Various Formats - Mortal Kombat

Various Formats

Mortal Kombat

Oh, come on. It had to happen eventually. I had to cover one of the most controversial, bloodthirsty games of all time, the game that infuriated a whole generation of clueless parents. The game that pretty much invented the "Death Move", brought blood and guts to be standard fare in video games, and really kicked off what was just the beginning of increasingly violent digitised beat 'em-ups across all available formats.

But no-one, except Midway, made decent ones. Pretenders all were the likes of Survival Arts, Street Fighter: The Movie, Time Killers (OK, not digitised, but riding on the crest of the violence wave), Kasumi Ninja, Way of the Warrior and Vicious Circle. Mortal Kombat and its sequels seemed to be the only games of this type that really WORKED, that didn't come across as a gimmicky load of old tripe.

Right, enough of this, let's dive in.

The arcade version came along first; 7 characters, a fairly standard moveset for each (except for the specials, of course), and a back story that spawned a million (approx) fan stories and ran deeper than Advanced Lawnmower Simulator. Let's touch on that quickly (it gets more and more complicated as the series expanded), basically there is the Earthrealm and the Outworld or some such place, where there exists a fighting tournament, which some guy called Shang Tsung has corrupted. Thanks to his meddling, there now exists a rule where 10 victories in a row for Outworld would result in the Earthrealm being overrun by Shao Khan's Outworld forces. How marvellous!

Naturally, of course, it falls to the fighters of Earthrealm to stop this, especially since last year was victory number 9...

So, the characters first of all: they're a varied bunch, a couple of Ninjas, the token Bruce Lee-alike, a God of Lightning, a film star, a mercenary and a woman. Each of them has the standard moveset, which is high and low punches and kicks as standard, the leg sweep, the big uppercut, the overhead throw and a roundhouse kick. Without special moves, each character would actually handle identically.

But there ARE special moves, although usually only 2 or 3 per character. Johnny Cage, Liu Kang, Kano, Rayden and Sonya all have a "Fireball" move (ok, it might be lightning or a knife, but the effect is the same), whilst Scorpion and Sub-Zero have slightly different moves... Scorpion has a harpoon, which, on successful impact, he uses to drag the enemy in close, briefly dazed, for either a throw or an uppercut for best results. Sub-Zero uses an iceball, freezing the opponent on the spot, again with chance to get in close for a throw or an uppercut. Be careful, though, attempting to freeze an already frozen opponent will result in a "Double Ice Backfire". Oooh, nasty.

Other special moves tend to be something like a "teleport" punch or kick variant, or Johnny Cage has the "Package Check" punch, which is good for a laugh. But the big part of the game was without doubt the fatalities. That's right, upon winning your second round, you were commanded to finish your opponent, a swift joystick combination from the correct place on the screen would result in some kind of bloodthirsty finishing move, which caused outrage in some anti-video game circles, but then again, so did most games, so maybe we can't pay too much attention to that.

Your game would consist of beating each opponent in turn, then a "Mirror Match" against yourself, followed by 3 "Endurance" matches where you must beat 2 opponents. Then comes the big guy, Goro, a huge 4-armed half-human half-dragon who is not at all easy to beat, and then the final boss, the fireball-spamming Shang Tsung himself. Occasionally you'll be asked to "Test Your Might" against a variety of substances, starting with wood and going up to diamond, this little sub-game was a button-bashing frenzy to build up the power and strike. A nice little diversion, there.

You know, I'm going to be brutally honest here... Without the death moves, Mortal Kombat would probably have never "made it", there wouldn't have been a sequel, there wouldn't have been a film, and there certainly wouldn't have been so much fuss about what is mostly a fairly "average" beat 'em-up.

Hold on though, there is more... Y'see, Mortal Kombat was a sneaky and deceptive game, in that there were a few little tid-bits to deliberately keep surprises coming. First of all, on occasion a Green version of Scorpion and Sub-Zero would drop down before a match, give you a little bit of information, then jump away again... This was Reptile, and he was a hard-to-reach secret character. Once you got the clues, you then needed a little luck to find and face him anyway. You needed to fight on the Pit stage, with shadows going across the moon (I seem to remember this was a 1-in-64 chance every time you reach the Pit level), win with 2 flawless victories, no blocking, and do your fatality. Until you find that Reptile is a faster enemy combining Scorpion AND Sub-Zero's special moves, which makes him very hard to beat. But still, word of mouth spread news of his existence.

