Films such as The Cabin in the Woods are often described as “a love letter to horror.” Monolith’s 1997 first person shooter Blood is more like a rambling, 50 page Unabomber manifesto stuffed into horror’s mailbox at 2:00am, complete with the final line “ps: nice view thru yr bedroom window ;)”. Conceptually it’s one of most ridiculous and nebbish games ever made: the dialogue consists of groan-worthy riffs on famous horror movies, the levels are themed off places like the Overlook Hotel and Crystal Lake, the game shoves references to Lovecraft and George Romero under your face with such obsessive frequency that you almost want to pat it on the shoulder and say “Relax, I get it. Stop trying so hard.”.
But it’s also one of the most fun shooters ever made. There’s just no cohesive direction to any of it, and strangely, that completely works.
You have 1) a brainless “shoot everything that moves” gameplay, 2) paired with a complicated set of RPG -style damage modifiers (as a simple example, stone gargoyles repel fire attacks). You have 1) a nonsensical throwaway plot about an old west gunfighter (with anachronisms galore), and 2) a very detailed mythos, right down to the fact that the enemy cultists speak a constructed language (there was a dictionary on the now-defunct Blood site, revealing said language to be the product of hurling Sanskrit and Latin at each other in a Participle Accelerator.) You have 1) shitty graphics (the Build engine was dated in 1996, and even more so in 1997), and 2) fairly groundbreaking use of 3D voxel imaging (for tombstones and such). Blood’s an anomaly.
The game’s a mess, in the best way possible. It’s like it was made by two different teams living on two different continents who could only communicate by carrier pidgeon. “Throw a bunch of interesting ideas together” seldom works, but here’s the exception.
I’ve played through it several times, at various difficulty levels, and I still find it capricious, challenging, and occasionally brilliant. The Build Engine isn’t the prettiest whore on the waterfront, but it allows for destructible/deformable environments and the game takes those features and runs like they’re a pair of scissors. E1M3, “The Phantom Express”, takes place on board a moving train – it’s stunning as a visual effect, and the level design perfectly complements it: you have to fight tense gunbattles in narrow train corridors, etc. The only bad thing is that none of the later levels quite match it in creativity.
The weapons are savage and visceral (though I never figured out exactly how the voodoo doll work), and the level design fun, flowing, and filled with endearing human touches. Duke Nukem 3D was the anti-Quake. This is the antier-Quake. This is the final and complete triumph of content over technology, and nobody in gaming realised it, either then or now.
Not even Monolith did – Blood II was an inexplicable attempt at remaking this game with zero character or charm. And of course, the game still has a modding community.
Blood isn’t perfect. The final boss is the easiest one in the game. The weapons aren’t balanced all that well (generally, the cooler a weapon seems, the less useful it is in the game) and some of the enemies are truly ridiculous bullet sponges. It’s bimodal nature means it has daring creativity paired with cloddish FPS cliches – there’s the old “shoot a crack in the wall to reveal a secret area” wheeze…again…and again…
But it’s classic, and the rarest type of game: one that is impervious to time. To preserve a human body, you generally extract all eight litres of blood – and I guess this is where it all ends up. Duke Nukem 3D came out a year before and laid the ground for this type of game (gory violence + campy irreverent humor), but between the two of them, THIS is the one to play first, and perhaps last.
The Biblical Urheimat of 3D shooting games. Asking if it’s fun is like asking if the Hammurabi Codex is good writing: it’s transcended such things.
In 1992, Wolfenstein 3D changed everything. It made people nauseous. And upset. There were violent games before, but their lack of immersion softened the blow. “You” didn’t rip out spines in Mortal Kombat 2, a sprite on the screen did. But from a first person perspective (with a phallic gun-barrel intruding into your viewfield), the illusion breaks. In this game, you are definitely the one pulling the trigger.
Nobody who’s played Wolfenstein 3D could be seriously offended by it. The Nazi element is played for kitsch and camp, this is Springtime for Hitler: The Game. And the game’s sense of realism is shallow at best: the corners are all 90 degree angles, the ceilings and floors lack textures, the repetitive environments make you feel like a rat in a maze, etc. The massive body count has a nugatory effect: after a few hours, shooting someone is as shocking as the 300th “fuck” on a rap album.
Gameplay kicks off with a screen saying “GET PSYCHED!” and this captures the game’s flavour: a crazy sugar rush. You charge around turning Wehrmächte into Swiss cheese. You’re not exactly thinking “only the dead have seen the end of war”.
