Qt3 Classic Game Club #6: Blood

Blood

Blood. Blood! BLOOD! I quite like the short, snappy, literal-minded names given to the early FPS games: Doom, Quake, Blood, Wolfenstein: Spear of Destiny etc. It’s nice that they let you know what you’re in for before you being playing, and in this game you’re in for lots and lots of Blood.

Boring info

Blood is a 2.5D FPS game based on the BUILD engine (i.e. Duke Nukem 3D). It has the characteristic 3d walls + spirtes look that accompanied other BUILD games, and much like Duke3D and Doom, it features fast gameplay, lots of guns, lots of explosions, and most of all irreverent humour focused around heavy metal shtick and references to B-movies. I think it’s meant to be the cutting edge of 2.5 shooters. Watch this to whet your appetite.

Where to buy

Both Steam and gog feature identical copies of the game, I believe. Both use DOSBox and therefore should be playable on practically everything.

[ul]
[li]gog.com[/li][li]steam[/li][/ul]

I bought it on gog as it was 38p cheaper and gog gave me a low quality AVI of a [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD5No_JRrZw&feature=kp]Type 0 Negative song](
[url) that is apparently in the game?

Why I picked it

I have fond memories of playing the game, which is interesting given that I only played the shareware version, and therefore only played 1/4 of it. But what I do remember is vivid enough to make me want to go back and make me regard it fondly:

[ul]
[li] The way the game starts.[/li] You wake up in a grave with a pitchfork and proceed to sprint at and stab zombies in the face. These days zombies are a bit cliché, but somehow I don’t think my enjoyment of this beginning will fade.

[li] Bombastic weapons![/li] Flare guns that set fire to people, TNT to throw at people, tommy guns to rat-a-tat-a-tat at people. You can dual wield flare guns and sawn off shotguns! Who doesn’t love dual wielding things?!

[li] Alternate fire modes[/li] I have no idea if Blood invented this, but it was the first game I played that featured this. I remember being in some grey castle area full of (now) dead monks, near a courtyard with a fountain in it, and accidentally pressing the ‘X’ key. The tommy gun did a little dance as it sprayed bullets in the alternate fire mode. I WAS OVERJOYED to hit that button, as should you be.

[li] GORE[/li] Lots of Blood and gibs. Possibly dismemberment? I know that you get to shoot the heads off of Zombie and then punt them about like footballs. I also remember the acolyte dudes screaming lots as you set them on fire…. And I don’t think you can turn it off.

[li] The levels[/li] The initial graveyard. Then there’s a level set entirely on a moving train (that you can fall off of), and had to proceed from one end to the other, JUST LIKE IN THE COWBOY MOVIES! Then there was a random circus level, though I remember that sucking. Either way: The levels stick out in my head a lot more than Quakes, even though I replayed Quake last summer. (black and white tiled gothic castles full of lightning?)

[li] A very cool theme to the game[/li] Some kind of Victorian horror wild west cross-over?

[li] General ‘old school’ gameplay[/li] I think it set out to be the cloniest of doom clones. I’m hoping that after playing I’m of the opinion that it is great success in this area.
[/ul]

However I can’t remember much more than that. For all I know it has lots of inane jumping puzzles and key-fetching that will bore you to tears. I do know, however, that it has terrible, terrible primitive 3d cutscenes. They’re truly horrendous.

But really, I picked it because it’s just come out on Steam, which prompted someone elsewhere to post about it, which reminded me how great it is and that I want to play it again. I was going to pick Syndicate or Doom before today :) I think I only ever played the first episode/chapter of Blood via the demo/shareware release, so I’m itching to play the rest. I’m just using this as an excuse to do so, and I’m dragging you all with me.

I find playing Doom after playing something like Call of Duty to be a very refreshing thing as both games purport to be the same “thing” but are both massively different. I’m hoping Blood further reinforces my love for Doom-style gameplay, and brings those of you who never really experienced early FPS games over to the dark side ;) I think a lot of you might enjoy it.

edit: I’m told it has:

Kick-ass multiplayer maps including:
Football pitch.
Opposing castle map.

A football pitch! To kick zombie heads around! !

