Clive-Barker’s Undying (PC)

Game review by Gavin Martin

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Genre: First-person Shooter

Engine: Unreal Engine 1

Release Date: February 07, 2001

Cost: $17.99 (originally $49.99)

400 MB of hard drive space
Windows 2000/XP/Vista (32-bit or 64-bit)
Mac OS X 10.4 or better (PPC or x86)
Linux Kernel 2.2 or better with glibc

“You get to hunt crazy stuff, levitate, and shoot dark energy forces from your hands. It’s like Dragon Ball Z corrupted by something more sinister than a work of Edgar Allen Poe…and you love it. (There are guns, too.)”

Undying is a book by acclaimed horror writer Clive Barker. If you haven’t heard of the guy, he is so good that Stephen King said he is influenced by Barker and thinks he is one of the best horror writers of all time. Granted, Stephen King isn’t the greatest authority on such things, but he’s also not a guy to hand out compliments.

In other words, Clive Barker earned it.

What makes the game version even cooler, besides the fact that it doesn’t suck like many other cross-media ports, is that Barker worked with the developers every step of the way to turn his words into visions and concepts, and those visions into concepts into a very kick-ass single-player experience.

Gameplay: 9/10

Check this out:

You see that? It’s only a graphic example of what you get when you launch yourself into the interesting gameplay of Undying, but it still gives you an idea of what I’m talking about.

The game is a shooter but also has an added bonus of spell casting as you can see above. You have a full arsenal of guns to choose from with only so much ammo, and you also have your mana supply for spellcasting. Furthermore, certain creatures are better defeated by guns, while others fall more quickly to magic. Others require a combinations of the two. This gives a great amount of balance to the game, and also gives you (the player) a varying, exciting, and dynamic gameplay experience.

You also have in this game the ability to scry using the the stone above. You can only scry in certain locations, but when you find the right ones, you are thrown into this vision where you can see the past which adds a cool element of depth to the story.

The story works so well with the gameplay that you really wish that Barker’s book were something like 3,000 pages. In any case, I don’t want to give anything away, but I will tell you that it focuses on a troubled family with a dark past, and you are sent to investigate WTF is going on. As it turns out, part of your job description is risking your life with every step in this evil house (located on the south Jersey shore.)

Control: 9/10

The controls are standard for any shooter, with the exception of the fact that you have standard and alternate fires for not only every gun, but also for every spell.

Even with that level of depth, it becomes intuitive quite quickly. Best of all, however, is the fact that it seems really easy to aim in this game. I guess maybe they spent some extra time  making sure that the game reads mouse movements correctly. In any case, the only improvement that could be made to the controls would be if the controls when you fly (yes, you get to fly in this game too like a crazy God-wizard-thing) were more smooth and less chaotic. But then again, who said making a human fly would be easy?

Graphics, Look, and Feel: 8/10

It’s interesting that I give this a fairly high score, for as you can see below, it seems very unpolished. Honestly, when I first played the game I thought it was stupidly bad for a game that was released in 2001. But then I had an epiphany which you can read about below this lovely picture:

That epiphany was that the graphics were what they needed to be. I mean, let’s face it, horror is designed to be dark, mysterious, and somewhat disturbing. For this particular storyline, the graphics were perfect. In fact, I think that if they were to make a second version of the game, to mess with the graphics and the way the game feels to make them more appealing would be a mistake.

Much in the same way that dusty black-and-white photos have the ability to be more eerie than a color photo, this game hits on all of the right visual notes to give you the feeling of, “STOP IT…DON’T OPEN THAT DOOR!”

Okay, well there’s no badly voiced-over Wesker in this game, but when you do open that door above, there’s a wolf that wants nothing more than to eat your face. That’s what your gun is for…

Sound: 10/10

Wow…
That would be all I needed to say, but I will elaborate for those who still aren’t convinced that this game is compelling, awesome, and also has an epic storyline.

The sound is crisp, has warmth, is timed perfectly, and sounds insanely realistic. If I were to be stuck in a haunted house with God knows what, I would probably expect those same eerie sounds to resonate through the house. And with my Z-550 speakers, they resonate quite strongly.

I mean, honestly, the sound effects were part of the great experience of the game that gave me cold hands and feet, and rushes of adrenaline every time I entered into a new part of that accursed house. Seriously, the audio guy was that damn good.

Undying vs Related Games, and Final Thoughts:

I really cannot relate Undying to another game except for something like Heretic or Hexen. But even those examples fall so far short of what Undying is. Undying is an experience, artfully mastered and brilliantly pulled off. The storyline is awesome and it makes you become a big fan of Barker’s work. If his aim was to sell more books, he would have by patronage.

Undying needs no comparison, even in the way it came to me. I met a goth girl on a strange date where I started the night in her bedroom. I didn’t get what you guys think I did, but she did give me a copy of this game and told me to check it out. On a cold winter night, I did, and I realized I didn’t need more girls, nacho cheese, or more cowbell.

What I needed that night, and on the nights when my brain wants to be amazed, tricked, messed with, and worked up, I needed and still need more Undying.

