PC Round-Up #1 - Part 2

After perhaps world record levels of procrastination (I started this post two years ago, which was itself some five years since my first 'Catacomb' post!), I've finally gotten around to resuming my coverage of first-person shooters... which never even started to begin with. This is due to my mild-yet-prevalent OCD which dictated I review the first FPS before looking at the later, more well-known ones. This led to a problem: what was the first FPS? My initial research into this subject has yielded several answers. Many might say Doom; oldies like me will remember Wolfenstein 3D; but the answer lies even further back than that - Catacomb 3D and its sequels.

Catacomb 3D: The Descent (1991)

Also known as Catacomb 3 to tie in to the 2D games and also known as Catacomb 3D: A New Dimension to emphasise the added dimension, this possibly first ever first-person shooter by the now-legendary id Software casts you in the same role as before - that of wizard Petton Everhail who must save his friend from the evil lich Grelminar. This seems to involve wandering around various mazey stages shooting lots of monsters with fireballs from your hand as you try to find the portal that takes you to the next such example. I was expecting an ugly, clunky, unplayable mess to be honest but I was pleasantly surprised. I mean, the stages are all flat and there's not much variety but movement is smoother than I thought it would be which includes a helpful strafe button, and there are plenty of scary monsters and stuff to collect, and even some secret areas! Frankly, I was just going to play it for long enough to grab a screenshot and get a reasonable impression of it but I kept playing simply because I was enjoying it. Okay, it's very basic and repetitive (especially the music) compared to later examples, but it's not at all bad, all things considered... 6/10

Top Five First-Person Shooters

Now, many regular readers here at Red Parsley will have already gotten a good idea about my gaming tastes and preferences – namely that I’ve generally stuck to consoles of the 80’s and 90’s (or arcades, when lucky enough to find one) and almost always play arcade-style games mostly consisting of shmups, platformers, racing games, and a sprinkling of puzzle and fighting games. There have been some fairly sizeable casualties as a result of these stringently upheld habits with some of the biggest including my neglect of genres more usually found on home computers or modern consoles such as RPG’s, survival horror, strategy and simulation games, and of course the one that currently comprises about half of all games released – the First Person Shooter. The paltry number of FPS’s that I’ve actually devoted more than a few minutes to could literally be counted on the fingers of one hand and could accordingly be summarised in a Top Five list right here! So, taking the form of a comedy Top Five, here are my five ‘favourite’ FPS’s:

5. Killing Time (3DO - 1995)

I’m quite confident in saying that this is the first FPS I ever owned and it was bought only on the strength of a decent review in the short-lived 3DO Magazine that I used to buy. It was all rather new and intriguing to me but I also didn’t really have any idea what I was doing. The story casts you in the role of an Egyptology student searching for a lost artifact somewhere within the estate of a wealthy heiress located on an island in Maine. This involves snooping around the large play-area which is soon discovered to be filled with lots of spooky ghosts and undead creatures! There are a number of weapons available, including the usual pistols and machine guns, and lots of areas to explore as you gradually uncover the story of the occupants of the island and the heiress herself. One notable aspect of the game is its graphics which were very impressive in their day. The locations are pretty nice and most of the sprites are FMV-based which help make Killing Time a very atmospheric game with some genuinely unsettling moments!