For anyone not familiar with Amiga machines and the architecture they were built around, getting an FPS, even a raycasting Wolf 3D type of FPS like this, to run on them at anything resembling a decent level of performance at the time that this game came out (I'm not counting all of the post-Commodore community designed accelerators and reimplementations, you can get an Amiga to do all kinds of weird shit nowadays with the homebrewed addons and hardware we have available) was a pretty significant achievement in and of itself. When the Amiga architecture was originally designed in the mid to late 80s the market was all about 2D performance, color representation, etc, and while at that time the Amiga could absolutely run circles around IBM PCs in 2D rendering and how many colors it could display on screen at once and even certain types of 3D stuff, the IBM PC had this weird little video mode in the VGA specification that no one would have predicted would be the thing that eventually led to the PC putting the Amiga in it's grave (to any Amiga fans who might read this, to be clear I say that with no small amount of sadness, I actually wasn't even alive until '97 but as an enthusiast of 80s and 90s home computers I long for the days when machines that weren't based on the IBM PC were a totally reasonable choice for your primary home computer). That weird little video mode was commonly referred to as "chunky mode," and it was very special because it had something that turned out to be so powerful when utilized well that basically every modern home computer in the world still uses updated implementations of it to this day, something the Amiga did not have: a frame buffer. I'm not going to go into details because I'm really doing my best to keep this from becoming an entire essay like it always seems to, but on the surface-most level the reason this is so important is because when John Carmack and the rest of the team at id Software finally cracked the problem of fast 3D (or at least, pseudo-3D in this first iteration) rendering and unleashed the cultural and technological tidal wave that was Wolf 3D and later Doom unto the world, they did so through clever use of that chunky mode frame buffer. The Amiga simply could not do such a thing, and while he would eventually be proven wrong through hacker magic and the admirable fervor of the Amiga community, Carmack himself famously said that Wolf 3D and by extension Doom would never run on the Amiga. Obviously that statement might seem a little silly when we're here discussing a very similar type of game running on the Amiga, but at the time it wasn't as ridiculous as a statement as it seems now in hindsight. All of this is to say, setting aside all of the cool artistry and atmospheric nightmare fuel this game has going on, the fact that it even exists and runs decently enough to be playable at all is very, very cool. I hope it doesn't come across as rude to suggest viewers check out another creator on this video, and Ranger should you see this and ask that I remove it I absolutely will do so right away, but I feel it would be wrong or misrepresentative of me not to mention that Modern Vintage Gamer here on UA-cam has an excellent video on the topic of how Wolf 3D killed the Amiga wherein he covers the whole series of events and the technical aspects of the situation in much greater detail than I am able to and I learned most of what I know of the topic from him. Plus he did some pretty critical work on the Nightdive remaster of Quake, and somehow I get the impression that Quake is a game that's held in particularly high regard around these parts, so that's pretty cool, too.
@@ThommyofThenn Well I reckon they're about the same age, just different subscriber sizes. Ranger might even be older (I think Civvie was born in 1988??)
Sometimes you have to step back and see the forest for the trees. This might be merciless and miserable in places, but it is a game experience absolutely like none other I've ever endured. Great shit, but not for everyone.
It's not every day I learn about a janky looking, obscure fps. But some of the work here is nice looking! Im gonna go back to sleep for a few hours but I'll rewatch what I don't watch now
The blood splatter on the walls after killing enemies is a very neat touch for the time. I won't tell George Lopez about them ripping off Star Wars. I also woke up to the sound of the sewer run and got very confused.
Game of my childhood. Me and my brother were glued to the chair while playing it. But the glitches, Jesus Christ so many glitches that Amiga 500 got for this game.
What a fascinating game, I'm sure as hell not gonna play it, it looks like it would twist and warp my sense of reality, but it's great to know it exists!
Cytadela (Citadel: Remonstered) was recently released on Evercade as part of the Home Computer Heroes Collection 1. Since Evercade is an emulation console, one can use savestates to mitigate for the sometimes crushing difficulty. This version also contains "Training levels", which are basically sandbox maps for folks, who just want to run around and shoot stuff.
