Now for something completely different! I've plumbed the depths of the 3D Realms Anthology collection and finally beaten some games I've had for many years.
Alien Carnage: Has no redeeming features that I can see so I'm not playing it. Particular issues: Aimless levels, nonsensical secret items, only one visible ammo bar so you may be critically low on flamethrower fuel and not know it because you're toting about some other weapon (and this matters because you must have fuel to move vertically by your jetpack). It does have decent enough music, I guess.
Monster Bash: Like Bio Menace this is primarily a Jim Norwood release so it's got good looks and is among the best 2D stuff here, despite its generally annoying gameplay, but lazy New 3D Realms uploaded the wrong damn version! So on the last few levels of the first ep you have a mandatory timer on dying, and on the last stage it threw up a half minute timer and then just locked out. Bio Menace might be better, but there is a bit of variety in enemy types as well as some of the creative use of skies that is the hallmark of the first party Apogee stuff.
Hocus Pocus: My highscores for the retail episodes (2-4; the first ep is shareware-ish) are 1336800, 1444500, 1351500, and I believe these are the maximum possible scores. 1.3M points is a lot of gold crowns at 1000 points each (but lots of items are just 100 or 250 points). On the first glance this seems like a deceptively simple game - but it is just simple. After the first level, most level layouts are very straightforward. You're meant to race through them all, making detours by warp to collect more loot. You spend most of your time watching the edges of the screen waiting for enemies to slowly warp in, watching your Hobbit-esque character pelt even smaller badguys, or watch him dissolve hideously into a sphere which then moves all the way across the map at walking speed to a secret location filled with more meaningless sapphires, rubies, diamonds, goblets, and crowns. It's very easy to find the secrets - if you can just keep your eyes open during all the monotonous running back and forth. The basic point of the game is collecting all the treasure, and doing it under a time limit. Unfortunately this requires tons of button mashing to kill the awfully spongy enemies that get in your way, fiddly elevator placement abuse, and repetitive jumps across the series of evenly spaced platforms which appear multiple times in EVERY map, most of which are spaced just so you cannot simply run straight across while pushing jump - no, you usually have to pause your forward movement just long enough for stunted Hocus to touch down momentarily. All the same this also means you spend a lot of time immediately pushing the jump button just after releasing it. Moving through the surreal yet completely interchangeable graphic tilesets, the only real breaks come at the bosses, which start out underwhelming in episode 1 and become laughable by episodes 3 and 4. There is a weak attempt at introducing some element of skill in the "smart bomb" items, which only appear a handful of time and are often harder to hit than just shooting through the enemies, or just avoiding them. After an episode you are treated to entertaining story snippets and mostly well-drawn graphics, although the very final screen of Hocus and his true love is truly frightening.
The Cutting Room Floor actually has an entry for this game, and according to Mobygames
Moonlite Software actually made three other titles, all vastly inferior in looks to this one, yet suspiciously familiar.
Duke Nukem: I never was able to decide whether this is an OCD person's dream or nightmare, but there's no question - it's a nightmare, as you cannot even know the proper way to approach a level without trying it. Right off the bat, though, any - or almost any - stage with "Technorabbits" (they keep going and going...ha, ha, ...ha?) is best beaten by just letting Duke get hit. Anybody who's even seen this game in action knows the score: Leaps of faith everywhere, fiddly / obnoxious map design and item placement everywhere (one of the last stages puts bomb boxes behind empty item boxes, so you can invisibly trigger a live bomb - and then pulls the same trick again a few tiles over), tons of obscure routes, absolutely awful framerate, pretty poor core gameplay. I do like a lot of the crazier ways to achieve points, in theory, but given the low framerate and the difficulty in getting off lots of shots safely, it's a crapshoot. Favorite moment: Certainly not the girder mazes. Certainly not hiding under a one-tile platform that ED-209 clones were hopping on and off of. Certainly not the helicopters. I do like the general look of the first level and there is some clever use of the backgrounds (they even change in some levels, depending on whether you're above ground or underground, or in the past or the future), but the main thing I liked was just getting high up in the architecture and finding some goodies hidden away. Beyond all that, it's really just a pretty awful game. Strangely, the second episode gives you a gat upgrade on the first level, and full power in the next, but I couldn't find any upgrades at all until very late in the second episode.
