*Tap tap tap* Is this thing on?

Who’d of thought one of the communities biggest abandoned projects such as the DHWTC would of actually been released? This is great!

The DieHard Wolfers TC was named as such because it was planned -back in 2004- to be a mod constructed by a “large group of modders from the DieHard Wolfers Forum”. The original idea was proposed by community member Ringman, and it was met with enthusiasm from many members of the Wolfing community. Things progressed smoothly for just over a year, then the mod suddenly halted.
From then, it wasn’t until the intervention of Dean and a few other members of the community almost four years later that production resumed again. Because of them, we have yet another great game to play, and one with lots of history too!

This is one of those games that makes the clever choice of not making you play as BJ, who being the original protagonist is also the usual go to for mods. Instead, you play as the great great great great grandfather of Blake Stone, Leonardo Stone in an alternate timeline where BJ goes missing during the missions of the original games. It falls on you to both find the Spear of Destiny, and rescue BJ if you can.

At this point, you’re thrown into the game. What you’re met with is a wonderful sight; almost everything has been changed, and thanks to the large number of artists who took part in the project, it all looks beautiful.

The art is top notch and really sets a mood that separates it from it’s father game. From the dank jails to the rather blood-red demon areas, there are no boring areas to explore.
This is also thanks in part to the amazing map makers. I only got lost in one level, and that’s due to my failing to notice a very obvious door. The way the maps were designed I felt like the enemies were waiting for me, ambushing me and tracking me. At first I thought this was simple coding tricks making enemies spawn when I obtained something or got to certain areas, but no; it’s just fantastic mapping. This makes me very excited and wanting to push on.

The composition of the music really gets me pumped and wanting more, however at times I wish the game had a way to tweak the volume, it can get a bit loud even when I turn my computer volume all the way down.

I’m finding the further I go through the game, the more hints are being dropped that something dark is going on. The fact that this is done rather subtly instead of being thrown in my face is just serving to immerse me even more in the experience. Encountering things like three daemonic looking skulls on poles sent shivers down my spine, as they obviously have a purpose, but what purpose that was was beyond my knowledge.

While I was getting heavily into the game, there were a few things that did ruin it, though they’re easily forgivable in such a largely fantastic game. The first was a one off thing, and that was that in the above screenshot, even though there were only two barrels I was unable to cross the room. There was an invisible field stopping me. Why? I do not know. It tore me out of the game for the few seconds I was confused by it.
The second is some of the level design choices. While I praise all the map makers and think that 99.9% of the design is first rate, things like this never cease to bug me.

It’s a big locked steel door between two thin wire fences. Why?

Besides that though, I’m finding the DieHard Wolfers TC a blast. I’m hoping to have the first episode finished all the way through by the end of this week, work allowing. It’s a thrilling game that gets me psyched (aha!) and if you haven’t begun playing it, I truly suggest you download it (via the Wolf3D Dome) and try it out. Definitely a worthwhile purchase. For free. Because it’s a mod.

If you like it, drop a comment here, or post on the DHW forum thread.

The game talked about in this post can be downloaded from here, and you really should. Nembo put a lot of work into it.

Just to be clear, it seems when I say “tomorrow” I mean “two weeks from now”. Now that that’s out of the way, onto things. You like things don’t you?

One of the things that intrigued me about Unsung was an option called Instant Action. One of the things that I love about modern games is the replay appeal. New maps, content and simple appealing “can you beat your previous score” systems all appeal to the competitive side of gamers. Games like Wolfenstein 3D and it’s mods focus on an overall score system, which while it’s great to hit a good score, you don’t want to play through a whole game a second time just to try and do a little better.
Unsung supplies a simple remedy to this. Play on a single map, and fight an endless horde of nazis. If you aren’t careful, you will die. Kill as many nazis as you can before you die. There is no winning in this mode; you simply play to try and top your previous score.

