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I first played Wolfenstein 3D in 1993 – the shareware version – and was utterly amazed by it. After all, my Gameboy had nothing that came close and even my friend’s SNES had nothing that could hold a candle to this game. The subject matter alone was thrilling: nazis! Being a war hero! Not quite the same as a moustache-wielding plumber jumping on mushrooms, is it? Sure, I got dizzy after playing for more than half an hour (and the friend watching over my shoulder had to give up even faster) but it was a blast to play – fresh, original, different! And sure enough, Wolfenstein 3D was a huge hit and has become a true classic since.

I’ve often gone back to playing the game to get a nice nostalgic feeling but, to be honest, it’s not that great a game any more. Frankly, it never really was, but because there was nothing else like it (leaving aside the obscure Catacomb 3-D), people glossed over the terrible level design and the dull mazes you had to crawl through. You see, id Software made two mistakes that stop me from really enjoying the game today:

• Maps were designed to be real mazes with keys hidden around it
• The map overview screen was dropped in the end due to technical problems (I believe a lack of disk space)

The maps were already mostly created when the decision came to drop map overview so it might explain the sadistic designs. Without it, later levels became very painful to navigate since it was difficult to orientate yourself. Some levels were even symmetrical or had identical areas which confused even more. You’d often run around for half an hour, not encountering a single enemy because you were threading across covered ground while looking for a door you hadn’t yet opened. Speaking of doors: this leads to another flaw: as if it wasn’t hard enough to keep track of where you’d already been, doors close after mere seconds so you were never sure whether you’d opened it before or not.

Still, these days it’s easy to use Google to find the maps and if you have two screens like me, you can simply show the map on one screen and play on the other although that’s not an excuse, really. There’s also no real reason to play the later chapters – in fact, map design gets worse and worse with every chapter and there’s no new weapons to uncover so little incentive to keep playing.

Side note: there were no “qualified” map designers because of how easy maps were to make, so they were really thrown-together by any available staff members – some of whom later admitted it was a very tedious task which meant it was done in a hurry to get it over with – that may explain why many of them are quite … well, crap … .

Despite my criticism involving the confusing maps, the game still had some great ideas that many modern FPS games (sadly enough) no longer use or not enough:

• You could sneak up on an idle soldier and stab him in the back, leading to an instant kill – no quick time events here – just good old sneaking.
• Enemies could hear gun shots and then came to the room where guns were fired – you could hear the distant doors open which always put me on edge.
• Secret rooms! This seems so evident today, but it’s said that, for a long time, Carmack was very much against the idea until close to the end of development.

id Software later sold the engine to other developers to make their own games – Rise of the Triads and Blake Stone being the two best known ones – so we can be thank Wolfenstein 3D for that as well.

So, would I recommend it to those who have never played it before? That depends, really. To show them the game that kicked off the FPS genre: yes. As an enjoyable retro experience? Not really. There’s far better old FPS games out there (Duke Nukem 3D, Doom, Rise of the Triads, Blood, Skynet, Hexen, Dark Forces, etc.) and while Wolfenstein 3D led to the brilliant Doom, I can’t help but feel that it was never really that great a game.

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Aportación externa, gracias a Wish, grabador original.

Here’s the whole kit and caboodle. Two magazines and three games. Well, technically three games, I’ll explain in a second.

First, the magazines. One is a recent issue of PlayStation: The Official Magazine (PTOM) from October, covering Batman: Arkham City (the RAGE picture shown is an advertisement). I got this because it was dirt cheap (50 cents!) and it was the fiftieth issue of PTOM. Technically the actual issue number is much higher, they used to be known as “PSM: Unofficial PlayStation Magazine” to distinguish themselves from the original Official PlayStation Magazine that Ziff-Davis ran a few years back. But when they got renamed to PTOM, the issue numbers reset, so I’m guessing this is the 280-ish issue of the magazine.

The other is Official Xbox Magazine (OXM) from September 2007. Talking about the then-unannounced Grand Theft Auto IV, as well as a comparison of the hotly contested music game battle of 2007: Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock vs Rock Band. Again, more for nostalgia’s sake, and this was after I stopped buying these randomly around 2006. This was the cheaper of the two, it was also 50 cents, but the thrift store had a sale where anything with a white tag was 75% off, so it was like 12 cents.

Now the three games. First up is Hexen, which is a Raven Software action game on the Doom engine. Originally billed as a sequel to Heretic — until they actually made Heretic II anyway — it was different in that it was a hub-based game where you went back and forth between various areas, rather than just going through each level one at a time like Doom did. I got Hexen II several years ago and I honestly couldn’t play much of that, so I’m hoping the original is better.

Next is  WWII Iwo Jima. Famous internet website Something Awful dot com covered a game similar to this called WWII Normandy, presumably by the same developer. Since the guy who reviewed Normandy thought it was a steaming turd, I bet Iwo Jima isn’t any better. I’ll be surprised if it even runs on my Vista box.

The last one is the real interesting one of the lot. The spine calls it Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3 Companion Demo Disc. Featured are demos to Rainbow Six 3 (sans the “Raven Shield” subtitle the PC version had), Ghost Recon, Ghost Recon: Island Thunder and Splinter Cell. The demos aren’t the appealing part of it. It’s that the bottom of the cover mentions “new missions for Ghost Recon Island Thunder and Splinter Cell.”

