61 Frames Per Second : 3do

10 Years Ago This Week: Requiem: Avenging Angel

Joe Keiser — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:15:00 GMT

A rare effort from 3DO to create a first-person shooter franchise, Requiem: Avenging Angel (released April 4, 1999) had a fascinating premise but nevertheless was a critical and commercial dud. It was also the last game to come out of Cyclone Studios, a short-lived development house that never managed to find its footing despite having a string of interesting game concepts.

Requiem’s mythos combined a near-future dystopian scenario with a story of heavenly intervention. Fallen angels have come to a late 21st-century Earth and suppressed the populace under totalitarian order, with the goal of using that disciplined force to build a starship that would touch the face of Paradise. As this is an act God cannot allow, he sends his angel Malachi to Earth to deal with the situation.

This combination of tropes is unique, engaging, and provides the game with its greatest strength: its arsenal. It’s huge, combining your typical FPS weapons loadout with a variety of neat and sometimes hilarious angelic powers. In 1999, it was almost worth it to play through the game just to get the Pillar of Salt ability, and really get biblical on those grunt soldiers.

But for all its attempts to do something interesting with the genre, Requiem suffers from a great many negatives. Like many FPS titles that began development before Half-Life but shipped afterwards, it felt obsolete out the gate. But in addition to this lack of vision Requiem had enough post-Half-Life development time to attempt to shoehorn its story in via in-game scripting. Unfortunately, the technology simply wasn’t there to support this type of game structure, and the result was lots of stationary NPCs talking: a wooden, hollow telling of what could have been an interesting yarn.

And yet Requiem had even bigger problems in that its gameplay itself failed to engage. Interestingly, this was not because the mechanics of the shooting game itself were bad (although they were loose). Rather, Requiem suffered from a lack of adequate positive feedback: the player didn’t feel powerful no matter how powerful they actually were. The reason for this was primarily a failure on the part of the game’s audio direction. Most weapons and powers simply didn’t sound like they had any oomph, enemies rarely responded to damage with reasonable exclamations of pain, and these lousy samples were put into the game at a low audio quality, which made them sound even more tinny and weak. If you’ve ever wondered how important good audio direction is to a game experience, Requiem: Avenging Angel should be your textbook case of why skimping in that department is a bad plan.

Requiem was the last game to be developed by Cyclone Studios, and it actually released several months after 3DO closed the studio and absorbed its assets. This may have been the best option for the studio: reports from the time state that Cyclone had a habit of hiring green developers with no experience but incredible passion for the medium, which is no doubt why it’s major franchises, Requiem and the early first-person RTS Uprising, were so interesting in concept and so messily executed. It’s unfortunate that we’ll never get to see these concepts handled with the weight of experience behind them, but with 3DO gone and its assets thrown to the wind its unclear who even owns the rights to Requiem: Avenging Angel anymore.

Requiem still has fans, as is evidenced by a Quake 4 engine total conversion effort that actually got pretty far along before apparently being scuttled just a few days ago. But that doesn’t mean it has too many fans: you can find copies for less than a dollar on the aftermarket. Fully patched Requiem: Avenging Angel gives the illusion of working in Vista, but it’s really too buggy to get very far without an incredible amount of frustration.

Previously on Ten Years Ago This Week:

Everquest
Army Men 3D
Silent Hill
Syphon Filter
Alpha Centauri

10 Years Ago This Week: Army Men 3D

Joe Keiser — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

10 Years Ago is a recurring feature that looks at whatever the new hotness was around this time 3,652 days ago. Ostensibly it will look at the game’s impact both in past and present terms, but mostly it will just make you feel really old.

It’s hard to imagine a time when the world wasn’t glutted with terrible Army Men games. And yet, that’s exactly the world that Army Men 3D (released March 2, 1999) was born into. Army Men 3D was the game that made the series’ descent into crushing awfulness visible to all.

Army Men has been the poster boy of franchise overexertion and laziness since its 1998 debut, but that wasn’t always immediately apparent. While only the most generous of reviewers considered the first Army Men title to be even mediocre, there was no denying that the concept of little plastic green men fighting little plastic tan men was an interesting game space to explore.

