Ross kills some time for Halloween in Killing Time. Killing time. You can buy Killing Time here if you're interested: af.gog.com/game/killing_time?... accursedfarms.com
Can we get a moment of silent appreciation for the amount of times during this series where Ross has said 'this audio/visual thing is annoying, but I'll edit it out for you guys'. That's just above and beyond and I shudder to imagine the cumulative amount of hours he's spent doing that over the years.
The biggest example is probably armed and delirious… I’m trying to imagine how much time he put into fixing alllll the audio just for the video, while torturing himself listening to whatever torture that was.
@@AcidelCyqage So instead of explaining further what you mean you resort to telling me I´m using one of the biggest websites on the Internet? What does that have to do with your comment? Or my Comment? My brother in Christ please get a grip.
What fascinates me about Ross is how he's somehow able to come across as extremely normal and relatable, yet also weird and eccentric, at the same time. The man is an international treasure.
Ross is probably the best litmus for "Reasonable Guy." His analytical skills and rhetorical wit evoke an American everyman that's appealing to old and young alike.
I love him cuz he's just like me. I'm apparently extremely charismatic and fascinating but people use "weird" to describe me in a good way. I'd marry him if I could.
I feel like he's good at making stream of thought content, becuase he knows exactly the right way to word his thought process in a way that's easily understandable.
I like how the designers decided that the gratuitous amount of ammo needed to be explained, but the clowns didn't. Like, I can believe gardeners, maids, cooks, and bugs in a mansion, but clowns aren't synonymous with mansions for me. I must have missed that part of the Great Gatsby with the circus clown. Daisy wasn't driving the car! It was the clown!!!
They're there to be hunted by the manor's owners. The gangsters round them up and ship them to the island in crates. There just wasn't enough time to kill *all* clowns though, hence the plot.
I figured the clowns were so numerous because Tess was always throwing parties; and, it had progressed to such an extent that she needed to keep hiring more entertainment just to keep up with the constant rotation of venue while some of entertainers had to sleep.
@@RupertAndCheese based on what tess says I guess the idea is EVERY enemy in the game is one of the guests and/or staff, transformed into a murderous monster by the act of time being 'killed'.
There's a first person action adventure game called "Titanic: Adventure Out of Time" which uses this weird psuedo-FMV animation for the characters. It's more like stop motion but with pictures of the actors.
One of the contributors of the Killing Time PC patch here. The imperfection (stutters) of mouselook is actually because the Page Up/Page Down keys were edited to use the mouse movement up and down. As for the audio popping per music changes is also with the old audio driver being imperfect. The original version was playing all audio at 11025 Hz. We patched the game sound driver to 22050 Hz so that the sound files that were exactly at 22050 Hz quality would play in it's fullest instead of being heavily compressed even if there are still some remains of noises in the background. We couldn't figure out yet how to reduce it in the driver file. Another unfortunate issue with doing this was making the FMVs audio have random cut-offs after a little while. Another thing we are unsure as to why, the game's video player code is really finicky with that. The jumping mechanic was originally worse. We had to patch it to allow the player jumping a little higher but also had it's own issues in other places. The jumping without patches works if the game is ran around 30-35 FPS... which also makes the weapon bobbing animation work again similarly to Doom. (Doom ran at 35 FPS originally on DOS) I perfectly agree with many areas being really cramped. Apparently the map size is doubled than the usual size of Doom levels (if you play the game levels in Doom for example) The annoying sticky wall (barely any friction) is another issue I'm not sure why it even happens. There was a patch log for one of the MAC release patches mentioning they "fixed" it but it wasn't really. With all these annoying limitations, with the game (even the re-releases online) are all still just using the same build released back in 1996 with no patches done to the game's codes and assets except on the MAC release, I decided to finally work on a project, thanks to a russian written tool to extract the data of the game, to reverse the map format to work with GZDoom. (The game was in fact running on a heavily modified Doom Engine, or at least based off of it, which is why a lot of similarities with Doom). One year later edit: According to Rebecca, she made her own BSP based engine for Killing Time PC, with a lot of similarities to DOOM. They did make the levels using a heavily edited level editor that was originally made for Doom. This now actually explains a lot of the similarities I was encountering.
That's an interesting read. You think that it would be possible to swap the 3DO FMVs since they seem to be of higher quality? Unless there's some plot rewrites between the two versions.
@@POLE7645 We've been wishing to get them. The 3DO version, while we could get the higher quality audio from it (which is included in the community patch for the PC version), the video themselves are not easy to get since they are encoded in a format that is still yet not figured out by the 3DO community. If the format could be deciphered, we would definitely include them for the PC version, as well as the remake to GZDoom I'm working on.
@@Tristan885 could you mod the 3DO copy of the game so the cutscenes play against a solid green background and chroma key them out? or something like that, trick it into handing them over relatively clean?
@@cerebralm I don’t know if my previous comment made it through since I wrote one and UA-cam didn’t seem to have sent it. Anyway, yes I once tried it but it didn’t work the first time. I could learn a bit more on editing the 3DO version to extract the videos out that way if I find out how to make all textures green.
Doom was specifically coded to prevent player from sticking to walls like this. Instead of just stopping the player, the game tried to slide them along a wall. A bug in that code caused a glitch called "wallrunning" where the player accelerates well beyond normal speed while running along a straight wall and looking at certain angle.
Classic slide mechanic giving you the ability to add more speed to your current walk speed, which then gets more added to it, which then gets more added to it. If I had a dollar for every game that had such a bug over the last 30 years, I'd propably have enough money to afford German electricity prices
@@Reac2its in quake and if you think about how many engines are based on that code even to this day its not surprising. there was a graph somewhere with all the engines that are related to quake and it was massive
11:25 - Cerberus had a twin-headed brother called Orthrus, who was also a multi-headed dog (except with only two heads). He was a guard dog for some weird abomination called Geryon, who Geryon himself is more interesting... since he was pretty much a '''human'''' creature that tried to one-up Cerberus in the limb multiplication department in having multiple heads, legs, arms, or even torsos (depending on the version of the myth).
I'm honestly impressed with the cutscene animations playing within the level for this era of game. Surprised not more of this type of doom shooters did that.
Yeah, I wonder how was that done - were these video files composited as sprites? These clips seemed to have way too many frames for a sprite sheet to hold.
@@unfa00 Pretty much the way to go: Just decode each frame from the video and draw it to the sprite. This is also actually exactly how in-game video is done in all games, except that in this case the display surface is placed in game world space, which was quite unique and cool. Kind of like an in-game AR. Don't think I've seen that before, ever.
I'd make a guess and say the people who made Doom shooters generally weren't interested in acting and deep storytelling. There's the famous quote from John Carmack about story in a videogame being as important as the story in an adult movie. It's more the mentality behind the people who made Doom rather than a general rule but it does tell you where their priorities lied.
That and the stage design making sense for it's location (like a mansion actually looking like how a mansion would look) makes this game feel ahead of it's time compared to something in the Build engine.
Ross saying "I am the keymaster" makes me think that there's a hidden Strife reference in every single game dungeon and when someone collects them all we too can use the vessels to win the game.
Cerberus is the three-headed dog, but there's actually a two-headed dog in mythology you can reference. Orthrus was the two-headed dog that guarded Geryon's cattle and was killed by Heracles during his twelve labors.
Funny thing is one of the oldest representations of Kérberos is with a single head, but snake heads about his body (not tail - oddly enough, despite some articles saying so). Which makes me think that Orthos was in fact the OG, and later stories picked up on his theme (since Kérberos is usually depicted with two heads) and ran with it. Orthos might've genuinely been some dude's double headed dog that was a novelty in old times, that slowly grew into a tall tale. Kinda like Marilyn Manson's rib (which was initially another celebrity's story, but got passed through schools for decades - long before the internet, growing more outlandish with every depiction).
Knowing how Ross isn't afraid to pull punches, it's refreshing to see the majority of the video he's giving praise to the game.He's tortured himself pretty bad for the sake of some of these videos so it's nice to see an overall positive experience.
"And that switch leads to ANOTHER switch and cockroaches, And that switch leads to ANOTHER switch and cockroaches... Okay I'll stop but the game doesn't." Lmao Ross is so damn good at writing these quips.
This comment is realistically about a decade too late, however some of the first things I ever came across when discovering UA-cam as a kid was Freemans Mind on Machinima. Little did I know it was just preparing me for Game Dungeon. Next month will mark 15 years since the first episodes of Freeman's Mind, and also 15 years of me watching you. Its incredible that I've gone from a wee boy to a grown man in that time. I wish you the best of luck into the future, and I really hope you keep going as long as you enjoy making content.
Well it's not that late, I'm still here. And don't worry, I'll keep going with something. I honestly feel like I haven't gotten to my best stuff yet, though FM/RGD may plateau.