Wolfenstein 3D is an arcade game. The more you play WOLF3D (as the DOS executable was called), the more it feels like it belongs on a CPS-2 arcade cabinet with wadded-up gum jamming the controls. You have lives, and a high score. All that’s missing is B.J. Blazkowicz telling you to insert a quarter. Modern 3D shooters aspire to be on the cutting edge. There’s the feeling that a game with revolutionary graphics needs to be revolutionary along other axes, too. Wolfenstein 3D remains (as it did at the time of release) stuck in the past.
There’s lots of fun goodies herein. A hidden “Call Apogee say ‘AARDWOLF'” message, remnants of an aborted contest that was immediately made pointless by fan-made data viewing programs. A Pacman level. Another level made entirely out of swastikas. The statement “This game is rated PC-13, for ‘Profound Carnage'”. A naff and entertaining battle against Adolf Hitler. A episodes 4-6 are called Nocturnal Missions. Barring Rise of the Triad, this is perhaps the most overtly comedic FPS until the release of Duke Nukem 3D (Ken’s Labyrinth was too autistic to be funny).
Little map design is possible with such a limited engine. You wander mazes and shoot groups of enemies. While Doom would give the player new and varied things in its later levels, WOLF3D has nowhere to go except harder mazes and larger groups of enemies. At a certain point, your brain becomes bored, and starts craving more stimulation. You could argue that the game reinforces the social message that mass murder is boring.
Even the game’s technological wizardry smacks of Uri Geller. Just fire up Ultima Underworld, which came out six months earlier, and had angled walls, textured ceilings, slopes, look up/down, swimmable water, etc. Not a fair comparison, since that game was developed over years next to this one’s months. And Wolfenstein 3D’s engine is faster and leaner. Too bad that equals a fast and lean journey through Legoland.
Wolfenstein 3D is a dated experience with immense historical. I can’t imagine myself ever replaying Wolfenstein 3D the same way I play Doom. But though I don’t play it, I can’t ignore it.
Way back in strategy gaming’s past, you find this. Way back in the planet’s past, you find dinosaur shit. It’s not too pretty to look at, but we’re standing on it.
Blizzard’s 1994 “build a town and destroy the other guy’s town” game wasn’t the first, but Dune II was crummy and nearly unplayable. This is actually sort of fun. You choose a race (orc or human), then you harvest gold, build a city, train an army, win the game, type “u suck, git gud scrub” to your opponent, bribe your correctional officer so that he lets you use good shower in Cellblock D (which has hotter water and 23% fewer rapists), and wait what was I saying
The graphics are a 320×240 assault of pixels, blocky but nostalgic and charming. The audio’s pretty good. The game’s only plot is a funeral plot where Blizzard’s scriptwriter was buried after starving to death. Games in 1994 did not need stories. The game is overall simplistic but enjoyable: 90s PC gaming in a nutshell. Most people who played Warcraft back in the day enjoyed it, and some of the people who play it now will also enjoy it.
Incidentally, the orcs and humans aren’t identical mirrors of each other. You’ll see many reviews claiming that they are, and it’s a dead giveaway that the reviewer hasn’t played the game. The human archer shoots further than the orc spearman. The orc necrolyte has more range than the human priest. The differences are subtle, but you soon get a second sense for them. Unless you haven’t played the game, I guess.
The game has two crippling flaws, neither of which relate to its age.
First: you can only move four units at a time. I hate this. Commanding large armies is aneurysm-inducing. You can roughly simulate your experience playing Warcraft by filling a huge swimming pool using a 1 liter kiddie bucket.
I think Blizzard’s defense back in the day was that they didn’t want people to just spam a bunch of units and flood them at the enemy. That’s one way to solve that problem. Another would be to pay a guy to kick down my door, yank my keyboard out of the computer, and RKO it through the nearest wall. If your only answer to “degenerate user behavior” is “take away that user’s ability to play”, you do not know how to design games.
Second: nobody thought that balance between the varying units was important.
No-fail recipe for victory: choose orcs, spam archers, get warlocks, then spam demons. The only way to counter this strategy is to do it yourself, except better. There’s just no stopping demons in this game. They cost nothing, and beat everything. Yeah, they eventually run out of magic and die. Fighting them merely makes you run out of everything and die. If the game’s cover accurately reflected the balance level, the human would be bent over, taking it in the pooper.
It’s old. It’s crappy in places. Play this to see where the Warcraft series began. Unlike many supposedly classic games, it’s fairly good for what it is, not just for what it inspired. I hold considerable respect for it, which is why I’ve waited this long before helpfully pointing out that Warcraft anagrams into Warcfart.
