The Compleat Retro Shooter thread

Oh jumping Jesus K. Christ – Proteus is just the game you want when you need to absolutely Cover the Earth [tm] with gore, and feel like a total badass doing it.

Fixed that for you.

Ohhh, you’re talking about Prodeus! ;-)

I say potado you say potato

Anyway, I guess that there’s more than a little Brutal Doom DNA in Prodeus, and 1 to 1 enemy types with classic Doom, but it tickles the crap out me more than either

Hrot’s available now with a 15% discount.


Dangit.

Here we go with my unprompted “Boomer Shooter” roundup. My interest in Boomer Shooters runs to the old-school, straightforward stuff - none of the goofier “roguelikes” or smeary pixel art experiments that are out there.

  • Dusk: the best of the bunch. The presentation isn’t attempting to mimic anything but lo-fi, and while simple, has a a coherent art style. Everything about this shooter is good – the fluid movement, the weapons, the enemies – but what sets it apart is a level design that is never afraid to fuck with you in imaginative ways without being ever being lazy, gimmicky, or unfair. This shooter is a work of passion created by a designer with their own vision who handpicked the best part of old shooters and then added their own secret sauce. The only one of these shooters I powered through start-to-finish without any other long breaks. Nothing ever annoyed me about this game – even the boss fights, which generally annoy the hell out of me in other shooters – raised my ire.

  • Ion Fury: you wanted Duke 3D v3.999999? You got it. Level design is uniformly fantastic, pushing the creaky Build engine to limits we could have never imagined back in 1996. Gameplay-wise… well, like I said, it’s DN3D v3.99999. The weapon loadout is blasé (although the Loverpistol’s secondary is a lovely crutch), with nothing like Duke’s Expander, Freeze-Ray, or even trip mines. And where’s the f’ing ROCKET LAUNCHER??? Enemies are also similarly unimaginative, with an overuse of annoying little bastards (the headspiders and ESPECIALLY the little green floaty things). Essentially an extension of what made DN3D great, I figure this is the best Build engine game ever made (although efforts like Alien Armageddon & AMC come close).

  • Prodeus: (prerelease). It’s Brutal Doom 3D. This is not a bad thing. The torturous sprite tricks (I can’t imagine the pain of having to pre-render all those monster sprite viewing angles!) are amazing. I honestly don’t have much to add; the weapons are basically Doom’s, and the monsters are almost direct representations of Doom’s bestiary. Again, not a bad thing. These are all known, time-proved commodities that still work perfect fine in 20xx. True to its roots, it has absolutely the best, most completely insane gore system I’ve seen. Definitely produces the highest rate of “FUCK YEAH” utterances of any of these games.

  • Amid Evil: I can’t be fair to this game, and I honestly don’t know why I picked it up (thanks, Civvie11!) Why? I didn’t like Heretic, or Hexen, or any other “fantasy shooter”. I just don’t like the esthetic or shooting things from wands. So I didn’t much like Amid Evil, either, even though there is absolutely zero wrong with it and even has a kind of Painkiller demon mode mechanic. And one of your weapons shoots entire planets (stars in demon mode). Other than that, it’s competent as hell and you should probably play it.

  • WRATH (prerelease): First impressions: holy cats, did the designers work really hard to make the old Quake 1 engine spit out graphics that look just like Unreal 1 graphics. And, holy cats, yeah, this is a big-boy shooter for l33t sh00t3r nerds. I mean, after a short intro to knife-jumping and some lumbering zombie-whacking, you’re immediately thrown into a big area with only a crap pistol against some heavy-hitters. You can tell that the designers want to punish players whose shooter skills aren’t up to snuff. Smooth, fast, punishing gameplay. I haven’t gotten too far into this one yet thanks to the immediate difficulty spike, but if want badass bragging rights, I guess this is the one to champion.

TL;DR: all five of these are good, for different reasons, all with gameplay mechanics firmly rooted in the Golden Age of 90s shooters, before Quake III’s engine ruined shooters for over a decade.

Oh nice. Thanks for the write-ups.

FEAR-ish, but in GZDoom

Well HELLO there…

Another Cyberpunk-style FPS in the works, Turbo Overkill. The team describe it as retro, which outside of the obvious pixelated visuals I think is a bit of a stretch as it lots of stuff from contemporary shooters, but it looks like something I want to play. Coming “soon” to Steam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=varoEJiaxjo

I’ve been following the dev’s progress on the Unity powered Cultic for a while as its making a effort to recapture the dark horror ambience of Blood (1997). Doesn’t have a Steam page yet, but I imagine a boutique publisher will snap this project up.

Blade of Agony, an amazing total conversion that basically creates a new Return to Castle Wolfenstein-style experience on the Doom 2 engine, is receiving its final episode and a campaign overhaul on April 30.

That’s the Doom 2 engine? It looks nothing like it.

For sure, but it’s a project benefiting from a quarter century of community support and modifications. There’s no way someone could’ve pulled off a similar project back in 1994.

After six years of work, the super ambitious Doom 2 total conversion Blade of Agony is finally done! If you enjoyed Return to Castle Wolfenstein back in the day, then you owe it to yourself to check this out, as it’s an a love letter to that classic. Best of all it’s completely standalone. No need to fuss around with any original files, or fiddling with folder merging and source ports - just download and play!

Nice, thanks for the heads up!

7 posts were merged into an existing topic: Graven: an indie Ultima Underworld that…doesn’t go anywhere?

A new challenger enters the ring!

???

image

Crap, the link isn’t showing up:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1156120/DOOMBRINGER/

Also Hedon 2!

A shame because the trailer looks like a very competent Q3 mod.