed adventuring and tons of gunslinging into one of the best side-scrolling experiences on the PC. The game plays like a cross between Sonic the Hedgehog and Earthworm Jim. You play the titular green alien hare, whose purpose in life is to fight the oppressive hordes of the space tortoises. To do this, you get to use tons of different guns like flamethrowers, freeze guns, and laser beams to blast enemies, all while running at near-hedgehog level speeds through conveniently curving and sloping levels.
Will GreenwaldFriday Flashback: Shatterhand
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World hits theaters today, and to celebrate a game with an endless stream of video game references this week's Flashback is going to look at the game behind one of the most obscure references: Shatterhand. In the comics, Scott's band was originally called Sex Bob-Omb, but changed its name to Shatter Band, after the NES game Shatterhand.
While it never became particularly popular, Shatterhand was awesome from the moment it hit American stores, from its ridiculous box art of a chubby biker punching the logo with his cyborg hand to its Ninja Gaiden-meets-Bionic Commando graphics. The game was developed by Natsume, which also produced the NES non-classic-but-still-great Shadow of the Ninja, which itself played like Ninja Gaiden meets Bionic Commando.
Will GreenwaldFriday Flashback: Dune 2
Starcraft 2 has been on a lot of gamers' minds lately. It's certainly been eating up my attention and time for a good part of the past week. To commemorate the game we've been waiting a decade for, this week we're going back to the origins of the game, and indeed the very genre itself. No, not Starcraft. No, not Warcraft, but that's a good guess. No, this week's flashback is the godfather of all RTS games: Dune 2: The Building of a Dynasty (or The Battle For Arrakis, depending on whether you're looking at the game's box or its title screen).
Will GreenwaldFriday Flashback: Commander Keen
This week's flashback is a bit of a strange one, because it's not a game I've played a million times and have memorized perfectly. In fact, I'm not even sure if I ever played it on my own computer. However, it still holds a place in my heart because it helped while away the hours during my high school's programming class. After I finished my BASIC assignments (yes, BASIC was all my high school had), I played one of two games on the computer lab's systems: Virtual Pool and Commander Keen.
Will GreenwaldFriday Flashback: Descent
Quake might be considered the most important game in introducing true 3D graphics to PC gaming, but it's not the first to do it. A year before, Interplay introduced a title that not only used 3D, polygonal graphics, but introduced full 3D movement into the gameplay. While Descent isn't as memorable as Quake in the history of PC gaming, it's arguably a more impressive game.
Descent is a unique cross between an FPS and a space sim. Instead of moving around floors, bound by gravity, you fly a heavily armed exploratory craft over all three spacial axes. You can fly back, forward, left and right, plus up and down, literally giving the genre a new dimension of action and exploration. Of course, this did give rise to some issues with motion sickness. Over a decade before Mirror's Edge came out, Descent had weak-stomached gamers tossing their lunches in scores.
Will GreenwaldFriday Flashback: Pilotwings 64
The NES pioneered a lot of video game concepts, and the SNES perfected them. However, the SNES didn't quite get everything right, and for a few games it took the 3D processing power of the Nintendo 64 to reach true excellence. Mario Kart was great, but Mario Kart 64 was amazing. F-Zero was great, but F-Zero X was amazing. Pilotwings was decent, but Pilotwings 64 was awesome.
Mode-7 graphics were awesome for some effects, but the early Super Nintendo games really overused them. While they produced the best racing and flight effects at the time (until Star Fox came out with the SuperFX chip, at least), they were really missing something. Pilotwings 64 gave players an entire 3D world to fly around, not just a strange, flat landscape with ethereal floating rings over it. The Pilotwings 64 levels were big and detailed, with great flourishes like Mario's head on Mount Rushmore. The added dimension of graphics really made the flying feel more real, with mountains and buildings actually sticking up in front of players instead of laying flat like Mode 7 textures.
Will GreenwaldFriday Flashback: Sewer Shark
Usually, Friday Flashback games are great titles that few people have heard of or look back nostalgically. This week, let's turn it around and look at an utterly terrible game that everyone inexplicably remembers. This game was stupid. It was borderline impossible to play. It had horrific (and hilarious) cut scenes. And yet, if you mention the Sega CD to the average gamer, this is the game that they think of.
When you hear Sega CD, you don't think Sonic CD. You don't think Lunar: The Silver Star. You don't think Ecco: The Tides of Time. No, you think Sewer Shark.
Oh, this game is bad. However, it's also freaking hilarious. The story is utterly nonsensical and told through FMV cutscenes with the poor man's Bill Paxton and Danny DeVito, David Underwood and Robert Costanzo. Fun fact about Costanzo: He also provided the voice of Detective Bullock in the 90's Batman cartoon. The cutscenes look like what would have happened if Wing Commander was shot in a dilapidated warehouse on a $20 budget. .
Will GreenwaldFriday Flashback: Metal Storm
Robots are awesome. Gravity-defying physics are awesome. 2D, Nintendo Hard side-scrollers are awesome. And yet, with all of these qualities at the forefront, Irem's Metal Storm remains an obscure NES game far from most gamers' minds. It's really a shame, because this is a great-looking, challenging, creative shooter/platformer that deserved more respect.
At first glance, Metal Storm looks like another side-scrolling shoot-em-up, like Contra or Mega Man. While it indeed follows the formula of "go from point A to point B, fight boss at point B," it incorporates a few unique game mechanics. First, you can switch your personal gravity at any time. Hitting up and jump at the same time lets you fly to the ceiling, where you can move back and forth normally, but fall up and jump down. Combined with one-way platforms and moving walls that would shift whenever you switch gravity, this made for some challenging, creative level design. There are no bottomless pits in Metal Storm, either; in levels where you can fall off the screen, you just fly in from the other side. Certain levels can scroll up and down endlessly, forcing the players to use the repeating layout to get past traps and obstacles.
Will Greenwald
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