Back in the days before we were downloading digital games through our 360s and PS3s, downloadable content for games on the PS2 and Xbox was very scarce and usually required demo discs or other assorted means to acquire these since not everybody had high-speed internet (some still don’t!). The original Splinter Cell came with three additional downloadable missions available for the campaign mode. These were not available on the PS2 and Gamecube versions (although the PS2 version did get a unique mission not available in the other versions), and the PC version only got it by special means. Since Microsoft shut down the original Xbox Live in 2010, all the original Xbox DLC is now lost to the bowels of time, barring any that they released in disc bundles like this. Since this happened, there was only 3 ways to play these bonus missions:

• Hope to god you downloaded them onto your original Xbox (or 360) before the service shut down
• Find a copy of the Collector’s Edition of Splinter Cell Chaos Theory for the PC, which had a special 1.3 patch that reinstated the missions for the PC Splinter Cell
• This companion demo disc.

Of course, I could be wrong and this may require Xbox Live to work, but I don’t have Splinter Cell on the Xbox to check. That’s gonna be something I’ll have to look into soon. (EDIT JUNE 27: And I did, a few months later. You find the entry here, on my other blog.)

That’s it. This is probably the last shop finds of 2011, and I hope to find more goodies in 2012.

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Aportación externa, gracias al grabador original.

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Menschen, die einem die Zukunft deuten, erkennt man nicht daran ob sie Hexen sind, sondern an ihre Qualifikationen.  Der Profiltext verrät recht viel über die Ansichten eines Zukunftsdeuters. Ist er realistisch in seinen Aussagen, oder ergeht er sich in vielen beeindruckenden Schlagwörtern fernab der Realität? Kann ein Zukunftsdeuter in seinem Profiltext erklären was er tut, weiß er wie seine Wahrsagen Instrumente funktionieren, kann er darlegen wir seine Gabe funktioniert? Zukunftsdeutung ist eine komplizierte Sache, wo fängt die Suggestion an und wo beginnt die echte Seher Gabe?

Man sollte also nicht nach echten Hexen Ausschau halten, denn Menschen, die von sich behaupten Hexen zu sein, sind in der Regel meilenweit davon entfernt. Eine echte Hexe verbirgt instinktiv ihr wahres Ich, man kann es nur erahnen. Wenn man sich das vorstellt: “Guten Tag, ich möchte Mal einen Blick in die Zukunft haben, apropos, sie sind doch eine echte Hexe, oder? Lach, nein so geht das nicht. Hexen verstecken sich von alters her, denn eine Hexe zu sein ist nicht witzig. Hexen machen in ihren Leben wenig gute Erfahrungen mit abergläubischen Menschen, sie sich zu Neid und zu oft boshaften Handlungen hinreißen lassen. Denn wir wissen ja alle wie Lebewesen behandelt werden die einfach anders sind. Demzufolge ist eine echte Hexe auf das Menschengeschlecht, welches nach 2 Jahrhunderten was Hexen betrifft nichts dazugelernt hat, nicht besonders gut zu sprechen. Echte Hexen leben zurückgezogen und befassen sich nur selten mit der Zukunftsdeutung.

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Nota: Por problemas técnicos el fragmento hablado entre las dos primeras canciones no se grabó.

Schwarzen Katzen, schwarzen Tieren im Allgemeinen und Hexen liegt wohl eher eine Allianz zugrunde, denn eine Hexe wird mindesten genauso abergläubisch betrachtet wie eine schwarze Katze. Jeder, der einen schwarzen mittelgroßen Hund hat, kann sicher ein Lied davon singen, was die Wirkung auf Menschen betrifft. Auch heute noch gelten schwarze Hunde als schwer vermittelbar, ein Aberglaube, der sich bis in die heutige Zeit gehalten hat. Schwarz = bösartig und hinterhältig.

Auch Nichthexen haben heutzutage schwarze Katzen, ganz einfach deshalb, weil sich zum Glück für die Tiere unter den Katzenfreunden Menschen befinden, die klar und logisch denken können. Eine Hexe, oder Hexen haben was den Aberglauben betrifft keine Lobby, es gibt sicherlich viele Hexen, die ihre Intensionen wohlweislich für sich behalten und ihre Arbeit im Stillen tun.

Im Allgemeinen kann man sagen dass eine Hexe, oder Hexen sehr naturverbunden und tierlieb sind und sie haben sicherlich auch andersfarbige Katzen, aber das Bild mit der schwarzen Katze, wenn es geht noch sitzend auf dem Buckel der Hexe, hat sich halt eingebrannt in die Köpfe der Menschen. Eine schwarze Katze war in früherer Zeit sozusagen noch die Krönung der Unheimlichkeit und Teufelsverbundenheit. Heute werden Hexen meist als Schwindlerinnen abgestempelt, ob nun mit- oder ohne schwarze Katze, jetzt kann man es sich als Hexe aussuchen was nun besser war; eine Teufelsbuhle zu sein- oder eine Schwindlerin? Eins hat sich aber im Laufe der Jahrhunderte nicht geändert, das ist die Doppelmoral und Scheinheiligkeit derer, welche heimlich die Dienste eine Hexe, z.B. auf einer seriösen Hexenline, in Anspruch nehmen und hinterher in den vernichtenden Chor der anderen Scheinheiligen einstimmen. Eine schwarze Katze und eine Hexe haben viel gemeinsam, aber das haben sie sich nicht ausgesucht.

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