You start off with your rifle and knife, and a few medkits. There are no pickups in this mode, so ammo really counts. While the lack of pickups seems scary, there are rewards for making a certain number of kills. Six kills gives the player more rifle ammo, nine gives more luger ammo, and every thirty kills gives the player a new weapon (Up to sixty, of course.). At 14 kills you receive a new medkit.

Despite the promise of constant flow of ammo, it proves hard to get the needed kills with the limited ammo supplied in the beginning. On all difficulties except Easy, I found myself dying after only three kills. I don’t consider myself a terrible gamer; I play a lot of competitive online games and like to think I’m not half bad, so to find myself forced to play on a mode named Easy in order to have fun feels a little confidence shattering.
From the other point of view, it proves quiet a challenge and for the masochistic gamer who is in the mood to die a lot but doesn’t have a copy of Super Meat Boy, this mode is the perfect thing.

Instant Action has 5 maps to choose from, each providing a different environment to fight in. While basic gameplay is as you’d expect across all the maps, the simple change of scene in each map feels welcome. Each map offers different cover too, and are large enough to give the player plenty to explore.

There are a few bugs associated with the mode though; many times collections of enemies will spawn in the same spot, and get stuck until someone (That being you) puts them out of their misery.

Furthermore, you’re just as likely to get stuck in their spawn points as well. In tighter areas, if you’re standing in the wrong spot at the wrong time, an enemy might join you in that spot and get you stuck.
While seemingly minor bugs, they can really detract from the game when all the enemies are stuck in one place and all you need to do is shoot, duck, pop out, repeat and don’t have to worry about them coming after you. 

In the end, if you like these sort of challenges, you could do a lot worse than the Instant Action mode in Unsung. However, balance issues with Easy being TOO easy, and all the other difficulties being awfully challenging, coupled with the bugs can make it a bit irritating or boring at times.

Coincidently, I thought I’d share my high score; I made it to 242 kills before giving up on it. This is of course on Easy difficulty on the Stettin Docks level. I know this will be an easy score to beat, and if you read this and have beaten it, email a screenshot of your score to tf2jtc@gmail.com, you know the drill.

As usual, thank you very much for reading my Wolf3D ramblings, and for putting up with the rather unreliable update schedule of Wolfing Time.

Being one of the people who were given a test copy of this game so the author could get some feedback, I was blown away by the little bit that I played. While I’ve been a little distracted by things outside of the Wolf3D community, the moment I got the Wolf itch again, it was this game I gravitated towards.

Unsung is made by Nembo, and runs on the Wolf4SDL engine, meaning even those of us with Windows 7 can play it. 

One of the big things, if not the biggest things, that drew me into this game was the comic book style of the intermission art. Rather than go with a text heavy screen like others, we’re greeted with full screen images and speech bubbles:

From there I knew this was going to be an interesting experience. These “comic style” screens even happen in the middle of gameplay using some clever tricks. This makes the game feel different to normal, as you’re getting given storyline whilst playing.

Unsung seems to have done away with the scoring system completely, with all trace of the bonus screen at the end of a level gone, and the score bar removed from the stylish minimalist HUD.

I love score systems in my older style games, and have always considered them the thing that fuels me to search through every nook and cranny (Note: I love the words ‘nook’ and ‘cranny’). However despite the lack of any points to earn, I found myself searching places I could of simply left alone. I’m still no certain if it as a subconcious need to get every medkit in the level, or if it was the desire to soak up every bit of the environment the Author Nembo has created, but I had to appreciate a Wolfenstein mod that manages to distract me from just running through the level to the end.

Everything in the game blends together quite well and leaves a great impression; the music drives emotions and pushes me through the game. The maps are really well done, feeling polished and easy to navigate, the latter of which is often an issue for me in games that use limited textures. The map design is made all the more intriguing with the use of multiple roof types within the same level. You can move around outside and see the clouds in the sky, then a minute later be under a wooden roof. This sort of design makes the game all the more convincing.