You're incredibly lucky to have found his stuff first on UA-cam. I only found it because I use to peruse TV Tropes like a psychopath, and a quote from a Freeman's Mind video was at the top of the page.
I was honestly shocked how much I liked Killing Time when I played it last year, I heard the 3DO version is terrible but the PC version is genuinely a hidden little gem. I love its open design too and how you can tackle different objectives at different times, I honestly consider it a better Hexen than Hexen. Very rough around the edges but it shines where it matters most and that fan patch is absolutely essential to get the game running. Honestly it's one of those games that would benefit massively from a modern remaster to iron out those issues like sticking to the walls and adding some quality of life improvements because more people should play it.
Well... the 3DO version was the original while the PC version is an enhanced port. And the 3DO version is certainly a hidden gem for the 3DO. Certainly better than Doom for the 3DO.
Classy little game, but better than Hexen? Really? Maybe give that one a retry too, it's not nearly as cryptic as people tend to complain. At the very least not anymore so than something like this.
I never liked how cartoony the pc version looked, I found the 3do version to be more creepy. The only issue I had with the 3do version was the framerate, which is solved if you're emulating it on pc because you can just overclock the cpu in the settings and that fixes any slowdown. Although architecturally, the pc version is definitely much better than the 3do version. I also want to mention that you don't get the tommygun until much later in the game in the 3do version, and it's even possible to beat the game without ever getting it. IIRC, the entire area with the tommygun wielding enemies is optional. Looks like they got lazy and basically copied the design of the winecellar from the 3do version onto the pc version. In the 3do version, you can actually enter the sewers early, there is a 2nd entrance to it in the courtyard and you can go there before even going to the mansion. The flamethrower on the other hand is trapped, in the 3do version there are barely visible teleport orbs and grabbing the flamethrower teleports you to a nasty room, where you have to find your way out in pitch darkness, surrounded by the skull enemies (that look a lot better in the 3do version btw). The switch puzzle and hellroom is also in the 3do version of the game and without mouselook, changing the camera angle up and down is brutal. I don't think it was required to get all of the vessels in the 3do version to beat the game, only the keys. In the 3do version, all of the waterclocks are in the last area, the attic, so at least that isn't a slog compared to whatever this is. I don't remember there being a Tess boss in the 3do version. The game over sequence is the ending to the 3do version, Tess tricked you into destroying the waterclocks and you're trapped on the island.
The music jumping between spooky and ominous to instantly a silent film comedy soundtrack is hilarious. The composer really composed every genre of music for this game, regardless of if it fit the theme or not. I respect that
Sometimes it feels like he just made all the kinds of music he thought would fit the themes of the game and they just tried to use everything because they had paid for it.
That made me wonder if that was the composer's doing, so much as the composer just making a bunch of horror music and 30's sounding music, and then afterwards the level designer just assigned it to areas at random. I could see that 30's swing music working better in that clown infested area.
The concept of the Set boss battle is actually quite remarkable. Most games would have him be a hit sponge and lock you in an arena with him, but instead they made him a relatively fragile boogeyman that refuses to stay dead and pitted you against him in a running battle. That's really creative🤔
They went with the hit sponge/arena tactic for the final boss battle with Tess though. She wasn't fought in the 3DO version though. ua-cam.com/video/B3MkkBHlkX8/v-deo.html
13:43 I like how Ross completely glanced over the fact the house has a *second floor*, as in what that means from a technical /engine standpoint. Room over room stuff wasn't really that simple to pull off in those days, and from what I can see there's a silent teleporter or cut in the stairwell
I was actually aware of that, hence why I pointed out a second floor, though I wasn't sure how applicable it was to this engine since I wasn't even sure what it was.
@@Accursed_Farms ah, my bad. Didn't mean to come off as condescending btw now that I re-read my comment. Could be an in-house engine but don't think it was capable of literal room-over-room stuff, judging by how "flat" most of the levels are
@@Intestine_Ballin-ism The old Build engine quirk of "I can see and shoot at the enemy who's above me and they'll never react." I remember a boat level in blood being guilty of that.
@@arciks11 the map "raw sewage" is particularly egregious with one room you enter where you can just kill every enemy above you, and they don't see you
My favorite example of the "developer graveyard" is in Dragon Age Origins, where they included things they wanted to put in the game, but couldn't make work, like horses and polearm weapons.
I think this game really shines the potential of real life sprites - No one tries it anymore, but, you can pretty much make really interesting filmed sprites in games to add a very different vibe. It's a relic in visuals.
Man, Time Trap was great. I honestly wouldn't have thought anyone else had seen such a no-fanfare little indie title. And I'm really torn about whether I should be surprised, or not at all surprised that Ross did see it.
Time Trap did the impossible in it started out stereotypical direct-to-video bad, then gradually got better and better. I almost never see that happen in movies.
Oh my God. I remember seeing boxes of the PC version in some game store when I was like 5 years old and it traumatized me for weeks. Not even one minute into the video yet and you've already unlocked some of my most repressed, forgotten memories.
My guess to why so many old FPS games had such "unrealistic" level design is because most people creating games at that time came from a programming background, and didn't have any experience in architecture, product design, or film/theatre. Fields where you learn how a realistic environment is designed. And the limited design experience some of them had would perhaps be from designing mazes/dungeons in DnD. Purely a guess on my part, but that's where I would put my money.
We actually know the story of what happened with Doom level design, thanks to the book "Masters of Doom". Basically, Tom Hall, one of the original game designers at id, had done extensive research on layouts of military bases and such so he could make some realistic maps. Unfortunately, the team had found his maps too boring and grid-like (because, you know, real architecture tends to be rectangular, especially if we're talking about functional stuff such as military and industrial facilities), meanwhile John Romero produced more abstract maps but their gameplay was better, so the preference was given to his style.
This was an absolute treat of a game review. Ross is probably the most consistent youtuber quality wise which after over a decade sets him in living legend category for me.
It’s 2022 and I can clearly say as a modern and retro gamer Ross is THE best video game content creator on the platform today. His narration, actual creative criticism and humor make even the worst games watchable if he is playing them. Never change Ross and please never stop doing this I’ve been watching for years and I’ve relived so many childhood memories through your vids🙏🤘
Ross, the reason why there are a bunch of games with ""secrets"" (or story progression) that you have to spam click to activate, is the same reason you could get screwed in Sierra games. Most manuals had a phone number to call to get hints. THESE COSTED MONEY TO USE. It's the equivalent of an arcade token taker. Back in the day, a lot of people didn't have easy access to the internet and online game guides were rarer, so you could get legitimately stuck in a game, encouraging people to call the hint line and earn more money for the company, or help to sell guides or partnered gaming magazines with instructions (Nintendo Power anyone?). Yep, even back then companies were finding ways to bilk the player out of more money. This practice died once internet access became more common and sites like GameFAQs cropped up. It was similar for cheat codes too.
Damn, this is interesting information. Companies really were screwing over potentially great games with dumb tactics purely for greed, all the way back in the 90’s and early 2000’s. This is actually a massive revelation.
@@Dr.Oofers That's also why games like Battletoads and Ninja Gaiden III were so hard. They didn't want you renting and beating them over a weekend, so difficulty walls were added to push you to buy your own copy to practice on. But over in Japan, since game rentals were basically outlawed, the Japanese versions were far, far easier since they weren't losing sales to games rentals.
@@iceman78772 That I remember hearing, but to be fair, that was to combat game rentals since it did hurt sales. It wasn’t to squeeze you for your last dollar (unless you wanted to keep renting it, which only the store you rented it from would benefit).
@@Dr.Oofers We used rentals to decide if we liked something enough to buy it, but there were compulsive game-beater types who rented everything. Different kinds of players. The cheat codes/hints were not just a cash thing; we were poor AF but unless someone was a dick, the magazines & knowledge were passed around. I remember kids with notebooks filled with hand written/drawn cheats, hints, maps, build tips, etc. I hope some kids kept those; would love to look thru them again. Anyways, sorry, just got hit in memory lane but my point is there was a community aspect to "secrets" back then too, not just a cash grab.
Between a new Game Dungeon the day after Mandalore's Ring premiere, and how well I did on my midterms, the last four days have been amazing for me. Thanks Ross
"You know, I think we've seen a drop of clowns in games. People just can't handle them." "Oh my god! ...it's Killing Time from Studio 3DO!" I've been waiting 1 year, 10 months and 11 days for this.
I watched a bunch of other game reviews of bad games from other UA-camrs recently. They were complaining about everything, even the parts that I thought were only meh, or even decent. It really made me miss videos like Ross'. He says when something is bad, but he also praises everything that is good about a bad game. He is not in it to make the game look bad. He is just describing his honest experience and thoughts with the game. As a reviewer should.