Another rumour was that of more hidden characters, such as Ermac, this was in fact just the name of a counter for "Error Macros". But still, it led to false counters being introduced in subsequent Mortal Kombat games in the future.

But it was the death moves, the fatalities, that everyone wanted to see. Still my personal favourite was Sub-Zero's Head-and-Spinal-Cord-Removal, though Kano's Heart-Rip was also good. Liu Kang's was crap, though, basically a somersault kick and an uppercut, leaving no clue that the opponent was actually dead, except for the big "Fatality" bonus, that is.

Uppercutting your opponent on the pit stage would cause them to fall onto a bed of spikes, ironically Reptile's lair, which was always nice.

So, the arcade game was superb, how were the conversions handled?

The SNES version was heavily censored, and removed blood (instead replaced with "Sweat") and changed several of the death moves to less "gruesome" moves. However, it still played really well, which is always a good thing. The Megadrive version started out with no blood, but had two codes to activate it again, which of course, everyone did. Despite some slight compromising on the graphics, it retained the speed and action of the arcade game, enough to compete with the SNES, so simply for the fact of the added gore, the Megadrive version just about trumps the SNES here, although you NEEDED a 6 button pad for complete control.

The Amiga version was absolutely superb. It SHOULDN'T have worked, especially with only one fire button (I can't remember how it was done myself, but I promise you it worked perfectly), but the game was outstandingly good, and probably the most graphically impressive of all the 16-bit versions, but with disk loading times, and obviously getting used to the 1-button system, the Megadrive version would still win out, just about.

However, the PC version was ARCADE PERFECT, except for the music which was probably better. Of course, you can just play it in MAME now, but without doubt, if you're going to find a home version, the PC is the one to go for. Although with it being DOS based, you might have a few problems here and there.

The MK series got better, though, and even progressed into 3D, but the original game will always hold a special place in my heart. It's just a shame my heart is in Kano's hand and I'm on the floor. D'oh.

The Best in Copy Protection

The Best in Copy Protection

Y'know, I remember the good old days. When games were nice and cheap and no-one really copied them. Well, they did, of course, but not in the same way they are now. Y'see, one of the most valid arguments pro-piracy (and believe me, I'm NOT pro-piracy, I just agree with this particular train of thought that games are too expensive, and that encourages piracy) is that each copied game is not REALLY a lost sale, it's a sale the developer was never going to have, and instead they get free word-of-mouth advertising if their game is really good. It's a weak argument, sure, but it's one that makes me think, "The Pirates have a point".

Anyway, my point of view is that if a product is worth buying, and I can afford it, I'll support it. I've done it with Shareware, and had no complaints about doing it. So, if a developer comes up with something novel or interesting to frustrate pirates, then I'm all for it.

Back in the day, the simplest forms of Copy Protection were a case of "Look up the first word on line x of page y". It wasn't much, but it was enough. Obviously the photocopier helped to circumvent that particular form of protection, although in those days a photocopier wasn't quite so easy for Joe Public to find. Things developed over the years... Who can forget Lenslok? Then Code Wheels were introduced (games like Zool and Monkey Island probably most famously), and code books printed on paper designed to be impossible to photocopy (e.g. Worms)

But as things progress, things get more sophisticated. Games became able to detect themselves whether they had been been pirated, or even at risk of being pirated, and refused to run... or perhaps even stranger effects.

Let's also not forget that anti-piracy methods also introduced us to the first PC Virus, the Pakistani Brain virus. Designed to protect a heart-monitoring program from piracy, (or rather track it) it soon spread to the UK and US. It didn't actually do any damage, thankfully, but still people rang the programmers asking for their computers to be "vaccinated" in their thousands.

So here are my favourite anti-piracy or copy protection schemes, and some of them I'd actually really like to see in action.

Code Sheet - Jet Set Willy (Spectrum), Worms (Amiga)
The code sheet was nothing more than a list of numbers (or in JSW's case, Colours), an entry from which would be required on loading the game. Simple, quick and downright straightforward to circumvent by copying the code sheet. Worms made life harder by printing it black-on-black so that you couldn't very well photocopy it, but a dab hand at Excel could copy it within an hour or so.

It's pretty obvious how this works... The game requests the code from Column A, Row X, you look it up and type it in. JSW provides you with a key to the colours and what numbers they represent, which is nice.