One of the more interesting features I’m on the fence about is that you only get one life. If you die, you are brought back to the main menu. This makes the ability to save all the more important, and something that should be done often. However for myself and probably others, this can be a hindrance of sorts. When I get really immersed in a game, I can find myself forgetting to save for multiple levels in a game. This is why auto-saving in modern games is a huge relief for me. While this isn’t a big deal, it can kill the mood to die so far into something and find you need to start again.

I’m still playing this and as far as I know I am nowhere near finished with the game. However, this is such a good game with so much more to it that one post cannot cover everything, so this is simply the first part of a pair of posts dedicated to Unsung. The second part will be out sometime tomorrow.

We all know and work with ModDB; it’s a great way to post news, images and host downloads for our mods. However, along with those websites, the creators have introduced a very promising piece of software.

Desura is a reasonably new ‘digital distribution’ system for games in a similar vein to Steam. The difference that separates it is that unlike Steam, Desura is built with modders and independent developers in mind. The creator has full control over the product, and can track stats and communicate with the community.

What does this means for Wolfenstein and our community?

This is actually an interesting situation. Right now, Wolfenstein mods and total conversions are really only played by our rather closed community. This isn’t our fault, but apart from recent events concerning a certain game, Wolf3D doesn’t get much press.

Desura however, has a steadily growing community, currently sitting at just over 500,000 members. Being reasonably new still, the program is still changing as they add support for new things, and features are being implemented. But imagine if say, Orb of Dilaaria got featured on Desura. That game would now have an additional potential audience of half a million gamers who are interested specifically in mods and independent games.

That idea is exciting to me. There is a lot of potential here, and I’d personally love to see it tapped into. I can only hope.

Surprisingly, that isn’t a screenshot of a graphical glitch so much as the game itself. This is the one level game by WONDER-TONIC, showcasing what Wolfenstein 3D would be like with only one dimension. You are the short white line of pixels, moving from room to room, collecting, opening and killing other lines of pixels accordingly.

It’s quite a funny little game, which if you have a spare minute or two on you, you can play here.

Half Life is one of my most beloved franchises, next to Diablo and basically anything ID Software releases. To find a Wolf3D mod based on it is great, but sadly, it’s not what I expected of what you’d think to be a fellow fan.

There is no story accompanying this game, so I don’t know what’s going on in the game. Thrown into a level full of poorly drawn headcrabs and not being Gordon Freeman (The protagonist of the original game), I assume I’m in the role of another innocent man who got caught in the middle of whatever it is that happened to bring aliens in from another dimension (The same as all the other guards and scientists there). I am mistaken.

Along with the headcrabs, I am also shot at by the blue uniformed guards of the facility, which I would of assumed were on my side, considered aliens from nowhere have shown up and are killing everyone. But no, that isn’t the case. Instead I’m fighting both sides and trying to escape, it seems. Shouldn’t we as humans combine our efforts to fight these alien hordes? No? Okay.

There are scientists and wounded individuals, but instead of being enemies or static NPCs, they are instead collectable. I assume that as the character I assimilate them into my being. Maybe this is why the guards are angry? Because I steal the essence of the scientists?

All sorts of characters from Half Life are present, including the Headcrab Zombie. While they are badly drawn, they do have the nifty ability of never dying to both make up for that, and to frustrate me to no end. I shoot him, and seconds later he comes back. Weird as shit, and quite annoying.

Textures often feel messy and out of place, but that’s probably due to the fact that they are messy and out of place. This doesn’t help the often simplistic and boring level design present, and only serves to ruin the atmosphere almost as much as the sounds.
The headcrabs make this weird “OOOH” sounds, while it seems those blue guards are saying “You’re dead, homes.” like some sort of teenage kid with long hair and a tin of weed in his bag. Seriously, that doesn’t fit in with anything, and made the game just that little bit more terrible

As a fan, I expected a lot more from this game, which isn’t much more than a bad graphics and maps patch. I can only assume the name was slapped on to sort of justify the mashed up graphics. If you’ve ever played Half Life I sincerely suggest you miss this one, unless you want any memories you have of that game sullied forever.