Your content has come at a time when I need to ease my mind, Ross. My mother has been hospitalised after a car crash a few days back. I'm glad to have subscribed to you, keep doing what you do, thanks for keeping me entertained for almost a decade now.
I love reading all the neat trivia and facts everyone has on this game. Whenever I run across games like this I’ve never heard of I think “this game is someone’s childhood favorite they played in some basement decades ago” pretty cool stuff.
I'm honestly surprised the creators didn't add a twist to Tess that she was Set in some way, being her name is basically Set backwards. I don't know if they didn't realize it, or did and were just smart enough not to do it.
The whole "the level design actually looks like something" part is a good chunk of the reason I always loved Build engine games (Duke3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood, Redneck Rampage...) because the maps in those looked like places I might actually see in real life. No idea what they were thinking with Doom or Quake but I guess some random corridors, rooms and open areas that share the same palette composed mostly of brown and grey are easier to make than something more distinct?
The original Doom had a bunch of different people involved with different philosophies at the time and were just spitballing on what felt right, with less regard on their authenticity or believability of a location's design. Recall Carmack's quote to put the philosophy of the game design in a nutshell "Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important". There really wasn't like a visual standard or strict rules everyone followed during the design process. Every level designer had their priorities of how the levels flowed, where enemies, pickups, secrets, etc. should be, and making sure it all worked right. Similarly how platformers also tend to focus on making a level enjoyable as a platformer over making something that resembles structures and design that evokes real life engineering. Not to say they completely ignored aesthetics, there's definitely a certain look in mind they had for it, even with the contemporary reputation that Doom is a fast-paced action shooter, they were leaning a lot of towards horror, which also kind of gives further context on the direction Doom 3 went as soon as they were able to have the tech for it. But yeah all that said, I think it's unfair to just label it as random corridors, it's very much deliberately designed, it's just that making it look and feel like an authentic place wasn't on top of their list, and prioritized how it felt to play instead.
As outlined in _Masters of Doom,_ originally Doom had realistic architecture (or as "realistic" as it could get given engine and hardware limits). The team literally visited actual military bases and industrial buildings for mapping research. However Romero's style of unreal, highly abstract map design tended to flow much better during gameplay testing so they ditched the realism and deferred to that map style.
Every time a Game Dungeon gets uploaded, I always drop everything I'm doing to watch this amazing series in the WORLD!!!! This video is no exception! Love it!
These are the kind of video I love from Ross. Played this game about 10 years ago and I had about the exact same experience. It's wonky but ambitious, it's cheesy but atmospheric, it's all over the place but somehows still find my way back to it over the years. BLOOD is still the top dog in terms of great believable level design coupled with spooky Lovecraftian horror and John Woo action.
I replay Killing Time, Blood, Realms of the Haunting, and Clive Barker's Undying as a kind of tradition during Halloween season. Of those Blood and Undying are certainly head and shoulders above the other two, but ROTH and KT are still great, underrated classics -- even if ROTH does kind of devolve into ridiculous fantasy stuff in its latter half. There were just so extremely few horror fps games back in the 90s and 2000s vs the absolutely saturated, flooded market we have now.
Its also crazy that the revolver and thompson actually use the same cartridge so it isn’t just some magical pistol shaped grey goo resource that makes a little png animate in front of you.
My fiance and I look forward to this time of year because we know we will get to watch more game dungeon. Thank you for making these videos, we absolutely love them 💚
Ross would make the explanation probably funnier. - Burn it with fire - I know the global warming is an issue and I don't think ancient egyptian artefacts are the reason for it but when we talk about putting the immortal down getting rid their whole body is the easiest solution. - Architect was not crazy - I don't have to explain that. The only exception are those stairs probably build for weak lower class serving the royals. - Colorblindness included - Or maybe should I say; what is the door and what isn't. Sometimes when you push objects around in Doom Shooter you keep wandering if whole building will collapse when you pull a lever.
I’m sure that “haven’t seen the new Indiana Jones, but I hear this is better than that” will age so gracefully with the fifth one coming out, and expected to be worse.
If anyone's curious, which, probably not, the pistol and the Thompson gun using the same ammo is actually entirely plausible, in fact, makes sense. In WW1, the United States Army and I think Marines couldn't get enough M1911s to give to the troops, so they contracted Smith & Wesson and Colt to make a new revolver in 45 ACP, both called the M1917. These were sold as surplus for the most part after the war, and were cheap, well made, and good shooters. So it is entirely likely as a cost cutting thing to afford all of their Thompsons, the gangsters bought these old military revolvers that also use the same ammo.
With these games you gotta keep in mind that they came with instruction manuals that explained a lot of the stuff in the game that the game itself didn't. Like the purpose of the winged vessels here.
Every October since their breakup I'm constantly missing the Super Best Friends Shitstorm of Scariness, but at least I can always rely on Ross to keep the feeling of the season alive come Halloween time!
Ross talking about 90s FPS games and their environments not even trying to look like real world locations was great. One reason I love the Build Engine Trilogy. Especially Blood. Blood really went all out to look like real locations even with the limited tech.
Honestly, to me it was just hard to listen because it just sounded like "modern gamer incapable of understanding visually abstract but design-wise simplistic levels designed for fun, visual simplicity, speedrunning and combat."
One of the few games from the 90's I've actually played. I never finished it, but it has hands down one of the best theme songs I've ever heard for a video game. Plus it was scary as hell when I played the demo as a kid. It may have had more than a few problems, but this game was a hidden gem I wouldn't mind seeing rebooted. Side note: I now live on the coast of Maine where the game takes place. (Not to worry, none of the islands have been overrun by the undead for at LEAST two weeks.)
You touch on something I noticed in the 90s as well. I clearly remember being immensely impressed by shooters that had realistic environments, precisely because the trend was to just have random corridors. So like, the offices of early Half-Life and stuff in Sin.
This is literally the plot to Great Gatsby. Gatsby was a former bootlegger who went to great lengths to hide his past, Tom Buchanan was a respected Egyptologist, and Daisy Buchanan was obsessed with finding an ancient Egyptian artifact. The narrator, Nick Carraway, let his shotgun do most of his talking.
I have been so lost in life's BS lately that I totally forgot that today was halloween. So I was pleasantly surprised when I was reminded by a Game Dungeon halloween special. It feels like finding money you forgot on one of your jacket pockets.
I literally yelled out loud and clicked immediately. We may not be getting spoiled like last October but a Halloween Game Dudgeon is always an immediate watch for me.
Visually this reminds me so much of Blood (and so does that outdoors music). It'd be really interesting to see how that game would play out if all the levels were logically connected the way they are in this game.
41:42 I was also getting a The Descent vibe from those caves, as well as an Enigma of Amigara Fault one, especially at the part where you were worried you had to go through a too narrow crack in one of the cave areas earlier. Such a thing actually happens in the Amigara Fault webcomic/manga and the results are similar to what happens if a human gets sucked through a large enough pool drain into the pool's filter fan.
I always appreciate Ross for showing these exotic games (esp older games) that we otherwise would not likely run into in our lives - I appreciate that this is one solid place to find these little troves, I wanna find more little caches like this.
OK, awards time! Feel free to suggest better ones than me as I may be reaching a little. *FMV Game that Doesn't Suck* It's a title also shared by Realms of the Haunting (though parts of that game are bad) and Rama. While we lose out a little on the cutscene quality front compared to the crappy 3DO version, the rest of the game sure makes up for it even though there's some hurdles. It's amazing how the actors blend into the game world so well and unlike Rama, we don't lose any immersion by having them walk off offscreen and completely vanish instead of helping us, as the FMV characters except the two boss ones are System Shock 2 & Bioshock style ghost visions. *Why Hasn't Someone Done This Yet?* While we did have Pathways into Darkness & Marathon for story in a shooter with the former being an RPG with smooth level transitions and the latter being Doom 4 & Doom Eternal before it was cool (literally as Marathon had a mod called Marathon Eternal first), they both suffer from Wolfenstein & Doom design respectively. Marathon 1 is really bad for having areas labelled on the automap look nothing like themselves, and the bodies don't stay dead though PID has a good reason for that. For example, we get a room that's supposed to be a drydock for shuttles, but it's a tiny closed in room with a bunch of lifts that are meant to represent garage jacks and nothing like a spaceship dock. The recreation area in the first escort quest is devoid of anything for recreation minus a nearby target range called "the funhouse" and in the third final level we have cargo holds the size of garden sheds that are completely empty. Then there's the open, handrail-less, uninsulated lava heating & power system canals, a "sensory deprivation chamber" that's just a medieval oubliette and of course the Galaxy Quest hallways. System Shock tried to alleviate this and take a 3D Metroid approach, but it also had respawning enemies, awful controls (except the Enhanced Edition) and its realistic architecture was mostly limited to clicking on textures to see what they were meant to be, adventure game style. I don't think Powerslave (Saturn) was out yet and it still had the respawning monsters problem. Killing Time is basically a forgotten gem that set the stage in Boomer Shooters for a lot of level design choices we take for granted nowadays most of us only saw in platformers like Tomb Raider or shooters like Build Engine games back then. It feels like a strange mix between a Doom clone shooter like Marathon, a 3D metroidvania like System Shock or Powerslave, an FMV horror game like Realms of the Haunting and something with semi realistic level design like Blood, Tomb Raider 3 or Half Life. Some of those latter games handled it all better especially Tomb Raider & Half Life, but seeing stuff like this back in the mid 90s before more famous games did it was like seeing a game like Rise of the Triad 2013 revive Boomer Shooters before Doom 4 & Wolfenstein: The New Order made it cool. *Doesn't Respect Your Time* If you see what I did there. We also have some rather convoluted quests like the puzzle design straight out of Marathon Evil and how some areas are a slog to get through, like the clown maze, wine cellar and vessel hunting if you missed any, followed by the obnoxious Set chase.
