[HN Gopher] How Wolfenstein 3D shocked the world, 30 years later
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       How Wolfenstein 3D shocked the world, 30 years later
        
       Author : mariuz
       Score  : 70 points
       Date   : 2023-05-05 15:51 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.howtogeek.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.howtogeek.com)
        
       | drybjed wrote:
       | Deep dive on the Wolfenstein 3D by Ahoy is worth watching, if
       | you're interested in the game:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSb87DC-PtA
        
       | jhbadger wrote:
       | One downside of the popularity of Wolfenstein 3D is that its
       | success has almost completely erased the original 1980s Castle
       | Wolfenstein (and its sequel Beyond Castle Wolfenstein) from
       | popular culture. These earlier games (for 8-bit computers like
       | the Apple ][ and Commodore 64) were in a way more sophisticated
       | (despite their simple graphics) because they were stealth games
       | -- in the original you were terribly outmatched and couldn't just
       | run around shooting Germans but had to sneak around, kill one by
       | stealth to get a uniform, and so on.
        
         | jnsie wrote:
         | > they were stealth games -- in the original you were terribly
         | outmatched and couldn't just run around shooting Germans but
         | had to sneak around, kill one by stealth to get a uniform, and
         | so on.
         | 
         | Taking this off topic a bit but your description made me
         | nostalgic for the video game Commandos Behind Enemy Lines.
         | There's a lot to be said for stealth in video games!
        
         | EvanAnderson wrote:
         | It's worth search-engining the author of "Castle Wolfenstein"
         | and "Beyond Castle Wolfenstein", Silas Warner (of MUSE
         | Software).
         | 
         | Coverage from The Digital Antiquarian:
         | https://www.filfre.net/2012/01/silas-warner-and-muse-softwar...
         | 
         | Interview with Silas Warner from Kansas Fest 1992:
         | https://www.kansasfest.org/wp-content/uploads/Silas-Warner.h...
        
         | yamtaddle wrote:
         | > One downside of the popularity of Wolfenstein 3D is that its
         | success has almost completely erased the original 1980s Castle
         | Wolfenstein (and its sequel Beyond Castle Wolfenstein) from
         | popular culture.
         | 
         | Similar thing happened with Duke Nukem 3D. There were two
         | pretty-fun platformer shooters before that, but together I'd
         | say they have like 1% the cultural visibility/awareness as 3D
         | does.
         | 
         | [EDIT] Oh, the Metal Gear series is another example, at least
         | in the West (IDK how the series is perceived in e.g. Japan).
         | The break-through entry was ( _checks notes_ ) the _fourth_
         | game, with two of the earlier ones having had US releases years
         | before that one.
         | 
         | (there's also the phenomenon of starting in the arcade but
         | getting huge with a console sequel, like Mario Bros, but I
         | think that's a bit different, or cases of series that have
         | several Japanese releases before _finally_ having an English
         | translation of some later title that gets big in the US, but,
         | again, not quite the same thing)
        
           | kirbysnacks wrote:
           | I loved the original Duke Nukem, and other side scrollers
           | from that era such as Commander Keen. Duke Nukem 3D wasn't
           | all that great if I remember.
        
             | 1letterunixname wrote:
             | Duke Nukem 2D sidescrollers with the Keen sound fx.
             | 
             | The original Duke 3D and some expansions were alright but
             | they got progressively worse with larger budgets and longer
             | development cycles.
        
             | pengaru wrote:
             | Agreed. Duke3D was junk, but a big part of that was the
             | stiff 3D FPS competition from id.
             | 
             | I think people stopped caring about the Duke series enough
             | to remember/play the 2D scrollers not so much because
             | Duke3D overshadowed them, but more that there were far
             | better games to play than any of them.
             | 
             | DOOM and Quake practically owned PC gaming in my sphere for
             | quite some time. Even Descent didn't do too well despite
             | the 6DoF tech being impressive at the time.
        