Not much more can be said about this. It's as basic as it gets.


Code Wheels - e.g. Zool, Monkey Island (Amiga)
Designed to be overly complicated to copy, Code Wheels were actually a pretty simple concept. The game will show you a picture or something, made of two distinct halves. Take your code wheel, turn it to make that picture. Then read the code from the indicated window. Tap it in, and joy! Your game runs. Get it wrong, and you'll probably get another chance. Get it wrong again and the game will probably reset itself. Annoying, huh? And since the windows are all over the place, it's not so straightforward to calculate their positions. Genius! Oh, did I mention the black-on-black writing used for Zool? Impossible to read! Wahey! At least it was impossible to photocopy.

Actually, not everyone had the foresight to use black-on-black, Lucasarts' code wheels for the Monkey Island games, for instance. 15 Photocopies is all you need. Not something that would put off the serious pirate.

Again, though, this wasn't going to STOP piracy, just discourage it slightly. Anyone with patience could actually copy the numbers in a spreadsheet, if they were that determined to copy a game.



Lenslok - OCP Art Studio (Spectrum)
Ah, one of those things that always gets the little "TM" after its name. I might change my name to Fishsta(TM). Ahem.

Anyway, I remember my mum deciding it would be a good idea to get me a mouse and Art Program for the Spectrum. And you know what, it wasn't bad. But it introduced me to what was probably the best copy protection system I'd ever seen. No, really.

You ask any Retro-head about Lenslok, and they'll tell you what a stupid, crap, unreliable system it was. I personally never had a problem with it, and I found it GENIUS. Take a look in this box here, and you'll notice the red thing. That's the Lenslok "lens".

So, you load your game/art software up, and then you are presented with the first stage of the protection... measuring your lenslok. No, really. You hold the thing up to the screen (fully unfolded) against a large letter "H", and using a couple of keys on the keyboard, adjust the width of it until it matches the length of your Lenslok. Press Enter to move onto the next stage, the "dry run test" stage.

Now you fold the Lenslok so that it resembles a map-reading magnifier. Hold it against the screen, centered on the middle of the "H". The plastic bit in the middle acts like a prism, distorting your view of that portion of the screen. If you look at the screen without the Lenslok, you'll just see a garbled mess, the distorted view through the Lenslok actually makes sense of it, and you should be able to read 2 letters, at this point they should be "O" and "K". Once you're happy with that, keep the Lenslok in place and press enter. Two new letters appear, type them in, and off you go.

So, what were the problems? Well, the idea of measuring your lenslok on the screen was so that the size of your TV or monitor wasn't a problem, but with the limited resolution of home computers, sometimes it was. And, of course, constantly bending plastic back and forth will eventually break it, even if that's what it was designed to do.

It sounds as though I was lucky, really.


Modern day In-Built Copy/Crack detection - Having fun with the Pirates!
Now for my FAVOURITE part. You've done what you can to stop piracy, and it still happens. It always will. It's never going to stop. So make it a game itself, then. Mess with the pirates heads, annoy them, frustrate them, do whatever you can to delay "Day Zero" hacked versions appearing.

It's been going on for a while. Just ask anyone who knows their stuff about Spyro or Earthbound. These used multi-layered protection which worked so that the game would detect unauthorised copies at several points, and cause undesirable operation throughout the game. The game lets you know right away that it knows it's copied (Spyro actually tells you outright, "I'm sorry, Spyro, but you seem to be playing a hacked version of this game..." it really couldn't be any clearer) but crackers persisted and EVENTUALLY beat all the layers, which would include surprises like more and tougher enemies, settings changes and even the famous "crash and delete your savegames" trick.

I could go into great detail about all these, but they've been written about elsewhere and a quick search on Google will find you plenty of in-depth information. But I take great delight in those measures that leave pirates confused as to whether it's a problem with the game or deliberate protection by the developers. Very quickly, here are some of my favourites that I've recently heard about:

Michael Jackson: The Experience (DS)
What could be worse than a generic dancing game cashing in on Michael Jackson's awesome music and dancing skills? How about getting into a game to be treated to the sound of the Vuvuzela over the soundtrack? Yeah, that'll put the pirates off, more than replacing all songs with DJ Otis' "Hey Baby!"