Tip 1: jumping is mostly fixed with the community patch. Don't forget you also jump much higher and farther if you RUN. The default movement is walk, and there's no auto-run so you have to hold the button. I found the lighthouse and "fire room" areas easy with the patch and running jumps. Tip 2: there's a hidden easter egg room in the starting area of the mansion: From the main lobby go through the East (first right) door, straight forward til you reach the section of hallway with 4 pillars. Use the wall between the pillars on the left to open the developer's room. Use each portrait to spawn a weapon, item, booby trap or enemy ....all of which reference in-jokes with the dev team members. You can get a flamethrower, health orbs, ankh, crowbar, 2nd pistol, various ammo and an "Egyption trash can" (200 health). The hall is accessible as soon as you get the RSVP to enter the mansion, so the dev room can be a huge advantage very early in the game. Tip 3: you need to collect all 10 colored vessels to open the endgame doors. Each vessel also provides a *single-use* temporary powerup when activated (god mode, infinite ammo, nightvision, etc). _Except white vessels,_ which aren't needed for the doors. White ones just reload all the colored vessels, and there's 3 of them hidden throughout the game. So, find all 3 white vessels and you can use all the colored vessel powerups 4 times per playthrough.
Just wanted to quickly drop by to express my appreciation for yet another review of yet another game I have never heard about! Lots of good points on the level design and music.
I love the strange mix of classic spooky horror, action, film noir and ancient Egyptian aesthetics here. I think it's the black leather gloves under a pinstripe suit jacket the protagonist has that really drew me into the style, like you're a snazzy hitman fighting off ancient evils.
As someone with dev experience, if I were to guess: the "wall friction" is because the game is checking for collision with walls and if there is, it's setting the players velocity to zero. It's not pushing you back out or letting you "slide" along it the way DOOM et all would by calculating a new velocity vector along the wall, it's just setting it zero. You only "unstick" yourself by using an arrow key that the next velocity addition yields you being outside the collision. So if you're touching a wall ("colliding") and attempt to move longwise with the wall with the arrow keys, unless you move directly away from the wall you're still "in" the wall and can't move forward along it. Kind of hard to illustrate without a visual aid. Basically it's "on collision, velocity equals zero". You can see this in some 2D games where a character goes flying/jumping/whatever, then touches a wall and freezes for a frame, then starts falling from gravity. They don't preserve the original velocity, they just zero it. Unless this is a bug is not in the original. Then it could be a wide variety of things and what-if scenarios.
Killing Time always fascinated me. Weird as hell, surprisingly ambitious, kind of bad but also kind of good... my favorite blend of attributes in games of the era.
I've made a playlist of Game Dungeons i prefer listening to while working on projects, and most of them are the Halloween themed ones. This one is going to be placed in between "Strife" and "Realms of the Haunting". Great work!
The ghost of the Egyptian relic hunter sort of resembles Miss Fisher from an Australian crime drama called Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. Nice touch with Build Engine Powerslave at the start. 👍 Also, the atmosphere at 9:38 is from Tomb Raider 4: The Last Revelation. A snippet of it also appears in Marathon 2 during the intro screen for Episode 8: Simulacrums.
@@arciks11 Which was the style at the time. Just like Doom's doors and Marathon's elevators. Some monster sounds in this game like a splat sound also seem to be from Pathways into Darkness, Marathon's predecessor.
Great upload! Thank you for amazing content. I found your channel last summer and binged all of the episodes of the Game Dungeon in a few weeks. New episodes are always a delight.
its hard to believe we've had to wait the better half of a year for the next installment in our favorite video series of all time. this dude just has something no one else does
Can we get a moment of silent appreciation for the amount of times during this series where Ross has said 'this audio/visual thing is annoying, but I'll edit it out for you guys'. That's just above and beyond and I shudder to imagine the cumulative amount of hours he's spent doing that over the years.
It's a normal thing to do on youtube, other people don't mention it because it's expected.
@@AcidelCyqage say you don't know anything about editing without telling me you don't know anything about editing
The biggest example is probably armed and delirious… I’m trying to imagine how much time he put into fixing alllll the audio just for the video, while torturing himself listening to whatever torture that was.
@@kevinhaas4820 say that you a reddit user without saying it.
@@AcidelCyqage So instead of explaining further what you mean you resort to telling me I´m using one of the biggest websites on the Internet? What does that have to do with your comment? Or my Comment? My brother in Christ please get a grip.
What fascinates me about Ross is how he's somehow able to come across as extremely normal and relatable, yet also weird and eccentric, at the same time.
The man is an international treasure.
Ross is probably the best litmus for "Reasonable Guy." His analytical skills and rhetorical wit evoke an American everyman that's appealing to old and young alike.
he sounds like a fucking idiot
and no youtube this comment is not respectful
I love him cuz he's just like me.
I'm apparently extremely charismatic and fascinating but people use "weird" to describe me in a good way. I'd marry him if I could.
I feel like he's good at making stream of thought content, becuase he knows exactly the right way to word his thought process in a way that's easily understandable.
I like how the designers decided that the gratuitous amount of ammo needed to be explained, but the clowns didn't. Like, I can believe gardeners, maids, cooks, and bugs in a mansion, but clowns aren't synonymous with mansions for me. I must have missed that part of the Great Gatsby with the circus clown. Daisy wasn't driving the car! It was the clown!!!
They're there to be hunted by the manor's owners. The gangsters round them up and ship them to the island in crates. There just wasn't enough time to kill *all* clowns though, hence the plot.
Also the demons, there really wasn't any kind of obvious reason for demons to be there.
I figured the clowns were so numerous because Tess was always throwing parties; and, it had progressed to such an extent that she needed to keep hiring more entertainment just to keep up with the constant rotation of venue while some of entertainers had to sleep.
@@RupertAndCheese based on what tess says I guess the idea is EVERY enemy in the game is one of the guests and/or staff, transformed into a murderous monster by the act of time being 'killed'.
There’s a cutscene where Tess mentions hiring clowns for entertainment at her party, though I think she might have gone a little overboard.
low resolution FMV in sprite-based FPS is such an unique taste. I wish there were more like this.
Lands of Lore 2 has got you covered, if you prefer an RPG
There's a first person action adventure game called "Titanic: Adventure Out of Time" which uses this weird psuedo-FMV animation for the characters. It's more like stop motion but with pictures of the actors.
@@andrewdias478 | So, original Mortal Kombat style?
@@2HeadedHero There's also the more recent "Hand of Doom."
One of the contributors of the Killing Time PC patch here.
The imperfection (stutters) of mouselook is actually because the Page Up/Page Down keys were edited to use the mouse movement up and down.
As for the audio popping per music changes is also with the old audio driver being imperfect. The original version was playing all audio at 11025 Hz. We patched the game sound driver to 22050 Hz so that the sound files that were exactly at 22050 Hz quality would play in it's fullest instead of being heavily compressed even if there are still some remains of noises in the background. We couldn't figure out yet how to reduce it in the driver file. Another unfortunate issue with doing this was making the FMVs audio have random cut-offs after a little while. Another thing we are unsure as to why, the game's video player code is really finicky with that.
The jumping mechanic was originally worse. We had to patch it to allow the player jumping a little higher but also had it's own issues in other places. The jumping without patches works if the game is ran around 30-35 FPS... which also makes the weapon bobbing animation work again similarly to Doom. (Doom ran at 35 FPS originally on DOS)
I perfectly agree with many areas being really cramped. Apparently the map size is doubled than the usual size of Doom levels (if you play the game levels in Doom for example)
The annoying sticky wall (barely any friction) is another issue I'm not sure why it even happens. There was a patch log for one of the MAC release patches mentioning they "fixed" it but it wasn't really.
