N64 Time - Duke Nukem 64

[importaku]

Task two, on the other hand - learn to cook - is not so simple. It involves meeting the owner of a pub, several visits to a job registration office, actually registering for one of several jobs on a computer, going back to the pub, returning to the boat, buying a tray, teaching Josette to carry it properly, as opposed to, say, kicking it across the floor, throwing it like a frisbee, or EATING IT. That's just to get her to the stage where the owner asks if she'd like to cook. You still have to go back and buy all kinds of things and teach Josette to use them all. I have NO IDEA how anyone would manage any of that without understanding Japanese.

Hehe i remember this task well & how many times i failed till i realied i had to teach her taste by eating the condiments. Once she had a sense of taste her cooking would pass the inspection.

Something about clenliness too, where you had to force her to wash. Dosent go down well as robots & water don't mix lol. Lost count of how many puddings i had to give her to cheer her up after each attempt.

[egparadigm]

Just got my copy of Doom 64 through the post, and the really good news is that the buttons are completely customisable. The only thing you can't change is the control stick. So I immediately set it up with Goldeneye controls – C-button strafe.

Hell, the game even has brightness and screen centring options!

[noobish hat]

What a coincidence, I got mine today Actually I got it earlier in the week but I couldn't open it till today Will be having a go on it later though!

[egparadigm]

Only realised yesterday, after doing a bit of reading around, that Doom 64 is not actually a port of Doom, but more a spiritual successor. :/ Perhaps it's for the best, though, because I have played a good 2/3rds of Doom on GBA.

[noobish hat]

That's right, it's all new levels. You never finished Doom on gba? Or are you saying you're just playing it now? Doom gba is one of the (very) fews games that absolutely blew me away just by seeing it running.

[Skull Commander]

Just got my copy of Doom 64 through the post, and the really good news is that the buttons are completely customisable. The only thing you can't change is the control stick. So I immediately set it up with Goldeneye controls ? C-button strafe.

Hell, the game even has brightness and screen centring options!

I must of missed that when I was playing it. It's a relief as it was pretty tricky with the default control scheme. I agree about it being more of a follow up than a port though.

[egparadigm]

Finished Seeds of Evil earlier this evening. A curious game, and no mistake.

The visuals are excellent, but as has been stated by Tetsuo, the frame-rate is pretty abysmal. The combat is completely and utterly ruined by it, because there are so many missing frames that it is very difficult to make an accurate shot – the only time it is possible is when there is only a single enemy on screen, and that becomes a rarer event as the game moves into its second stage.

The weapons are mostly very good. The obvious candidate for commendation is the Cerebral Bore – a very neat and enjoyable invention, which it takes some time to tire of. There is also the visually impressive flamethrower – which is probably the best realisation I've come across, even today – and the Razor Wind, to name but two.

The levels and pacing – in the sense of their size and the positioning of save-points – becomes more and more exhausting as the game proceeds, with the notable exception of level 6, which is well constructed. I suppose the worst aspect of it is the fact the levels can be so confusing, even more so perhaps, due to their scale, than Turok 1 – despite the greater visual clarity on offer. Not only do you not know how far off the next save-point is, but finding a previous one is a task in itself. It is all too easy to miss branching pathways, and find yourself running all over the level searching for a tiny part of the level you visited earlier, and there is no visual suggestion of the correct path to take.

My final completion time was approximately 20 hours, and a good third of that was necessitated by getting lost and other backtracking. The final boss was a bit underwhelming – initially, if you stand in the wrong place, it is quite possible to miss the purpose in hand and be unable to harm him (there are these insects flying about which he sends out, and if you stand in the centre of the stage, they do not put themselves in a position to be fired at, whilst the baddy is beyond your reach). When the solution is revealed, beating him is really very straightforward.

I definitely enjoyed my time with it more than I spent loathing it, but I found myself playing far longer at individual sessions than I would have liked, as I wandered around trying to complete objectives or find a save point. Once the end was in sight, I wanted nothing more than for it to be over. Thank god it is.

I suppose the disappointment is simply that it could have been so much better if a few rough edges had been ironed out.

[noobish hat]

Well, there was a rare occurence at my house the other day. My brother came round with his wife and son at the same time as my friend, and so we had enough people for four player Mario Kart. Having only one friend can have its down sides, and one of them is I rarely get to play any retro multiplayer, let alone 4 player, so this was indeed a rare treat for me. Luckily I managed to find an old gold controller in my cellar and, even more luckily, it actually worked perfectly. Soon we were all battling and racing. My brother was laughing his head off at Toad being called Kinopio in the Jap version, but played as him anyway. His wife did not fare too well since she was having to keep the baby distracted at the same time as firing shells and bananas all over the shop. Multiplayer just makes everything seem a hell of a lot more fun, and funny - whereas in single player I was smashing my controller to bits in frustration, suddenly it was hilarious to hear my brother screaming in delight "I'M IN FIRST PLACE! SEE YA, SUCKERS!" only for him to get hit by a truck, and seconds later find himself in 8th. Four player battle mode is also total mayhem, and all the more entertaining for it. Because I'd never played with more than one other person, I had no idea you turn into a wheeled bombed-mobile when you die and get to chase everyone else around, adding yet another layer of panic, competition and jollity. We were all surprised by that. I remember my brother crying out "I'M A BOMB! I'M A BOMB!"