Why it’s a classic

It’s got a high metacritic score!!

I think it was well received at the time, though I imagine it got a panning because it wasn’t ultra 3d omg polygons. It’s definitely got that classic arcade FPS gameplay element that I find is sorely missing in today’s games, which in my mind makes it a classic game, along with Doom and Duke. I want to find out if it’ll replace Doom as my go-to arcade FPS, however. It’s definitely the kind of game that you want in your repertoire of game knowledge.

Interestingly it came out in 1997, which is AFTER the dawn of non-shit 3d games like Quake and Tomb Raider (infact: one of the cheat codes even proclaims that ‘LARA RULES’), but yet it stuck to the sprites and fake-height walls of the BUILD engine. I don’t why Monolith chose that engine: Easy to use? Well proven? Good business deal? They wanted lots of enemies on-screen, which was difficult with early 3d? I have no idea, but I’m quite glad they did, as I think that Blood still looks very nice. There’s something about sprite based enemies in a 3d world that I find quite charming, something not present in its successor. Blood 2 strayed a bit too far enough into that early-3D, uncanny valley that these days looks less like an arcadey videogame and more of a big blurry 3D mess. I think you can definitely see the attention to detail in these 2.5d environments, enemies and sounds that you don’t really find in the early 3d games as they were more technically constrained.

It’s a metaphor for the wii vs 360 or something.

Also: It inspired someone to make a comic. Did anyone make a comic of Thief 2?!

Things to think about and discuss

[ul]
[li] Good idea to use the 2.5D BUILD engine in times of polygons? Do you think the game still holds up today? Do the pixels grate on your eyes? Can you actually tell what things are meant to be in the world?[/li][li] Was the extreme gore good for the game? I know they had to release a ‘censored’ version.[/li][li] What do you think about the pacing of the levels?[/li][li] Weapons?[/li][li] Those terrible cutscenes and early attempts at weaving an out-of-gameplay narrative into an FPS game?[/li][li] Would you like to see modern AAA games take anything from Blood? Do you think there’s anything we’ve happily left behind? (Would you like to see the dry, po-faced seriousness in modern AAA games replaced by streams of childish references to B-movies? IF NOT WHY NOT?)[/li][li] Do you like finding secrets yet? Even more than in DF2:JK?[/li][li] Did you bother to try multiplayer/co-op?![/li][li] <more stuff here>[/li][/ul]

Technical issues

I didn’t really have any with my gog package, aside from having to bother rebinding keys and having mouselook issues.

If you plan to play with only the keyboard: You will probably not have any either.

If you plan to play with the mouse: Then I highly recommend you read this steam guide. Specifically step 4 and 6. (Though I ended up using different numbers for my mouse stuff)

Instead of editing files you can actually do it all in the setup.exe. Here’s a rundown:

Download bmouse and drop it into your Blood dir.
Choose 'Launch Settings' in your Blood start menu area
	Controller options
		Set controller type
			Keyboard + external
		Advanced Control Options
			External program
				Bmouse.exe
			Advanced Mouse Setup
				fiddle with mouse sensitivity
				unbind mouse y axis
				+ set mouse clicks
				(I had left=weapon, right=weapon alt, middle=open)

IMPORTANT: PRESS ‘U’ IN GAME (or whatever you rebound mouselook to) to actually enable mouselook
Note: Mouselook is a bit weird and doesn’t pick up slow Y axis movements

I hope look forward to playing this, aren’t overcome with technical issues and most of all you have fun playing it.

Link to Book Club master discussion thread

Great choice! I’ll have to find time to play this one as I never have before!

I think I’ll be sitting this one out. I haven’t played it since nineteen ninety something but I don’t remember having a very high opinion of Blood then, seemed in retrospect to be a weird kind of precursor to Painkiller. I’ll enjoy reading everyone’s impressions of the game though, as always!

Tied with Duke 3D and Doom as my favorite shooter ever. The weapons are ridiculously powerful and the sense of place is absolutely amazing!

I recommend using Skulldog’s Dosbox launcher. It lets you skip to any level you want through a drop down menu and fixes a few bugs found in both the GOG and Steam releases. It’s super easy to setup.

