VOGONS


Lesser known first person shooters

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First post, by Kerr Avon

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There's an interesting blog I've been reading through for a while now, written by a bloke who likes playing bad first person shooters, or rather, he spends his time playing the first person shooters that either escaped the public's general attention (usually by only being published in whatever small East-European country they were written, and/or not being officially translated into English), or have the reputation of being very bad indeed. He says he does this partly out of interest, and partly to see what good games are actually mixed in with the (mostly) bad games.

The games he covers are mostly for the PC, but some are also on console (or can be emulated on a console - it's amazing how far PS2, Gamecube, and Wii emulation has come, apparently), and it's interesting to me because I love first person shooters and I'm always on the look out for more that might interest me.

A few of the games reviewed seem too well known to me to be eligible for such a blog, such as Pariah, Hard Reset, Deus Ex: Invisible War, and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (I found Pariah bland and not too interesting, but Hard Reset to be fun,and Invisible War to be an OK game but utterly terrible as a sequel to my favourite PC game ever. I've not played the Silent Hill game), and he reviews The Suffering: Ties that Bind, which isn't what I'd call obscure, as it was pretty well known on the original XBox (he reviews the PC version, but I'd have thought that that version would be as well known as the XBox version. It's a good game, though).

But most games on the site seem to be fairly unknown or even very obscure, as far as I can tell. And the site has some further value as the reviews sometimes link to a downloadable, fan-made English patch for the game, or contain advice on how to run the game on a modern PC (and in the case of the Neuro review, for example, in one of the visitors comments on that page, there's a link to a file that apparently allows the temperamental game to run on Windows 7 64-bit (and maybe later?), which it turns out might have helped someone on Vogons a couple of years back).

Unfortunately, the blog does link to a download of at least one of the games (a fixed version of the game Neuro, which from what I can see, was never made free to download by it's creators, so it's probably a pirate link), and might do to more games too, so I can't post the Blog's name or URL here, which is a pity as it might interest first person shooter fans here, and it would be interesting to see anyone's recommendations of the games listed on the site, or of any other obscure but worth playing FPS games.

My biggest complaint about the blog, other than it not being updated since 2015, is that as far as I can tell, there's no page listing which of the games he'd recommend anyone try. To find out you have to look through his (sometimes lengthy, though that's not a bad thing) reviews, which is fine, but you might have thought he'd have one quick summary page listing the games in such catagories as 'Worth playing", "Not bad if you're willing to overlook it's flaws", "These really are quite bad", and "Stay well away from these, trust me!".

Amongst the ones recommended in the reviews (or at least summed as being good enough to deserve playing by more people) and that I personally think sound worth tracking down are:

Neuro,
Operation Matriarchy,
You are Empty,

Can anyone recommend any more obscure first person shooters, or any sites that might deal with this subject, please?

Reply 1 of 30, by Procyon

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Funny, I found Paraih quite good, nice overall gameworld and it has glimmers of an interresting story which sadly never went anywhere.
On the contrary, I found Deus Ex 2 utterly unplayeble and Hard Reset okay but mostly a boring slog.

As to contribute some unknown shooters, let me introduce the fine people at Orion Games, makers of ultimate campfest first person shooters if there would exist something like a B-game.
I especially like Hell Forces which is the closest thing you get to an Evil Dead video game and they made, but I never played it, a game based on They Live called They're Alive.

Another good one is Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter, I really like this game, has nice level design and weapons and you can also fly a spaceship.

Then there is Alpha Prime, a game bashed so hard by gamingfolk that I was surprised to like it the way I do, an alright game if you ask me.

Actually someone did a series about obscure FPS's one YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxRMsBlro68&l … BBA1AB1CF53EEAC

Especially watch the intro of Liquidator 2, it's probably the funniest thing in videogaming.

Reply 2 of 30, by squiggly

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Procyon wrote:

Funny, I found Paraih quite good, nice overall gameworld and it has glimmers of an interresting story which sadly never went anywhere.
On the contrary, I found Deus Ex 2 utterly unplayeble and Hard Reset okay but mostly a boring slog.

Ay, Caramba, it's unplayeeble!

