You no mess with Lo Wang

Shadow Warrior looks like it will be F2P forever on steam so everybody can now experience the MAGIC that is Lo Wang.

yes!!! i was gonna buy this when it came out on GOG but i guess holding off on it worked out well. thanks for the heads up

How does that work? Did they update it so that I have to pay $4 per weapon?

Wow.

That's legitimately wonderful.

This is awesome. Never got the chance to play this. Thanks for the heads up!

From the About the Game blurb:

Experience total blood immersion

I challenge any game to top this description.

@ajayraz: The GOG version includes the expansions where this steam version does not.

This is fucking great. Too bad the remake won't do the original justice. Since we're in' The age of hurt feelings'

As opposed to the days of getting away with blatant prejudice?

This game was the JAM when I was young.

I need a strong dose of misogyny and racism today! Thanks for the tip-off!

Awesome. Never played this before. Seeing as I still hold an appreciation for Duke Nukem. Im sure Ill have a hoot.

@Video_Game_King

I ain't taking that bait, mate...

Honestly, the most racist thing about Shadow Warrior is that you have a voice actor doing a really bad Japanese stereotype accent. Replacing "R"s with "L"s that sort of thing. That's about it. I don't see how that's much different than, say, someone doing a really campy Russian accent. No one calls TF2 "racist" because of the Heavy. To my memory there's nothing openly derogatory toward Asians in it.

Now it is misogynistic - or at least it objectifies women in a very juvenile manner, but little more so than Duke Nukem 3D or any other 90s game trying to cater to horny teenagers - which I'm sure most of us were at one point...

Free Wang is the best Wang.

I already own this game two times over (hard copy and GOG), but having it on Steam is still nice, plus it gives me an excuse to replay it.

@shagge: That's some marketing genius right there.

At some point it's more important to consider the game from a preservation perspective and keep it all intact. There's nothing wrong with putting a disclaimer on the page saying "hey, this shit may be considered offensive, racist, sexist, and anything else you might think of. Watch out or disagree, do what you will."

Games, and media in general, like this is inherently paradoxical. Because in order to appreciate it you have to understand the layers going on and the irony inherent in appreciating it BUT its creation was likely devoid of such layers and irony. Culture is weird.

@sweetz said:

You're making a false equivalency. There's a very specific history of racist imagery of Asian peoples (particularly in the US) that Shadow Warrior readily invokes. A big white dude with a goofy, generic Eastern-European accent doesn't have the same baggage.

So because racism against Asians exists outside the game, doing a campy Asian accent is racist, but doing other campy accents is not as long as there isn't perceived racism that exists for that culture/race outside the game. Is that the logic there or am I misunderstanding? I can't say I particularly agree.

Are there specific things in the game you can point out? I don't necessarily disbelieve you, but my memory of the game is admittedly quite fuzzy. Worth noting, there is a difference between tastelessness and racism.

They called the enemies who carried dynamite Coolies, ffs.

Well ok yup, that's racist - or at least really insensitive. See I don't remember stuff like that. I just remember that as monster with dynamite. Do they actually name it in game or does that just show in an enemy viewer or something? The first time I ever heard someone talk about the "proper" names for monsters in Doom I was perplexed. I was like "how the heck do you know that's a 'Cacodemon', I just call it evil tomato cyclops" ;)

Fair enough. I'm not exactly sure where I first saw it, either, but it might be in the manual. I still have the physical disc with case and manual, so.

Aaaand, yup. Right there in the manual.

Aswome to hear thanks for letting me know. Now I got to go download this game, and slice off demon nuts with a samurai sword.

HOOOOOOLY SHIT. That's really disgusting. I've never played this game and so I was perplexed when all the controversy popped up after they announced the remake. That's really, really fucking terrible. Yuck. No thanks, Shadow Warrior.

Just played some of the first level. Its pretty fun I'm liking it so far although man makes you really forget how much shooters have changed in the last 15 or so years. Game is fairly brutal even on the 2nd difficulty setting. I'll try to make it a point to beat it soon. There is some neat things that this game has going on for it but it seems pretty obvious why Duke was the one of these two games that really broke out.

Although playing this has me wanting to buy the Steam version of Duke 3D now.... Devolver Digital did a good job making this thing work with modern PCs like a charm.

You want free Wang? Or you want watch Wang free Wang?

I find it funny that the developers of the remake went out of their way to say that the new game won't be racist and sexist like the original, and then they make the original a free download. Doesn't that seem a bit unethical?

@spaceinsomniac: I suppose its a bid to try to lure some of the fans of the old game over with good will.

After playing Shadow Warrior for awhile it's fun, but compared to other 3drealms games such as Duke3d and Blood. I'm not finding it as enjoyable as those two games.

Oh christ, I totally forgot about that. When the game came out, I didn't understand the connotations "coolie" had. Goddamn. I always saw Shadow Warrior as more "insensitive" than actively racist, but that's the very definition of going too far.

It's especially rough since I really do like the game as a game, but that really taints my view of it.

@shagge: To be fair, I only just learned that coolie was an offensive term. Someone on Shacknews pointed it out in a news story of the reboot.

Blood was actually made by Monolith. All three of these games use the Build engine, though.

So I just finished the game (put on god mode and rushed through it) and I more or less stand by my original statement. The use of the term "coolie" for a monster was stupid and there's no excusing that, but the word never actually shows up in game and it was more than likely used out of ignorance than any specific hateful intent - not that that excuses it, but again, not actually in the game proper. Apart form the main character's campy accent and idiotic non-stop "Wang" puns, there's really nothing in the game that's specifically derogatory towards Asians. There's a lot of generic pan-Asian imagery that mixes elements of Japanese and Chinese cultures together in perhaps a careless manner, but nothing painting it in a negative light. Beyond the opening minutes of the game, all of this gives way to it just being a fairly generic feeling 90s FPS. I have no particular desire to defend the game (I don't even think it's that good as I shall briefly elaborate below), but I think time has distorted memory of how offensive the game really was; it isn't that bad - it's far more dumb than hateful.

As far as the gameplay itself - I'm really glad the industry relatively quickly moved on from the maze/key hunt/find the switch pattern of FPS design. For those who complain about modern tightly scripted and linear FPSes, I recommend playing this to see what you're "missing". It's obviously hard to judge out of period, but I didn't find much especially worth remembering here and I too wonder why someone thought it worth resurrecting the name, regardless of whether the game is racist or not. FWIW, I replayed the original Dark Forces about a year ago and found it to hold up far, far better; however, I admit much of my enjoyment of that could have been bolstered by nostalgia for "old" Star Wars.

I get Lo Wang for free every day, namsayin?

Unfortunately, I do.