Batman: Arkham Asylum (PC)
But... but... I am BATMAN. I cannot have my abilities taken away, surely? If you're a pirate, yes, you'll lose the ability to Bat Glide. Since there's parts of the game where you HAVE to glide to survive, you'll only get so far before you hit a brick wall. And the best bit? Someone posted on a forum about the problem they were having, only to be told outright, "It's not a bug in the program code, it's a bug in YOUR moral code". Awesome.

ARMA2 (PC)
This one I'd really like to see. Apparently, a new technology called "FADE" was introduced, which basically SLOWLY broke the game. It started messing with the camera, and lowering your weapon's accuracy and power, until eventually they were as useless as pea-shooters. And finally, you get a message, "Original Discs don't FADE". It sounds pretty cool.

Serious Sam 3: BFE (PC)
I have to take my hat off to this one, this is brilliance. And again, this is one I want to EXPERIENCE. The game plays as normal... for about 30 seconds. Just after you collect your first gun, you run into what is now known as the "DRM Scorpion".

This guy looks mean, and is armed with tough claws and twin machine guns. He's fast, too, about 5 times as fast as you. Basically, there's no escape from him, so maybe you should face him head on and kill him before he kills you...

Nope, that doesn't seem to work. Maybe a game of cat and mouse, in and out of cover, get as many hits in as you can?

Maybe you should stop wasting your time, pirate. The DRM Scorpion is immortal. He will persist in chasing you until he kills you. Although apparently you can get through the first couple of levels, the difficulty curve isn't just steep, it's vertical.

Don't worry, though. Even the best gameplayers will get stuck when the second protection system kicks in... all of a sudden you'll look up to the sky and start spinning on the spot. Meanwhile, any bad guys in the area will take this oppurtunity to kill you.

Is that the last of the protection systems? Maybe... maybe not. But the Scorpion alone sounds too awesome to miss. The regrettable thing is that it's tempting for even a non-pirate to pirate the game just to see it. This must be one of the rare occasions where the pirates get more content than the people who hand their money over for a legitimate copy. Maybe not such a wise move?

PC - Max Payne

PC 

Max Payne

Dark trenchcoats. Slow Motion "Bullet Time". Diving around shooting guns. What's that, you say? Sounds like The Matrix?

Hmm. I wonder if there was any inspiration there. To be honest, it's blindingly obvious, but fortunately what DIDN'T happen is that the resulting gaming experience was NOT in any way rushed out so much as to be an awful game. Almost unbelievably, I've got nothing but praise for what was basically a cash-in on a popular film licence.

No, I have to hand it to Remedy, they made a great game, with a great storyline, and here's the bit no-one will ever agree with me on... great voice-acting.

Alright, I know, everyone who looks at this game slates the voice acting, I just don't understand why. It might not be up there with the likes of the Uncharted series (Nolan North does have an incredible talent), but it's so far above, say, House of the Dead 2 on the Dreamcast it's not even funny. This is the thing, I suppose, it comes down to personal taste, and Max's dead-pan delivery is spot-on to me.

Anyway, enough of that, let's talk about the game now. To cut a long story short, Max Payne is an undercover policeman whose family are murdered by drugged-up thugs. As a man with nothing to lose, he's prepared to stop at nothing to uncover the secrets and lies behind the origin of the drug in question, known as V. Starting out among some of the less desirable of the criminal underworld, you slowly fight your way up the chain, discovering eventually that the whole dang thing is overseen by... well, I won't spoil that for you.

The gameplay itself takes a little while to get used to, but once you do, you'll be spinning and shooting your way in slow motion all over the place. Whilst as a 3rd-person shooter you can just run around and shoot your enemies, they're pretty accurate and have fast reactions, you're likely to die fairly quickly. You need to find cover and get the hang of diving out in Bullet-Time, aiming with the mouse, trying to get the crucial head-shot or enough body hits to drop the enemies. You may have 2 or 3 to aim at, so your reactions need to be quick. Accuracy will increase the amount of Bullet-Time you can use, and you can use your Bullet-Time whilst just walking around, but it runs out very quickly in that instance, so there's really not much point.

Weapons wise there's a good selection, several of which can be dual wielded, but my personal favourite is the Sniper Rifle. Aim at an enemy's head, and you're treated to a camera angle following the spinning bullet as it traces a path to the fatal impact. It's a gimmick, yes, but it works.

To be honest, this was probably one of the first "cinematic" games I really enjoyed. Cut-scenes and storyboards are part and parcel of games nowadays, and Max Payne used them EFFECTIVELY. Alright, graphics are much more sophisticated now, but we'd advanced from Quake and the idea of using the Quake engine to make movies, which, let's be honest... wasn't all that great.

