Thursday 10 November 2011

The Grisly Grotto

For last week's post at HoP Von recorded a video on what roleplaying is, and it's worth a look. When I clicked through I found it linked to a vid on Quake, a seminal first-person shooter from back in 1996, and watching more reminded me how good the design was.

This is a walkthrough of the fourth map, the Grisly Grotto, built around a flooded cavern, one of my favourites for the character of the spaces and the clever setups. Quake never seemed especially complex in how it populated levels or reacted to events, but the bad guys and locations were arranged well to draw players on and keep them off balance.

This is the PC version and as far as I can tell it's not using the DarkPlaces mod or any texture packs. Watch out if you don't know Quake - it's pretty gory, and could be scary.

If you're wondering why all that infrastructure might be there, Callin at Big Ball of No Fun has a lot of options, and for more cavern inspiration check out the links at this post.

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5 comments:

The Angry Lurker said...

Reminded me so much of Doom and the homage that the movie "Doom" made to this type of gameplay, check it out if you can.

Porky said...

I'm very interested in that kind of move between media. As well as Doom there was Wolfenstein 3D, with only 18 months between them. I look at first-person shooters the way I look at wargames and think how much more there is that could be done, and W3D and Doom are nearly 20 years old now.

Game Master Rob Adams said...

I had an old hack for wolfenstein that was very interesting... Anyway it is not something I'd do now but when I wasa teenager.

SinSynn said...

Ah, I so loved Doom, Doom II, the Quake series, Tribes, even some of the Unreal games.

But then came Counterstrike, which was ok...
But that led to the current glut of Military shooters.
I recently purchased Battlefield 3, but hated getting shot by people lying prone in bushes.
Not a lotta fun there.

Sadly, I can't play Halo...listening to 10 year olds scream gets on my nerves.

I miss a good shooter.

Porky said...

@ ArmChairGeneral - I'd be glad to put in some time even now, if only there was enough time to go round.

@ SinSynn - Yep, I've been looking back over the history recently and it's a mixed bag. Two of the most interesting things I've come across recently in the first person are this unarmed escape in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, for that sense of retreat in fear rather than going forward boldly, and the similar general approach in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which also represents in-game a slow loss of sanity and has a more complex way of interacting with objects. There are some early scary bits here, a little strong language included, with some explanation of how the game works. I think we'd gain from more of this multi-layered thinking.