1957: More Than a Demo

Out of curiosity, I downloaded Dead or Alive 5: Last Round – Core Fighters on PlayStation 4 this evening. Aside from having one of the most cumbersome titles in recent memory thanks to its string of unnecessary suffixes, DoA5LRCF is actually a really good example of something I hope we’ll see more of in the near future: cut-down, free versions of games that are more than just demos. The modern equivalent of “shareware” versions, I guess.

For the unfamiliar, Dead or Alive is a fighting game series that has been running since the PS1 era. It’s most notorious for its big jiggly bosoms on the female characters — the jiggle factor of which has always been adjustable, and indeed DoA5 is no exception to this — but it’s also one of the best 3D fighting games out there, and one of my favourites. I suck at it, of course, but it’s a game that I enjoy sucking at, whereas many of the current crop of 2D fighters are now so completely overcomplicated that I just get frustrated at not understanding why I suck.

Anyway, Core Fighters is a special free version of Dead or Alive 5: Last Round that includes just four of the characters from the full version’s rather large cast, plus occasional rotating extras every so often. Core Fighters also lacks the full game’s story mode, but other than that it is a complete game — you can play arcade mode, survival mode (a long-standing favourite of mine in the series) and even online. It’s even got the full suite of tutorials in it, which seemingly do an excellent job of explaining exactly how the game works — something that previous installments have lacked.

Conveniently, Core Fighters includes my favourite game mode — Survival — and my favourite character — Kasumi — and as such it’s a package that I’m eminently satisfied with even in its free incarnation. What’s nice about it though is that despite the lack of characters, it doesn’t feel especially “limited”; it gives an excellent taste of what to expect from the full game, and does a much better job that your typical demo at convincing you to part with your cash.

I’m not sure if I’ll pick up the full version of DoA5 at any point — though I do very much enjoy the series — but Core Fighters is a great means of helping me come to a decision one way or another. I’m looking forward to giving it a shot in two-player versus mode at some point, since I splurged on an extra DualShock 4 controller today. Perhaps I’ll even be able to drag Andie away from Final Fantasy XIV for five minutes to fight me. Fight me!

Koei Tecmo has also done a similar arrangement for the PlayStation 4 version of Dynasty Warriors 8 Empires. Given that this is a series I’ve also enjoyed a great deal over the years, I’m thinking I may well check this out now. Well, tomorrow, because it’s nearly 1am now and I need to sleep.

1741: Shareware

I was interested and excited earlier to hear that 3D Realms had come out of sort-of-retirement to unleash a pretty spectacular package onto the world: an anthology containing a fantastic selection of its games from over the years, going right back to its early days as Apogee — a time when men were men, women were women and PC games ran in four-colour CGA.

I probably don’t have to tell you that I didn’t hesitate to hand over the $20 for the complete collection of 32 games — many of these games were fixtures on my home PC while I was growing up, and even more of them were titles that I never got around to playing at the time for whatever reason. A surprising number of them hold up pretty well today, more to the point, and with the Anthology package updating them to run just peachy on modern Windows systems as well as providing rudimentary controller support, it’s a great time to rediscover these great games.

Of the 32 games, I had heard of most of them — though a couple, like Arctic Adventure and Pharaoh’s Tomb, were new ones on me. I’d played a decent number of them, too; particular favourites from the past included the Commander Keen games, Raptor: Call of the Shadows, Shadow Warrior and, of course, Duke Nukem 3D. I’m pleased that the collection offers the opportunity to rediscover somewhat lesser-known titles like Bio Menace and Terminal Velocity, too; both of these were games that I only ever played the limited shareware versions of “back in the day” and was always curious to see how they developed in their full, registered versions. This being the mostly pre-Internet days, however, it wasn’t as simple as just clicking “buy” on a game and having it on your computer moments later.

I really liked the shareware model, and I’m actually surprised it’s not used as much these days, since the Internet would seem to provide an ideal delivery medium for this sort of thing. For those unfamiliar, a shareware game could be distributed for free, and generally provided a full and satisfying game experience in its own right. It would usually only form the first “episode” of a fuller experience, however, and to see how the story concluded — or simply have the opportunity to acquire new weapons and fight new enemies — you’d have to pony up the cash for the full, or “registered” version. In some cases, you had the option to purchase some of the game instead of all of it — Wolfenstein 3D, for example, featured six episodes, the first of which was free, the second and third could be purchased as a bundle, and the fourth, fifth and sixth episodes could be purchased as a separate bundle. Or, of course, you could buy the whole lot in one go.