Never heard of this game before. That's a first for me and retro shooters. And why I follow your channel. It's fascinating. Also props for referencing the best episode of the best Star Trek.
Reminds me of the morning of my first job interview. I'd never experienced sleep paralysis so when I "woke up" with spiders covering every inch of the walls/bed I was trying to scream but I was petrified. Desperate to fend off the bugs, my frenzied mind somehow dug up the information I had absorbed from my many wiki-rabbit holes. The thought "hold your breath!" came pulsating into my conciousness and I gaspingly managed to close my mouth. After maybe ten seconds or perhaps a minute, I regained the ability to move and I snapped out of it. Nauseated, I got up to wash my face and relax. When I got up I was surprised to see my dad standing in the hall. I said "hey" only have noticing him but he just smiled. Then his arm stretched out down the hallway like an octopus and grabbed my leg, which also began stretching. My body had taken on the texture of silly putty and began stretching and bouncing off the walls like that old windows screensaver. Then i jolted awake back in bed and i just lay there for who knows how long but I knew i would never sleep well again 😂
I'm Polish , remember playing it on Amiga when I was a kid. This game would run ok only on a super tiny screen size otherwise you would get like 5 fps ;D
Lol for a quick sec I thought this would be about The Citadel, the japanese anime fps, which is one of my fav recent fps. But this was really interesting I did not know of this game, dope vid
You described a good portion of the 20 hour game as being crushingly difficult but that stuck in your mind because of how merciless it felt is something I also found after playing Max Payne 1 for the first time in more than a decade. Replaying the parking garage level was insanely difficult, had some really cheap deaths, and was unrelenting but I think that gauntlet is now my favorite Max Payne level (once you play through it and remember all the enemies and Remedy's little 'jokes' it's a lot easier, even on the highest difficulty).
Somehow we have both a well made wolf clone and a weird build engine esq RPG shooter with Goldeneye autoaim and a lot of quirks how did we made these both in 1998 god damm
3:44 Ahh, Amiga MOD music. There is genuinely nothing else like it. I used to listen to a tonne of the stuff in the early 2000s when I first got my own internet: it downloaded way quicker than MP3 and sounded amazing.
Interesting! I thought I was pretty well versed in obscure retro fps (gaming since the mid 80s) but I've never heard of this one before. I like the presentation here, but as much as I loved Wolf3D back in the day, now I find I have little patience for its basic design: bland, single-level, 90-degree-wall labyrinths. Funny I still absolutely _love_ Rise of the Triad, but that has enough variance in combat and map design to be interesting, despite its obvious heritage. I'll give this one a try though and maybe its personality will be enough to rise enough the tech limitations... EDIT: No offense but I had to laugh at your using "non-Euclidean" to describe this. I get you seem to mean it in the sense of eldritch location/hostile architecture, but as game *literally built around parallel lines and right angles down to its very core* it's actually one of the most Euclidean games to exist. Sorry to be the math pedant here 🙃
I know you probably don't/won't cover mods of games, but I kinda wish you would cover the Apotheosis X scenario for Marathon. It's a standalone scenario that runs on Aleph One and features really good visuals, level design and it's own story.
The 'blood sewer' part has a massive drop in quality because you start doing this whiny 'WHAT WERE THEY THINKING' angry video game nerd routine We get it. The game is hard. Try articulating it in a way that doesn't involve rephrasing 'this is hard' over and over again while your voice cracks.
I'm glad somebody else felt this way, tbh. It's a good video overall but I got a little sick of the constant vitriol. I don't mind cussing much normally but nearly every 'fuck' in this video was said so harshly that I felt...just, bad. Uncomfortable? Like dude please calm down and stop hissing at me so much. Kinda felt this way throughout the whole video but I agree it was definitely worst in the sewers.
@@RubyRangerr The swearing was totally fine, I just thought the tone was a little too strong with it. ^^ I do watch some swear-heavy folks that don't make me feel that vibe, not entirely sure how to explain the difference I admit, it's just sort of tones.
Agreed. I can understand the attempt here, but civvie uses 'kids' with a jaded, older tone which makes it work. In this video, the use of 'kids' is too straight, and sounds pretty patronizing. It also mixes very uncomfortably with the vitriolic tone of the cursing here. Weird vibes.
