Stumbling through the 3D Realms Anthology - 1987-1992

[davidn]

Wow, do I really care about this journal so little now that I haven't posted a single one of the video series I've been doing over the last few weeks? Here are the first three parts - they're basically my attempt to substitute for my obsolete dream of becoming a games programme presenter on television.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X60j-TWn414&hd=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMOSgepPNDY&hd=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQsIhIoIur0&hd=1

Comments

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

So which do you prefer to be known as, the furry Noel Edmonds or the furry Dominik Diamond? :P

This third video is about the era when I started getting into Apogee games; we got our first PC about this time, just breaking out of the BBC Micro era and after a disastrous flirtation with early Macs. My first introduction to Apogee was Monster Bash, and dad enjoyed it enough that he looked into their back catalogue. Secret Agent, Commander Keen 1 and 4 and Word/Math Rescue were the ones I remember most; Wolfenstein 3D was when I first noticed the difficulty I have with motion-sickness in first-person shooters (specifically when strafing along walls hitting the spacebar looking for hidden passageways).

On a vaguely-related note, I miss the days when the stars in space were made up of every colour the graphics card was capable of. :P There's something about that style that just hits all the nostalgia buttons for me. :P

D.F.

[davidn]

Oh dear god, I'd forgotten about Dominik Diamond - I suppose that's pretty much who I am here, but without the sheer aggression of constant innuendo.

There's definitely a feeling that comes with the limitations of these graphics (and the capability of the engines made to run on the computers of the time) that can't easily be replicated now :)

I know I had the shareware episodes of Dark Ages, Secret Agent and Duke Nukem - I think it was just whatever got distributed on magazine coverdisks at the time. My dad borrowed the registered disks of Commander Keen 1 from someone at his work, and it was the best thing to ever happen, finally getting to see the worlds beyond the confines of the shareware episode of something :) I remember having Monster Bash as well, but it was a cut-down version of even the first episode because at the time, a full 1MB was seen as a bit much for a game coverdisk!

How... disastrous, exactly, can a flirtation with Macs go? :X

[kjorteo]

[davidn]

Oh, great Saint Pigeonation himself :X

[kjorteo]

 

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

Well, this was back before Macs really worked properly. You needed much more command line knowledge than anyone in our family had; sure, it had a CD-ROM drive and could do fancy things (I remember playing with a voice-recording application and learning how to set the system alert sounds to clips of me saying dumb stuff), but none of the software that you actually wanted to use worked because it was for Windows, none of the Mac software worked beyond the basics because you needed to know the ins and outs of how to set it up, occasionally it would do stupid things like crash because one program somewhere was set to colour-mode when the OS was running in black-and-white mode (for some reason), and then you'd get that lovely helpful error message with the icon that looked like a bomb, which is great for calming people down and encouraging them to think problems through rationally.

I remember Darwin's Dilemma being a fun little puzzle game, though. Though even that would occasionally generate unwinnable levels through the curse of the RNGenie.

D.F.

[kjorteo]

My experience with the multicolored star thing was from one of the After Dark screensavers ... man, I miss those. Screensavers in general aren't really a thing anymore, are they? And I'm pretty sure After Dark in particular is so dead that you can't even run it in compatibility mode or anything anymore. :( I remember we used to have After Dark Deluxe Edition, with a lot of "screensavers" that were semi-amusing time wasters to watch/enjoy actively but would be absolutely godawful at actually saving a screen (You Bet Your Head, Rat Race, etc.) but my favorite real screensaver was always Satori (which I can't find anywhere now. :() It was just really pretty!

Unfortunately, that is about the extent of my ability to relate to any of this. Of all the games presented thus far, the only one I actually played was IBM Mega Man, which was actually even worse than David's quick two-second cutaway gag reference made it look. :P

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

"Wow, do I really care about this journal so little now that I haven't posted a single one of the video series I've been doing over the last few weeks?"

:' (

What is the name of the top down shooter game in the montage sequence of the first video. That game was excellent.

[davidn]

That's Raptor! I loved it when it came out and it'll be in the 1994 video :)

[canadanne.livejournal.com]

Ha, I was reminiscing about Raptor quite recently (http://canadanne.livejournal.com/2946978.html). I think I recognise the clip just before that, too - Mystic Towers?

Loved those old Apogee and Id games. Didn't like Wolfenstein 3D with all the dog shooting, but Blake Stone was awesome. And Monster Bash!