I remember playing this game for hours and hours and hours on end. I was probably 11 or 12 when this game came out. It was one of the first first-person-shooter games I had ever played. I’m not sure where I got it, how I got it, or what inspired me to get it. All I know is that I had it. This game was DOS based and came on a set of like 10 floppy disks so it took a while to install. This was long before the days of DirectX, games that came on CD-ROM’s, and Windows XP.What made this game so good was all the stuff you could do in it. First their was the solo mission, which was fun, but you could make it a lot more fun with all the cheat codes that this game had available. It had more cheat codes than any game I have ever played. You could enter a code to do just about anything such as: reduce the gravity, give you any weapon, god mode, disco mode, etc. This game also had some kick ass weapons. There was the standard weapons such as the pistol, dual pistols, machine gun, and the rocket launcher. Then there was a set of weapons that raised the bar a bit like the heat seeker, and the drunk missle. Then there was a set of weapons that picked up the bar and broke it in half over it’s knee such as the dark staff, which shot out energy ball looking things that just completely killed everything. God mode was just a hand that shot heat seeking balls of energy, which pretty much killed everything. And finally, there was my favorite which was excalibat. This was a baseball bat that shot baseballs and killed everything and then some. It was fun to play the single player missions with a cheat code that gave you every weapon and invulnerability. That way you could just plow through the game destroying everything in your path. Once you got tired of destroying everything in your path you could move on to some other fun things this game had to offer, such as secrets. This game had more secrets than the Whitehouse. You could move walls, shoot walls, and shoot plants to open secret areas. Within these secret walls were all kinds of things like triad coin things, which you were supposed to collect for points and bragging rights. There was also the DIP balls. The developers of the game called themselves The Developers of Incredible Powers (DIP) and thus put their heads on these balls that you could find all over the game.
This game was also my first experience with multi-player games. You could connect to someone else who had the game by dialing up their modem. Me and a friend of mine would have all night two player death matches. This seems ridiculous when compared to today’s first person shooters that have hundreds of servers with 30 people in each game, but at the time it was some top of the line hi-tech fun.
Anyway to complete my trip down memory lane last night, I downloaded the shareware version of the game and played it for about an hour and realized that games that were fun back in the day, really suck now. But as with many other things in life once you cross the line and experience something better than you already have, it’s heard to go back.
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