Alright, so the game can get a little repetitive at times, but it was nothing short of superb. To keep you playing, there were several difficulty levels, which included a special difficuly called "New York Minute", in which you had a 1 minute timer to complete each level. Don't worry, you could earn extra time, but you were always up against it with that timer.

It's worth it, though, because, as a little bonus, hidden away at the end of the game is a version of the lobby gunfight from The Matrix... yeah, it's not exactly the same, but then again, with free level-design tools available on the internet, plenty of people made more accurate versions of that particular scene.

So there's a new Max Payne game coming out. Will I buy it? Maybe. Will it be as good as the original? Doubt it, but I hope so.

One thing's for sure, it's got a lot to live up to. If you haven't played the original, go and find it. Now.

PC - Desktop Tower Defence

PC
Desktop Tower Defence

Never played a Tower Defence game? Maybe you should.

You see, my problem was the name. It didn’t exactly… grab me. It sounded kind of boring.

And then, someone pipes up over on Fruit Forums, “Hey, have you guys played this game? Seriously, I’m hooked.”

So I gave it a try. Guess what? I was hooked.

The premise is simple. “Creeps” will begin to emerge from the top and left and make the quickest journey they can to the opposite exit. Every creep that makes it loses you a life, of which you begin with 20. The only way to stop them is to construct Towers of varying types which will automatically fire at enemies in range.

The best way I can describe this game is… think of Command & Conquer, but your troops cannot move.

Creeps come in many different flavours… standard creeps just amble towards the exit. There’s creeps that like to stick in a big group, so whilst they might get past towers that can only shoot one creep at once, explosions might wipe the whole troop out at once. There’s also fast creeps, flying creeps, spawn creeps and “dark” creeps, which you will just have to learn how to deal with.

Luckily, your towers also come in a variety, and all have their strengths and weaknesses. Some can fire single shots at a time, some fire explosive or “sticky” rounds, or there’s other effects you can induce. Bash Towers are devastating but only harm ground creeps real close by, whilst Swarm Towers will only attack airborne creeps.

Towers can be upgraded too, so that their damage, range and firing rate can be boosted to very high levels. And you’ll need to have some good towers to beat creeps on later levels as their health increases massively.

There’s a couple of accepted tactics usually employed… either concentrate on a particularly devastating section that the creeps must traverse, or create a long maze of low-level towers whose combined firepower should be enough to see off most enemies. Another tactic you can employ is “juggling”, although this is tantamount to cheating. But basically this involves getting the creeps into a long maze, then selling a tower that creates a very short route to the exit, which will actually tempt all the creeps to come back to the hole you just created… only for you to seal it up, causing them to go back through the maze of deadly towers you set up. And repeat ad infinitum.

The latest web version, which can be found here, is TDPro, featuring several scenario levels, a sandbox (with score multiplier based on how easy/hard you make things for yourself), sprint and multiplayer. There’s also a new version on Facebook called Desktop Defender, which I think is brilliant, and allows you to challenge your friends to beat your scores, as well as many other features and boosts you can use. Unfortunately it starts out very difficult as you have to buy extra towers with your in-game coins… But still worth persevering with.

In short, if you haven’t played it before, go and play it now. Although not at work… you might lose track of your dinner break.

PC - Duke Nukem 3D

PC
Duke Nukem 3D

Prepare yourself. This is going to be a bit of an epic. Not only that, but due to the nature of the game itself, there's going to be some swearing. Only repeating what you can expect to hear in the game, mind... but still, warning you seems only fair. Like it says in the title pic... ADULT CONTENT.

Right, hopefully that's the kiddi-winks toddled off now, leaving just me and the grown-ups here, still reading. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

Duke Nukem started life as a character in a platform-based shoot 'em-up, although his name was spelt Duke Nukum then, and starred in two old PC games. I may be wrong on this, but I'm pretty sure these games pre-date VGA graphics, so possibly used CGA or EGA. Whatever they are, they’re old-school, both in style and playability.

Several years later, 3D gaming is the norm, Doom and Doom 2 are huge hits and the first person shooter is rapidly gaining in popularity. We haven't reached the stage of 3-D modelling yet (although it’s not far off), so what we've got is a kind of faux 3D, which basically means 2D sprites moving in a 3D space. Effectively you can rotate around an object, and whilst the walls and floor move realistically and 3D-like, the object will still be showing the same face whichever way you look at it, unless it happened to have different sprites set up for it, like the enemies did.