It’s eight years later, but…sequel please?

Nexuiz (PC)

Game review by Gavin Martin

Publisher: Alientrap

Genre: First-person Shooter

Release Date: May 02, 2009 (current version, 2.5.1; first version: May 31, 2005)

Cost: Free (GPL License)

400 MB of hard drive space
Windows 2000/XP/Vista (32-bit or 64-bit)
Mac OS X 10.4 or better (PPC or x86)
Linux Kernel 2.2 or better with glibc

High Quality/Recommended

A 1.5 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 chip or AMD Athlon 1500+ or better
9600ati or 5700fx or better
512 MB of ram or better

Low Quality

1 Ghz Pentium III or AMD Athlon
Geforce2 Video card
512 MB of ram

“Take Quake, introduce it to a aesthetic-savvy ninja who knows a thing or two about movement and netcode, mix in some trace-elements from Unreal Tournament, and you’ll more-or-less have Nexuiz. Yeah…it’s completely free too…”

I first heard about Nexuiz through a Linux distro which touted the game as a selling-point for switching over. I noted the name, noted the fact that it’s a FPS, and went on with my life. Fast-forward a year later to today, and I finally made the 600+ MB plunge into Nexuiz.

When I say 600+ MB, I’m referring to the download itself, which, for Windows anyway, is a .zip download available on the website (alientrap.org/nexuiz). Oddly enough, the download itself was the first impression I got from the game. The reason for that is the fact that Nexuiz, when extracted from the zip, is just a folder with a self-contained file structure. In other words, there’s no exes or registry BS to deal with. You just download, unzip, and run the exe from the folder itself – you can throw it in Program Files if it makes you feel better.

I, just wanting to get to the action, left it on my desktop. I loaded it up, set my keys, binds, graphics, mouse sensitivity, audio to how I like it for FPS’s, and clicked on the “Instant Action” button. The Instant Action deal threw me into a game with bots – giving a very similar feel to actually being in a server. This was reminiscent of games like Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament, where the server-esque experience is always readily available.

Nexuiz has 24 official maps, 15 player models, and 15 guns. Let’s jump right into the nitty gritty:

Gameplay: 8/10

Just as small forward: The game is based off of a modified version of the Quake Engine called the DarkPlaces engine, but for simplicity and nostalgic value, I’ll refer to the Quake Engine primarily.

Why 8/10 you might ask? Well, I’m a huge-fan of fast-paced shooters. But even more than that, I adore bunnyhopping and this game has it. The bunnyhopping is really intuitive for anyone who has ever bunnyhopped in any game based off of the Quake engine, like in the hay-days of Half-Life, for example. Just as small forward: The game is based off of a modified version of the Quake Engine called the DarkPlaces engine, but for simplicity and nostalgic value, I’ll refer to the Quake Engine primarily. The game has a built-in speed meter for those who want it, frame-rate monitor, and endless customizations and mutators for you to play with.

Just to give you an idea as to how many details, settings, tweaks, and customizations there are to Nexuiz, I’ll just say this: After roughly 20+ hours of intense gameplay, I still am figuring out a handful of new things every time I load the game. What’s even better is the fact that the endless possibilities to this game aren’t overwhelming, and, in fact, they allow the game to be formed to anyones preferences. So, for example, if you don’t like how powerful a particular gun is, you can either have it not spawn on your server or you can change how much damage it does. Want low gravity? No problem. Instagib? No problem. 1V1 Arena Mode? Well, you get the point.

Lag isn’t a real problem, the netcode makes aiming fairly easy and only troublesome at times (like it is with any game,) and camera angles aren’t a problem since it’s first-person. There is one quark, however: Not all headshots are created equal, so I found out. The “very top of the head” headshot is an instant kill with the sniper rifle, whereas the “middle of the head” headshot is something like a two-shot kill. I guess they have hard heads…

In short the only real problem with the gameplay are the maps. To put it not so nicely, they seem amateur It’s not the look of them or anything, but they aren’t built toward the faster-paced gameplay that the tagline of Nexuiz touts. That tagline being “Simple, fast, intense, and completely free!”

It has the intense, completely free, and simple parts down, unfortunately the fast-ness, if you will, is reamed by the maps which are completely non-conducive to things like bunnyhopping, rocket propelling, and circle-strafing. The exceptions to this are there on the larger maps, but it’s still a big enough deal on enough maps to make me uncomfortable.

The maps are also leave something to be desired as far as complexity, depth, and explorability. As a contrast, Half-Life’s default maps were very interactive, fun to explore, and they were inherently challenging Figuring out exactly when things spawned and where they were. Where the longjump was and how to get to it. Where to fire the gauss gun to nuke that annoying camper. These were things that made HLDM so insanely fun and popular. Nexuiz is lacking that. Much in the way that the Playstation 2 trumped the XBOX just because of the game selection and availability, other Quake forks like Half-Life make Nexuiz seem sub-par by comparison solely because of the maps.

