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Blood - From the workshop of Kevin Kilstrom, Plus mods/maps/launchers thread

Durandal

Arcane
Joined
May 13, 2015
Messages
2,117
Location
New Eden
My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
In the context of Duke, Doom and Blood - how good is Marathon? Or Rise of the Triad?
in comparison, eh

The story, weapon balance, enemy design and general combat are fucking primo, but the level design overall ranges from poor to ok with the occasional standout mission. It was the first FPS to have liquid physics whose level could be altered and would let you swim around in it, but other games did it better by just letting you shoot all your weapons underwater. The sourceport it runs on is old junk capped to 30fps, and weapon switching needs to be done via WeaponNext/WeaponPrev buttons rather than binding each weapon to a separate button.

The first game's levels were largely designed by someone who never did any level design before, and it shows with how experimental it is. The second game has more of a focus of action and the levels tend to feel more fluid to play through with some creative setpiece encounters, though there are often some weird levels where you can basically skip 70% of the level unless you want to explore for questionable rewards. The third game goes full experimental in a different way, and relishes in confusing the player. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

Verstuurd vanaf mijn GT-I9301I met Tapatalk
 

lightbane

Arcane
Joined
Dec 27, 2008
Messages
10,196
The first game's levels were largely designed by someone who never did any level design before, and it shows with how UTTER SHIT it is.


Fixed. Fuck platforming sections with no option to jump, forcing you to walk around the entire level pushing switches and pray you get the right combination. Or being forced to use explosives to "grenade jump". Or having reloading weapons without being able to manually reload. And so on.
 

Astral Rag

Arcane
Joined
Feb 1, 2012
Messages
7,771
In the context of Duke, Doom and Blood - how good is Marathon? Or Rise of the Triad?

I played Marathon on a friend's mac back in the day and I remember thinking: "When can I go home so I can play Doom ". meh/10

Rise of the Triad is cool. It started as a sequel to Wolfenstein but plans changed over time.

I love the setting, music and sound effects, the crazy weapons and power-ups, the use of traps, the gore, the dark humour. The game makes amazing use of the Wolf3D engine but that then already dated engine was also its doom.
The number of enemy types is limited and the environments get samey rather quick.
There is more interactivity than in other fps of its time but it pales in comparison to the Build games.

I would certainly recommend playing at least the first episode / shareware.

I use the WINROTT source port.

Return of the Triad (2011) is also worth a try if you end up enjoying the original.

Also, dat boxart:

latest
 
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SharkClub

Prophet
Patron
Joined
May 27, 2010
Messages
1,535
Strap Yourselves In
I played the Marathon Trilogy with Aleph One a few years back. The weapons in those games are really fucking good (dual wielding lever action double barrel shotguns wut), the enemy lineup is fine. Aside from the obvious problems with a lot of the levels being totally experimental, though to be honest I found myself enjoying a lot of the puzzle-platforming in Marathon 1, my main issue with the series is that Marathon 2 and Infinity don't have any fucking soundtrack whatsoever. You just play in relative silence with sound effects for two entire games. The soundtrack in Marathon 1 is really good in my opinion so it seemed like such a wasted opportunity.

They're worth playing if you're interested in seeing the Mac's Doom-clone and being able to form actual opinions on things without being a poser (like a lot of our friends here on the Codex), but overall they fall into the "decent, not great" category for me.
 

agris

Arcane
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Joined
Apr 16, 2004
Messages
6,810
Thanks guys, I think I'll go with the classic and fire up Duke 3d. I never made it past the 3rd level or so back in the day.
 

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
Developer
Joined
Mar 1, 2012
Messages
2,052
A bit of an offtop but Darkest Dungeon clone where I'm freelancing has hired Stefan Weyte (aka Caleb) to be their narrator. That's the opening intro (even the artist agrees that the narration is so cool that it overpowers the animation):



And, obv, he will comment all the way through the game. He's a bit old now, but that's ok for the ancient necromancer.
 

Sjukob

Arcane
Joined
Jul 3, 2015
Messages
2,060
2 days ago I finished Death Wish and I want to share my experience.