               | throwaway675309 wrote:
               | Duke Nukem 3-D was a great game _if_ you were the type of
               | kid that liked to modify your games rather than just
               | consume them.
               | 
               | For a lot of us in grade school, it was our first
               | introduction to games that actively encouraged you to mod
               | them, it came with a level editor for the Build engine,
               | and you could open up the CON files to physically alter
               | the actual scripts and behavior of items and entities.
               | 
               | And when compared to id software's games (particularly
               | the brown horribly muted color palette of quake), Duke
               | Nukem 3d absolutely shone with personality and
               | interactivity. There's a reason that it consistently
               | scored in the 90s in old school PC gamer magazines.
        
             | klyrs wrote:
             | The thing that made Duke Nukem 3D great was its
             | irreverence, compared to the seriousness of its
             | contemporaries. It wasn't meant to be "great." It was
             | _fun_.
        
               | Fnoord wrote:
               | Shake it baby. Do you wanna dance?
               | 
               | And there was this one time I bought a Penthouse (I was
               | 12) because I wanted the Duke Nukem Penthouse level which
               | came with it.
        
               | yamtaddle wrote:
               | Irreverence, and richness of the environments. Mirrors!
               | Decorations that could be destroyed! Jetpacks! It felt so
               | much freer than prior popular FPS games. A bunch of that
               | stuff become standard fare in FPS games soon after, but
               | Wolf3D, if not being the first to do those things (Rise
               | of the Triad had some of that stuff, and came out first,
               | but was nowhere near as popular as Duke3D) definitely
               | popularized them and was a lot of players' first exposure
               | to some of those features.
               | 
               | It wasn't just goofier than the FPS games people were
               | used to at the time--it felt like a leap forward in
               | realism and capabilities.
        
           | whoopdedo wrote:
           | The follow-ups to Metal Gear and Duke Nukem at least were
           | made by the same people as the originals. Hideo Kojima and
           | Todd Replogle/Allen Blum III respectively. Some copies of
           | Metal Gear Solid even included the original game.
           | 
           | Wolfenstein 3D only used the name for publicity. And for
           | cheap too. Pro tip: don't sell your IP, license it.
           | Especially if someone comes knocking on your door. If someone
           | else wants something you have that means there's more value
           | in it than you can see.
        
       | scarface74 wrote:
       | > Scott Miller didn't hold a grudge: "It was entirely
       | understandable and expected because, at that point, they had
       | learned all they needed to learn from us as far as how to market
       | these things."
       | 
       | Why can't people have this same attitude today?
       | 
       | On another note: I bought a 486 66DX/2 "DOS Compatibility Card"
       | that had a dedicated 32 MB of RAM and a Soundblaster card for my
       | PowerMac 6100/66 just to play Wolfenstein, Doom and the other
       | games of that era.
        
         | 1letterunixname wrote:
         | Houdini II or the Apple one?
        
           | scarface74 wrote:
           | The Apple one. I thought the codename for the one for the
           | 6100/60 was Houdini II and the one that ran on 68K Macs was
           | the original Houdini?
           | 
           | Speaking of which, I wonder can I still salvage that setup.
           | It's at my parents house in a closet....
        
             | aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote:
             | Fly, good Fleance, fly, fly, fly!
        
         | whoopdedo wrote:
         | Did you ever see Interplay's port to Macintosh? It has 128
         | pixel textures instead of 64 and a new soundtrack.
        
           | scarface74 wrote:
           | Yes, I bought that one when it came out. It was much better
           | than the x86 version - especially with SpeedDoubler (a better
           | 68K emulator).
        
       | zantana wrote:
       | Seeing Wolf3d running on PC screens in those computer shows at
       | the Cow Palace was what finally convinced me to move from the
       | Amiga to PC.
        
       | dbavaria wrote:
       | Play Wolfenstein 3D on Archive.org (DOSBox emulator runs in the
       | browser): https://archive.org/details/msdos_Wolfenstein_3D_1992
        
         | justaj wrote:
         | When I switch to a different workspace and come back again, the
         | screen is turned black with no other means of getting it back.
         | I guess no one tested it on Chromiun that runs on Ubuntu 22.03
         | with i3wm.
        