The closest equivalent we have these days is, I think, the “episodic” games that companies like Telltale put out, but they’re not quite the same; although there are sometimes special offers or even giveaways of the first episode, the game isn’t built around the assumption that the first episode is not only free, but also freely distributable. That “share” part was important — you were actively encouraged to share the free episode with family and friends, and in that way these games built up a very early means of viral popularity, without the Internet to support it. Kids were already illegally copying games and sharing them with one another in the playground, after all; all shareware was doing was legitimising this to a certain extent — though I don’t doubt that a few dodgy copies of registered versions probably did the rounds, too.

Sony sounds like it’s trying some interesting “sharing” functionality with the PlayStation 4, but it’s still not quite the same. Perhaps I’m just being nostalgic and looking back on it with rose-tinted glasses, but I do know one thing for sure: I have very fond memories of a lot of these games, and a surprising number of them still hold up very well today.

If you’d like to try them out for yourself, you can grab a copy of the complete Anthology here, or download and purchase some of the games individually if you prefer.

1261: Registered Version

The resurrection of various video games from my youth is interesting.

I’m not talking about remakes here — though this discussion is in part prompted by the upcoming Unreal Engine 3-powered remake of Rise of the Triad — but instead, the rerelease of old DOS games, suitably tweaked and DOSboxed up in order to make them work properly on modern machines.

An awful lot of these games that are being resurrected were once “shareware” titles. For those of you too young to remember the shareware model — I’m not even sure it’s still around these days — it was a means of distributing usually independently-developed games that involved giving away a significant proportion of a finished product for free, then inviting people to cough up for a more fully-featured “registered version” if they liked it.

The distinguishing factor between a shareware version and a good old-fashioned demo was the fact that demos are usually crippled or limited in some way; shareware versions, meanwhile, are fully-functional, just not quite as fully-functional as the registered version.

I didn’t explain that very well. Let me give you a practical example that might make it a bit clearer.

Let’s take the PC game Rise of the Triad, since it was that that got me thinking about this today. Rise of the Triad’s shareware version was subtitled The HUNT Begins and featured ten levels in which you could only play one of the different characters available in the full version. These ten levels did not appear anywhere in the registered version, which was known as Dark War. This meant that you could play through the shareware version, decide you liked the game, buy the “full” version and play through a completely new series of levels.

This was one approach to the shareware model. Other games, such as Rise of the Triad’s spiritual predecessor Wolfenstein 3D, were split into discrete “episodes”, with the shareware version consisting of only the first episode and usually not featuring all the enemies, weapons and graphics from the full version.

The reason I’m thinking about this today is because when I was young and playing shareware versions of these games that I got from various magazine cover CDs and downloaded from CompuServe (yeah, you heard me), attaining the registered version appeared to be something that was all but impossible to me as a teenager with no credit or debit card. Digital distribution of paid-for titles was unheard for, so there was no “just download it from Steam”, and many shareware titles required you to order the registered versions from America, leading to exorbitant shipping costs.

As such, I didn’t really get to play many registered versions of shareware games I remember rather fondly until much, much later. It’s a lot of fun to be able to revisit these games so quickly and easily these days and discover that the registered versions were indeed rather fun, after all.

Do they still hold up as decent games after all this time, though? Your mileage may vary somewhat, but I certainly still have a soft spot for things like Rise of the Triad, and am very much looking forward to seeing what Interceptor Entertainment have made of the upcoming reboot, which I preordered today. (It’s $15, and you get four old Apogee titles for free when you preorder, including the original Rise of the Triad, its expansion and the two Blake Stone games. Not a bad deal at all.)

Rise of the Bizarre

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I’d love to have sat in on the design meeting for Apogee Software’s 1995 FPS Rise of the Triad, now available on Good Old Games. In my mind’s eye, it runs something like this:

“So, gentlemen. That Wolfenstein thing did rather well. Let’s do a sequel.”

“Yes! I love Wolfenstein. Who wants a beer?”

(Beer is chugged. Conversation resumes.)

“Right. So how are we going to make this better?”

“Okay. Here’s the deal. Umm… Hitler was actually being controlled by… like… um… some big corporations.”

“Great. Sounds good. How many?”

“Um. Three. Three’s always a good number. Wolfenstein had three episodes. Plus another three.”

“Right! We could call them the Triad.”

“I think that’s been done.”

“Doesn’t matter. Okay, so Hitler was being controlled by the Triad.”

“Yes. I need another beer. It helps me think.”

(More beer is chugged. Conversation resumes.)

“Okay. So, game-wise, what are we going to add?”

“Rocket launchers.”

“More gore. More gore!”

“Dual-wield pistols!”

“Traps! Spiky things! Flame traps!”

“All good suggestions, but… let’s think outside the box a little.”

“Boss?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t use management-speak. It makes you sound like a douche.”

“Sorry. Where were we? Come on. Think bigger.”

(Silence ensues.)

“Nothing? Really? Okay, maybe this will help.” (Produces a bottle of absinthe.)