I tried it like a year and a half ago for the first time, but didn't play past the first episode for reason I can't recall. I'm pretty sure the mod has already been analyzed to death, so I'll try to be short - fucking play it, seriously! It's not just that you will have a fun time as somebody who likes FPS or Blood, it's one of the best things you can experience in gaming in general. The variety, the level design itself and the gameplay it offers are 11/10, it doesn't take it's time to really get going, instead it starts strong and engaging and just keeps delivering till the very end. Not to discredit original game, but I found Death Wish to be straight up better at everything, especially at presenting the main villain and creating atmosphere. Unlike in original campaign you will be constantly encountering Tchernobog during the entire playthrough, he will be laying out traps, summoning monsters, trying to kill you by casting explosions or napalm into your face or just jumpscaring you. Remember the feeling of darkness and slaughter in Blood? Death Wish takes it on another level, not only there's just plain more carnage around, but you will also be swimming in rivers of blood, seeing heretical ceremonies and sacrifices, hearing and seeing paranormal beings more often, and in general level appearence is dirtier and gorier, in one of them you literally swim in shit. Death Wish also tries to go for horror feeling much more often than original game, especially towards the end.

The gameplay is good and fun, for more details see the spoiler below ( it has always been a problematic topic for me ).

I made a lot of screenshots, the game might not appear as good on images, but when you play it the feeling of environment around is great.
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Rant about gameplay
I was using BloodGDX with following difficulty settings
SXRIJRfg_T8_HRu_Phc_cropped_Tq_Ed_K.png


The problem with Blood is that a lot of enemies are almost harmless and cultists are too fucking amazing. Any melee monster can't even hit you as long as you are moving, but fanatics are hitscan, deal a lot of damage, have nearly instant reaction and can shoot from pretty long ranges, oh and they throw dynamite as well. Seriously, the only dangerous monsters are: Cerberus, hellhound, beast and Tchernobog and even they are a cakewalk if you know what to do. So the difficulty of the game is directly tied to the amount of cultists and open spaces, the proof is the first episode of original Blood that was the most frustrating and difficult, because it contained the biggest amount of cultists, after that their number dropped in favor of monsters and the game became significantly easier. Death Wish tries to fix this by putting player in tight spaces and making monster ambush you and, well, it works alright, but doesn't fix the issue, even then the big hordes of enemies are easily destroyed by dynamite, napalm or tesla gun. I'm glad that author wasn't cheap and didn't come down to cultist spam as it would've been a great turn off for me. My problem is that people were saying that Death Wish is very hard, much harder than original Blood. Yes it is harder than original, but it's not hard by itself, because of the shortcomings of the original I've just described. It's still very very fun to shoot things in Blood though, weapons in this game are exceptionally well done.
 
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Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
Patron
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Messages
27,207
Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
Unlike in original campaign you will be constantly encountering Tchernobog during the entire playthrough, he will be laying out traps, summoning monsters, trying to kill you by casting explosions or napalm into your face or just jumpscaring you.

This does not exactly inspire me with confidence. I've seen this exact same mechanic used in other mods for other games with not-so pleasant results.
 

Sjukob

Arcane
Joined
Jul 3, 2015
Messages
2,060
This does not exactly inspire me with confidence. I've seen this exact same mechanic used in other mods for other games with not-so pleasant results.
I can assure that it feels natural and is not annoying at all. At times when I saw him at the distance I would become curios: " What that crazy bastard got for me now? ". Sometimes he doesn't do anything, just observes or taunts you. You can even see him on some of my screeshots - the hooded figure with lantern, it's supposed to be his form before transformation.
 

Astral Rag

Arcane
Joined
Feb 1, 2012
Messages
7,771
Definitely :salute:

I hope he also implements a disable friendly fire option even though the revive feature itself will already make accidental team kills less annoying. For those who don't know, normally you re-spawn at the start of the map when you die in co-op.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
So I'm taking a look at Blood, and looking for ways to run it properly on a modern OS, and I check out BloodGDX, and get all excited and worked up and then...

Requires Java

:x:x:x

Is there another program that does the same thing as BloodGDX, but does not require this abomination to work?
 

soulburner

Cipher
Joined
Sep 21, 2013
Messages
810
Not really. I've seen some Blood launchers that work with DosBox, but I think if you want widescreen, better mouse look and stuff, you're pretty much stuck with Java. Unlike some Java apps, which seem very heavy and resource intensive, with the exception of double clicking on a .jar file, you probably won't even be aware it's there.

Anyway, I am interested why the author chose Java. The original code was probably written in C and Assembly.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
On a related note - does anyone (*cough* Astral Rag *cough*) happen to have good images of the various box covers for Blood?

The ones on Mobygames seem a little shoddy, to be honest.
 

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