           | Fnoord wrote:
           | > I guess no one tested it on Chromiun that runs on Ubuntu
           | 22.03 with i3wm.
           | 
           | Correct as there's no such thing as Ubuntu 22.03.
           | 
           | When I gamed on Linux a lot (ironically, Return to Castle
           | Wolfenstein and Enemy Territory) I used to run a second
           | Xserver.
        
         | cf100clunk wrote:
         | If playing it locally in DOSBox on Linux here are some settings
         | to try out in your ~/.dosbox/wolf3d.conf copy of
         | ~/.dosbox/dosbox-x.xx-x.conf                 [cpu]
         | core=auto       cputype=auto       cycles=10000
         | cycleup=10       cycledown=20
         | 
         | And at the bottom of the file add your own mount like this:
         | [autoexec]       # Lines in this section will be run at
         | startup.       # You can put your MOUNT lines here.
         | @ECHO OFF       MOUNT C /games       C:       CD WOLF3D
         | WOLF3D       EXIT
         | 
         | Then start the game with:                 dosbox -conf
         | ~/.dosbox/wolf3d.conf
        
       | nailer wrote:
       | I'd seen various Apogee games like Catacombs and Ken's Labyrinth
       | and Ultima Underworld (some might have been released after
       | Wolf3D). Wolf3Dwas MUCH faster, and had AMAZING sound design if
       | you had a sound card, but what shocked me was DOOM.
       | 
       | I was thinking recently about where exactly I was - in both
       | physical space and in Doom 2.5 space - when Doom shocked me. And
       | it's to do with the very beginning of E1M1.
       | 
       | Player start in Doom's E1M1 makes it look like Wolf 3D for just a
       | moment. All the walls you can see are are right angles, there's
       | not much verticality:
       | https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.78eb767e50af435112fea3ffb5ac8aee
       | 
       | And then you turn left GO UP SOME STAIRS AND THERE'S A WINDOW.
       | 
       | Or right and there's ANOTHER MASSIVE WINDOW AND IT LOOKS LIKE YOU
       | CAN GO OUTSIDE. Then there's computers and glowing nuclear waste.
       | 
       | Wold3D was a great Nazi-themed maze game, but it was Doom where
       | you felt like you were in a place.
       | 
       | I hope Carmack sees this (and Romero too but I don't think he's
       | on HN).
        
         | AndrewStephens wrote:
         | It is impossible to overstate just how astounding Doom was when
         | it was released. I had heard people talking about Doom for a
         | few weeks but didn't know anyone with a fast enough PC to
         | actually run it. Then I found that a friend of a friend with a
         | 486DX had gotten a copy from somewhere so we all went around to
         | see it.
         | 
         | Your description is exactly correct. I still remember the
         | amazement when we realized that you could go up the stairs.
         | Managing to find the secret doors and actually go outside
         | elicited gasps.
         | 
         | I am not sure that Dooms level design has ever been beaten in
         | terms of how elements are introduced to the player.
        
           | bombcar wrote:
           | Doom was amazing with the level design - it wasn't until
           | almost a year later when I started playing with the editors
           | that I realized there was a limitation-you couldn't ever be
           | on a second floor above another place you could be.
        
           | danieldk wrote:
           | _It is impossible to overstate just how astounding Doom was
           | when it was released._
           | 
           | 100%. We had a 386SX-25 with 2MB RAM and there were two
           | things that were just out that I couldn't run: Slackware
           | Linux and DOOM. I took DOOM to my uncle at a birthday, since
           | I knew he had a more powerful machine. I started up DOOM and
           | I was shocked, I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. It
           | was just so otherworldly. I never had the same feeling with
           | earlier and later advances (though Quake was really nice).
           | 
           | I was 11 or 12 and immediately after that I started lobbying
           | my parents to get 2MB extra memory. Lots of fun DOOM (and
           | Linux) hours followed.
        
             | mobilio wrote:
             | Same here! SX with 2MB Ram.
             | 
             | But... one day i learn that you can make "swap file" on
             | DOS4GW just like on Windows. And i make it! Opening game,
             | menu and first level screen took ~30 mins.
        
