Half-Life without the storyline
Written: Jan 23 '01 (Updated Jan 23 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Hard to find
Cons: Myriad of bugs; thoroughly unenjoyable experience; unresponsive controls; cheap plot; terrible voice acting; dated engine.
The Bottom Line: If the people at Rewolf wanted to make the Worst Game Ever out of the Best Game Ever, they havecreated a masterpiece. Otherwise, thistitle should return to the drawing board.
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| duke_nuker's Full Review: Gunman Chronicles for Windows |
Seen from the outside, to work as a game reviewer has to be the best kind of job available out there. You play games all day (which by the way, are shipped to you for free), write a review between 500-1000 words after you are done with them, and you even get paid for what you write provided you are employed in one of the big sites or mags. A nice life indeed.
But it’s not always like that. There are times when you open the mail only to see a pure and absolute piece of cr0p (or you go buy it yourself, for that matter) you will have to waste a good 20-30 hours playing, just to then waste another one to three hours bashing it while you write the damn review for the site that asked for it. When a game really sucks you can’t tell it by just looking at the unwrapped box, you have to actually play the darn thing to notice it, which turns out to be a painful and traumatic experience.
There are a some good games out there, a few excellent ones that become classics the moment they are released, many mediocre ones and another small percentage is composed by pure junk.
Gunman Chronicles belongs to the last group. Basically, the kind of garbage you want me to review for you to save you a couple of hours of your precious gamer time waiting at the tedious return lines.
So I will sit here in the computer room and sacrifice some more time to give you the needed advise. After all, I have already played the thing, so it’s not possible for this to get any worse, don’t you think?
Mr. Freeman, what have they done to you?!?
Speaking of FPS games, I can remember Half-Life as one of the best singleplayer experiences I ever had the pleasure to enjoy (only overshadowed, perhaps, by the superb System Shock 2). There were cover ops, aliens, a conspiracy, machinegun turrets, head-crabs that made that spooky noise when they were nearby, OpenGL support, sniper women, a colt gun, an excellent Artificial Intelligence never seen before, yellowish alien blood spread all over the floor.
In short, the kind of experience that make reviewers give away some ‘Game of the Year’ awards with gusto.
So it’s really terrifying to see the atrocities a bunch of programmers have done to that classic. [A note of mercy: Game reviewer’s cruelty and sardonic style aside, the people at Rewolf are not real game developers but guys that like both Half-Life and programming and decided to make a new mod for it in their free time, like any of us would do an activity we enjoy in our own spare time. But then some green-dressed d*ck head executive decided to ‘purchase’ the thing and sell it at retail price (at a suggested $39,95) as if it was a professional product, thus Gunman has to be judged having what is currently on the market in mind. And that’s exactly the reason why I’m giving it just one star].
For start, there is one thing in gaming that is called aging. When an engine was coded two years ago or it’s even older than that, its graphics won’t look remotely as good as those of engines of newer titles. And since Half-Life didn’t have the best graphics in town to begin with (admit it people, this was the only not-so-strong aspect of the game), two years and a half later the thing will look awfully worse, no matter how hard it’s tweaked.
And in Gunman’s case things get even worse. Not only are Half-Life’s graphics brought back in the ugliest of fashions, but there are also some incredibly annoying problems in the technical department. Direct3D mode was simply unplayable in my PIII 450 machine with a TNT2 Ultra card, not the latest of systems but I can run Half-Life without a problem with these specs so I really don’t understand why Gunman can’t work the same way. OpenGL also had its issues, the game would show black rectangles at the screen at random, solid surfaces such as walls would move as if they were water for no apparent reason and other minor annoyances.
So I ended up playing in the horrendous software mode, something I hadn’t done since I downloaded the OpenGL patch for the first Quake. Oh, look! There are pixels in here, and they look so damn awful. Arrrgg!!!
I can play a game without the sound if it gets really bad by turning the speakers off, but I definitively cannot play with the monitor turned off if the graphics are too ugly. So I had to keep looking at those eye-insulting pixels till the end.
Can somebody please send me a screenshot of an Unreal Tournament open environment so I can heal my wounded eyes? Thanks.
As I told you, it is possible to play a game muted, although annoying, it can be done. But in this case it wasn’t annoying at all, in fact, it was extremely alleviating, (they already damaged my eyes, but they had to continue by torturing my ears too. I should definitively sue Sierra for this one!).
Metallic sounds abound, glasses are shattered at every moment, noises are repeated ad nauseam and there is no music, even a rave DJ would be disgusted.
In the first moments of play, when you are introduced to the game and its mechanics (the intro is like that in Half-Life but you are inside a claustrophobic elevator opposed to a train in H-L, and the woman’s voice acting is dirt cheap), I mean, when I first ran Gunman, there was a strange problem that made the character move in one direction until he reached a wall and then stay there stuck with no possibility of putting him back in normal position. Deactivating joystick support fixed the problem. (Note to self: Now I realize I should have just unplugged the power cord before playing this game instead of turning off accessories one by one).
But the problems in the control department don’t end there. Controls aren’t very responsive; sometimes it will take the game a second or two to realize you hit a key.
And there’s also some sort of unseen entity that tries to hold you hampering your movements, this is especially exasperating when trying to push boxes or aiming at a distance.
Ah, I forgot to say something about the plot, but it really doesn’t matter. It’s Space Cowboys meets Starship Troopers, the enemies are slight variations of those found in Black Mesa; you and another bunch of soldiers have to go to a recently discovered planet where men doesn’t belong to and exterminate all of its rightful owners that lived in there for centuries to protect humanity. Sweet.
One last note: PR people please stop doing the cruelty of making us watch a movie file of an infinitely superior game after we are done with the installation (in this case an Empire Earth preview), not only there are proofs that this marketing strategy doesn’t work but it’s also very depressing to watch after having to put up with a game as bad as this one for thirty hours of our lives.
Bottom Line
If the people at Rewolf wanted to make the Worst Game Ever out of the Best Game Ever, they have created a masterpiece. Otherwise, this title should return to the drawing board.
Duke Nuker
Recommended:
No
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duke_nuker
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