Oohh, that looks awesome. Thanks MrTibbs!

http://blood.nanoaugur.net/
I saw this other launcher and thought it looked cool, but it required 4 different patches to get ‘up to date’. No thanks! :/

The launcher you’ve linked to is 1.4GB and downloads from two terrible file hosts :'( (one is slow, the other requires some firefox extension? NO THANKS). Do you know of an alternate download/torrent of this?

This should be educational for me. I mostly skipped this generation of shooters (including DOOM and Duke) and always assumed Blood was a cynical low-quality cash-in on ultraviolence. But it’s Monolith, huh? Well, maybe it’ll turn out to be a high-quality cash-in on ultraviolence?

That was a great introduction to the game, Pod. I think I’m with you in appreciating character sprites in 3D, generally, over the gunky 3D of the time. And I didn’t know this was a western-themed game (nothing about the packaging seems to indicate that) so that adds some interest for me. And a TRAIN LEVEL? Wasn’t that the holy grail of level design at the time? I feel like every game I worked on we wanted to put a train level in it and never managed to pull it off and it seemed like no one else ever did. Guess I was wrong!

Yikes. I had no idea, Pod. Sorry about that. I downloaded it ages ago. I doubt there’s a torrent but Skulldog is updating it this week for the Steam release. I’ll ask him if he can set up a torrent. For me, all the extras make it essential. Performance can be absolutely horrible on the vanilla GOG version if you want to run it at a decent resolution.

As I just found out a few minutes ago. More than a bit ridiculous that running this at 1280x1024 doesn’t give me a silky smooth framerate. I also lost mouselook functionality partway through for some reason.

Difficulty seems relatively unforgiving even on moderate settings. Lots of damage. Lots of fucking rats.

I hate rats.

My recollection of that time is that any Monolith games, or indeed any games using the LithTech engine, were notoriously low-quality in terms of visuals etc, though the games themselves were usually steller :) Blood, thankfully, used the Duke 3d engine, so it’s a great game on a relatively decent engine. I think Monolith redeemed themselves and LithTech after they made F.E.A.R?

That was a great introduction to the game, Pod. I think I’m with you in appreciating character sprites in 3D, generally, over the gunky 3D of the time. And I didn’t know this was a western-themed game (nothing about the packaging seems to indicate that) so that adds some interest for me. And a TRAIN LEVEL? Wasn’t that the holy grail of level design at the time? I feel like every game I worked on we wanted to put a train level in it and never managed to pull it off and it seemed like no one else ever did. Guess I was wrong!

It’s not that wild-westy at all really. You play as a undead cowboy and the trains reminds me of the late wild west. And it takes place around 1920 or something? If anything it’s more Lovecraft style occultism.

But it’s nothing like Outlaw or an ‘actual’ wild-west themed game.

For native gog: I ran it above 640x480 for a bit, and it performed terribly. So I put it back, but I honestly didn’t notice too much of a visual difference. Then I set it to 640x400, because the letterboxing helped avoid the FOV-terror/vertigo that rose up in my when looking down near a wall, and the BUILD engine does weird things to it :P

I’ve done levels 1, 2, 3(TRAIN!). Level 2 is really hard for some reason. There’s little ammo or health, even if you mange to find all of the secrets. Make sure you finish level 1 relatively intact. re: mouselook, did you press U? ;)

Sorry, what? The game runs slowly at 640x480??

I was trying to remember why Blood was not like Doom, and your post reminded me: Doom embraced the abstract, while Duke 3D and Blood featured realistic environments.

I played it recently. Still holds up pretty well. Don’t forget you might run into some stupid level designs later in the campaign and not know where to go. Fortunately there’s YouTube walkthroughs.

Unfortunately, the source code has never been released. There’s a community chomping at the bit to implement 32-bit Polymost and Vert-minus widescreen. Jace Hall has the source code and was going to upgrade it for free, but Atari broke of the negotiations early last year.

Yeah, like a lot of Shareware games the first episode is the strongest. There are a few highlights later on, including a romp through a spooky mansion (The Haunting), a grotty hospital (The Sick Ward) and a scary Friday the 13th inspired lake-side cabin (Crystal Lake) but a number do descend into kinda dull key hunts.