Reply 3 of 30, by DosFreak

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Can't really contribute on the unknown shooter front but ones I rarely see mentioned and they are all worth playing:

Black Mesa
Corridor 7
Dead Island
Dying Light (Counting this and Dead Island on the list)
Painkiller series
Red Faction series
Rune (Sequel is coming!)
Soldier of Fortune
Strife
Tribes Series
Tron 2.0

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
Make your games work offline

Reply 4 of 30, by The Serpent Rider

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Bet on Soldier
Vivisector: Beast within
Psychotoxic*
Codename: Outbreak
Nitro Family
Will Rock
Kreed*
Hour of Victory
Chex Quest
Cyclones
Malice for Quake
Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza
KISS: Psycho Circus
Mortyr

*Horrible game

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 5 of 30, by Firtasik

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Chasm: The Rift
Eradicator
Gore: Ultimate Soldier
Marathon Trilogy
Redline
Requiem: Avenging Angel
ÜberSoldier

Psychotoxic is my guilty pleasure and I love Hard Reset. 😎

11 1 111 11 1 1 1 1 1 11 1 1 111 1 111 1 1 1 1 111

Reply 6 of 30, by DracoNihil

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DosFreak wrote:

Rune (Sequel is coming!)

Rune is a third person hack and slash, not really a FPS game...

And no, the "behindview 0" thing doesn't count.

“I am the dragon without a name…”
― Κυνικός Δράκων

Reply 7 of 30, by leileilol

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Anything that's not called Call of Duty, PUBG, Counter-Strike or Overwatch is what's considered lesser-known these days...

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 8 of 30, by DosFreak

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DracoNihil wrote:
DosFreak wrote:

Rune (Sequel is coming!)

Rune is a third person hack and slash, not really a FPS game...

And no, the "behindview 0" thing doesn't count.

🤣. Damn memory.

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
Make your games work offline

Reply 9 of 30, by xjas

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I like Tecno - the Base (yes, that's the right spelling) quite a bit. It has a fleshed out single-player mission and reminds me a bit of System Shock 2, at least in terms of atmosphere. AFAIK it runs its own engine. Pretty good for a single person dev team. Wish it were multiplatform, but it's easy enough to run.

For multiplayer / arena type, Nexiuz is pretty good & has made it into the repositories for a lot of Linux distributions, so it's easy for me to throw on a machine if I just need to shoot some stuff. 😁 (There's a remake based on a modern engine on Steam, but the original v2.5.2 is still free.) Quite a few games out there based on the Cube / Cube 2 / Sauerbraten engine family to check out. Cube 1 & 2 (duh), Nexiuz & Red Eclipse come to mind.

On DOS MadSpace is one of those ones that I like a ton even though I've never played it all the way through & don't even think it's very good. The gameplay is honestly kinda crap (and SO VERY UGLY) but it was super innovative back in the day. AFAIK it was the first FPS game to do non-euclidian geometry as a gameplay element in its official release. (There were already some community-made maps for Descent 1 & 2 that played with it in a similar way.) If you liked Antichamber or Portal, well, this one did it first.

It also supports the VFX-1 (albeit with the left & right eyes reversed?? I haven't been able to get that set up right yet!), 3D shutter glasses, and voice commands via speech recognition.

Fun fact: it's also on Steam so you can still buy it to this day.

twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!

Reply 10 of 30, by DracoNihil

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Y'know since "MadSpace" was brought up, might as well bring up Z.A.R. as well.

It can be found on GOG and Steam, republished by Night Dive Studios.

The expansion pack is Russian only though...

“I am the dragon without a name…”
― Κυνικός Δράκων

Reply 11 of 30, by Procyon

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squiggly wrote:
Procyon wrote:

Funny, I found Paraih quite good, nice overall gameworld and it has glimmers of an interresting story which sadly never went anywhere.
On the contrary, I found Deus Ex 2 utterly unplayeble and Hard Reset okay but mostly a boring slog.

Ay, Caramba, it's unplayeeble!

I know my English can be horrible sometimes, maybe I should go working for a Japanese videogame company. 😁

Reply 13 of 30, by Cyberdyne

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I like Corridor 7 and Strife. Among older dos games.

And Mortyr from newer Windows games.

I am aroused about any X86 motherboard that has full functional ISA slot. I think i have problem. Not really into that original (Turbo) XT,286,386 and CGA/EGA stuff. So just a DOS nut.
PS. If I upload RAR, it is a 16-bit DOS RAR Version 2.50.

