Build Engine Retrospective

[tormund]

Lawl, what a pretentious hipster asshole. Endless road to progress which (as far as FPS genre is concerned) ended with ultra linear corridors/lazy level design, slow paced action adapted for consoles, 2 weapon limit, arsenal of interchangeable assault rifles, cutscenes/scripted actions galore, pathetic enemy variety and lack of gore. Such progress, such evolution! These are great days we're living bros!

Build Engine games might be antiquated castles but they sure as hell aren't rendered obsolete/breached by water pistols and firecrackers.

They are like antiquated castles and cathedrals that were both made with skill and made to last, compared with sterile and expendable modern architecture.

Yes, entire article reads like it was written by a hipster that discovered new "le vintage format", instead of someone who regularly play and honestly enjoys those games...

 

[Wilian]

I'll forever love Build. Making maps for Duke Nukem 3D was extremely fulfilling and the flexible engine did let me do all sorts of whacky things my imagination allowed just as long as one knew how to fully utilize it. It's only downfall was that in the end the offered map-space sort of fell short during my most over-thought things.

 

[taxalot]

Build is from a time where video games still looked like video games.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Big Build fanboy here. I played 'em all, except Witchhaven (would rather play Powerslave which at least looks professional) or the sci-fi ones based on William Shatner's literary droppings, which I wouldn't touch with your 10 foot pole. Oh, and I didn't play any of the Redneck Rampage games, though its queasy humor intrigues me. It's like the wonderful vulgarity of Duke 3D with the volume turned all the way up to eleven ("I'm so hungry I could eat the ass-end of a menstrual skunk!"). But when I first played Duke Nukem 3D back in '95...wow...Doom seemed anemic by comparison, though I realize now that Doom 1 & 2 are absolutely the superior games, and the modding community second to none. Duke 3D has a brilliant community too.

 

[tormund]

Powerslave (PC) is p decent, theme was really cool and weapons felt good. It had some BS that you need to get used to if you intend to play it though. For example, strafing is so slow that it is next to useless, and sadly (at least to my knowledge) there was never a mod that fixes it.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Powerslave (PC) is p decent, theme was really cool and weapons felt good. It had some BS that you need to get used to if you intend to play it though. For example, strafing is so slow that it is next to useless, and sadly (at least to my knowledge) there was never a mod that fixes it.

Speaking of strafing, I never figured out how to circle-strafe in any of the Build games, at least in the MS-DOS versions. It seems that once you press that left/right strafe key, the mouse becomes deactivated or so sluggish & unresponsive it might just as well be. Got a hold of the complete 5193 game eXoDOS set from the Internet Archive and decided to play Duke 3D and Blood in their original forms but, man, I miss that smooth circle-strafing we got in the eDuke ports.

IIRC, from the very few levels I played of Powerslave the enemies moved so slowly strafing almost wasn't necessary.

 

[Drax]

I. Want. JoJo.
Caleb, Lo Wang, The Duke....
And kids today like heroes like "Master Chef", typical marine huzza-huzza golf-war in spaze cliché.
Retards, retards all the way down.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Duke 3D has some of the best level design I've seen in games. I was so impressed that I actually looked up and learned about Richard 'Levelord' Gray. Later when I heard he was also on the Half-Life:Opposing Force team, I already knew to expect excellent stuff, and it sure was there.

 

[DraQ]

Eradicator is actually pretty solid little FPS, with some neat ideas. Worst thing about it is that it was visually pretty bland, and that enemies were mostly various robots which naturally sucked a bit of satisfaction out of its FPS action.

True. OTOH mechanically it was pretty solid with a lot of emphasis on movement (the game had only one hitscan weapon which was SSG equivalent and chronically low on ammo), ToP-esque enhancement chips, shmup-esque floaty sidekicks, lots of weapons and nearly a third of your arsenal featuring some sort of remote guidance option.

If it wasn't for blandness and overall lack of juice it could have been a classic.