Imagine what you think Ranger looks like from the sound of his voice. Get a good mental image. Got it? Great. Now, make that person ~20 years older and ~20kg more jacked and you've got our Ruby.
For anyone not familiar with Amiga machines and the architecture they were built around, getting an FPS, even a raycasting Wolf 3D type of FPS like this, to run on them at anything resembling a decent level of performance at the time that this game came out (I'm not counting all of the post-Commodore community designed accelerators and reimplementations, you can get an Amiga to do all kinds of weird shit nowadays with the homebrewed addons and hardware we have available) was a pretty significant achievement in and of itself.
When the Amiga architecture was originally designed in the mid to late 80s the market was all about 2D performance, color representation, etc, and while at that time the Amiga could absolutely run circles around IBM PCs in 2D rendering and how many colors it could display on screen at once and even certain types of 3D stuff, the IBM PC had this weird little video mode in the VGA specification that no one would have predicted would be the thing that eventually led to the PC putting the Amiga in it's grave (to any Amiga fans who might read this, to be clear I say that with no small amount of sadness, I actually wasn't even alive until '97 but as an enthusiast of 80s and 90s home computers I long for the days when machines that weren't based on the IBM PC were a totally reasonable choice for your primary home computer). That weird little video mode was commonly referred to as "chunky mode," and it was very special because it had something that turned out to be so powerful when utilized well that basically every modern home computer in the world still uses updated implementations of it to this day, something the Amiga did not have: a frame buffer.
I'm not going to go into details because I'm really doing my best to keep this from becoming an entire essay like it always seems to, but on the surface-most level the reason this is so important is because when John Carmack and the rest of the team at id Software finally cracked the problem of fast 3D (or at least, pseudo-3D in this first iteration) rendering and unleashed the cultural and technological tidal wave that was Wolf 3D and later Doom unto the world, they did so through clever use of that chunky mode frame buffer. The Amiga simply could not do such a thing, and while he would eventually be proven wrong through hacker magic and the admirable fervor of the Amiga community, Carmack himself famously said that Wolf 3D and by extension Doom would never run on the Amiga. Obviously that statement might seem a little silly when we're here discussing a very similar type of game running on the Amiga, but at the time it wasn't as ridiculous as a statement as it seems now in hindsight.
All of this is to say, setting aside all of the cool artistry and atmospheric nightmare fuel this game has going on, the fact that it even exists and runs decently enough to be playable at all is very, very cool.
I hope it doesn't come across as rude to suggest viewers check out another creator on this video, and Ranger should you see this and ask that I remove it I absolutely will do so right away, but I feel it would be wrong or misrepresentative of me not to mention that Modern Vintage Gamer here on UA-cam has an excellent video on the topic of how Wolf 3D killed the Amiga wherein he covers the whole series of events and the technical aspects of the situation in much greater detail than I am able to and I learned most of what I know of the topic from him. Plus he did some pretty critical work on the Nightdive remaster of Quake, and somehow I get the impression that Quake is a game that's held in particularly high regard around these parts, so that's pretty cool, too.
I pinned this comment because it is significant. Thank you for your contribution here!
@@RubyRangerr I am honored and appreciate the pin!
Big props to Civvie for propping up legit smaller cFPS creators. Hell yeah.
Give it time and Ranger will be the big name collab in one of Civvie's videos.
@@audiosurfarchive Civ is trying to keep up with the young go hards
@@AndrewD8Red *BreakingBadWaltYoureGDRight.mp4*
@@ThommyofThenn Well I reckon they're about the same age, just different subscriber sizes. Ranger might even be older (I think Civvie was born in 1988??)
I'm two years older, but Civvie sounds much, much older than me :)
Guy goes through hell, makes it sounds like a miserable experience, then compliments the game and recommends it...
Sometimes you have to step back and see the forest for the trees. This might be merciless and miserable in places, but it is a game experience absolutely like none other I've ever endured. Great shit, but not for everyone.
