Yeah duke nukem had the first free form aiming. But all the critters were bitmaps, got really blocky when you got up close.

A house based on a quake level ?
Doesn't sound like a good idea - although the teleports and secret passages and rooms would be cool

We can't forget DOOM.

The first 3d shoot em up and still one of the best to play. Got doom 1& 2 on the gba. Surprisingly good platform for it.
One of the best things about doom was the customiser. At one point I had a shotgun that would take down even a big boss with one shot - but that fired about 50 rounds a minute.
You could make it fire faster, but the reload animation couldn't keep up.

How old is doom ?
I remember you needed a 386 with a maths co-processor (yep they used to be seperate chips), or a 486 processor to run it.

Here's another thing to think about.
What do you think is the best noise a 'gun' has ever made in a video game.

For me it's the plasma cannon in the atari jaguar version of DooM.
I think I was the first non-atari employee in the uk to see the prototype controllers for the jaguar console. Had programmable buttons which was very new.
They were lying around atari hq when we went down there one day.

Unfortunately like all their later consoles. Atari had the best hardware but couldn't get independant games development going.
It was a 64 bit console when the rest of the world was still running on 16 bit.
Likewise the lynx was 16bit when everybody else was 8bit.

But the plasma cannon sound on jaguar doom - oh man ! 

Just had a quick search and the guy who used to run atari uk way back then - darryl still - now runs kiss ltd, a games company. Great bloke.
Was very good to a couple of young chaps publishing a small press niche magazine.
Actually so was everybody else. We visited a games developer in manchester - probably 1991. Who not only showed us the game in development - power factor - but sat us down in front of a blackboard and gave us a very instructive lecture on the three principles of video games.
Was a fun couple of years.

And no matter the game, or when it was written all video games boil down to these three principles.
1) collision
2) avoidance
3) interaction

Every single thing that happens in every video game ever made uses one or more of those three principles. 

OH. MY. GOD Just did a quick search for the lynx - There's a forum with a section on the magazine. So I can say the guy's name who gave us the lecture was Jim Gregory.
Just saw this post: 'I had the 2 page interview/feature with Jim Gregory/Hand Made Software scanned and i sent it to Atarimania for their WIP Lynx section.'

Looks like I came onboard around issue 5.

I still play fairly regularly.

With the (relatively) new high speed internet I can play with my siblings ~1000 miles away regularly. Beats the crap out of a regular phone call. Our default is Team Fortress II. Still a great game.

Bioshock I and II were excellent excellent games. Wonderful exploration of gaming itself, individualism vs collectivism, and a few other serious philosophical questions. All done in an incredibly immersive environment and compelling story. The internet disagrees with me but bioshock infinite was crap. The first two are very very worth playing through.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the recent Xcom Enemy Unknown. It's really more a complex board game (turn based) but I really enjoyed it.

There was a Star Trek game based on the quake engine (Star Trek Voyager Elite Force) that was a surprisingly solid FPS.

Of course classics like Tetris and Asteroids. Red Alert and Red Alert II.

Steam got me back into gaming. With their sales? I can play games for <10 bucks a pop. And they have old games so even if your rig is trailing edge, you can find a game you can run.

Kick wrote on Apr 24^th, 2018 at 1:59pm:


Not even to go Slinging?!?! 

I love that Steam let's people experience otherwise dead games from years past in an accessible way. I found a game called Arx Fatalis on there for something like 5 dollars at the time and tried it out. It was quite good. Never heard of it before Steam.

Funditor406 wrote on May 10^th, 2018 at 9:01pm:


That was one of my favourite games! It's a shame they haven't made a modern remake of it like they did with Age of Empires II.

There's lots of old games that it would be amazing if they remake it... then I remember stuff like the COD 4 remaster and Star Wars: Battlefront and Battlefront 2 and... yeah maybe I'm ok with just playing them on old consoles with dirt graphics.

Nothing wrong with liking old games and consoles.

In some ways I think there was more elegance in the old games. There had to be because there were only so many options for both the players and the programmers. You had to find elegant solutions. Now it feels like the emphasis is on "look at these beautiful graphics" instead of "here's a fun game". And spoonfeeding. Spoonfeeding everywhere. Not just "here's a map". Here's a lit up portion of the area that has what you're looking for. Not enough? We'll make it light up too.

For old style elegance, "Gunpoint" on steam was a lot of fun. Also Portal and Portal 2 (though portal 2 somewhat less) for a really inventive and entertaining game.