Only disappointment was that my nephew seemed resolutely unimpressed with the whole N64 scene...

[Mayhem]

Picture is a classic there

[noobish hat]

My brother got a better photo of him when he was sat in his mum's lap - he was actually grabbing the 3D stick

Anyway, although I've not yet finished with Wonder Project, I've decided it's time to move on into the second month of the project, which is of course May, 1997:


And the first game up is Doom 64:


I've been playing Doom since I got it on my birthday last Friday, and I am enjoying it a LOT. The gameplay is refreshingly frustration free after the whole Turok debacle. The problem is that Turok was a very early game in the new breed of console first person shooters, being fully 3D and everything, and as such, it messed up pretty much everything. Doom 64 on the other hand doesn't really break any new ground and doesn't make the most of the N64's potential, instead relying on its tried and true formula. The result is a much more satisfying game.

The controls were a total mess in Turok and one of the biggest problems with it, having all movement mapped to the C buttons, and the camera controlled completely with the stick was a nightmare. As Pat says, in Doom 64, the controls are customisable. The default setup is a ridiculous - backwards and forwards movement on the d-pad, and strafing on the shoulder buttons means you would have to have your middle finger outstretched to reach the z button for firing. I switched backwards and forwards movement to the stick and strafing to C left and C right. Of course, this is Doom, so there is no looking up or down, and (thank ****) no jumping either.

For those who are unaware (which is everybody, apparently), Doom 64 is not another port of Doom. It contains 32 (count 'em) all new levels. The weapons are the same, and so are the enemies (although sadly lacking Spider Masterminds which, since I cut my teeth on GBA Doom, I have yet to see). The weapons remain as perfect as ever, packing a satisfying punch, and the pointlessly long reloading animations of modern games are nowhere to be seen. Naturally, everything has had a major graphical facelift. What has impressed me the most is the lighting effects. Doom has always relied on its lighting for atmosphere (again, I was robbed of this a little by playing on the GBA, where you can't see a frogging thing unless you turn dynamic lighting off), but Doom 64 has awed me somewhat. There is a corridor in level two that is totally dark, save for luminescent red arrows on the floor and ceiling, and then after hitting a switch, fluorescent blue light fills the room, and everything goes a bit Tron. As you walk around, the light falling on your gun will change colour depending on where you stand, flickering red as you walk under the arrows and so on. The ambient music is also highly disturbing, and filled with ominous screams and the scraping of machinery, like Satan himself re-wallpapering the inside of an oil refinery. When you arrive in Hell, you start to hear babies crying in the distance. This game should be played at night, in the dark.

If you own an N64, you should have this game in your collection. It's a simple game really, but it does everything right, and harks back to a time when first person shooters weren't bogged down with all the bull****.

[egparadigm]

I've played a bit of Doom myself now. It comes as a breath of fresh air after the Turok games. It couldn't really be any more different – the early levels only last about five minutes! The game really feels a lot more like I remember Quake being, than what I've experienced of Doom on the Game Boy. This is no bad thing, IMO, as Quake 1 was my first PC FPS and I really enjoyed it at the time.

One annoyance is that the control setup cannot be saved – which means setting them again each time. Luckily this doesn't take long, but it's still a needless hassle. I'm not convinced of the benefit of searching for all the secrets, as I've found a couple by hitting the use button while running along the walls – how exactly are you meant to find them without this type of tedium?

After getting stuck on level six, I started to play The World Is Not Enough. Competent is a fair word for it, but that appears to be about as far as it goes. The graphics are abysmal and, while there appears to be a high res mode, this only really lifts it slightly, with the game almost looking as good as Goldeneye – which is pretty poor for a game released as late as this one. On the default setting, it looks like a PSone game.

The gameplay is really more akin to Die Hard Trilogy, with a complete lack of AI. Enemies will run in on cue, but spend the majority of their time rooted to the spot. This lack of self-determination is most evident on level three – when the hostage takers see Bond, rather than immediately shooting the hostage, they simply aim straight for the man himself.

[noobish hat]

If you pull the map up on Doom, you can often see where a door is hidden along a stretch of wall because it will be yellow instead of red. It doesn't matter anyway because the secrets in Doom are always non-essentials, unlike sodding Turok. I'm certainly not trying to find all the secrets for every level, I'm having too much of a ball running around killing everything that moves - if I do happen to find some then it's just a delightful bonus. Actually, I do tend to find most of the secrets for each level just by chance.

[Jaz]

You'll be into Blast Corps this issue. Awesome game.

[Rep]

Blast Corps Is another Game that's fiendish If you want to 100% It. Special mention goes to the Moon Physics too

[importaku]

Blast corps is one game i'd love to see remade, imagine what it could be like now with todays graphical ability. In my head i can already imagine it

Box art is ace too