Not meaning in any way to take anything away from Duke3D, because after all, I'm probably the World's Biggest Campaigner for substance over style, gameplay over graphics. If graphics look a little ropey, fine, as long as the game makes up for it by being playable and enjoyable.

ANYWAY, to stop digressing for just one moment and actually talk about the dang game, you play the role of Duke Nukem, Earth’s hard-nut (actually reminds me a lot of Ernie the Psychotic Madman), and you must take on hordes of Aliens that have seemingly taken over Los Angeles. Apparently you were in some kind of spaceship and got shot down, armed with only a pistol. Not to worry, you’ll soon come across some better weaponry…

And the weaponry is nothing short of FUN at the best of times. Whilst you start off with fairly standard stuff (Pistol, Shotgun, Machine Gun, Rocket Launcher) you soon start collecting fancier bits of kit like Pipebombs (more like a remote controlled mine), the ShrinkRay (make your enemies tiny, and then step on them!), Lazer-activated Trip Mines, the Devastator (Automatic Rocket Launcher, save it for the bosses) and the FreezeRay (freeze your enemies, then kick ‘em and smash ‘em!). Oh, and you can’t forget the mighty foot, as well, if you’re up close and personal to an enemy… or just plain out of ammo.

There’s plenty of fodder to use these weapons against, too… from annoying alien “grunts” to Shotgun-toting Pigcops, to the Octobrains and bosses. And usually Duke has an amusing quip just before a tasty encounter, maybe something like “I’m going to rip your head off and shit down your neck.”

Yeah, about that… you shouldn’t play this game if you’re easily offended by naughty words like piss and shit, they’re contained in abundance. Sometimes an alien will do a little poo on the floor. Walking through it will leave brown footprints behind, and Duke will exclaim “Shit happens”. In fact, all through the game are little touches and things Duke can interact with that were quite unprecedented at the time. For example, there’s many mirrors (which will usually cause Duke to say, “Damn, I’m lookin’ good!” and toilets (“Ahhhh, much better!”) and a few little “Easter Eggs” (usually references to other games) can be found too. Shall I spoil them for you?

Nah. If you want to know about them you can find them easily enough on the internet. But you can’t forget about the girls. Yep, some of the levels visit strip clubs and sex shops, where you can give money to the girls working there, who will quickly shake their assets in your direction for you.

In between each level there’s little cut scenes, one of which is particularly funny, where Duke makes good on his earlier promise to rip of the bad guy’s head and… well, I mentioned it earlier, you can guess the rest.

Once again, these features ensured the game courted controversy, at the time it was often a winning formula for games, having the “enraged parents” and the Daily Mail repeating their tired old routine (“Think of the Children” and “Computer Games Are Evil”, basically). What is it they say, no publicity is bad publicity?

There were other features too, such as the Holoduke (a fake copy of yourself to confuse the enemy), Jetpack (useful for those hard-to-reach high up places) and Steroids. Steroids made your “Mighty Foot” even mightier than it ever was before, allowing you to actually boot your foes across the screen in a hilarious manner.

I hope you’re sitting comfortably here, because I’m FAR from finished yet.

Duke Nukem3D, as well as being a fun single-player game, was an AWESOME multiplayer game too. Now, this is where my first real experience of on-line gaming came in…

British Telecom used to have a service called “Wireplay”. This was basically a dial-up service with its own DOS-based software which allowed you to play games online against other users. It was expensive, 6.5p per minute during the day and 2.5p per minute in the evenings and weekends (If I totted up hours I put in to online gaming now in comparison, it’d be frightening), but it was pretty much the only option open to me. 4-player Dukematches online were good fun, although plagued by “Out of Sync” errors.

Fortunately, new Wireplay software was on the way, and I got myself on the Beta Tester’s list. Now THAT was a tasty experience. 8 players at once, super fast, lag was a thing of the past, and best of all, the promise of a complete refund of any charges incurred once I returned my feedback at the end of the trial.

I proceeded to run up almost £800 of charges, all of which were refunded. I went by the name of Dameron back then (inspired by Myth on the Spectrum), so I’d be interested to hear from anyone who may remember playing against me. If it helps, I was most likely the one covering the RPG spawn and spamming it to death.