But Army Men 3D didn’t explore it. Instead, it was a 3D remake of the 2D original—an incredibly brazen move, since that first game was less than a year old and generally disliked. This was the first real sign that 3DO didn’t actually have a plan for the Army Men series beyond driving revenue—and the product matched the intention.

Compared to it competition of the time, like the now classic Silent Hill or even the antiquated popcorn action title Syphon Filter, Army Men 3D is atrocious. Sarge stumbles clumsily towards his objectives, all the while fighting tan enemies against a light brown backdrop in the beige-colored fog. Death comes quickly and without remorse from opponents that will see you long before you see them. It’s a frustrating experience that somehow also managed to be accused of being too short, though it’s probably fair to say that the weekend it would take to beat Army Men 3D would be a weekend wasted.

Another curious negative about the Army Men series that is exemplified in Army Men 3D is how seriously the early games in the franchise took themselves. All of the actors in Army Men 3D are toys, but there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it beyond netting a more family-friendly image on store shelves: the environments are all realistic and the violence is at the level of any contemporary war game, and the silliness of the premise is never even alluded to. Just about everyone was disappointed by this at the time, to the point where the ending of Army Men 3D (which is embedded below to save everyone the trouble) attempted to solve the issue. Of course, it attempted to solve it with the bizarre band-aid explanation that there are portals between our world and the World War II-esque world of the Army Men. An even more bizarre devotion to canon ensured these portals remained a major part of the franchise throughout its many, many iterations.

Despite all of this, Army Men 3D marked the height of market success for the franchise and was almost certainly in the top 100 best-selling games of the PlayStation overall. The game’s sales made the franchise the flagship of 3DO, and the deluge of Army Men games began. And though it’s been a decade and 3DO is long dead, Army Men continues: almost nobody noticed, but the most recent title in the franchise released as recently as last October.

Army Men 3D proved that a strong concept can drive a company’s fortunes even if implementation is shoddy. It would not be much longer, however, before the next iterations in the series proved that taking too much advantage of a strong concept will drive a company into the ground.

Previously on Ten Years Ago This Week:

Silent Hill
Syphon Filter
Alpha Centauri

Periphery: The Coolest Homebrew Project Device Ever

John Constantine — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 23:00:00 GMT

My understanding is that Niagara Falls is something of an awe-inspiring sightseeing opportunity as far as natural formations go and it’s a tacky extravaganza of shoddy, moldering love hotels as a tourist destination. You go to gamble, eat at buffets, and look at some fast water, right? I honestly don’t know. I haven’t been there in eighteen years, and my child’s-memory is fuzzy at best. It’s a cluttered jumble of images and familial inside jokes, things like eating pickle chips and weighing the odds of my survival if I jumped the railing. My clearest memory, though, is the preponderance of freak museums. Every corner boasted its own hall of mismatched curiosities, from replicas of barrels that made the falls’ descent to stuffed polar bears and any number of imaginary anthropological curiosities. I fear going back because I prefer my memory of the city’s institutionalized theater-of-the-absurd.

I check the website GameSniped on a weekly basis because, while it is intangible, it is very much a gaming freak museum. Prototype NES carts, complete Master System collections, strange promotional materials from bygone eras. It is a literal island of lost games, the detritus of the medium’s collective subconscious, interesting to collectors and freaks only. And me of course. Today’s spotlight is especially alluring, as both a historical find and as an opportunity. Some intrepid Ebayer is selling off a boxed M2 development kit. The M2 was Panasonic’s finished but never commercially released follow-up to the 3DO, meant to compete with the Playstation and Saturn. Back at the end of August, I linked to some bonafide footage of Kenji Eno’s first version of D2 running on the M2 hardware and, man, is it ugly. While Panasonic never released the M2 as a gaming console, the hardware actually powers some mundane devices these days, including ATMS and Japanese coffee vending machines. At least that’s what Wikipedia says so, you know, take that with a teensy grain of salt.

Why should you, the intrepid gamer, care about this M2 development kit? Why, think of what you could do with it! You could be the first person in the 21st century to actually make an M2 game. Talk about nerd cred! They’d give you a symposium at GDC for that kind of nonsense. That, or five people on a message board would hail you as a visionary. You could also make your own Japanese coffee vending machine. Awesome? Yes.