Pathalogic was the game that gave me Stress Dreams. I soft locked myself 5 hours in and never touched it again. I still remember the cold sweat 😰
It's not every day I learn about a janky looking, obscure fps.
But some of the work here is nice looking! Im gonna go back to sleep for a few hours but I'll rewatch what I don't watch now
Aw that main theme is distilled Amiga. As a British kid this was our main computer until IBM PC's started to take over after Doom and Myst.
Superb video, Ranger. I love seeing you enjoy a new game... but seeing you suffer is damned entertaining too! (sorry)
Yeah yeah, I know, that's why I play the ones that hurt. Just for your entertainment. ♥️
The blood splatter on the walls after killing enemies is a very neat touch for the time. I won't tell George Lopez about them ripping off Star Wars.
I also woke up to the sound of the sewer run and got very confused.
14:20 this part actually surprised me somewhat with how ridiculously, unacceptably jank that is. And I've seen your Tekwar video
Oh yeah some of the textures in this port are JANK
Game of my childhood. Me and my brother were glued to the chair while playing it. But the glitches, Jesus Christ so many glitches that Amiga 500 got for this game.
What a fascinating game, I'm sure as hell not gonna play it, it looks like it would twist and warp my sense of reality, but it's great to know it exists!
Big Marathon vibes around this one. Cutting edge in a lot of ways, though relatively unknown.
Even the sounds of the weapons are reminiscent too.
@@AndrewD8Red once you play Marathon, every retro fps hit different you know it's true
@@ThommyofThenn
Wise words my friend.
1:22 Man that was close!
Eat your heart out "OSHA"!😊
Heh, the guards in the prison are wearing a stormtrooper costume.
Cytadela (Citadel: Remonstered) was recently released on Evercade as part of the Home Computer Heroes Collection 1. Since Evercade is an emulation console, one can use savestates to mitigate for the sometimes crushing difficulty. This version also contains "Training levels", which are basically sandbox maps for folks, who just want to run around and shoot stuff.
Never heard of this game before. That's a first for me and retro shooters. And why I follow your channel. It's fascinating.
Also props for referencing the best episode of the best Star Trek.
this reminds me a WHOLE LOT of pathways into darkness, which is the prequel to the marathon series.
Reminds me of the morning of my first job interview. I'd never experienced sleep paralysis so when I "woke up" with spiders covering every inch of the walls/bed I was trying to scream but I was petrified.
Desperate to fend off the bugs, my frenzied mind somehow dug up the information I had absorbed from my many wiki-rabbit holes. The thought "hold your breath!" came pulsating into my conciousness and I gaspingly managed to close my mouth.
After maybe ten seconds or perhaps a minute, I regained the ability to move and I snapped out of it.
Nauseated, I got up to wash my face and relax.
When I got up I was surprised to see my dad standing in the hall. I said "hey" only have noticing him but he just smiled.
Then his arm stretched out down the hallway like an octopus and grabbed my leg, which also began stretching.
My body had taken on the texture of silly putty and began stretching and bouncing off the walls like that old windows screensaver.
Then i jolted awake back in bed and i just lay there for who knows how long but I knew i would never sleep well again 😂
....yeah that's kind of how playing this game felt.
@@RubyRangerr Lol im amazed how coherent my unhinged story was. I fell back asleep after like 5 min so now I get to watch this again!-
I'm Polish , remember playing it on Amiga when I was a kid. This game would run ok only on a super tiny screen size otherwise you would get like 5 fps ;D
So, i was thinking " When will Ranger upload another "ranger report"?, and then, i saw this
Just when I was needed, I arrive.
Ouch, I'm not a ghost!
This game gives me a ton of Blake Stone vibes.
REALLY. A fascinating comparison!
Same here, largely because of the keyboard-only movement and the way the HUD presents information.
Lol for a quick sec I thought this would be about The Citadel, the japanese anime fps, which is one of my fav recent fps. But this was really interesting I did not know of this game, dope vid
You described a good portion of the 20 hour game as being crushingly difficult but that stuck in your mind because of how merciless it felt is something I also found after playing Max Payne 1 for the first time in more than a decade. Replaying the parking garage level was insanely difficult, had some really cheap deaths, and was unrelenting but I think that gauntlet is now my favorite Max Payne level (once you play through it and remember all the enemies and Remedy's little 'jokes' it's a lot easier, even on the highest difficulty).