Reply 15 of 30, by Kerr Avon

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These are my suggestions:

Not well known but seem to be well liked amongst those who've played them:

Breakdown (original XBox) - very good, but can be very hard at times,
Cold Winter (PS2) - pretty good, but is too easy,
Duke Nukem: Zero Hour (N64) - a really great game (my favourite Duke Nukem game), that is third person, but you can play in first person using a cheat, or an un-lockable option,
Singularity (PC, XBox 360, PS3) - mostly very good, it feels like a cross between Half-Life 2 and Bioshock, but the quality goes off towards the end, you can see that the game was probably rushed at the end to get it to the shelves,
Star Wars: Republic Commando (PC, original XBox) - I've not yet played this, but it seems to be very well thought of,
Unreal Championship 2 (original XBox), a really good game, in some ways the best Unreal game, but it should have been ported to the PC so PC gamers could get to play it, since the other Unreal games were always on the PC.

First person shooters that I consider to be under-rated:

The World is Not Enough (N64) - most people dismiss this as in inferior Goldeneye clone, which it is, but it does a lot right in itself, and is a lot of fun,
Timeshift (PC, XBox 360, PS3) - *
Turok 3 (N64)

* I think Timshift is the worst game in this post. It does a few things amazingly well (such as the time powers, the weather effects, and some good weapons), but it went through 'development Hell', and it shows. The game is very uneven, with the good parts being mixed with bad or boring level design, sudden deaths that you can't help failing at the first time you encounter them, the best (most enjoyable to fight) enemies only come near the end so you don't get to fight them often, the story is extremely badly told, the ending answers *nothing*, and it just feelings unsatisfying.

I mean, I've completed it several times (because when it's good, it's really good and enjoyable), but I still don't know much of the plot, or what the ending is supposed to be mean. The game's development went though two major changes of direction, and in the final one, which is basically the game that we were given, they stripped away so much of the plot and the characters' backstories and whatever, that it's difficult to know much of what was intended to be portrayed by the story.

The character you play, a scientist turned first class gunman/survivalist, has no name (that we're ever told of), and we know nothing about him. But it's hinted that he was involved with another (female) scientist, and there's obviously some sort of power-play driven intrigue behind the theft that starts the game. At the start of the game, in modern times (say 2008, around the time the game was released) in a large scientific research centre, one of the higher up scientists, called Dr Krone, steals a new invention, a time-suit (the Alpha Suit), which allows the wearer to travel through and control time. Before he time-jumps away, he activates a bomb in the building.

The hero of the game manages to get to, and don, another time-suit, and also jumps just before the bomb destroys the building and kills everyone in it. The hero appears around 1939, but it's not the 1939 of his (our) past. The villainous scientist, Dr Krone is now some sort of dictator, controlling some or all of Earth (exactly how much of the world is ruled by him is only one of hundreds of things that the game never tells us), as Dr Krone has changed history. This 1939 now is now evidently mostly fascist ruled, and with technology *far* in advance of what it should be, and in some ways more advanced than the 2008 when both scientists jumped back in time.

The hero of the game has the 'Beta Suit' (as opposed to Dr Krone's Alpha Suit), but it's never made clear what the differences are, and though presumably the hero's beta suit can jump through time (since it just did), you never get to use this feature yourself, instead you get to pause, slow down, or rewind time at will, but only for at most a dozen or so seconds at a time. The suit also generates a shield to protect itself (and so the user, too) from physical harm, and it covers the who of the user (including their face, so no one looking in can see the user's face).

The world of 1939 where you start the game, contains an organised, armed rebellion against Dr Krone's much better armed forces, and when you arrive, because this is a game with little attempt made to fix any plot holes, then the rebels trust you implicitly for no reason at all. The rebels don't know who you are or where you're from, you're wearing a strange armoured suit that they've never seen before, and they're facing certain death from all sorts of much better equipped and more numerous and varied official military personnel and machinery, but none of them even thinks "This stranger we've never seen before, in a strange suit, who hasn't even shown us his face, could he possible, just possibly be an enemy, maybe a spy sent to infiltrate us?".

Throughout the game you constantly encounter new rebels and new official soldiers, and the former always trust you straight away, and the latter
seem to know that you're an enemy. Alright, so maybe Dr Krone told the soldiers that "If you see someone in a suit that looks like this, then he's an enemy, so kill him", referring to your time-suit, but it doesn't explain why the rebels overcome both their paranoia and common sense to trust someone they don't know.