         | bryanlarsen wrote:
         | I'd guess that the reason you think this way is because you're
         | younger than I am. I wrote my first game in 1987 and so thought
         | I had a basic understanding of how games were made and
         | designed. Until Wolf3D came out. It blew me away on 2 different
         | levels -- from a technical perspective and design wise on how
         | they created immersion at a level never seen before. Wolf3D was
         | the first game for me where jump scares were a big part of the
         | game.
         | 
         | Doom did all of that much better. But that just confirmed my
         | belief that Carmack was a freaking wizard who could do
         | anything.
        
           | hnlmorg wrote:
           | I know what you mean about jump scares in Wolf3D. That first
           | boss with the chain guns, I nearly shit myself when he first
           | appeared.
           | 
           | People keep calling Wolf3D a maze game but the level design
           | worked well.
        
         | notahacker wrote:
         | Yeah. Wolfenstein 3D was very playable, but the levels were
         | essentially a 2D maze. Doom actually felt like a 3D world
        
           | mysterydip wrote:
           | Interestingly, doom is also 2D, in the sense that there are
           | no level-over-level portions. The map design was pretty
           | clever to hide this in some areas.
        
             | giobox wrote:
             | Crucially it supported walls intersecting at angles other
             | than 90 degrees though! Just having walls at arbitrary
             | angles to one another allows Dooms worlds to look so much
             | more interesting.
        
             | bombcar wrote:
             | It added floor heights which make it 2.5D as it's sometimes
             | called.
             | 
             | There's also no aiming up or down; but it feels so natural
             | with the level design that you don't notice.
        
         | cwillu wrote:
         | The link after "there's not much verticality" appears to be
         | broken
        
         | thanatos519 wrote:
         | I also remember exactly where I was, playing a leaked version
         | with no sound. Even without sound it was amazing.
         | 
         | Once it was released, we played it in the dorm via IPX-over-
         | parallel cable going between rooms via the windows.
         | 
         | What I most vividly remember is the first time I saw an
         | elevator come down with a figure I had never seen before ...
         | the space marine, the guy in the other room! Then I got a
         | rocket in the face.
        
           | giobox wrote:
           | > playing a leaked version with no sound
           | 
           | Doom was shareware - it almost goes without saying we all
           | played a copied version. Thinking on it, I don't know anyone
           | who actually paid to get the full game, I miss the floppy
           | cloning days.
        
       | NeuroCoder wrote:
       | I still remember sitting on my father's lap as a small child
       | while he played Wolfenstein on the computer. Then my mom got mad
       | at him for letting me watch him play.
        
         | bentcorner wrote:
         | I remember playing this a bunch way back in the day. My dad
         | overhead me playing, he recognized one of the levels played
         | morse code in the background of the music and decoded the
         | entire message.
         | 
         | https://eeggs.com/items/31712.html
        
         | themodelplumber wrote:
         | Funny. It's awkward sometimes as a parent to weigh the
         | excitement of "how cool is this" with the possibility of your
         | kid being exposed to that kind of excitement before it's really
         | appropriate. Particularly if your own childhood worked out more
         | or less fine that way...
         | 
         | You got me thinking though...I first saw Wolf3D in high school
         | drafting class. Mostly 386/40s but some 486/33 systems too. My
         | mouse sat on top of a big digitizer tablet next to the
         | computer.
         | 
         | The teacher was cool with us playing games and things at lunch.
         | Sometimes people would pop in to ask about drafting and CAD
         | while we were playing on Wolfenstein or...what was the
         | artillery one? Scorched Earth I think. Death's Heads going off
         | while brushing doritos crumbs off the shirt and saying "hi
         | there, welcome...so these are all CAD systems running AutoCAD,
         | and uh..."
         | 
         | To counterbalance this, another student was usually rendering
         | things in POVRay and I think at one point I brought in VistaPro
         | to show people.
         | 
         | It's funny to think about the scariness factor. Wolf3D and Doom
         | were both pretty good for jump scares and relative tension. But
         | the feeling of excitement was really well balanced in various
         | ways. Finding weapons, using cheat codes, etc.
         | 
         | I still remember that I found Friday the 13th for the C64 _far_
         | more terrifying than even Doom on the PC. Similar with Force 7
         | and Aliens for the C64, in which the landing sequence made you
         | think you were playing Master of Lamps and then boom, you were
         | screwed.
         | 
         | Weirdly, I also remember Prince of Persia for DOS being kind of
         | scary in an atmospheric way. It was one game that I'd usually
         | quit after too long when playing it alone at home. Terminator
         | Rampage was atmospherically intense and I couldn't play that
         | one for long either.
         | 
         | Apogee and Microprose games in general were way easier on the
         | atmospheric tension...some Blake Stone followed by Aces of the
         | Pacific and then a bit of FastTracker II was so often my jam.
         | Good memories...
        
