Format: PC
Year: 1999
Here’s another game that was introduced to me by my uncle Dave (who to this day, does the best impression of the monk from the first game out of anyone I know – “WOLOLOOOH!”) Anyway, I learned more history from playing Age of Empires 2 than I ever did in school. I experienced the brutal horde of Attila the Hun as he ravaged old Europe. I followed the rise of El Cid, and helped Ghengis Khan flood across Asia. I can’t remember much else actually, because my mind always turns to making a plague of Persian elephants to send at my enemies, crushing all of their puny houses and stamping their cities into the dust, mwhahaha! Ah man, it’s an absolute classic game, the first strategy game I ever played and thanks to the recent HD remake, is still a lot of fun even 18 years later.
Once during my travels around New Zealand, I ended up working as a vineyard labourer along with a whole bunch of other travellers. We were living in a grotty little house together, and needed to find ways to entertain ourselves after a hard day’s work in the various factories, vineyards and warehouses. A bunch of us had laptops and Age of Empires 2 ran easily on them because it’s such a low intensity game. We setup a miniature LAN party in the garage, using a table tennis table as the base and all sat around it waging epic 3 vs 3 or 6 player free-for-all battles. All connected via LAN through an Android mobile phone. It was fantastic fun, and a welcome dose of gaming that I never expected to find wile on the road, exploring a new country. A few beers, good company, and some healthy gaming competition – what better way to wind down in the evening after working your arse off all day?
I recently played through Cult of the Lamb, a satirical take on the concept of running a demonic cult. It turns horrific things like sacrificial rituals, cannibalism and straight up gaslighting abuse into hilarious amusements by filtering everything through its cartoonish lens. You are a sheep, after all, and all your followers are sycophantic anthropomorphic […]
Hello, world! This post marks the moment in time and space when BangClickReload got a little redesign and was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Every post before this point is rather old and might not look right, and unless I decide to go through them all to fix them, they’re going to […]
I’ve been pretty absent from PC gaming for some time, since moving to Canada in early 2017, because I haven’t had a proper computer to play games on. That has recently changed, since I got myself set up with a new gaming rig that can handle pretty much anything that’s out at the moment. I […]
Imagine waking up to the deafening sound of air rushing past your body. You have no idea where the sod you are, you’re alone, falling, probably about to die. You’re in freefall. You panic. The ground is about 10’000 feet beneath you but approaching fast, you struggle to find your parachute but can’t get a grip of the rip chord. The air twists you and you’re spinning out of control towards a messy death, as the trees spring up towards you, you manage to open your chute just enough to slow you down as you slam through the jungle canopy and hit the ground. Then the title PREDATORS fills the screen.
Format: PC
Release date: 2001
Return to Castle Wolfenstein introduced me to the world of PC gaming. I have my uncle Dave to thank for this. He used to play two games, Wolfenstein and Fighter Ace, and I loved going round his house because he had a gaming PC, curiously built by a company called Gateway… The PC was something so alien and awesome to me that it made my N64 seem like the toy it always was (I still love you, my 64). Wolfenstein became Enemy Territory, a free standalone multiplayer component, but it was the ‘original’ Return to Castle Wolfenstein that dragged me into PC gaming, and I’ve never looked back since.
The singleplayer was all about shooting Nazis, but as soon as the game introduced zombies on about the fourth level, I couldn’t play it any more. I had yet to grow a spine. Multiplayer didn’t have any zombies, though. It was a pure WW2 shooter, Axis vs Allies, no frills first-person combat. It was the first game that I ever played which let you choose a role – you could be a medic, a soldier, engineer, lieutenant, and each class supported each other. Teamwork became an essential tactic; a team full of regular soldiers wouldn’t be able to complete all the objectives in a level.
Let’s take the classic Beach level as an example. First you’d need an engineer to blow up a hole in the wall using TNT and pliers. Lieutenants could dish out ammunition and call in artillery strikes on the bunkers overlooking the beach. Medics, useful in any situation, would run around handing out medpacks and jabbing injured soldiers back to life with adrenaline shots. And finally, flamethrower wielding soldiers were deadly in the tight confines of the trenches and pillboxes, cooking enemies alive with a stream of molten fire. Oh, god there are few games that have a more satisfying flamethrower.
This game started my love affair with FPS games on the PC, and while the accuracy and nimbleness of using a mouse and keyboard helped, I think the classes were a massive part of that. It paved the way for games like Planetside and Battlefield, other excellent examples of class-based multiplayer shooters. Team Fortress Classic deserves some recognition here I’m sure, but I only played the long-awaited sequel many years later. For me, Return to Castle Wolfenstein is where my PC gaming passion took hold. I was 13 when I built my first computer, again thanks to my uncle Dave who showed me how to do it, just so I could play Wolfenstein with him. I have gone through 6 or 7 iterations since then, constantly upgrading it every now and then. Owning a PC is a wonderful hobby, and more than that, gave birth to my entire career as a web designer, animator, writer, and geek… and Return to Castle Wolfenstein was my gateway.
Today I saw for the first time this video about the incredible facial animation technology for the upcoming LA Noire, Rockstar Games’ soon-to-arrive, gritty looking crime thriller. The game, from what I’ve read and seen, allows you to see real live emotions through the faces of the characters in the game, and allows for a whole new element of realistic, lie-detecting gameplay, adding an incredibly realistic new angle to the concept of a crime solving game. I can’t wait to see this in action in the full game, but until then I’ll just have to be content with seeing amazing videos like this one:
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