The conveyor belt maze at the end of the second episode probably seems like the most obnoxious thing in the game, or "that green stage" (which is actually very easy to figure out), but it's an example of focused design and presents a series of clear, sustainable challenges. I found it satisfying to clear it out fully. What really annoyed me were the many cases where enemies were put in places where you had no chance of reacting quickly enough to avoid damage, having to fiddle with screen edges or jump into areas repeatedly to get item boxes to fall or enemies to appear, crappy hidden "gotchas," and soda cans in unreachable niches...in the girder mazes.
Word Rescue: I'm stuck between "clever" and "it's an abomination." It's made for kids, so some ideas that could be fun aren't allowed or developed. All that is left is a bowdlerized version of Alien - if the alien moved at 2 miles per hour and could be put away permanently by looking at it and pressing a button so Benny Bookworm will slop a pail of slime over it. Well, there is a bit more than this: It is surprisingly tense moving about the environments. If I jump on this roof edge, will I stay? Or will I fall through and pick up the wrong letter or item? You have three tasks per level (besides ruining come critter's day): Collect letters in order, match words to pictures, and find all the "book" items hidden through the stages. Some of the levels are actually fun to travel through as abstract adventure platforming (the pueblo and factory ones are my favorites - the third episode's "haunted house" is a terrible letdown, of course), but the core gameplay probably isn't more appealing to kids when you can load up The Oregon Trail, go hunting, and lose all your provisions attempting to ford a river. Many of the word associations are ambiguous - you can have a red cross picture right next to a picture of a picture of a nurse with a red cross on her uniform. So which should a kid choose for "nurse" and which for "cross?" "Bear" and "paw" is worse. For that matter, why is some vaguely pen-shaped gray thing in the game as a "file," and why are "trike" and "wine" even in the dictionary?
If you pick up the wrong letter, just find the nearest DANGER sign and throw your her/him straight in. Tactical suicide in an edutainment game - you saw it here first! Well, suicide attempts - it's less painful than dysentery.
Math Rescue: Take everything bad about Word Rescue, and make it worse! Strangely enough, the literary aspects were much improved with a dedicated writer who crafted many word puzzles you can opt to choose - if you can stay awake to read them properly, you'll be rewarded with humorous exposition of the troubles you can expect from Gruzzles. Unfortunately you can also crank up the difficulty and get swarmed by a seething mass of Gruzzle hate you can never avoid or exterminate (although you can lure them into lava pits or hungry shark mouths, but violence is never the answer - a phrase you'll never see written again in this thread). The maps so far have all been designed like parking garages, demanded by ill-conceived new game mechanics - solving puzzles in the correct numbered order (that's fun, isn't it?), and bumping into "robot controlled garbage trucks" in the correct order. Do anything wrong, and you lose a garbage can lid. Oh no! I think the whole game should have been chucked, and the student writer on this project should have released a standalone "choose your own adventure" book instead. That said, there is an end-of-level bonus lightning round, so get your fingers on the number pad and think of better times playing Surprise Attack.
I wonder what the team behind Capcom's "Adventures in the Magic Kingdom" could have cooked up if given the edutainment task.
I think that's about it. I've not touched a lot of the good platformers in the pack, but I think I need to wash out the taste with some Epic Megagames. I'm also trying to figure out which of these games reuses the Commander Keen teddy bear, and I'm definitely not going to say anything about the many extremely early and primitive 4/8 color games in the Anthology. Overall, it's astonishingly poor value for money, with most of the library having been recently released as freeware, or being available elsewhere in much superior DOSbox-free forms. There is Duke's Manhattan Project, which starts strong and ends with a whimper if my memory's right.
Besides the loop's uncompromising toughness, I really like the password's progress-tracking feature. Makes gradually gaining ground as addictive as it is grueling (note it'll auto-enter your current PW if you reset).
By the 2-ALL I was almost wincing at the thought, haha.