       | wernsey wrote:
       | If you're at all interested in the technical aspects or retro
       | computing, I highly recommend Fabien Sanglard's Game Engine Black
       | Book: Wolfenstein 3D: https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbwolf3d/
       | 
       | The technical wizardry that went into making it fast went way
       | beyond the raycasting graphics engine. There were all kinds of
       | tricks used to speed up the engine:
       | 
       | One that comes to mind was compiled scalers - they basically JIT-
       | compiled the code of an unrolled loop that drew each scaled
       | vertical strip of a wall. That was why the game had to do some
       | slow processing when you resized the view area.
       | 
       | Another one was that if two vertical strips were the same, they
       | could be sent to the VGA card at the same time.
       | 
       | There were also a couple of tricks to speed up drawing sprites if
       | they contained lots of transparent pixels.
       | 
       | I vaguely also recall seeing the "fizzlefade" effect discussed
       | here a while back: When you die the screen is faded to red
       | through a linear feedback shift register that touches each pixel
       | on the screen once in a seemingly random way.
       | 
       | Kids today have it so easy with their Unitys and their Unreals...
       | :P
       | 
       | The Black Book on Doom is also worth a read for comparison - it
       | is quite remarkable how much the PC improved when 16-bit real
       | mode was replaced by 32-bit protected mode and how different the
       | design of Doom was from Wolf3D.
        
       | throw7 wrote:
       | I got nausea when playing wolfenstein. so yeah, I wasn't that
       | interested until doom hit.
        
         | LeoPanthera wrote:
         | You probably suffered from the early version of the raycasting
         | algorithm, which resulted in barrel/fisheye distortion because
         | of the way raycasting algorithm calculates distances.
         | 
         | When the rays sent out from the player's position intersect
         | with walls, the distance between the player and the wall is
         | calculated. This distance is then used to determine the height
         | of the wall slice being drawn on the screen. However, the
         | distance calculation is based on the player's position,
         | resulting in non-linear scaling of the wall heights, which
         | leads to the curved appearance.
         | 
         | Some later ports of the game to other platforms employed a
         | modified version of the raycasting algorithm, where the
         | distance calculation is adjusted to account for the angle
         | between the player's view direction and the ray being cast. By
         | using the correct distance for each ray, the wall slices are
         | drawn with more accurate heights, resulting in straighter walls
         | and less distortion.
        