With all these annoying limitations, with the game (even the re-releases online) are all still just using the same build released back in 1996 with no patches done to the game's codes and assets except on the MAC release, I decided to finally work on a project, thanks to a russian written tool to extract the data of the game, to reverse the map format to work with GZDoom. (The game was in fact running on a heavily modified Doom Engine, or at least based off of it, which is why a lot of similarities with Doom).
One year later edit: According to Rebecca, she made her own BSP based engine for Killing Time PC, with a lot of similarities to DOOM. They did make the levels using a heavily edited level editor that was originally made for Doom. This now actually explains a lot of the similarities I was encountering.
That's an interesting read.
You think that it would be possible to swap the 3DO FMVs since they seem to be of higher quality? Unless there's some plot rewrites between the two versions.
@@POLE7645 We've been wishing to get them. The 3DO version, while we could get the higher quality audio from it (which is included in the community patch for the PC version), the video themselves are not easy to get since they are encoded in a format that is still yet not figured out by the 3DO community.
If the format could be deciphered, we would definitely include them for the PC version, as well as the remake to GZDoom I'm working on.
@@Tristan885 fantastic work either way. my hat's off to people like you preserving art like this
@@Tristan885 could you mod the 3DO copy of the game so the cutscenes play against a solid green background and chroma key them out? or something like that, trick it into handing them over relatively clean?
@@cerebralm I don’t know if my previous comment made it through since I wrote one and UA-cam didn’t seem to have sent it. Anyway, yes I once tried it but it didn’t work the first time. I could learn a bit more on editing the 3DO version to extract the videos out that way if I find out how to make all textures green.
I love it when i see a Game Dungeon and don't recognize the game's name. I know I'm in for an adventure.
I actually DID recognize the game, as I actually own it on my 3DO.
I love it when I see a Game Dungeon
Those plus crazy stories from Ross's life are the best.
You saw this video and had some time to kill you say?
@@Kenshiro3rd you have one?? Man, I never knew anyone as a kid that had one. Have any good games?
Doom was specifically coded to prevent player from sticking to walls like this. Instead of just stopping the player, the game tried to slide them along a wall. A bug in that code caused a glitch called "wallrunning" where the player accelerates well beyond normal speed while running along a straight wall and looking at certain angle.
Classic slide mechanic giving you the ability to add more speed to your current walk speed, which then gets more added to it, which then gets more added to it.
If I had a dollar for every game that had such a bug over the last 30 years, I'd propably have enough money to afford German electricity prices
It's been actual decades & I instantly flashed back to that haptic illusion when Ross was experimenting there. Which was wild.
@@Reac2its in quake and if you think about how many engines are based on that code even to this day its not surprising. there was a graph somewhere with all the engines that are related to quake and it was massive
11:25 - Cerberus had a twin-headed brother called Orthrus, who was also a multi-headed dog (except with only two heads). He was a guard dog for some weird abomination called Geryon, who Geryon himself is more interesting... since he was pretty much a '''human'''' creature that tried to one-up Cerberus in the limb multiplication department in having multiple heads, legs, arms, or even torsos (depending on the version of the myth).
dfkjvn a human that has multiple heads, legs, arms AND torsos is literally just multiple dudes standing near each other
@@thuslyandfurthermore I think there's a Japanese racing game who took that idea very seriously
I can't remember its name, though
This is follow-up episode worthy if I remember.
@@Accursed_Farms sorry to jump in but you should put a disclaimer next to your GoG affiliate link for legal butthole protection.
@@Accursed_Farms u also didnt give awards to this game
I'm honestly impressed with the cutscene animations playing within the level for this era of game. Surprised not more of this type of doom shooters did that.
Yeah, I wonder how was that done - were these video files composited as sprites? These clips seemed to have way too many frames for a sprite sheet to hold.
@@unfa00 Pretty much the way to go: Just decode each frame from the video and draw it to the sprite. This is also actually exactly how in-game video is done in all games, except that in this case the display surface is placed in game world space, which was quite unique and cool. Kind of like an in-game AR. Don't think I've seen that before, ever.
28:29 is it me, or does the butler sound like someone from Oblivion?
I'd make a guess and say the people who made Doom shooters generally weren't interested in acting and deep storytelling.
There's the famous quote from John Carmack about story in a videogame being as important as the story in an adult movie. It's more the mentality behind the people who made Doom rather than a general rule but it does tell you where their priorities lied.
That and the stage design making sense for it's location (like a mansion actually looking like how a mansion would look) makes this game feel ahead of it's time compared to something in the Build engine.
Happy Halloween everyone, the Admiral hopes you all get plenty of treats and maybe a trick or two. As always, more later.
Cheers, Admiral. Hope things are looking up for you.
Ahh, The Admiral. Things are starting to make sense.
Thank you admiral! Hope the family is well!
NOW I am finally ready for Halloween.
Really says something about the game in today's episode if not even you are saying things make sense.
Ross saying "I am the keymaster" makes me think that there's a hidden Strife reference in every single game dungeon and when someone collects them all we too can use the vessels to win the game.
FIVE FEET BY FOUR FEET
.... it's just a Ghostbusters reference.
Cerberus is the three-headed dog, but there's actually a two-headed dog in mythology you can reference. Orthrus was the two-headed dog that guarded Geryon's cattle and was killed by Heracles during his twelve labors.
Good to know
Thank you very much for the reference!
give it another few millennia and we'll get it to four headed dog
Well, he sure spared its puppies, judging by the game )
Funny thing is one of the oldest representations of Kérberos is with a single head, but snake heads about his body (not tail - oddly enough, despite some articles saying so). Which makes me think that Orthos was in fact the OG, and later stories picked up on his theme (since Kérberos is usually depicted with two heads) and ran with it. Orthos might've genuinely been some dude's double headed dog that was a novelty in old times, that slowly grew into a tall tale. Kinda like Marilyn Manson's rib (which was initially another celebrity's story, but got passed through schools for decades - long before the internet, growing more outlandish with every depiction).
Knowing how Ross isn't afraid to pull punches, it's refreshing to see the majority of the video he's giving praise to the game.He's tortured himself pretty bad for the sake of some of these videos so it's nice to see an overall positive experience.
"And that switch leads to ANOTHER switch and cockroaches, And that switch leads to ANOTHER switch and cockroaches... Okay I'll stop but the game doesn't." Lmao Ross is so damn good at writing these quips.
26:17
Tess inexplicably changing from live-action to CG while turning out to be a human pain elemental is probably the scariest part of this game.
I guess becoming CG is the price of immortality.
@@fallenlight8460 the scorpion king learned this
Interesting fact about Tess in the PC version, she's exclusive to the PC version as a boss, the 3DO version doesn't have her as one.
@@clan741
🤣
@@MegaRazorback The 3DO version ended with this. ua-cam.com/video/B3MkkBHlkX8/v-deo.html
This comment is realistically about a decade too late, however some of the first things I ever came across when discovering UA-cam as a kid was Freemans Mind on Machinima. Little did I know it was just preparing me for Game Dungeon.
Next month will mark 15 years since the first episodes of Freeman's Mind, and also 15 years of me watching you. Its incredible that I've gone from a wee boy to a grown man in that time. I wish you the best of luck into the future, and I really hope you keep going as long as you enjoy making content.
Well it's not that late, I'm still here. And don't worry, I'll keep going with something. I honestly feel like I haven't gotten to my best stuff yet, though FM/RGD may plateau.
@@Accursed_Farms love the honesty bro
@@Accursed_Farms Can’t wait for “The Movie” project. 🙂
Yeah, it's kinda insane to think about how much of my life I've known who Ross is / consumed his content
You're incredibly lucky to have found his stuff first on UA-cam. I only found it because I use to peruse TV Tropes like a psychopath, and a quote from a Freeman's Mind video was at the top of the page.
I was honestly shocked how much I liked Killing Time when I played it last year, I heard the 3DO version is terrible but the PC version is genuinely a hidden little gem. I love its open design too and how you can tackle different objectives at different times, I honestly consider it a better Hexen than Hexen. Very rough around the edges but it shines where it matters most and that fan patch is absolutely essential to get the game running. Honestly it's one of those games that would benefit massively from a modern remaster to iron out those issues like sticking to the walls and adding some quality of life improvements because more people should play it.
Well... the 3DO version was the original while the PC version is an enhanced port. And the 3DO version is certainly a hidden gem for the 3DO. Certainly better than Doom for the 3DO.
The 3DO version was quite good if you can get through that initial slog of an intro where you're wandering around killing ducks for no reason.
Classy little game, but better than Hexen? Really? Maybe give that one a retry too, it's not nearly as cryptic as people tend to complain. At the very least not anymore so than something like this.
I never liked how cartoony the pc version looked, I found the 3do version to be more creepy. The only issue I had with the 3do version was the framerate, which is solved if you're emulating it on pc because you can just overclock the cpu in the settings and that fixes any slowdown. Although architecturally, the pc version is definitely much better than the 3do version.