(Absinthe is chugged, with much teeth-sucking and head-shaking.)

“Right! That should get those creative juices flowing. Okay, let’s try again!”

“Ooo! Ooo! We need jumping.”

“Yes, but not normal jumping, no. We need springboards.”

“Yes! And floating platforms to jump onto. Otherwise there’s no point.”

“Right. And we can call them Gravitational Anomaly Discs.”

“GADs?”

“Yes. And the elevator ones can be called EGADs.”

“Egads! What a fabulous idea.”

“I see you’re getting it. Let’s have another drink.”

(Another shot of absinthe is consumed.)

“Jesus. Maybe… maybe you… maybe we should have a… y’know… God mode.”

“Ishn’t that, ishn’t that… jusht… y’know… an invinsh… invinsh… invuln… can’t die mode?”

“No no nononono, I mean an actual… actual God mode. Where you become God.”

“Oooo! I likesh it. You could get really big.”

“Yesh. And kill… peoplesh by pointing at ’em. You’sh an angry God.”

(Hysterical laughter.)

“Oooo! And how about… y’know… as a joke… we also put in a… a… Dog mode!”

“What, where you turn into a dog?”

“Yesh. You get *hic* really shmall and bite peoplesh nutsh.”

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(Thunderous belch.)

“Ugh. *hic* This is… ‘scuse me… *hic* shounding great. You know what? Shall we just ditch the World War II thing?”

“Yeah. Too much research.”

“Let’s have shome mad monksh inshtead.”

“Monksh with ROBOTSH.”

(Fade to black as hysterical laughter continues.)

The alarming thing about Rise of the Triad is that all of the above features were actually included in a game that was originally intended to be a sequel to Wolfenstein 3D. Now, Wolfenstein didn’t take itself too seriously anyway, what with all the zombies, and a very fat Hitler in a mechanized suit wielding two chainguns, but presumably at some point it became apparent to Apogee’s Developers of Incredible Power, the team behind Rise of the Triad, that a World War II setting wasn’t going to cut it. Instead, the game features a very strange setting, with players battling everything from soldiers dressed in what look like World War I uniforms to robots to monks, armed with a selection of weapons ranging from the straightforward (pistol) to messy (bazooka) to bizarre (drunk missile) to outright insane (Excalibat, which is exactly what you think it is). Add in the God/Dog modes, the ability to fly with Mercury mode, the headache-inducing Shrooms mode and you have a game which is clearly designed for fun foremost with the story being cast aside in tatters.

It’s all the better for it. The sheer speed and insanity of Rise of the Triad is one of the game’s best features. The relatively simplistic, boxy level design design based on an evolution of the Wolfenstein 3D engine means that it’s easy to race through relatively mindlessly, or those who prefer a more methodical approach can attempt to solve some of the quasi-platforming environmental puzzles in order to unlock the game’s secrets.

It’s evidence of a simpler time, when games either weren’t capable of telling a decent story, or it was seen as a secondary thing to do. Half-Life this ain’t. Rather, Rise of the Triad represents a time when gameplay was at the forefront, and shareware games were on the cutting-edge of technology. These days, shareware titles are less prominent in their importance for many people, but in the mid-90s when Wolfenstein and Rise of the Triad appeared, shareware developers like ID/iD/id/whatever and Apogee were very much leaders of the pack, pushing the capabilities of the PC to the limit. This was also a time when “shareware episode” meant “complete game in and of itself” – both Wolfenstein and Rise of the Triad‘s free shareware episodes featured ten full levels, which were complete experiences in their own right. Rise of the Triad actually went one step further by making its shareware episode a completely different set of levels to those in the full, paid version, meaning those trying out the game and then going on to buy it didn’t have to run through the same levels again. There were no 30-day time limits or crippling of features – if all you wanted to play was those ten levels, so be it. If, however, you wanted more levels and more features (in the case of these games, more enemies, more playable characters and more multiplayer modes) then you shelled out the money to support the game.

Apogee, of course, later became 3D Realms, which begat Duke Nukem 3D and Max Payne. Rise of the Triad does show that it’s worth delving back into a company’s history as you can often found some hidden gems amongst them, however bizarre they may be. There’s one thing you can’t deny about Rise of the Triad, and that is that it’s immensely creative within the limitations of the time, the genre and the medium. Releasing titles as shareware often freed up developers to do what they really wanted to do – and if that was to have the player assault an island full of soldiers, monks and robots while armed with a magic baseball bat and having the occasional ability to turn into a dog, that was up to them. Occasionally these days with indie titles we see glimpses of the same creativity. It’s important to keep that dream alive, otherwise we end up with a hundred and one identikit brown shooters.

Rise of the Triad 2009 on XBLA anyone?

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