Related links:

Games We Will Never Get to Play: Kenji Eno’s D2 for M2
Periphery: Archaic N64 Paraphernalia is The Best
Periphery: Emotiv's EPOC is Strong in the Force
Periphery: Angry Video Game Nerd Edition

Games We Will Never Get to Play: Kenji Eno’s D2 for M2

John Constantine — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:00:00 GMT

My obsession with Kenji Eno continues to grow despite the fact that I have yet to play a single game he designed. It isn’t just the mystery behind the man and his philosophy on design that’s got me so intrigued, but the fact that his games have always been on the periphery of my experience, especially the original D. Long before I had a Playstation or even a home computer that had a prayer of running the game, I remember gawking at pictures of the macabre adventure title in advertisements and being both fascinated and legitimately creeped out. When D2 came out for the Dreamcast, I was keen to check it and satisfy my younger self’s curiosity, but lost interest when I found out that the American version had been heavily censored. Thanks to Lost Levels and PC Games That Weren’t’s Timo Weirich, Kenji Eno and D just got a little bit more delightfully mysterious.

Weirich has been posting video of the original, scrapped version of D2 that was designed for the M2, the unreleased successor to Panasonic’s 3DO console. It’s fully 3D like the D2 that was eventually released but is almost the exact opposite in art direction and play, with an eerie castle setting as opposed to arctic wastes. Eno’s said that this version of the game was abandoned because he wanted to make a game with snow it, but other than that he’s offered no explanation for the radical change in design. This footage is all the info we’re likely to get.

Much love to Lost Levels, it’s great to see you all back after so long.

Related links:

Kenji Eno is a Mule of Epic Proportions
Kenichi Nishi and Kenji Eno’s Newtonica Brings iPhone Gaming Into the Realm of Awesome

Kenji Eno Is a Mule of Epic Proportions

John Constantine — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Mule [myool] – noun – an individual, male or female, who exhibits qualities of sweetness, silliness, generosity, enthusiasm, exuberance, exaggerated sexuality and adventurousness simultaneously.

Some things just pass you by. Sometimes you turn on the radio and hear a song that makes you perk up and when you find out who it was, turns out it’s your all-time favorite band. You never heard that song before and it baffles you that something like that could escape your attention. I felt that way after checking out the unedited Kenji Eno interview put together by Shane Bettenhausen and James Mielke over at 1up. Not only have I never played a single game by the maverick designer, but up until today I didn’t even know who he was. Which, I have to admit, is frustrating the ever loving hell out of me. Eno is responsible for some of gaming’s most infamous cult creations (shooter/point-and-click adventures D, D2, and Enemy Zero) and other oddities that I have trouble believing are even real (off-the-wall minigame collection Short Warp came packed with a condom. It was for the 3DO. I shit you not.) The man is downright fascinating, his powerful creativity coming through in every one of his answers in the interview. I just wish I knew about him earlier, especially last week when I was writing Easy Access. As one of our esteemed commenters mentioned, Eno created a Saturn game called Real Sound that was actually a mystery game free of visuals. Even more interesting is that he actually made it specifically for blind players.

1UP: After D, you surprised Warp's fans by creating an offbeat Sega Saturn adventure game, Real Sound.

KE: Oh, that's a funky game.

1UP: Yeah, not only was it funky, it was also a game without any visuals. What inspired it, and how did you get Sega to publish it?

KE: After I released D, people were always expecting more CG graphics from me, and I got tired of that. I didn't want people to think that they could predict what Warp would do next. Also, I had a chance to visit people who are visually disabled, and I learned that there are blind people who play action games. Of course, they're not able to have the full experience, and they're kind of trying to force themselves to be able to play, but they're making the effort. So I thought that if you turn off the monitor, both of you are just hearing the game. So after you finish the game, you can have an equal conversation about it with a blind person. That's an inspiration behind this game as well.

The man is an absolute, total mule.

Head over to 1up and read the whole thing. If anyone out there is a Kenji Eno fan, please point me in the right direction for what to play.

Related links:

Easy Access
Raised on the Stuff
Far Out, Man