Today I had the esteemed pleasure of playing Wolfenstein 3D on my Xbox 360. The full game is 400 Microsoft points, the exact dollar price of that many points I do not know (I’m thinking roughly five dollars).

The first noticeable thing is the makeover of the menu system. It doesn’t feel like Wolfenstein, but I forgive it.

It does look nice. When you go into the game, the most obvious thing for anyone with an up to date television is that the game is locked to the 4:3 aspect ratio, with no way to go into Widescreen. This disappoints me as the game is a simple PC to console port, and the PC version seems to scale to widescreen fine.

There is not much different with the game at all. Everything plays the same, except movement is easier for modern players, as the left joystick is used to move and strafe, while the right is used to turn. There are a few minor sprite alterations (large health packs show a girly love heart instead of a cross, for instance), but everything looks the same too.
When played on a 100 Hertz television, the graphics look rather low quality, but I’m not sure if it’s the same on all types of TV.
Bug wise, I noticed when a push wall was used, the game noticeable froze for a moment. I thought it might of been the gaming loading and afterwards it would be fine, but it happens every time, and really effects the mood.

What bugged (heh) me was despite being a relatively recent port of the game, it included no simple bug fixes that the community had come up with over the past decades (e.g. Collecting things by walking backwards over them). It wouldn’t of taken much to throw that in there, really.

If you own a copy of the 2009 game named Wolfenstein, you earn in game money to use on weapons in that game. An annoying pop-up which proves this port was a simple promotional rush job asserts this. Not a bad thing, but I sold my copy of that terrible game, so this just served to put the nail in the coffin for me.

The only real reason you should think about buying this version of the game is for the fun of earning achievements, and having your score on a global leaderboard. The achievements are the basic level ones for completing things like a single level, or an episode.

I’ll probably play through every single episode for the achievements, but I do not think I will enjoy it as much.

The Spear of Toti. This time I play the third game by Toti, creatively named The Spear Of Toti. I would play the first two before this, but according to Toti’s manual:

Sorry for my English, I speak Spanish.

Whoops, wrong paragraph…anyway, he says his first two games are nowhere near as good. So, I’m not going to subject myself to them. LETS GO.

After 5 minutes of play… I can’t stop laughing; not in the good way. You start the game in a room full of treasure. Theres an obvious pushwall with a heap of ammo and a machine gun. The next room is a badly designed mess of random blocks of walltiles. The only enemies are hiding in two offshoots of this room, guarding the Master Cup treasures. They’re worth 7,500 as noted in the manual, and this is only the worst idea ever. He’s placed whole groups of them in each of the hallways, the group’s points adding together to give you another life. You’d think that a treasure that valuable that it’d give the player more lives would be hidden a little better.
And that’s not even the worst map. The secret level is left as a wide open plain full of mutants, half of which glitch and disappear (a common side effect to the openness of an area). There are so many mutants that you need to either be super quick and constantly strafing, or you need a chaingun; the latter is easier.
The rest of the levels are just as simplistic, the third is just a spiral which gets smaller and smaller, and the fourth is just a couple of rooms, you walk in one, get the key, open the door for it, get the key, then go through the other door to the exit. Level six is SO retarded, I’m going to level it at that. The mapmaking skills are so terrible I can only hope the reason for it is Toti got bored with the mod and just pumped out stock levels. NO effort whatsoever seems to have been put into the maps, and that makes me cry.
The only interesting fights are those against a couple of the bosses (Mainly the Colonel, which bears a stricking resemblance to Schabbs).

The sprites are all borrowed and extremely obvious where they’re borrowed from. End Of Destiny is the first and most noticable rip. I don’t know why but most games I play use borrowed content.

I’m sorry Toti, but if this is your latest and best game, I truly shudder to think what your other games are like. I’m going to lie on my bed, curl up and cry.