Control: 9/10

It has bunnyhopping, endless customizations built-in the GUI rather than through a .cfg file like some other games I’ve played before, crosshair customization, game mutators, tweakable gameplay modes, FOV settings, etc etc. You can really make this game fit your playing style with the controls. What’s more, the bunnyhopping is truly integrated into the game rather than having to use a special jump script to avoid sticking, like you would with Team Fortress back-in-the-day.

For newcomers, don’t expect the controls to be intuitive if you haven’t messed around with Quake-based games before. Just about any Quake-based game has a somewhat steep learning curve for anyone to truly become proficient. For Half-Life, Quake, and Unreal Tournament veterans however, you’ll feel right at home. Furthermore, the sense of control and the ease-of-movement that is nearly everpresent in Nexuiz will almost certainly provide you with many fun hours of gameplay.

Graphics, Look, and Feel: 6/10

Let’s be frank about this: It’s not the prettiest game you’ll ever play. The textures are fairly dated-looking, the models show their polygons proudly (along with their literally retarded-looking faces,) and the colors themselves are less-than-stellar leaving the game feeling more like a cartoon than an adrenaline pumping shoot-em-up experience.

Now, in defense of Nexuiz, it doesn’t really need to fall back on aesthetics accomplish being a good game; the other parts of this review have shown that. Furthermore, in fast-paced shooters having a extremely low-lag gaming experience is vital to the fun-factor of the game. Having simpler models, textures, and graphics make lag a non-issue for those with lesser graphics cards. This also allows a multitude of people to get in on the action, thus helping keep both servers and players’ wallets full. But when I compare the graphics for the amount of resources the game uses – which is relatively low – to a game like Half-Life, for example, (yes, I’m a broken record) I feel as though they could have spent just a little more time in this department. But with the current trend of video games having orgasm-inducing graphics and “throw that crap out the window”-inducing gameplay, I’ll cut Nexuiz a break on this one and just be thankful for the already rock-solid gameplay and controls.

Sound: 7/10

By default, Nexuiz will play this techno sort of music in the background while you play, which is cool for awhile. Eventually, however, you throw on the headphones so you can hear your opponents footsteps throughout the map, and with that, you turn the darn music off. Once that’s done, you’ll really get a sense for how valuable the sound in this game is, as it is with most shooters. Each gun makes a distinct sound, which is nice when you’re trying to decide whether or not to open that door (assuming you don’t take Wesker’s advice.) All of the other sounds make sense, and the sound quality itself isn’t bad either. What’s also cool is the fact that when you hit somebody, you get the same sort of sound you get in Quake 3. It’s kind of like an instant feedback system to tell you whether or not your futile efforts are even noteworthy.

The only real downfall here is this: While the sounds are good and suitable for the gameplay, they aren’t intense enough for me. In Quake when you get quad damage or shards of armor, you are kicking ass. When you fire a rocket you are kicking ass. When you fire the nail-gun and hear the very distinct ricochet against the walls, you are kicking ass. The sounds in Quake are so intense, so full of bass and authority, that they pull you into the zone of kicking ass, even if you are AFK and eating a taco, or something.

In Nexuiz, you don’t get that same sense of intensity or excitement, and without intensity and excitement, enthusiasm is that much harder to come by. Throw in more bass and more intensity to the sounds, and you would have a better and more compelling gaming experience. Or you can do what I eventually did: Overwrite the default sounds with Quake sounds.

Nexuiz vs Related Games, and Final Thoughts:

I remember the hay-days of Half-Life induced synesthesia thanks to the god-like Adrenaline Gamer mod which so produced so many top-notch gamers. Garpy from the UK, for example, became the pro he is today because of the fast-paced, intense, competitive, and communal nature of AG Mod. Hell, I became good at shooters thanks to AG Mod. It had everything. It became my yard-stick for shooters to live up to. It’s the kobe beef of FPS experiences for me.

Nexuiz has reached the level of a dry-aged prime strip-steak when I compare it to the kobe that is Half-Life 1 with AG Mod. Furthermore, I would prefer a T-Bone. What I’m really trying to say is I want there to be a longjump, a gauss gun, and fun things like tripmines, satchels, hand grenades, and – PLEASE – better maps. I also wish the guns weren’t so heavily balanced. They are all so mild and moderate. There’s no single gun that can kick ass under all circumstances unless you count the vaporizer-rifle-thing in instagib mode. Again, it comes down to two things for me: Give me a gauss gun and a longjump, and I’ll be much happier.

But to get back to it…

I often referenced Half-Life, Quake, and I occasionally referenced Unreal Tournament. Really, Nexuiz is a smoothie of a game – a blend, a mutt, a smörgåsbord When you play Nexuiz, you’ll really see how the pieces from all three of these legendary FPS’s have come together to influence the growth and development of Nexuiz. When you take three very solid ingredients and mix it up, you generally have a pretty good result. That’s Nexuiz – A free, fast-paced, FPS which draws from other great FPS’s. Some games would try this same recipe, and end up with a “fruitcake” of a game. Nexuiz has come up with a three-part side-by-side milkshake, which, I might add, is free. I’m ready for more.