I am in on this one.

I think the reason why this isn’t full-3D is a bit simpler? I think this game started development before Quake/Tomb Raider, and before Quake I think Build and Doom were the only real players in licensed engines at the time. I’m pretty sure the first Lithtech game was actually Blood 2? Someone’s gonna fact check me on this and make me sound crazy.

This game hits right in my nostalgia wheelhouse. I remember downloading endless numbers of shareware games and playing them over and over again. Making crappy WADs and never finishing or distributing them. Pissed away many a summer on that sort of stuff.

I love how quaint it seems to think back to how these games all basically looked like TCs of each other and how the weapon set would be a big deal in comparing games. (Oh man, Blood has a VOODOO DOLL! GOTY!)

I remember thinking at the time that all the Doom descendants kind of kept that weird abstract level design, and all the Build engine games kept trying to make realistic levels. I guess the addition of their extra 0.5D trick gave map designers just enough rope to tempt them into going for a realistic look that never quite escaped carnival fun house territory.

Finally, I remember constantly visiting the ancient 3D Realms website circa 1997 or whenever, drooling for screen shots of Blood, Shadow Warrior, and Prey (!).

Blood was in development for nearly 3 years. It was originally a 3D Realms joint (originally titled Horror 3D). 3DR sold the rights to the developer (Monolith/Q Soft) a few months before it shipped.

DAMN that game is hard. I barely made it to the second little area without dying. Wooow.

I missed them too so I’m looking forward to giving this a try tomorrow. I expect to take a while figuring out how things work and then to be absolutely terrible at it.

Great pick, I gotta go digging for my CD. I still have that “I live. Again.” soundbyte in my head when I read the game title. ;)

I remember little about the actual gameplay - except general tropes pod mentioned in his initial post - but I always had a weak spot in my heart for Build engine shooters.
Duke 3D, Shadow Warrior and Blood were all great light hearted shooters with a humorous angle. And the engine was oddly part of their charm in a way. Blood 2 or even the recent Shadow Warrior remake lost most of that magic to me, for whatever reason.

Since we have spectacular weather here right now and I have some other things on my plate as well, might be until the weekend before I get a chance to play, though.

---

rezaf

It’s a software rasterizer running in a virtual x86/dos environment. It runs faster than simulation tools at work that are nothing but software rasterizers, so give it a break ;)

Also, for me it runs fine at 640x480. 800x600 it starts to bog down and also has weird artefacts, and 1024x768+ it’s about 3 fps.

That’s kinda what I meant about “Well proven?” – i.e. they chose to use an existing engine rather than make their own, as ID did with Quake. Quake was in production for 2years, I think, which back then was a considerable length of time? If what MrTibbs says about it being in production for 3 years, then that’s quite the stagnated game for the time. (And also a precursor of 3DRealms to come…) And yeah, wiki says the first public LithTech game was Blood 2.

I love how quaint it seems to think back to how these games all basically looked like TCs of each other and how the weapon set would be a big deal in comparing games. (Oh man, Blood has a VOODOO DOLL! GOTY!)

I remember thinking at the time that all the Doom descendants kind of kept that weird abstract level design, and all the Build engine games kept trying to make realistic levels. I guess the addition of their extra 0.5D trick gave map designers just enough rope to tempt them into going for a realistic look that never quite escaped carnival fun house territory.

Even down to the font! I remember seeing NAM in PC gamer and thinking “Is this a new Duke Nukem or something?”.

ps: Very initial thought on the game is that is has an over-reliance on hitscan weapons. Weapons that instantly fire as soon as you open a door. I think this is where the difficulty comes from in this game – you simply always lose health and it can’t really be avoided. At least in Doom and to most extents Duke3D you could avoid most damage by simply being nimble and aware. (Being aware in this game is hard! How many times has a downed zombie jumped up to it’s feet right in my vision? I know you can tell which death is the actual death via the sound, but in a large battle that’s hard to keep track of!)

I tried playing this a year or two ago and found the difficulty very frustrating. I’m no stranger to FPS games but this was weirdly difficult.