One last thing:

AHH!, A Dog! (The dogs are extremely dangerous.)

Sonderkommando Revolt, a highly anticipated game in the Wolfenstein 3D community, has hit a wall. Unlike other games in which these issues are usually engine limitations, or a lack of inspiration, SR is suffering from controversy of all things.

The game itself is centered around the Auschwitz concentration camps. The player, a revolting Jewish prisoner, is able to explore the gas chambers and see prisoners being viciously tortured.

This subject matter has come under scrutiny from several people and organizations including the Anti-Defamation League. This popularity and controversy has caused the developer DoomJedi a lot of grief, to the point that he has decided currently not to release the mod.

What is written above is all true. What is written after this paragraph is not fact, but my opinion on the matter at hand. Take it with a grain of salt, or a pint of beer.

I have read the Kotaku articles, several of the comments on the YouTube video trailer (70,000 views guys! Nice!) and all that. I have noticed the majority of comments are actually good. People seem genuinely happy with the game and most can’t wait to play it.

The Anti-Defamation League is complaining about this game “trivializing” the events, and depicting horrific events happening to the Jews. They believe because of this, the game should not be released.

I say fuck that. I have a few reasons.

1) It’s taught me things. As the same as others, I have never heard of Auschwitz. It has made me look up the events, and actually learn more about history. This is something very few games make you do. When you play Call Of Duty do you look up the history behind the war the game may be based on? No. However, this game has made me, and many others do just that. That is an amazing thing and the creators should be proud of this.

2) It is just a game. Let me repeat that; It is just a game. While based in a real place and event, it is a game and what happens in it is entirely fictional. I could probably surf the internet and find PORN of holocaust. In fact, as I wrote that sentence I opened a new tab and proved myself right, sadly.
If the ADL really believes it will give people the wrong idea and believe the events in the game really transpired as they are portrayed in this medium, it’s as simple as putting in a disclaimer saying the events did not occur as shown, and for more information supply some history reference pages. “Loosely based on real events” or something to that effect.

3) It’s not only just a game, it’s a mod, made by an independent non-commercial team. They don’t actually need to answer to the ADL or any individual. If I for example, wanted to release a game in which I punched children in the face, I could and no-one could actually stop me. It’s the internet, and if I want to release a project of mine for free, I can. It offends someone? Well they don’t need to play it. 

That’s probably the best point when talking about these sort of things. The people it offends do not need to play it. It can’t offend you if you don’t play it.

However I am falling off topic slightly. In the end, the people who offend will not play the game. It’s a free independent mod which as has been stated, has no political agenda attached to it. It’s a game loosely based on a historical event to give it that extra depth.
I hope the game comes out, because this stupid controversy is just more of the same. In a world where I can look up Holocaust Porn and get results, a free game based on an 18 year old game where the graphics are so primitive you can count the pixels should be the least of people’s problems.

I don’t want to make the creator’s current situation seem trivial though; I know he’s going through a lot. I can only hope things work out for him.

If you’re asked to name the best mod in the world, what do you think of? End Of Destiny? The Orb of Dilaaria? The up coming Sonderkommando Revolt? Why not look to the game actually called The Best Mod In The World?

Made by Ueberwolf, this game is impossible to describe and truly give you a picture of what it truly is. An amazing project, one that makes you question your place in life.

Somehow, by matching purposefully terrible graphics and sounds with music that sounds like a small child got hold of a midi keyboard you don’t get a terrible game, but out of the muck, something truly entertaining to boot up and play.

The game itself can seem confusing at first; enemies range from nonsensical creatures that turn into tables when they die, and stoves that shoot you. But once you play for a while you get used to it and learn to shoot everything with…your cross.

It’d be far too easy to pick things apart, but at the same time difficult when it’s intentional. This game is a work of art that you must play if you want the unique game experience.

Also, your melee weapon is a penis. Yours, to be exact. This will be a weird experience for any female fans who play the game.

The game is available from ModDB via THIS LINK. CAPS LOCK.