       | Fnoord wrote:
       | One of the few games I was able to play in The Netherlands, while
       | my cousin who lived in Germany wasn't allowed to. (He had
       | everything.)
       | 
       | I liked it, played it on our 80286. Battle Isle 2 was also fun.
       | Doom, Doom II I enjoyed back in the days, tho on the Pentium. But
       | its games like Heretic, Hexen, Duke 3D, Dune 2, Command &
       | Conquer, Warcraft II, and the Keen with the living vegetables
       | which stood out to me. They were either unique, hilarious,
       | exciting, or atmospheric.
       | 
       | I remember pirating C&C with a bunch of floppies. Played GDI, the
       | good guys like the good kid I was. Till I got to Greece, that was
       | brutal for me. So I tried Nod. Well, only one or two levels
       | worked. It was incomplete! I didn't have the proper floppies.
       | 
       | But almost all above games I played single player. Doom was good
       | fun with null modem cable. I guess the most multiplayer fun was
       | things like Quake II with Lithium mod and something like
       | Tetrinet.
       | 
       | To be fair, I'm not sure if its the enthusiasm I had back then
       | (easily enthusiastic and impressed as kid) or if it was genuinely
       | amazing games. Because nowadays, hardly anything impresses me,
       | while I see my youngest playing the shit out of a bunch of toy
       | cars we bought second hand (about 20 of them, together for one
       | EUR). Best investment I made in toys, ever. Cause I bet I'd have
       | loved some kind of Rollercoaster or Railroad Tycoon sim (I did
       | play Simcity as well) or Leisure Suit Larry back in the days. My
       | point being: stuff you missed wasn't necessarily bad. You'll
       | never know how good it was. Cause you're a completely different
       | iteration of yourself, with a lot more experience (different
       | context). And so, I have this rule for myself: _don 't replay old
       | games_. Keep it nostalgic. Cause it won't be as fun as the lovely
       | memory. I mean, I loved Speedball 2 and Mystic Quest on gameboy,
       | not many people I knew did, and that's OK. But whenever I tried
       | replaying them, it was a huge letdown. Likewise, I get annoyed to
       | smithereens with old games. The keybinds, the graphics, glitches,
       | etc etc. We're spoiled with today's supercomputers :)
       | 
       | Regarding the Wolfenstein franchise, I think the one game which
       | did it for me was Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Though I couldn't
       | afford it back in the days, so I had to single player and pirate.
       | Eventually Splash Damage's Enemy Territory got out. And that game
       | I played an insane amount of time, as it was F2P without strings
       | attached (as far as I can tell), and it worked native on Linux!
       | Back then though, there were some weird people playing that game.
       | With weird nicknames, for sure. I guess that aspect of gaming
       | only got worse though...
        
       | tpmx wrote:
       | Since September 2022 the current owners of the game IPR are
       | finally allowed to sell it in Germany:
       | 
       | https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/wolfenstein-3d-available-...
       | 
       |  _... interestingly, its legal text has also been changed on
       | Steam. Per the Wolfenstein 3D SteamDB page, we can see that lines
       | suggesting the game 's story "should not be construed" as
       | glorifying the Nazi regime's beliefs or actions have been added.
       | It's difficult to see how a game that's all about shooting Nazis
       | in the face and then killing Hitler could be seen as glorifying
       | Nazism, but hey._
        
         | msla wrote:
         | > It's difficult to see how a game that's all about shooting
         | Nazis in the face and then killing Hitler could be seen as
         | glorifying Nazism, but hey.
         | 
         | Because censors only want control, and if they can get that by
         | doing something utterly absurd, they can rub your face in how
         | much control they have. Laughing at them only goes so far: If
         | they do something apparently idiotic, they're still the ones
         | capable of enforcing an idiotic law, and punishing you for not
         | going along with the idiocy.
        
       | _trampeltier wrote:
       | Those old games are so cool and simple. You just can play this
       | games without to spend 100 hours to learn the game first.
        
         | dzonga wrote:
         | for casual gamers - a lot of games are offputting since you
         | have to spend a lot of time trying to learn the mechanics /
         | lore.
         | 
         | that's why the fps genre like call of duty reign.
         | 
         | simple point and shoot. and the more you do it the better you
         | become.
         | 
         | btw : Wolfenstein 2 - New Colossus is probably one of the most
         | fun game I ever played.
        
           | yamtaddle wrote:
           | > for casual gamers - a lot of games are offputting since you
           | have to spend a lot of time trying to learn the mechanics /
           | lore.
           | 
           | Now that I have kids, I have real trouble playing anything
           | that requires you to actually _build skill at the specific
           | mechanics /controls of that particular game_.
           | 
           | What happens is I get a ways in, have to put it down for a
           | week or two, come back, am at a part of the game that's quite
           | a bit more difficult than the beginning and requires you to
           | know how to play moderately well, but don't even remember the
           | controls, so I'm just fucked and can't make much headway
           | without a ton of frustration and effort.
           | 
           | Same happens for narratives in games. I _really_ appreciate
           | the modern trend of reminding you WTF was going on when you
           | load a game.
        
