Killing Time
Developer: Studio 3DO
Release Date: August 15, 1995
Time Played: Around 90 minutes
Troubleshooting: One surprisingly comprehensive fan patch. Who is the person weird enough to make this game not only playable, but surprisingly troubleshooting free on Windows 10? I do not know, but god bless them.
Dubiosity:4 out of 5
CD-ROM Energy: Maximal
Would I play more? Would consider it for charity purposes. Otherwise? Nope. Noooo. Nope.
The dying gasp of the 3DO is something most people probably aren’t spending time thinking about, but I’m not most people. By 1995, Trip Hawkins’ experiment in a multi-format, multimedia, multi-hundred (six, to be exact) dollar CD console had failed to overtake the Genesis and SNES, not to mention the oncoming Saturn and PSX. Despite this, it had surprising amounts of support from Japanese developers (see: the best console versions of Super Street Fighter II Turbo and SamSho at the time, a bunch of “classics” like D and Doctor Hauzer, and perhaps unsurprisingly a bunch of weird eroges) and perhaps most relevantly to my sicko tastes, two very bad looking Dungeons and Dragons licensed RPGs. It’s not a platform without effort, I guess is what I’m trying to say, but a lot of that effort was in service to chasing the worst possible trends the industry was experiencing at the time and also it was $600 in 1993 money.
With that in mind, Killing Time came out a month before the PSX’s launch in North America and was ported to Windows the following year. It’s the last game from Studio 3DO, the company’s in-house FMV-focused development team, and was initially very promising for me and my particular darkness. Its intro is Peak FMV, with the idea of a bunch of 1920s flappers, bootleggers, and socialites trapped in some sort of occultish time bubble on a remote island off the coast of New England. Are you a bad enough dude to, um, wander the island’s grounds, discover the shards of an ancient artifact, and shoot a bunch of the most pre-rendered sprite enemies you can handle? Because I was fucking SOLD. Hot damn, this was gonna be the ideal replacement after Fire Warrior suffered the curse of “not working” and I was very, very excited to show it off to my audience.
To my great disappointment, Killing Time is simply not a very interesting First Person Shooter. The soundtrack is actually pretty good, the FMV snippets you find are suitably hammy as shit, but a lot of my time on stream was spent wandering around this island, slogging my way against hordes of easily-dispatched enemies, dealing with the game’s awful movement (your acceleration grinds to a halt the second you collide with any object, which makes running around more stuttery than it should) looking for a handful of key items to actually progress. There’s an interesting threat of non-linearity here, especially for a shooter from 1995, but without the competence (or guidance, for that matter) to actually pull it off it’s mostly just Bad Hexen (and if you know anything about how I feel about Hexen, this is not a compliment.) Oh, did I mention that finding walkthroughs for this game is a nightmare, because no one played this? Well, now you know. I do think this might be worth watching an LP for, I don’t think you need to experience the magic for yourself.
Witchaven
Developer:Capstone Software
Release Date: September 30, 1995
Time Played: A little under an hour and 20 minutes.
Troubleshooting: Build GDX support
Dubiosity:5 out of 5
Duke Nukemosity: 0 out of 5
Would I play more? maybe
It’s probably fitting that we end this season with another high quality product using Ken Silverman’s Build Engine. The first game using that engine, released the same day as William Shatner’s Tekwar (also a Build Engine), by the same developer (Capstone Software), and somehow the better of the two. If you’ve watched any of Civvie 11’s videos (many of them being an inspiration for this wheel) you’ll know the particular brand of irony that comes from games made by a company whose tagline was “The Pinnacle of Entertainment Software.” I don’t hate myself enough to play Tekwar, despite its BuildGDX implementation, so the first person hack-n-slasher RPGish will have to suffice.
Witchaven has digitized claymation AND FMV spritework, so it’s already dubious in that sense, but being an early Build Engine game made by a team of noted incompetents makes it extra jank. So of course I had a pretty good time playing it. Random, frequent death traps, poorly-implemented level design, weapon durability, questionable hitboxes? Friend, this is a Capital D Dubious video game. Once again, I’ll trot out the Bad Hexen comparison, but while that was mostly a slight against Killing Time’s structure, for Witchaven I mostly mean in the sense that it’s a melee-focused FPS. You also level up, sometimes. It doesn’t seem to do much other than slightly increase your health and let you use different scrolls, but there was a point where I was considering throwing it onto The Wheel of Dubious RPGs instead.
The true secret to success in Witchaven is… you can kinda just run past everyone? Given how many hits from a dagger (which might randomly break) it takes to kill a slow-ass goblin, what if you just summoned your inner quake speedrun and zoomed past him? You need to find some sort of pentagram before you’re allowed to leave the level, which can be tedious, but also you can straight up bypass locked doors with the “open” spell instead of needing to find the key. Does that break one of the fundamentals of good FPS level design? Yes. Do I care? No. This game is busted enough without the advent of intentional sequence breaking, but it’s busted in a “fun” rather than a “fucked” way. It’s not good, you shouldn’t buy it, but as far as functional incompetence goes this is probably up there. At least, as far as what I saw. I would not put it past Capstone to fill the later levels with even more illusionary insta-death pit traps, but maybe Witchaven II is better? Who’s to say? Maybe a season 2? In any case, if you want a game with a similar aesthetic and energy which is actually worth your time, I’ll just remind you that Arthurian Legends exists.
But for now, that’s the end of The Wheel of Dubious FPSes. We learned a lot, and by “we” I mean me. I learned that Daikatana is somehow an acceptable barometer to judge if a game is “bad bad” or “good bad” or “interesting bad” just as I learned a lot of console shooters before the 360 era are rough to go back to. Except, surprisingly enough, the console version of PowerSlave, which is vastly superior to its PC counterpart. (no, seriously, PowerSlave Exhumed is very good and worth a look.) Maybe I’ll play Duke Nukem Forever for charity, because it’s terrible and I hate it! Heck, I spent time in my life that I’ll never get back to make Turok 3’s control scheme resemble a modern FPS, and it sort of worked! Turok 3 is weird! Night Dive remaster plz.
Moreso than the RPG wheel, I also think I learned a thing or two about “tech” and “engines'' and “getting shit to run properly.” Part of that is just reading Masters of Doom, to be fair, but the story of the First Person Shooter genre is as much about the tech as the games themselves. Unreal Engine 3’s entire beefchunk shiny lighting aesthetic is readily apparent no matter where you look, and it has aged more than you’d think! Unreal Engine 1 though? Still clean as hell, with the kind of stuff that will melt your Voodoo-Accelerated 3D Graphics Card. I learned that, despite loving several of their games, Monolith’s LithTech engine is a fucking nightmare to get running well on a modern 64 bit OS. Also, I dunno, Quake is fast and that’s very good.
Previously | Next |
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Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi and Perfect Dark Zero | TBA???? |
As mentioned in my last blog, my next wheel is already in progress. The Wheel of Ukraineous Video Games is my attempt at celebrating the efforts of Ukrainian video game developers in the only way I know how: by putting them on a randomizer wheel and streaming 2-4 hours of them. Well, not this first game. I’m playing through all of Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishments on my internet twitch because it turns out that game actually rules? I’ll also be including a donation link to the Ukrainian Red Cross in all of my streams and write-ups because fuck man I dunno what else I can do without being a weird war voyeur (Waryeur?) Please give if you can. I’m not gonna do a fundraiser or anything (given that I’m already on the hook for a certain community endurance run next month) but it’s the least I can do.
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