It would be nice to be able to play it online again, only without the Wireplay software, naturally.

The last thing for me to mention in this review is the fact that Duke3d was bundled with the “Build” software… effectively this meant you could make your own levels, which is exactly what I did. After a few test levels, I finally took the plunge and made an absolute EPIC level. To be fair, out of all the computer-related things I’ve done in my life, after my XM Music and Fruit Machine Emulation contributions, it’s probably my proudest moment.

In fact, in celebration of the fact that Duke Nukem Forever has finally arrived after over a decade’s expectation, how’s about I make that level available for you to play? I'll have to find it first... but if I do, you’ll need Duke Nukem 3D, and if I remember rightly you simply copy the map file into the Duke Nukem directory (or folder if you prefer), and run the game with the command line “duke3d –map impymish.map”

The map’s called “Impossible Mission”, although it’s really not. Especially if you find all the secrets hidden in there.

The plot’s pretty basic: You, Duke Nukem, have been captured and thrown in a prison cell awaiting execution. When your last meal is brought to you, you take advantage and smash the alien scumbag over the head with the tray. After eating your lasagne and cous-cous, it’s time to get make your escape, exacting some bloody revenge at the same time. Your journey will be long and filled with peril, and require you to use several transport routes, including hijacking a submarine to find the alien’s hidden temple, which holds the secret to getting back home.

The level is massive, I used practically all the space available to me to make it, and it’ll take a while to complete, but there’s some very varied ideas in there, hopefully it’ll be worth the time. Hopefully I'll be able to find it and upload it.

PC (DOS) - Pyro ][ - World Terrorism

PC – DOS
Pyro ][ - World Terrorism

OK, you’re going to have to bear with me on this one. At least, I assume you will.

Whenever the topic of “Best game ever” comes around, there’s one or two games that you can guarantee are mentioned, mainly (it seems) Nintendo games. But there’s always a few “outsiders” who get their names out there, for example the Sim City games (in particular Sim City 2000), or World of Warcraft might get a nod or two.

Then there’s the obtuse games that one or two people will shout out for, but no-one else has ever heard of, or at least can’t remember.

For me, there’s a game that falls into this category. If given the chance to name my “top 3 games EVAAAAR”, this one always sneaks its way onto the list.

I’m pretty sure it was a freebie, too, back when PD (Public Domain) Freeare & Shareware games and demos were distributed from PD Libraries rather than simply flung up to the internet. Pyro ][, whose prequel I’ve never played, was discovered by me in the relatively early days of CD-ROM technology, on a CD called “Hot Sound & Vision 2”, which was essentially a collection of PD software, add-ons and images, put together to save you having to download it all.

The game itself boils down to a simple puzzle game, but requires speed and forethought to complete to the best of your ability.

Forgive the primitive “Worse than an 8-bit” graphics, they’re not important. What matters (and always has mattered) is the gameplay.

The basic objective, then, is to burn down various famous buildings. You start out on the top floor of each one, and must work your way down. You drag a fuse along behind you, which usually takes around 15 seconds to start burning. Most walls are flammable, with the exception of the corners. To reach the walls though, you must either go past petrol cans, or you can spill a can on the floor if you prefer, creating a pool of petrol, which will also light. Then you must escape down the stairs to the next level without setting yourself on fire.

Repeat this for the hundreds of levels that face you. Easy!

Except it really isn’t. It’s FIENDISHLY difficult to make any real distance into the game. Pass your fuse by a petrol can and it will explode, spreading the fire around. Cause too big a chain reaction and you’ll end up having your fire catch up with you. Set fire to the stairs and you cut off your only escape route. Whilst you might think you can just escape without doing too much damage, there's the temptation to burn all the walls down after you’ve left, as you’ll earn a generous “Completion” bonus.

Y’know, writing this, I don’t feel I’m doing the game any justice. Maybe it’s just me (it usually is), but this game had that “one more go” factor. Back in the nineties, when all I had to worry about was school and my weekends consisted of almost all the free time I could desire, much of it was spent trying to progress through this game. I was never good enough to beat it, never good enough to make significant progress, but I couldn’t tear myself away.

It’s a sign of a great game, and if you can put up with the DOS graphics, you might well lose an afternoon to it too.

It looks like it’s still freely available on the internet through the usual abandonware/old DOS games sites, so you shouldn’t find it too hard to unearth, dust off, and set fire to it. BURN BABY BURN!