             | rightbyte wrote:
             | Ye learning new controls get emberresingly hard with age. I
             | crush any kid in Mariocart 64 but I can't play new Switch
             | games with the same fidelity and focus.
             | 
             | I don't feel much worse at games, just new games.
        
           | rightbyte wrote:
           | > that's why the fps genre like call of duty reign. simple
           | point and shoot. and the more you do it the better you
           | become.
           | 
           | You need to grind gear nowadays to have a chance. It is not
           | like CoD 2 anymore.
        
           | seattle_spring wrote:
           | I'd love to play newer Wolfenstein games. However, I picked
           | one up a few years ago and the very first thing you had to do
           | was kill your pet dog as a crying and terrified child in a
           | flashback while your abusive father yelled at you. I put the
           | game down and haven't wanted to touch the series since.
           | Notable because almost nothing in games gets to me like that
           | did.
        
             | wintogreen74 wrote:
             | just to clarify; _you_ don 't have to do it, but I'm not
             | sure the alternative is less intense and charged. There is
             | a related payback moment later in the game though, and it
             | feels pretty good.
        
             | Jare wrote:
             | The new Wolfenstein games are fantastic, but yes they are
             | very harsh and uncomfortable. There's a point to
             | everything, but they're tough. I've never been much of a
             | story-in-games person, skip cutscenes by default, etc. But
             | the narrative of the Wolfenstein games really gripped me
             | like no other game has in 40 years of playing.
        
           | johnwalkr wrote:
           | The latest Wolfenstein games are great. If you like old
           | school fps, the remasters of quake and quake 2 are excellent.
           | And in the last few years there have been great modern games
           | that either recreate the speed of quake with modern graphics
           | (like "Hellbound") or recreate the creepy, lo-fi atmosphere
           | (like "Dusk").
        
           | Insanity wrote:
           | 100% agreed. I enjoy games which are "easy to learn, hard to
           | master". I think Counter-Strike, Left4Dead and TF2 are great
           | examples of that. COD to an extend, but they added a lot of
           | other overhead which I don't like. (Weapon customization, and
           | general microtransactions)
        
       | jakzurr wrote:
       | Early 90's, 2-3 friends and I had all bought 486's. I got home
       | and listened to answering machine, and the voice was practically
       | gasping.
       | 
       | "You're not gonna believe this game.... You're just not gonna
       | believe it! Uh-huh-huh, you're not gonna believe it!!"
       | 
       | I still wish I'd saved a recording of that.
        
         | ryanklee wrote:
         | It's these kinds of unprimed expressions of authentic
         | astonishment that can mark off the entrance to new cultural
         | territory in tech. They don't always accompany quantum leaps,
         | but whenever you do hear such noises, you can be sure something
         | big has happened.
         | 
         | I heard such sounds only a few times in my life: - When the
         | internet entered my brain, life, and social circles in the
         | early mid 90s - When the iPhone landed - When ChatGPT tore a
         | hole in the sky just a few months ago
        
       | jdorfman wrote:
       | "Mein Leben" if anyone has played Wolf 3D, you know what it is.
        
         | 1letterunixname wrote:
         | "Schutzstaffel!"
         | 
         | (and what sounds like "dustoff" but no one can quite tell.)
        
           | yaky wrote:
           | Before I knew any German (or much about WWII), I always
           | thought they yelled "Gestapo!", introducing themselves
        
         | cf100clunk wrote:
         | To my ears, the brownshirted grunts seemed to shout ''Hark,
         | Guard!'', although it might have been ''Halt, Guard!''
        
           | jdorfman wrote:
           | I always heard it "Stah Mon!"
        
       | benmccann wrote:
       | Here's an amazing version that was recently written using Svelte,
       | HTML, and CSS! https://wolfensvelte-3d.vercel.app/
        
       | jimt1234 wrote:
       | Wolfenstein was cool, but these 3 words sum up my experience:
       | _"...overshadowed by Doom... "_
        
       | sourcecodeplz wrote:
       | It was great, really immersive.
       | 
       | You gotta give it to Microsoft too also, software from 20-30
       | years ago still work on the latest versions of Windows.
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-05 23:02 UTC)