I also want to mention that you don't get the tommygun until much later in the game in the 3do version, and it's even possible to beat the game without ever getting it. IIRC, the entire area with the tommygun wielding enemies is optional.
Looks like they got lazy and basically copied the design of the winecellar from the 3do version onto the pc version.
In the 3do version, you can actually enter the sewers early, there is a 2nd entrance to it in the courtyard and you can go there before even going to the mansion. The flamethrower on the other hand is trapped, in the 3do version there are barely visible teleport orbs and grabbing the flamethrower teleports you to a nasty room, where you have to find your way out in pitch darkness, surrounded by the skull enemies (that look a lot better in the 3do version btw).
The switch puzzle and hellroom is also in the 3do version of the game and without mouselook, changing the camera angle up and down is brutal.
I don't think it was required to get all of the vessels in the 3do version to beat the game, only the keys. In the 3do version, all of the waterclocks are in the last area, the attic, so at least that isn't a slog compared to whatever this is. I don't remember there being a Tess boss in the 3do version. The game over sequence is the ending to the 3do version, Tess tricked you into destroying the waterclocks and you're trapped on the island.
3DO version is better, then PC version
The music jumping between spooky and ominous to instantly a silent film comedy soundtrack is hilarious. The composer really composed every genre of music for this game, regardless of if it fit the theme or not. I respect that
Sometimes it feels like he just made all the kinds of music he thought would fit the themes of the game and they just tried to use everything because they had paid for it.
That made me wonder if that was the composer's doing, so much as the composer just making a bunch of horror music and 30's sounding music, and then afterwards the level designer just assigned it to areas at random. I could see that 30's swing music working better in that clown infested area.
@@Henskelion that's even funnier to think about.
"What do you mean you put the clown music in the Spooky Forest? I made a Spooky Forest theme!!"
Hot mess is what I'd call it.
@@planescaped It works for Final Fantasy 14
Ross's Game Dungeon and RLMs Best Of The Worst are becoming my favourite Halloween tradition.
Mandalore Gaming's insane adventure game showcase has been added to that list for me.
That and their Christmas specials. Easily makes both holidays far more enjoyable!
how the hell are you everywhere at once
AIIIIIIIIIIIDDDDDDDDDSSSSSSSSS
"And there are gangstas in the garden" made me laugh more than it should.
Love episodes where Ross is actually having a good time.
Dungeon Siege ahum.
a killing time
Ross, your Halloween videos are the only thing these days that get me into the spooky season.
Agreed :)
Spooky vids are the only thing for me too.
Nooooo. The new Hellraiser is AWESOME!!!! I am not a shill for this movie but IT GETS THE FUDGING SPOOKY and REALLY GOOD HORROR 😄😄😄😄😄
for me, all year is the spooky season. fuck 2020 and years after it
@@DyoKasparov ❤👍 Please. Let's all press on 😄❤👍
The concept of the Set boss battle is actually quite remarkable. Most games would have him be a hit sponge and lock you in an arena with him, but instead they made him a relatively fragile boogeyman that refuses to stay dead and pitted you against him in a running battle.
That's really creative🤔
They went with the hit sponge/arena tactic for the final boss battle with Tess though. She wasn't fought in the 3DO version though. ua-cam.com/video/B3MkkBHlkX8/v-deo.html
13:43 I like how Ross completely glanced over the fact the house has a *second floor*, as in what that means from a technical /engine standpoint. Room over room stuff wasn't really that simple to pull off in those days, and from what I can see there's a silent teleporter or cut in the stairwell
I was actually aware of that, hence why I pointed out a second floor, though I wasn't sure how applicable it was to this engine since I wasn't even sure what it was.
@@Accursed_Farms ah, my bad. Didn't mean to come off as condescending btw now that I re-read my comment. Could be an in-house engine but don't think it was capable of literal room-over-room stuff, judging by how "flat" most of the levels are
@@Intestine_Ballin-ism The old Build engine quirk of "I can see and shoot at the enemy who's above me and they'll never react." I remember a boat level in blood being guilty of that.
The 3DO always could do true polygonal 3D though, so I'd expect it if it is a port.
@@arciks11 the map "raw sewage" is particularly egregious with one room you enter where you can just kill every enemy above you, and they don't see you
My favorite example of the "developer graveyard" is in Dragon Age Origins, where they included things they wanted to put in the game, but couldn't make work, like horses and polearm weapons.
Horses, those are difficult, that makes sense... But giving up on polearms? Now that's just cowardly.
@@silverbeach1557
As a lifelong fan of spears and glaives, I'm forced to agree.
Same thing is in postal 2, one of them is rape clowns
They probably discovered that pointy sticks in general are pretty good, and decided to remove them to not embarass the sword guys.
@@silverbeach1557 difficult? Nah
I think this game really shines the potential of real life sprites - No one tries it anymore, but, you can pretty much make really interesting filmed sprites in games to add a very different vibe.
It's a relic in visuals.
I love it too. Sad that nobody use live actors anymore.
If only the resolution was a little higher. (3do version looked ok)
Man, Time Trap was great. I honestly wouldn't have thought anyone else had seen such a no-fanfare little indie title. And I'm really torn about whether I should be surprised, or not at all surprised that Ross did see it.
Time Trap did the impossible in it started out stereotypical direct-to-video bad, then gradually got better and better. I almost never see that happen in movies.
Strong Realms of the Haunting energy on this one. Also Ross as a man of the people who doesn't want to hurt the succubus maids, respect.
I literally left the same comment!
This feels very similar to realms of the haunting 😏
@@jeydeem2023 Except with a stronger emphasis on action.
Ross always brings the good stuff in the Halloween season
Oh my God. I remember seeing boxes of the PC version in some game store when I was like 5 years old and it traumatized me for weeks. Not even one minute into the video yet and you've already unlocked some of my most repressed, forgotten memories.
My guess to why so many old FPS games had such "unrealistic" level design is because most people creating games at that time came from a programming background, and didn't have any experience in architecture, product design, or film/theatre. Fields where you learn how a realistic environment is designed. And the limited design experience some of them had would perhaps be from designing mazes/dungeons in DnD.
Purely a guess on my part, but that's where I would put my money.
We actually know the story of what happened with Doom level design, thanks to the book "Masters of Doom". Basically, Tom Hall, one of the original game designers at id, had done extensive research on layouts of military bases and such so he could make some realistic maps. Unfortunately, the team had found his maps too boring and grid-like (because, you know, real architecture tends to be rectangular, especially if we're talking about functional stuff such as military and industrial facilities), meanwhile John Romero produced more abstract maps but their gameplay was better, so the preference was given to his style.
This was an absolute treat of a game review. Ross is probably the most consistent youtuber quality wise which after over a decade sets him in living legend category for me.
Man that zoom in and choir at *Adds full mouselock made me laugh waaaaay harder than it should hsve
My favorite moment was when Tess said "It's killing time" and killed time.
I clapped.
It’s 2022 and I can clearly say as a modern and retro gamer Ross is THE best video game content creator on the platform today. His narration, actual creative criticism and humor make even the worst games watchable if he is playing them. Never change Ross and please never stop doing this I’ve been watching for years and I’ve relived so many childhood memories through your vids🙏🤘
He's truly my favorite creator.
Ross, the reason why there are a bunch of games with ""secrets"" (or story progression) that you have to spam click to activate, is the same reason you could get screwed in Sierra games. Most manuals had a phone number to call to get hints. THESE COSTED MONEY TO USE. It's the equivalent of an arcade token taker.
Back in the day, a lot of people didn't have easy access to the internet and online game guides were rarer, so you could get legitimately stuck in a game, encouraging people to call the hint line and earn more money for the company, or help to sell guides or partnered gaming magazines with instructions (Nintendo Power anyone?).
Yep, even back then companies were finding ways to bilk the player out of more money. This practice died once internet access became more common and sites like GameFAQs cropped up. It was similar for cheat codes too.
There's a reason I don't play Sierra's other games no matter how much I like Quest for Glory.
Damn, this is interesting information. Companies really were screwing over potentially great games with dumb tactics purely for greed, all the way back in the 90’s and early 2000’s.
This is actually a massive revelation.
@@Dr.Oofers That's also why games like Battletoads and Ninja Gaiden III were so hard. They didn't want you renting and beating them over a weekend, so difficulty walls were added to push you to buy your own copy to practice on. But over in Japan, since game rentals were basically outlawed, the Japanese versions were far, far easier since they weren't losing sales to games rentals.
@@iceman78772 That I remember hearing, but to be fair, that was to combat game rentals since it did hurt sales. It wasn’t to squeeze you for your last dollar (unless you wanted to keep renting it, which only the store you rented it from would benefit).