Somehow we have both a well made wolf clone and a weird build engine esq RPG shooter with Goldeneye autoaim and a lot of quirks how did we made these both in 1998 god damm
Great vid !
Thank you!
The first reveal has these pathways to darkness vibes with these movements and sound 😅
Absolutely got that same impression.
3:44 Ahh, Amiga MOD music. There is genuinely nothing else like it. I used to listen to a tonne of the stuff in the early 2000s when I first got my own internet: it downloaded way quicker than MP3 and sounded amazing.
Nice work
On the levels of Wolf3D and Doom
No joke, I'm not keen on playing this one purely out of the pain it feels to move 😅 but to appreciate the combat and scope of it though.
19 HOURS!!!
19 fucking hours 😭
Cytadela SPEEDRUN when? XD just kidding
Just you wait, I'll make it happen
Interesting! I thought I was pretty well versed in obscure retro fps (gaming since the mid 80s) but I've never heard of this one before. I like the presentation here, but as much as I loved Wolf3D back in the day, now I find I have little patience for its basic design: bland, single-level, 90-degree-wall labyrinths. Funny I still absolutely _love_ Rise of the Triad, but that has enough variance in combat and map design to be interesting, despite its obvious heritage. I'll give this one a try though and maybe its personality will be enough to rise enough the tech limitations... EDIT: No offense but I had to laugh at your using "non-Euclidean" to describe this. I get you seem to mean it in the sense of eldritch location/hostile architecture, but as game *literally built around parallel lines and right angles down to its very core* it's actually one of the most Euclidean games to exist. Sorry to be the math pedant here 🙃
IT WAS METAPHORICAL
I know you probably don't/won't cover mods of games, but I kinda wish you would cover the Apotheosis X scenario for Marathon. It's a standalone scenario that runs on Aleph One and features really good visuals, level design and it's own story.
I'm definitely not against it after playing a certain mod for Quake recently. It would just have to be something that catches me enough to do so.
woooops I forgot to comment also this game wishes it was Baroque
The 'blood sewer' part has a massive drop in quality because you start doing this whiny 'WHAT WERE THEY THINKING' angry video game nerd routine
We get it. The game is hard. Try articulating it in a way that doesn't involve rephrasing 'this is hard' over and over again while your voice cracks.
I'm glad somebody else felt this way, tbh. It's a good video overall but I got a little sick of the constant vitriol. I don't mind cussing much normally but nearly every 'fuck' in this video was said so harshly that I felt...just, bad. Uncomfortable? Like dude please calm down and stop hissing at me so much.
Kinda felt this way throughout the whole video but I agree it was definitely worst in the sewers.
You're absolutely right. Thanks for the notes.
I swear a lot. It's okay to not watch if you don't like swearing.
first time?
@@RubyRangerr The swearing was totally fine, I just thought the tone was a little too strong with it. ^^ I do watch some swear-heavy folks that don't make me feel that vibe, not entirely sure how to explain the difference I admit, it's just sort of tones.
This game sounds terrible
In a lot of ways it is, but in a lot of ways it is refreshingly experimental and very interesting.
Stop calling the viewers "kids", CV11 can do it because he talks like an old man and it fits the character, but it doesn't work for your or your voice
Agreed. I can understand the attempt here, but civvie uses 'kids' with a jaded, older tone which makes it work. In this video, the use of 'kids' is too straight, and sounds pretty patronizing. It also mixes very uncomfortably with the vitriolic tone of the cursing here. Weird vibes.
I'm a 42 year old father of five. I'm Dad. Sorry I don't sound what you think I should sound like. Stay hydrated.
@@RubyRangerr That's honestly fair enough.
@@RubyRangerr hey we said that as a feedback for the future. Do what you wish, man
Imagine what you think Ranger looks like from the sound of his voice. Get a good mental image.
Got it? Great.
Now, make that person ~20 years older and ~20kg more jacked and you've got our Ruby.
Great video!
Thank you so much!