But game-play-wise, there is so much potential here - you can slowdown, pause, or even take back time whenever you like, and if works amazingly well. Whenever any of these powers are active, then you can, if you choose, still move and shoot at normal speed, so if you pause the game, and shoot some (now frozen) enemies with your shotgun, then they won't move (because time is standing still) but when time restarts, then they get thrown back and killed by the blasts. But it's mixed in with boring, sometimes even tedious level design, and even though the game seems professional (no bugs, the graphics are great, the backgrounds and art style do a great job of portraying a not-exactly-the-past-of-our-Earth alternative timeline, and there is so much to like about the game. But then you arrive at one of the boring parts, and remember why the game got such bad reviews.

The final nail it's coffin is that it's non-moddable. A real shame, as good modders could really have gone through the game, altering parts of some levels, placing more enemies in different places, etc, and if they were really good then they could have modded in a complete story (even if it was only in the relatively extremely simple method of adding story-based text in the loading screens between levels, and even added upgrade abilities to you time-suit and weapons abilities. The game is long, and collecting upgrade points to improve your defensive and offensive abilities would have been great.

Oh well. Still, it's very cheap now, should hopefully run on any PC, and if you like science ficton first person shooters that aren't great but do have flashes of brilliance then I would say try Timeshift.

Reply 16 of 30, by F2bnp

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There's also Pyl, a Polish FPS game from late 1998. It even has support for 3Dfx's Glide 😀.

You might also be interested in The Examined Life of Gaming's youtube channel, especially his Budget Barrel videos, he covers a ton of interesting games.

Reply 17 of 30, by titsmcgee

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leileilol wrote:

Anything that's not called Call of Duty, PUBG, Counter-Strike or Overwatch is what's considered lesser-known these days...

What?

Most star wars shooters not well known. like Republic Commando.

Reply 18 of 30, by Kerr Avon

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titsmcgee wrote:
leileilol wrote:

Anything that's not called Call of Duty, PUBG, Counter-Strike or Overwatch is what's considered lesser-known these days...

What?

Most star wars shooters not well known. like Republic Commando.

He meant that nowadays the only first person shooters people seem to know and talk about are the big name, big budget, AAA titles. It seems most modern gamers just want to play online (team) deathmatch variants. Single player campaigns, innovation, in-game levels that reward exploration, etc, don't seem to be in demand, at least not if you judge by the sales figures.

Reply 19 of 30, by Almoststew1990

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This is very obscure and also terrible game - Normandy.

Here is a review I put on another forum.

[spoiler]WWII: Normandy 2/10

This is a budget FPS title from 2002 by 3LV Games and published by budget publisher GSP more commonly associated with the more recent wave of frickin' point and click adventure games. It cost £20 when new but I got it for 99p from the British Heart Foundation.

I played it on my Windows 98 PC. The game isn't very good.

Technically, the game's sound is crackly throughout with my soundblaster Live!, a very common soundcard (no other game does this). The menus are barely usable because the mouse (a shell casing) leaves a ghosted trail behind it, as do any open windows or boxes. Within the game, performance was poorer than expected and the graphics looked about as good as I expected, which isn't very good.

The music itself is actually very good, especially for a budget title like this. I actually extracted the music from the CD to save to my normal PC to listen to in decent quality. I put a song on Dropbox which will play within the browser (it's a 36mb WAV) https://www.dropbox.com/s/4aqzsuut41sj2lk/NOR … ANDY-3.WAV?dl=0

j22qEv6m.jpg

The game is about an hour long, with 12 5-minute levels. No cutscenes or story. I ran to the end of each level and killed all the dudes in my path.

The levels are OK, like very scaled down MOHH:AA levels and fewer open areas.

The gunplay works OK. You point your gun and shoot dudes and they usually fall down. The AI is "pants-on-head retarded" as Zero Punctuation would say and will sometimes just stand facing you (literally spinning on the balls of their feet) taking my bullets. There are 5 weapons in the game as shown in the image, and you won't ever use the pistol or knife. I liked how you need to find backpacks lying around to get ammo for your gun (and health) and I occassionally found myself running low upping the challenge.

So why did I complete this game when I have much better games to play on my W98 PC? I don't really know. The levels were short enough to rattle through quickly and the controls simple to use. It has quicksave so the few times I died it wasn't a pain.

The credits rolled (suddenly, mid level it seemed but I must have reached the end of the level), and there were about 10 people in the dev team. Here they are! I wonder what they're up to now!

You can buy two Curly Wirlys for 99p (probably). Did I have more fun than this than I would have with two Curly Wirlys? Just about.[/spoiler]