@@Dr.Oofers We used rentals to decide if we liked something enough to buy it, but there were compulsive game-beater types who rented everything. Different kinds of players. The cheat codes/hints were not just a cash thing; we were poor AF but unless someone was a dick, the magazines & knowledge were passed around. I remember kids with notebooks filled with hand written/drawn cheats, hints, maps, build tips, etc. I hope some kids kept those; would love to look thru them again.
Anyways, sorry, just got hit in memory lane but my point is there was a community aspect to "secrets" back then too, not just a cash grab.
Between a new Game Dungeon the day after Mandalore's Ring premiere, and how well I did on my midterms, the last four days have been amazing for me. Thanks Ross
"You know, I think we've seen a drop of clowns in games. People just can't handle them."
"Oh my god! ...it's Killing Time from Studio 3DO!"
I've been waiting 1 year, 10 months and 11 days for this.
same
Good ol’ Civvie11.
Thank you Ross for getting this game remade
Supposedly, the vampire bat maids don't attack you unless attacked, which makes Ross quite the murderer
I watched a bunch of other game reviews of bad games from other UA-camrs recently. They were complaining about everything, even the parts that I thought were only meh, or even decent. It really made me miss videos like Ross'. He says when something is bad, but he also praises everything that is good about a bad game. He is not in it to make the game look bad. He is just describing his honest experience and thoughts with the game. As a reviewer should.
*Ross's
Your content has come at a time when I need to ease my mind, Ross.
My mother has been hospitalised after a car crash a few days back.
I'm glad to have subscribed to you, keep doing what you do, thanks for keeping me entertained for almost a decade now.
Sorry to hear that, I hope she's well and makes a speedy recovery.
That really sucks man, thinkin about y’all, hope everything turns out ok
Hope your mother fully recovers, and that she does so soon.
Aye, all the best wishes mate ✨
Hope she gets well soon
No awards? Absolute fan, so happy to see fresh content.
The cut-scenes in Killing Time are really impressive, as the developers somehow turned real FMV actors into sprites in the Doom engine.
Happy Halloween Ross (and everyone watching) really appreciate the effort you put in to each video
I love reading all the neat trivia and facts everyone has on this game. Whenever I run across games like this I’ve never heard of I think “this game is someone’s childhood favorite they played in some basement decades ago” pretty cool stuff.
The live action sprite cut scenes worked really well! Even the heavily compressed video aged better than some stiff animation I've seen elsewhere.
I guess this is what Ross expected Realms of the Haunting to be, years later, but he got it!
I LOVE this kind of game being reviewed.
Fun fact: in mythology a two-headed dog is called an Orthrus.
I'm honestly surprised the creators didn't add a twist to Tess that she was Set in some way, being her name is basically Set backwards. I don't know if they didn't realize it, or did and were just smart enough not to do it.
The whole "the level design actually looks like something" part is a good chunk of the reason I always loved Build engine games (Duke3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood, Redneck Rampage...) because the maps in those looked like places I might actually see in real life. No idea what they were thinking with Doom or Quake but I guess some random corridors, rooms and open areas that share the same palette composed mostly of brown and grey are easier to make than something more distinct?
The original Doom had a bunch of different people involved with different philosophies at the time and were just spitballing on what felt right, with less regard on their authenticity or believability of a location's design. Recall Carmack's quote to put the philosophy of the game design in a nutshell "Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important". There really wasn't like a visual standard or strict rules everyone followed during the design process. Every level designer had their priorities of how the levels flowed, where enemies, pickups, secrets, etc. should be, and making sure it all worked right. Similarly how platformers also tend to focus on making a level enjoyable as a platformer over making something that resembles structures and design that evokes real life engineering.
Not to say they completely ignored aesthetics, there's definitely a certain look in mind they had for it, even with the contemporary reputation that Doom is a fast-paced action shooter, they were leaning a lot of towards horror, which also kind of gives further context on the direction Doom 3 went as soon as they were able to have the tech for it. But yeah all that said, I think it's unfair to just label it as random corridors, it's very much deliberately designed, it's just that making it look and feel like an authentic place wasn't on top of their list, and prioritized how it felt to play instead.
As outlined in _Masters of Doom,_ originally Doom had realistic architecture (or as "realistic" as it could get given engine and hardware limits). The team literally visited actual military bases and industrial buildings for mapping research. However Romero's style of unreal, highly abstract map design tended to flow much better during gameplay testing so they ditched the realism and deferred to that map style.
I wonder if this game is suffering from the classic I-asked-for-evil-clown-enemies-but-got-evil-clouds-instead syndrome.
Every time a Game Dungeon gets uploaded, I always drop everything I'm doing to watch this amazing series in the WORLD!!!! This video is no exception! Love it!
These are the kind of video I love from Ross.
Played this game about 10 years ago and I had about the exact same experience.
It's wonky but ambitious, it's cheesy but atmospheric, it's all over the place but somehows still find my way back to it over the years.
BLOOD is still the top dog in terms of great believable level design coupled with spooky Lovecraftian horror and John Woo action.
I replay Killing Time, Blood, Realms of the Haunting, and Clive Barker's Undying as a kind of tradition during Halloween season. Of those Blood and Undying are certainly head and shoulders above the other two, but ROTH and KT are still great, underrated classics -- even if ROTH does kind of devolve into ridiculous fantasy stuff in its latter half. There were just so extremely few horror fps games back in the 90s and 2000s vs the absolutely saturated, flooded market we have now.
Its also crazy that the revolver and thompson actually use the same cartridge so it isn’t just some magical pistol shaped grey goo resource that makes a little png animate in front of you.
My fiance and I look forward to this time of year because we know we will get to watch more game dungeon. Thank you for making these videos, we absolutely love them 💚
Awards time:
- burn it with fire
- architect was not crazy
- colorblindness included
Ross would make the explanation probably funnier.
- Burn it with fire - I know the global warming is an issue and I don't think ancient egyptian artefacts are the reason for it but when we talk about putting the immortal down getting rid their whole body is the easiest solution.
- Architect was not crazy - I don't have to explain that. The only exception are those stairs probably build for weak lower class serving the royals.
- Colorblindness included - Or maybe should I say; what is the door and what isn't. Sometimes when you push objects around in Doom Shooter you keep wandering if whole building will collapse when you pull a lever.
Hey a game dungeon! Now it feels like the Halloween season.
I’m sure that “haven’t seen the new Indiana Jones, but I hear this is better than that” will age so gracefully with the fifth one coming out, and expected to be worse.
If anyone's curious, which, probably not, the pistol and the Thompson gun using the same ammo is actually entirely plausible, in fact, makes sense.
In WW1, the United States Army and I think Marines couldn't get enough M1911s to give to the troops, so they contracted Smith & Wesson and Colt to make a new revolver in 45 ACP, both called the M1917. These were sold as surplus for the most part after the war, and were cheap, well made, and good shooters. So it is entirely likely as a cost cutting thing to afford all of their Thompsons, the gangsters bought these old military revolvers that also use the same ammo.
(0:12) I love the cute little pumpkin next to your dungeon entrance, Ross! 😊
Rest in peace, Burger. You will be missed.
She's still alive
@@ChadMojito Nah, I ate the burger so it's dead now.
With these games you gotta keep in mind that they came with instruction manuals that explained a lot of the stuff in the game that the game itself didn't.
Like the purpose of the winged vessels here.
Your holiday Game Dungeons are my barometer for what month it is. I love these so much!!
Every October since their breakup I'm constantly missing the Super Best Friends Shitstorm of Scariness, but at least I can always rely on Ross to keep the feeling of the season alive come Halloween time!
I love it how the enemies tell their presence by making idle sounds, always great way to make up the atmosphere.
Ross talking about 90s FPS games and their environments not even trying to look like real world locations was great. One reason I love the Build Engine Trilogy. Especially Blood. Blood really went all out to look like real locations even with the limited tech.
Honestly, to me it was just hard to listen because it just sounded like "modern gamer incapable of understanding visually abstract but design-wise simplistic levels designed for fun, visual simplicity, speedrunning and combat."
This is the best series on UA-cam.
This channel has put me onto so many games I absolutely would have never discovered otherwise
Ross's Game Dungeon is one of the few things that can keep me going in the horrible carnival of modern life.
Definitely
One of the few games from the 90's I've actually played. I never finished it, but it has hands down one of the best theme songs I've ever heard for a video game. Plus it was scary as hell when I played the demo as a kid. It may have had more than a few problems, but this game was a hidden gem I wouldn't mind seeing rebooted.
Side note: I now live on the coast of Maine where the game takes place. (Not to worry, none of the islands have been overrun by the undead for at LEAST two weeks.)
oooo... spooooookyyy!
Glad you were able to deliver this one after all, Ross. Appreciated.
You touch on something I noticed in the 90s as well. I clearly remember being immensely impressed by shooters that had realistic environments, precisely because the trend was to just have random corridors. So like, the offices of early Half-Life and stuff in Sin.
This is literally the plot to Great Gatsby. Gatsby was a former bootlegger who went to great lengths to hide his past, Tom Buchanan was a respected Egyptologist, and Daisy Buchanan was obsessed with finding an ancient Egyptian artifact. The narrator, Nick Carraway, let his shotgun do most of his talking.
I have been so lost in life's BS lately that I totally forgot that today was halloween. So I was pleasantly surprised when I was reminded by a Game Dungeon halloween special.
It feels like finding money you forgot on one of your jacket pockets.
I literally yelled out loud and clicked immediately. We may not be getting spoiled like last October but a Halloween Game Dudgeon is always an immediate watch for me.
Visually this reminds me so much of Blood (and so does that outdoors music). It'd be really interesting to see how that game would play out if all the levels were logically connected the way they are in this game.
41:42 I was also getting a The Descent vibe from those caves, as well as an Enigma of Amigara Fault one, especially at the part where you were worried you had to go through a too narrow crack in one of the cave areas earlier. Such a thing actually happens in the Amigara Fault webcomic/manga and the results are similar to what happens if a human gets sucked through a large enough pool drain into the pool's filter fan.
The Powerslave gag got me excited, definitely the more Egyptian game of the two
I always appreciate Ross for showing these exotic games (esp older games) that we otherwise would not likely run into in our lives - I appreciate that this is one solid place to find these little troves, I wanna find more little caches like this.
Have you came across channel Civvie11 ? If no, check it out.
OK, awards time! Feel free to suggest better ones than me as I may be reaching a little.
*FMV Game that Doesn't Suck*
It's a title also shared by Realms of the Haunting (though parts of that game are bad) and Rama. While we lose out a little on the cutscene quality front compared to the crappy 3DO version, the rest of the game sure makes up for it even though there's some hurdles. It's amazing how the actors blend into the game world so well and unlike Rama, we don't lose any immersion by having them walk off offscreen and completely vanish instead of helping us, as the FMV characters except the two boss ones are System Shock 2 & Bioshock style ghost visions.
*Why Hasn't Someone Done This Yet?*
While we did have Pathways into Darkness & Marathon for story in a shooter with the former being an RPG with smooth level transitions and the latter being Doom 4 & Doom Eternal before it was cool (literally as Marathon had a mod called Marathon Eternal first), they both suffer from Wolfenstein & Doom design respectively. Marathon 1 is really bad for having areas labelled on the automap look nothing like themselves, and the bodies don't stay dead though PID has a good reason for that.
For example, we get a room that's supposed to be a drydock for shuttles, but it's a tiny closed in room with a bunch of lifts that are meant to represent garage jacks and nothing like a spaceship dock. The recreation area in the first escort quest is devoid of anything for recreation minus a nearby target range called "the funhouse" and in the third final level we have cargo holds the size of garden sheds that are completely empty.
Then there's the open, handrail-less, uninsulated lava heating & power system canals, a "sensory deprivation chamber" that's just a medieval oubliette and of course the Galaxy Quest hallways.
System Shock tried to alleviate this and take a 3D Metroid approach, but it also had respawning enemies, awful controls (except the Enhanced Edition) and its realistic architecture was mostly limited to clicking on textures to see what they were meant to be, adventure game style. I don't think Powerslave (Saturn) was out yet and it still had the respawning monsters problem.
Killing Time is basically a forgotten gem that set the stage in Boomer Shooters for a lot of level design choices we take for granted nowadays most of us only saw in platformers like Tomb Raider or shooters like Build Engine games back then. It feels like a strange mix between a Doom clone shooter like Marathon, a 3D metroidvania like System Shock or Powerslave, an FMV horror game like Realms of the Haunting and something with semi realistic level design like Blood, Tomb Raider 3 or Half Life. Some of those latter games handled it all better especially Tomb Raider & Half Life, but seeing stuff like this back in the mid 90s before more famous games did it was like seeing a game like Rise of the Triad 2013 revive Boomer Shooters before Doom 4 & Wolfenstein: The New Order made it cool.
*Doesn't Respect Your Time*
If you see what I did there. We also have some rather convoluted quests like the puzzle design straight out of Marathon Evil and how some areas are a slog to get through, like the clown maze, wine cellar and vessel hunting if you missed any, followed by the obnoxious Set chase.
Tip 1: jumping is mostly fixed with the community patch. Don't forget you also jump much higher and farther if you RUN. The default movement is walk, and there's no auto-run so you have to hold the button. I found the lighthouse and "fire room" areas easy with the patch and running jumps.
Tip 2: there's a hidden easter egg room in the starting area of the mansion: From the main lobby go through the East (first right) door, straight forward til you reach the section of hallway with 4 pillars. Use the wall between the pillars on the left to open the developer's room. Use each portrait to spawn a weapon, item, booby trap or enemy ....all of which reference in-jokes with the dev team members. You can get a flamethrower, health orbs, ankh, crowbar, 2nd pistol, various ammo and an "Egyption trash can" (200 health). The hall is accessible as soon as you get the RSVP to enter the mansion, so the dev room can be a huge advantage very early in the game.
Tip 3: you need to collect all 10 colored vessels to open the endgame doors. Each vessel also provides a *single-use* temporary powerup when activated (god mode, infinite ammo, nightvision, etc). _Except white vessels,_ which aren't needed for the doors. White ones just reload all the colored vessels, and there's 3 of them hidden throughout the game. So, find all 3 white vessels and you can use all the colored vessel powerups 4 times per playthrough.
21:54 her tonal changes are incredible. can't imagine someone else delivering those lines as good.
Pretty rad to be reminded that quality and popularity aren't always mutual. This game looks way better than any other FPS I played through 96
Just wanted to quickly drop by to express my appreciation for yet another review of yet another game I have never heard about!
Lots of good points on the level design and music.
I love the strange mix of classic spooky horror, action, film noir and ancient Egyptian aesthetics here.
I think it's the black leather gloves under a pinstripe suit jacket the protagonist has that really drew me into the style, like you're a snazzy hitman fighting off ancient evils.
As someone with dev experience, if I were to guess: the "wall friction" is because the game is checking for collision with walls and if there is, it's setting the players velocity to zero. It's not pushing you back out or letting you "slide" along it the way DOOM et all would by calculating a new velocity vector along the wall, it's just setting it zero. You only "unstick" yourself by using an arrow key that the next velocity addition yields you being outside the collision. So if you're touching a wall ("colliding") and attempt to move longwise with the wall with the arrow keys, unless you move directly away from the wall you're still "in" the wall and can't move forward along it. Kind of hard to illustrate without a visual aid. Basically it's "on collision, velocity equals zero". You can see this in some 2D games where a character goes flying/jumping/whatever, then touches a wall and freezes for a frame, then starts falling from gravity. They don't preserve the original velocity, they just zero it.
Unless this is a bug is not in the original. Then it could be a wide variety of things and what-if scenarios.
Killing Time always fascinated me. Weird as hell, surprisingly ambitious, kind of bad but also kind of good... my favorite blend of attributes in games of the era.
the atmosphere of this game reminds me of the later levels of Medal of Honor Underground, absolutely great
The amount of different enemies in this game is impressive.
The first 5 seconds of the video and I can already tell this episode is going to be golden.
I've made a playlist of Game Dungeons i prefer listening to while working on projects, and most of them are the Halloween themed ones. This one is going to be placed in between "Strife" and "Realms of the Haunting". Great work!
The ghost of the Egyptian relic hunter sort of resembles Miss Fisher from an Australian crime drama called Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. Nice touch with Build Engine Powerslave at the start. 👍
Also, the atmosphere at 9:38 is from Tomb Raider 4: The Last Revelation. A snippet of it also appears in Marathon 2 during the intro screen for Episode 8: Simulacrums.
Which means it's part of some Public Domain sound library/collection disc.
@@arciks11 Which was the style at the time. Just like Doom's doors and Marathon's elevators. Some monster sounds in this game like a splat sound also seem to be from Pathways into Darkness, Marathon's predecessor.
Great upload! Thank you for amazing content. I found your channel last summer and binged all of the episodes of the Game Dungeon in a few weeks. New episodes are always a delight.
its hard to believe we've had to wait the better half of a year for the next installment in our favorite video series of all time. this dude just has something no one else does
Finally some context for the gag in the Civvie video!
As a clown, I can confirm that it would take at least 2 shotgun blasts to take me down.
the laughing clowns in the background got me haha
and yes, Dixieland jazz DOES solve everything!
There's something fascinating about 90s FPS games trying to do outdoor environments.
The "To hear one's foes" vessel makes enemies appear on the auto-map as tiny skulls for a brief time so you can track them down. 38:20